Posts Tagged church history

In last week’s episode (number 31) of the podcast, one of our discussions related to doctrine and dogma had to do with the category of heresy, one that Michial and I disagreed on (as we did, if I remember right, in last year’s follow-up episode on Emergent and the New Calvinism).  As I remember both discussions, Michial’s working definition of heresy is that which stands against the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, while my own definition was that which, if taught to a generations of Christians, would result in something other than the Christian church.  (Michial, if I’m getting this wrong, do comment and set it right.)

Michial’s criticism of my definition is a valid one: if the definition of heresy is an open, functional one, that leaves the door open for just about anything to become heresy, the only barrier barring anything from the category being the capacity of a heretic detector to imagine a disastrous future.  And Michial is right to imagine (even if we didn’t dedicate the time during the podcast to say so) that heretic detectors tend to have lively imaginations.  I readily grant that my own definition has that real danger, and people should listen to Michial.  That said, I do want to attempt a positive case for thinking and writing about heresy precisely in those dangerous terms.

My functional definition stems from a hunch (and some history behind the hunch) that heretics have continued their innovative work (note that I did not call it creative) in the centuries since the Council of Constantinople (where, confusingly, the Nicene Creed took its final form). Those creeds were written at a time when homoousia and homoiousia were the central theological questions of the moment (in the case of the Nicene Creed), and although I can readily sign on to the former against the latter, I don’t know that our own generation’s teachings that stand the greatest threat to the core of Christian confession take their force to claims of similar natures rather than unitary nature.  If folks whose “new” teachings draw their force from that Aristotelian distinction do crop up, the creeds will be handy for countering them.  But those teachings that most threaten to turn the worship of Jesus Christ into civil religion, amorphous “spirituality,” or something else in our generation, at least as far as I can tell, draw their influences and their persuasive force from other places.

In other words, although one could stretch the Greek text of the Nicene Creed to counter such latter-day teachings as extreme forms of Italian humanism or blood and soil nationalism, I’d prefer to have texts contemporary to those phenomena (like the Barmen Declaration) address their particular character and engage the important question of whether their content and form threaten the particular faithfulness of those traditions that worship Jesus Christ.  Such texts, like the ancient creeds, should draw their force from the text of Scripture even as their vocabularies create new content with new ideas, and I imagine that, in order to do any work, they’d have to take on some sort of Magisterial authority for the sake of good Christian teaching.  Again, to grant Michial’s objection, to open up such possibilities is terribly dangerous.  To add to his objection, I’ll grant that such a move will mean that identification of heresy, for any given generation, necessarily continues to be the historically contingent (and thus even more dangerous) process that it was for those fourth-century Bishops.  That said, the alternatives seem to be refusal to pronounce on doctrine at all and trying to make another generation’s response to another generation’s problems fit our own problems in our own moment.  Since neither of those seems adequate to the genuinely human and historical and contingent life of the faithful in the saeculum, I’m inclined to lean towards the dangerous but potentially powerful authority of Christians in this or that generation to bind and loose with authority.

Such is not to say that the historical creeds have no place in Christian worship; if anything, I wish that my evangelical brethren and sostren did more things to declare our solidarity with those generations that came before us.  My call is not for an abolition of creeds (my apologies to my Stone-Campbell friends on this one) but to assign those historical creeds communal rather than judicial functions.  I would call on Christians both to honor and adhere to the historic creeds and to engage particular contemporary teachers, not abandon one to do the other.

I have to laugh as I realize that my journey with Michial through some of the big texts of existentialism in the last couple of years has led me to articulate what I take to be an existentialist argument against our resident existentialist.  That said, as someone who adheres to believers’ baptism and a conception of Church that does holds faithfulness to Christ as revealed in the Scriptures to be every generation’s burden, I am inclined to conclude that a definition of heresy that sets the boundaries in the fourth century simply does not grant enough importance to the continuous and crucial task of discernment.  I look forward to seeing Michial’s and anyone else’s responses.

Yesterday, April 8, was the feast day of a saint: St. Julie Billiart. I’d not heard of St. Julie before: she’s not medieval, so one won’t find her in the Golden Legend or other well-known sources of ancient and medieval hagiography. In fact, she’s quite a modern saint, born in 1751 in a little village in the Picardy province of France. She died on April 8 in 1816, so that her feast (like that of all saints) is a celebration of her dies natalis, her “birthday” into a glorified life.

Her village, Cuvilly, was small and rural; today it still sits in a patchwork of fields, perhaps not much larger that it was two hundred years ago. Though one of the youngest in a large family, Julie stood out from a young age because of her enthusiasm for sacred knowledge and her diligent practice of all she learned. Still, her opportunities for education were limited to the catechism, a local grammar school, and the instruction of her parish priest. Julie’s world got even smaller when she was twenty-two: someone with a grudge against her father took a shot at him, and Julie’s legs were paralyzed by the shock. She spent the next twenty-two years confined in bed as a shut-in.

A tragedy, we say, and doubtless it was, too, in the eyes of her family and friends. Piously we might call it a hardship to be endured with patience. Certainly, she made good use of her time, catechizing to village children, crocheting lace for the altar, and praying for hours on end. We might consider such things a consoling diversion. But, privately, I feel my throat tighten at the thought of such enclosure. Already her life was unthinkably claustrophobic by our standards: a parochial existence of limited space and limited knowledge. Imagining myself in such a situation, my attitude settles naturally into stoicism and other consolations philosophical, but I do not smile.

But Julie did. That is what she’s called, the Smiling Saint. It’s a feature in all her portraits, her trademark: St. Catherine has her wheel, but St. Julie smiles.

St. Julie’s confinement and her joy remind me of another Julie: St. Julian of Norwich. Julian was medieval–ca. mid-to-late 1400s–and she was English. She wrote one of the masterpieces of medieval English mysticism, The Revelations of Divine Love, which ended up on my Middle English Lit comps list.

Julian’s story is an instance of the strangeness of medieval Christianity to 21st century Protestants. Desiring to understand Christ’s suffering, Julian prayed to be stricken ill. This God granted, and as Julian lay dying, she called for a priest.

My Curate was sent for to be at my ending, and by that time when he came I had set my eyes, and might not speak. He set the Cross before my face and said: I have brought thee the Image of thy Master and Saviour: look thereupon and comfort thee therewith. (III)

In that moment, her eyes fixed on the cross, Julian had visions–sixteen in all. And then she made a full recovery. In similar circumstances, I imagine I (and most people) would have rushed to share my revelations with everyone else: “Hear what God told me!” Julian did not. It is one thing to see a vision from God, but it is quite another to understand what one has seen. Julian, knowing herself to be a “simple creature unlettered”, did not trust her own meager knowledge to interpret the revelation properly. Instead, she waited, reading books and contemplating her memories of the visions, until she felt ready to explain them fully. This took twenty years.

What’s more, she did it as an anchoress: one who vows a life of contemplation and devotion in both seclusion and total enclosure, within a tiny cell in the wall of a church called an “anchorhold”. An anchoress kept a strict rule of life, though she was not cloistered in community: her authority was her father confessor, and all divergences from her prescribed routine–including fasting–required his permission. In fact, Julian’s name is a sign of her status: her anchorhold was in St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, so she adopted the church’s name as her own. No record remains of her identity prior to becoming the anchoress of St. Julian’s. Her physical location within that particular church became also the locus of her personal identity: as an anchoress, who could be visited but never seen, she was a voice speaking through a veiled window, almost the voice of the church itself. So she was Dame Julian of St. Julian’s: truly, without irony, the Church Lady.

Again, I shrink from such confinement. I often (too often!) complain about my office in the Park Hall dungeon. I’ve dubbed it my Chinese takeout box, because it is square and taller than it is wide. I’ve got no windows, no view of the world beyond the hall outside, which is itself a little-traveled backwater. But I do have a computer: my portal to the limitless frontiers of the Internet. And, more importantly, I can leave whenever I like. I don’t need the First-Year Comp office’s permission to go outdoors. The notion of an anchorhold is a bit terrifying, like being buried alive. In fact, that’s what it was:

Though there are a number of variations, the enclosure ceremony usually includes the following elements: an anchorite receives last rites, has the Office of the Dead said over her, enters her cell, and is bricked in, accompanied at each stage by various prayers.  (“Ancrene Wisse, Introduction”)

The anchoress was dead to the world, dead to herself. Again, envisioning myself in such a state, I see austerity, self-discipline, and a zealous penitence. I do not see joy.

But look to Julian’s words, dear reader, and ask if such a thing could be written out of stoicism:

[...] there be deeds evil done in our sight, and so great harms taken, that it seemeth to us that it were impossible that ever it should come to good end. And upon this we look, sorrowing and mourning therefor, so that we cannot resign us unto the blissful beholding of God as we should do. And the cause of this is that the use of our reason is now so blind, so low, and so simple, that we cannot know that high marvellous Wisdom, the Might and the Goodness of the blissful Trinity. And thus signifieth He when He saith: thou shalt see thyself if all manner of things shall be well. As if He said: Take now heed faithfully and trustingly, and at the last end thou shalt verily see it in fulness of joy. (XXXII.)

This is Julian’s attitude: not teeth-gritting endurance, but “blissful beholding” and, in the end, “fulness of joy”. And how can she have such joy in such literally straitened circumstances? Because she trusts in the “Wisdom, the Might and the Goodness” of God that “all manner of things shall be well”: evil shall be resolved, even the little evils she knows and now experiences. This is what Christ speaks to her, even as He hangs on the cross, suffering Himself: “All shall be well.” Trust that it will be so, and then comes the joy that passes understanding. St. Julie Billiart had that joy too, I believe. Though she did not leave, so far as I know, the extensive theology that St. Julian did, there is one pet phrase of hers that is commonly cited: “Oh, qu’il est bon, le bon Dieu!”

Oh, how good He is, the Good God!

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

And so he did: Bilbo Baggins, that is. However, the opening sentence of Tolkien’s story could just as easily describe another hobbit–a girl hobbit, who is now referred to be the name “Flo”. Unlike Bilbo’s hole, Flo’s hole was indeed nasty, dirty, and wet–a muddy cave on the little island called Flores. And, also unlike Bilbo, Flo was real.

The story is too big to recount fully here, so I’ll hit the high points. In 2003, a band of intrepid scientists, digging about on the island of Flores in Indonesia, discovered something they hadn’t been looking for: the skeleton of what appeared to be an adult human, except that it was only about three feet tall. The stature of the skeleton was not terribly unusual–genetic dwarfism can produce people of that scale–but the size of the skull was very unusual: it was the size of a grapefruit and it possessed physical features very unlike human skulls today, especially in the jaw and the brow region.

The researchers concluded that this was a new kind of human, not simply a deformed, but otherwise ordinary, human. They named it after the island on which it was discovered–Homo Floresiensis–and dubbed the single complete specimen “Flo”. However, since many of the scientists were New Zealanders, the countrymen of Peter Jackson, the tiny skeleton reminded them of another cultural phenomenon, and so Homo Floresiensis acquired the nickname “Hobbit”.

Of course, the scientists still argue about whether Homo Floresiensis was really a separate breed of human or just an anomaly: skeptics cite such genetic defects as dwarfism and microcephaly as possible causes for Flo’s stature and proportions. (Also there was bad blood between the Indonesian scientists and the New Zealanders, which further complicated research.) However, the arguments supporting the idea of Homo Floresiensis as a distinct type of human seems dominant at the moment. They were not simply apes: though their brains were on a smaller scale than ours, their brain structures associated with higher level cognition were much like ours in size and shape (“The Brain of LB1″). The caves Flo was found in also contained stone tools scaled to her size and the remains of butchered animals, both signs of higher order (i.e. human) intelligence. (This is the most recent research on the subject, and the article that returned my thinking to the matter of hobbits.)

So, it seems as if there was, at least at one time and in one place, a race of people roughly half our size. This excites me. If little people were in Indonesia, where else might they have been? Were they, perhaps, the original brownies, huldufolk, and menehune? I don’t know, given that there’s been no physical evidence of a distinct group of little people anywhere else, but the notion seems more possible now than it did ten years ago.

(Not that the possibility has never been considered: it was a common theory amongst Victorian folklorists and anthropologists that British fairy lore stemmed from dim memories of a more primitive race that once inhabited the British Isles: a race notable for its small stature relative to that of the invaders. For a scholarly take on this, consult Silver’s Strange and Secret People: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness, especially the chapter on “Little Goblin Men.” For a literary imagining of such things, read Arthur Machen’s The Shining Pyramid.)

I must confess, however, that the possibility of hobbits also stirs anxiety in me. What sort of folk were they? Were they our kind of people? In short, were they human in the senses I see myself as human, not only biologically but also theologically? I don’t think this is a question science can answer. Certainly they can comment on the size and shape of brain structures–and they have–but they cannot find a soul in those old bones, anymore than they can find one in a living brain. All we are left with are the physical remains of a creature very like us and very unlike us. Hobbits live in the Uncanny Valley, always a distressing place to visit.

Sadly, I can’t offer answers on this subject. Still, I’m hardly the first to ask it, and perhaps steering our readers to the answer of a wiser man than myself is better, anyway. So, how did Augustine handle this question?

Chapter 8.— Whether Certain Monstrous Races of Men are Derived from the Stock of Adam or Noah’s Sons.

It is also asked whether we are to believe that certain monstrous races of men, spoken of in secular history,  have sprung from Noah’s sons, or rather, I should say, from that one man from whom they themselves were descended. For it is reported that some have one eye in the middle of the forehead; some, feet turned backwards from the heel; some, a double sex, the right breast like a man, the left like a woman, and that they alternately beget and bring forth: others are said to have no mouth, and to breathe only through the nostrils; others are but a cubit high, and are therefore called by the Greeks “Pigmies:”  they say that in some places the women conceive in their fifth year, and do not live beyond their eighth. So, too, they tell of a race who have two feet but only one leg, and are of marvellous swiftness, though they do not bend the knee: they are called Skiopodes, because in the hot weather they lie down on their backs and shade themselves with their feet. Others are said to have no head, and their eyes in their shoulders; and other human or quasi-human races are depicted in mosaic in the harbor esplanade of Carthage, on the faith of histories of rarities. What shall I say of the Cynocephali, whose dog-like head and barking proclaim them beasts rather than men? But we are not bound to believe all we hear of these monstrosities. But whoever is anywhere born a man, that is, a rational, mortal animal, no matter what unusual appearance he presents in color, movement, sound, nor how peculiar he is in some power, part, or quality of his nature, no Christian can doubt that he springs from that one protoplast. We can distinguish the common human nature from that which is peculiar, and therefore wonderful. (CoG XVI.8)

So, there you have it: Homo Floresiensis was mortal–the bones prove it–as well as rational, so far as we can tell from the skull and tools. Ergo, hobbits are people, too! (But so are dog-headed men, and monopods.)

Perhaps not the most satisfying answer, really, but Augustine’s logic can be readily connected to his theology. The marks of humanity are mortality and rationality, thus distinguishing humans from angels (immortal and rational) and beasts (mortal and not rational). Why are humans rational? Because we were made in the image of God: “God, then, made man in His own image. For He created for him a soul endowed with reason and intelligence, so that he might excel all the creatures of earth, air, and sea, which were not so gifted” (CoG XII.23). Rationality is, therefore, what distinguishes the human from the animal. Why are humans mortal? Because, claims Augustine, death is penal, and all who are of Adam’s race die:

For God had not made man like the angels, in such a condition that, even though they had sinned, they could none the more die. He had so made them, that if they discharged the obligations of obedience, an angelic immortality and a blessed eternity might ensue, without the intervention of death; but if they disobeyed, death should be visited on them with just sentence. (CoG XIII.1)

Note that for Augustine, humanity and Adam’s lineage are an identical set, two ways of saying the same thing. Those who read Genesis differently from Augustine, and those who don’t consult Genesis at all, will certainly object to the equivalence of hominids with the Adamic lineage. Still, I think Augustine’s definition of humanity is worth examining, because it isn’t biological, but in fact an interesting blending of the metaphysical and the experiential. The quiddity of the human is found not in the number and orientation of one’s limbs and organs, but in a particular relationship to time and eternity, to matter and spirit, to entropy and order. To live at the nexus of those contraries is what it is to be human.

Apparently, hobbits lived at that nexus with us, though we may have forgotten them,  or never even knew them.  Which leads me to a concluding question, to which I also lack an answer: will we meet hobbits in Heaven? I certainly hope so!

March 17 is the Feast of Saint Patrick.

(Seriously. What did you think I was going to write about? Saints are, like, my one schtick, especially those affiliated with Britain.)

This is one saint needs no introduction: we know Patrick, or at least think we do. Most of what we know, though, is drawn from the more flamboyant sort of medieval legendry, which is of dubious historical merit at best. A case in point is Patrick chasing the snakes out of Ireland. As the regular St. Patrick’s Day news stories are wont to remind us, there probably weren’t any snakes around on the island at the time anyway. What we miss–and what the mosaic to the right shows us symbolically–is that the legend of Patrick and the snakes is a parable about the coming of Christ’s kingdom into Ireland, so long a stronghold of idolatry: the devilish serpents of Ireland are crushed beneath the heel of Christ, though that heel is also Patrick’s. “How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace”–but those sandalled feet on a muddy Irish road were heard by the Enemy as the thundering march of a legion: a heavenly invasion.

With what manner of man or woman does our Lord invade the territory of His foe? In the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, such apostle saints are revered, and certainly Patrick is no exception: as early as the early 600s, Patrick was called by Irish Christians papa noster, “our father,” but also with the resonances of “our pope.” As an Evangelical sort of Protestant, I can attest to a similarly high view of missionaries in our wing of Christendom, especially missionaries to unevangelized peoples and resistant cultures. Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant, our traditions unite in admiration for the trailblazers of the Kingdom, without whom we would not have known the Gospel of Christ’s reign. We respect them, and sometimes (I confess) idolize them, and in doing so, set them apart from ourselves: theirs is a special breed and calling, and they are not such stuff as we laymen are.

Regarding this error, Patrick speaks to us–not through an object lesson in his story, but with his own words. Unlike so many saints of his error, Patrick left a paper trail: at least two texts that generally accepted as authentic works of the apostle to the Irish himself. Both are interesting, but Patrick’s Confessio is the more important of the two, for in it he tells of his life and defends his ministry.

(Dear reader, please take the time to read it all: it’s not very long, and this is what Patrick wanted us to know of him. Though he is gone from us, he stands in our Lord’s presence, and is bound to us by one faith, one Spirit, and one baptism. He is our brother, and we should do him this courtesy.)

And what does Patrick say of himself? How does he wish us to regard him? Certainly not as some sort of high and holy superior being. No, what Patrick wants us to see in him is the immensity of grace:

I am, then, first of all, countryfied, an exile, evidently unlearned, one who is not able to see into the future, but I know for certain, that before I was humbled I was like a stone lying in deep mire, and he that is mighty came and in his mercy raised me up and, indeed, lifted me high up and placed me on top of the wall. And from there I ought to shout out in gratitude to the Lord for his great favours in this world and for ever, that the mind of man cannot measure. (12)

Thus I give untiring thanks to God who kept me faithful in the day of my temptation, so that today I may confidently offer my soul as a living sacrifice for Christ my Lord; who am I, Lord? or, rather, what is my calling? that you appeared to me in so great a divine quality, so that today among the barbarians I might constantly exalt and magnify your name in whatever place I should be, and not only in good fortune, but even in affliction? So that whatever befalls me, be it good or bad, I should accept it equally, and give thanks always to God who revealed to me that I might trust in him, implicitly and forever, and who will encourage me so that, ignorant, and in the last days, I may dare to undertake so devout and so wonderful a work; so that I might imitate one of those whom, once, long ago, the Lord already preordained to be heralds of his Gospel to witness to all peoples to the ends of the earth. So are we seeing, and so it is fulfilled; behold, we are witnesses because the Gospel has been preached as far as the places beyond which no man lives. (34)

I am greatly God’s debtor, because he granted me so much grace, that through me many people would be reborn in God, and soon after confirmed, and that clergy would be ordained everywhere for them, the masses lately come to belief, whom the Lord drew from the ends of the earth, just as he once promised through his prophets: ‘To you shall the nations come from the ends of the earth, and shall say, “Our fathers have inherited naught but lies, worthless things in which there is no profit.”’ And again: ‘I have set you to be a light for the Gentiles that you may bring salvation to the uttermost ends of the earth.’ (38)

What can I say, that Patrick has not already said better? And this is truly what the saint wants us to hear, though it might be difficult to discern his quiet fervency through the din of parades. I cannot but imagine that Patrick would blush at the notion of parades in his honor, much less rivers running green. If you would honor Patrick, honor his God, for that is what he most desired:

But I entreat those who believe in and fear God, whoever deigns to examine or receive this document composed by the obviously unlearned sinner Patrick in Ireland, that nobody shall ever ascribe to my ignorance any trivial thing that I achieved or may have expounded that was pleasing to God, but accept and truly believe that it would have been the gift of God. And this is my confession before I die. (62)

So, another week, another feast for an Anglo-Saxon saint: February 2, the Feast of St. Chad. Don’t remember Chad? Oh, surely you recall those obnoxious little flecks of paper in the hotly contested presidential election of 2000, the chads? Dimpled chads, hanging chads, swinging chads, pregnant chads: so much hinged on what amounted, materially speaking, to little more than abortive attempts at confetti. Well, at some point somebody with a humorous sense of history put together chads and Chad, and found the fit rather neat: “Hard to Punch Holes in Story of St. Chad.” A little too neat: some took the news stories’ labeling of St. Chad as “patron saint of disputed elections” literally, to the point where the Snopes folks weighed in on the question. The short version: Chad’s tenure as a bishop of Northumbria was contested, and he stepped aside for the odious St. Wilfrid. (Full disclosure: I’m an anti-Wilfrid partisan, not that anyone cares anymore.) However, interesting correspondences do not a patron saint make, nor do waggish puns, and St. Chad is certainly not the patron saint of disputed elections.

But let us dwell no more on elections past, for I would have St. Chad remembered for another reason: namely, as the bishop who wouldn’t ride a horse. It was not a matter of fear, as would be the case with me. (Horses? Utterly terrifying, all flailing hooves, flaring nostrils, and uncomfortably large teeth.) Instead, Chad followed what he thought was the model of the episcopal office: the lives of the apostles and the life of his teacher, St. Aidan.

Chad, being thus consecrated bishop, began immediately to devote himself to ecclesiastical truth and to chastity; to apply himself to humility, continence, and study; to travel about, not on horseback, but after the manner of the apostles, on foot, to preach the Gospel in towns, the open country, cottages, villages, and castles; for he was one of the disciples of Aidan, and endeavored to instruct his people, by the same actions and behavior, according to his and his brother Cedd’s example. (Bede Historia 3.28)

Bede, whose account of Chad is the primary record of his life, clearly admired this bishop, for he saw in Chad the humility and service absent in monarchical bishops like St. Wilfrid. (See? Look at me hatin’. Well, Bede started it!) To Chad, and to Bede, a good bishop is a shepherd, tending to the nurture and safety of his flock. Practically, for Chad that meant what soldiers today call “boots on the ground”: an active presence, moving among his people, seeing them and touching their lives. It was not an easy practice, and Chad was probably not a young man: he had already served as an abbot prior to his appointment to the see of Northumbria, not an office for the young. But it was what Chad felt the job required, so he did it.

Of course, I’ve only explained how St. Chad didn’t ride a horse, not how he wouldn’t. That came later, after the newly appointed Archbishop Theodore, needing a worthy bishop on short notice, called upon the deposed Chad to be bishop of Mercia. Chad acquiesced, and resumed his old ways, trudging long roads through lands settled and unsettled to minister to his new flock. Archbishop Theodore, “seeing that it was the custom of that most reverend prelate to go about the work of the Gospel to several places rather on foot than on horseback, [...] commanded him to ride whenever he had a long journey to undertake” (Bede Historia 4.3). Theodore’s reasons are unknown: perhaps he feared for Chad’s health, or else thought walking beneath the dignity of the office. Whatever the archbishop’s reason, Chad refused and continued in his “custom”: he would not ride a horse.

What follows in Bede’s account is a subtle dance of courtesy and deference, for Theodore would not let things stand as they were: “[F]inding [Chad] very unwilling to omit his former pious labour, he himself, with his hands, lifted him on the horse; for he thought him a holy man, and therefore obliged him to ride wherever he had need to go” (Bede Historia 4.3). Bede sketches his scene with a few words, simple actions without color, but I imagine it whenever I re-read Bede: Archbishop Theodore on horse with his entourage, a muddy road, a stooped figure in weather-stained robes. But then the positions reverse: the lofty descends, and the lowly is lifted up. How could Chad refuse such humility? And so Chad accepted the horse in the end.

I’ve always been a sucker for a good monster story. As a boy, I would browse through my parents’ books, especially the encyclopedias, and stop whenever I saw an illustration of a monster. This was particularly true of dragons, of which I was specially fond. This was also how I first encountered Beowulf: as a story in which a hero fights a dragon. It was many years before I actually read Beowulf, of course, but my first knowledge of that Old English epic was as a dragon story.*

When I finally got around to reading Beowulf—years later and at the instigation of Tolkien—I naturally focused on the end: Beowulf’s last great monster fight against the dragon. It’s a particularly satisfying example of the dragon-slayer’s tale, both heroic in tone and dramatic in action. There’s also a note of tragedy, though: the dragon is slain, but so is the hero, who is old but goes down fighting. (Hopefully I’ve spoiled no-one’s Beowulf experience by revealing this: it’s over a thousand years old, after all.) It is the fitting last movement of a heroic life, one last act of bravery and sacrifice, but—alas—only a temporary solution, for Beowulf’s people are doomed to suffer and be scattered.

This theme in Beowulf—the balance of triumph and tragedy—is one of Tolkien’s chief concerns in his magisterial essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” For Tolkien, in fact, it is what the poem is about: “[M]an at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time.”

[A]s in a little circle of light about their halls, men with courage as their stay went forward to that battle with the hostile world and the offspring of the dark which ends for all, even the kings and champions, in defeat. (67)

Inevitable defeat—yet the hero goes anyway. But why do it? Is it merely foolish bravado? Should not the hero rather be wise than brave, yield to the natural order, and treat dragons with sensible caution? Better a live dog than a dead lion, after all! This is sometimes the rejoinder to Tolkien’s model of heroism, and other readings of Beowulf have been suggested, that cast Beowulf’s last fight as foolish error, or vainglorious bravado, or even ill-considered mercenary greed. (The dragon did have a treasure, after all.)

I’m sure it will surprise no-one to learn that I favor Tolkien’s perspective over the others. This is not, however, out of a naïve acceptance of the inherent heroism of hopeless last stands. Instead, Tolkien’s perspective (and my acceptance of it) arises from a prior belief in human dignity—even humans after the fall. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien shares a poem, written in a letter to a friend, which describes his view of postlapsarian humanity:

[…] Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned.
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned […] (74)

This image of mankind appears in the Lord of the Rings in the character of Aragorn: the crownless king who wanders as a vagabond, his broken sword the sign of ancestral rank and ancestral failure. But before that, it appeared in Beowulf, in Beowulf himself:

To Beowulf the news was quickly brought
of that horror—that his own home,
best of buildings, had burned in waves of fire,
the gift-throne of the Geats. To the good man that was
painful in spirit, greatest of sorrows;
the wise one believed he had bitterly offended
the Ruler of all, the eternal Lord,
against the old law; his breast within groaned
with dark thoughts—that was not his custom. (2324-32)

This is Beowulf after the dragon attacks: old Beowulf, fifty years after his youthful adventures in Denmark, now a venerable king. Only, now his hall is burned, along with his throne, “the gift-throne of the Geats.” And in this moment, his first anguished thought is of God, of divine justice, and of his own sin—but still he fights the dragon.

But let us proceed to a reason—at least, a reason I find plausible and personally compelling. (Caution! This is not peer-reviewed scholarly content, but the romantic musings of a student. Also, they’re my unpublished first thoughts, and they may end up being useful down the road, so don’t jack my style!) In my pursuit of all things Old English, I encountered an Anglo-Saxon homilist named Ælfric of Eynsham. His sermons are lucid, rhetorically sophisticated, and often nearly lyrical. One in particular has drawn me back repeatedly: “De Falsis Diis,” or “Regarding the False Gods.” The purpose of this sermon is two-fold: to contrast the true God with his false rivals, and to explain the origins of idolatry. To introduce his subject, though, he explains the nature of the true God, according to the ecumenical creeds accepted in the West in that era, and then describes the primal relationship between humanity and their Creator. Why do I bring this up? Because here there be dragons:

… [I]t is better for us to believe truly in the Holy Trinity (halgan þrynnysse), and to profess belief in them, than it is for us to ponder excessively about it.  The Trinity made the shining angels, and Adam and Eve afterward as humans, and gave them authority over the earthly things of creation; and they did not break that single command of God (an Godes bebod).  Then Adam lived carefree in bliss, and no creature could injure him, while that he kept that heavenly command (heofonlice bebod).  Fire did not harm him, though he stepped his feet into it, nor might any water drown the man, even if he ran suddenly into the waves.  Nor could any wild beast, nor any kind of serpent (wurmcynne), dare to injure the man with its mouth’s bite.  Neither hunger nor thirst, nor grievous cold, nor any extreme heat, nor sickness was able to trouble Adam in the earth, while he with faithfulness kept that little command (lytle bebod).

Afterward, when he had sinned, and God’s command broken, then he lost that blessing, and lived in trouble, so that the louse bit him boldly and the flea, the one who before the dragon (draca) dared not even touch.  Then he needed to be cautious with water and with fire, and to take care warily that he not fall down too hard, and to provide food for himself with proper difficulty; and those natural virtues that God made into him, he had then to keep, if he would have them, with great care, just as yet the good do, that with difficulty keep themselves from sins. (25-55; translation mine)

I hope, dear reader, that you note Ælfric’s careful parallelism and the drastic contrast it creates: humanity before the fall, fearless, untouchable, healthy, happy, and good; humanity after the fall, timid, fragile, frail, desperate, and wicked. And the pivot upon which this inverted world turned upside down was God’s single command—that little command (lytle bebod). I do not think the preacher’s emphasis on the command’s lytlenes is meant to cast God as unreasonable, but instead to heighten the foolishness—and the tragedy—of humanity’s violation of it. Ælfric, in essence, muses with Boromir in Pete Jackson’s version of LotR, that “it is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing—such a little thing.”

But Ælfric’s sermon does not leave man in an utterly wretched state. No, along with the loss of blessedness comes a new duty of obedience for the man: work, labor,  to get “for himself with proper difficulty” some remnant of the goods he has forfeited. The obvious one he mentions first, God’s edict that “by the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread” (Gen. 3:19). The second is less obvious, the hard labor of living rightly and resisting sin. However, there is a third good, other than sustenance and virtue, which Ælfric’s prelapsarian humanity possessed, which Ælfric does not redress: the threat of the natural world against weak, mortal man. The reversal the preacher describes is utterly pathetic—”the louse bit him boldly and the flea, the one who before the dragon dared not even touch”—but he names no labor of man to alleviate it.

But that, I think, is Beowulf’s labor, the hero’s labor: to still face the danger of the world, incarnate in the dragon, and to fight it. Not because the dragon can be beaten for good and all—it cannot, any more than one day’s sweat can make bread forever, any more than one temptation resisted can make a man pure forever. No, Beowulf fights the dragon because it is his duty and his proper labor. He does not to surrender to the natural order because it is not the natural order: we were not meant for this, to be the meat of dragons, to fear the fire that warms us, the water that sustains us, and even the ground that supports us. We were not meant for fear, but we surrendered our primal fearlessness. What remains is courage, and that is Beowulf’s labor.

So, in the end, I see dragon-slaying as more than just a good subject for a ripping yarn: it is the emblem of dignity in fallen humanity. Ceasing to be kings enthroned, we have become knights errant, finding our honor in work, not privilege. We must eat bread with the sweat on our brows, we must labor to keep our virtue, and, yes—we must fight dragons.

* These days my loyalty has shifted from dragons to giants, also because of Beowulf—come for the dragon, stay for the cannibal demon troll. I still have great affection for dragons, though.

Works Cited

Ælfric. Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection. Vol. 2. Ed. John C. Pope. London: Oxford UP, 1968. 2 volumes.

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. R.M. Liuzza.  Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2000.

Tolkien, J.R.R.  “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics.” An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism. Ed. Lewis E. Nicholson.  Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame, 1963. 51-103.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” A Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine, 1966. 33-99.

Today, February 16^th, is the feast of St. Juliana in the Latin tradition. While the earliest lists of martyrs link her with Cumae (through birth), she is also associated with Naples (the home of her relics) and Nicomedia (the legendary site of her martyrdom). Pinning her down historically is really impossible: though the venerable Catholic Encyclopedia asserts for Juliana the quasi-historicity of a conflated personage, it concedes that the stories associated with her are simply legends. What I care about, however, is not the history, but the legend, because the legendary Juliana is the one that is significant in Christian imaginations across centuries and cultures. In particular, I care about Juliana because she shares, with Beowulf, the distinction of being one of only two people in the Old English poetic corpus who manage to put a demon in a submission hold.

Juliana’s legend comes to us through various sources: the two I’m most familiar with are the Old English poem “Juliana”, by Cynewulf, and 13^th century Latin hagiographic compilation, the Golden Legend. (The Old English text of “Juliana” is here.) There are differences between the two: in Cynewulf’s poem, Juliana’s pagan fiance is Eleusius; in the Golden Legend, he is Eulogius; and so forth. But their accounts of Juliana’s encounter with a demon generally agree.

Here’s the abridged story for background: Juliana, daughter of a wealthy pagan, converts to Christianity. Unfortunately, she is betrothed to a prefect who is also a pagan; when he pressures her to move forward with the nuptials, she demands he also convert before the marriage. He refuses, she is jailed and then tortured.

It is in the midst of these torments that Juliana receives an (apparently) heavenly visitation, in which she is commanded to capitulate to her persecutor’s demands:

Then suddenly came into the prison the Enemy of mankind, skilled in evil; and he had the form of an angel. Wise was he in afflictions, this enemy of the soul, this captain of Hell, and unto the holy maid he said, “Why sufferest thou who art most dear and precious unto the King of glory, our God ? This judge hath prepared for thee the worst tortures, torment without end, if thou wilt not prudently sacrifice and make propitiation unto his gods. Be thou in haste when he bids thee be led outward hence, that thou make a sacrifice, an offering of victory, before that death come upon thee, death in the presence of the warriors. In this wise shalt thou survive the anger of this judge, O blessed maid!” (Juliana)

Juliana, rightly, questions this messenger’s veracity, praying for confirmation of the demon’s words from God. In reply, God gives her another command:

Then unto her spake a glorious voice from the clouds and uttered this word: “Do thou seize this vile one and hold him fast, till that he rightly declare unto thee his purpose, even from the beginning what his kinship may be.” And the heart of the glorious maid was glad; and she seized upon that devil. (Juliana)

At that point, the demon, like Grendel, wants nothing more than to get away—but Juliana’s grip, like Beowulf’s, is inescapable. She compels the trapped demon to confess all his misdeeds—an impressive catalog by any standard—that takes up the next 265 lines of the poem. In the end, she is called forth from prison to stand trial, and out she goes, dragging the devil with her, who begs for his release:

And in his grievous plight he began to lament his journey, bewail his torment, grieve for his fate, and he said unto her:

“I entreat thee, gracious Juliana, by the grace of God, that thou work upon me no further insult or reproach before men than thou hast already done, when thou overcamest the wisest in the prison shades, the king of the dwellers in Hell, in the city of fiends, who is our father, the lord of death. Behold thou hast afflicted me with painful blows, and in truth I know that, before or since, never did I meet in the kingdoms of the world a woman like unto thee, of more courageous heart, or more perverse, of all the race of women. Clear is it to me that thou wouldst be in all things unashamed in thy wise heart.” (Juliana)

Juliana relents, and the demon limps back to Hell, embarrassed at the thought of reporting his failure to the other devils. On this last point, the Old English poem is vividly and hilariously clear: “he, the announcer of evil, was wiser than to tell unto his fellows, the ministers of torment, how it befell him upon his journey” (Juliana).

So, this is the heroine of February 16: a martyr who endured to the end, who refused to surrender for relief, and indeed saw the temptation to surrender as itself another kind of attack.

* The image at the head of this post was discovered (via Google) on Flickr, taken by a photographer with the nom de album Jaycross, and is (apparently) a Spanish painting—not sure of the date.

Today, the third of February, is feast day of St. Laurence (Laurentius) of Canterbury.  He was an early figure of the branch of Christendom we might style “Germanic”: St. Laurence, though a Roman monk, was part of the first Roman mission to the Anglo-Saxons of Britain and later became the second archbishop of Canterbury.  He also can, through accounts of his life, show us the integral and sometimes messy relationship between Church and State in an era which is, to us today, only dimly remembered.

St. Laurence (d. 619), called by Bede a presbyter, accompanied the monk Augustine on his mission to the Anglo-Saxons of Britain.  Commissioned by Pope Gregory the Great, who had long dreamed of converting the tow-headed barbarians of Britain, the missionaries were welcomed by King Ethelbert of Kent and given Canterbury as a headquarters.  The account of the first encounter between the missionaries and King Ethelbert makes plain the strangeness of these visitors to their wary host:

Some days after, the king came into the island, and sitting in the open air, ordered Augustine and his companions to be brought into his presence. For he had taken precaution that they should not come to him in any house, lest, according to an ancient superstition, if they practiced any magical arts, they might impose upon him, and so get the better of him. But they came furnished with Divine, not with magic virtue, bearing a silver cross for their banner, and the image of our Lord and Saviour painted on a board; and singing the litany, they offered up their prayers to the Lord for the eternal salvation both of themselves and of those to whom they were come. When he had sat down, pursuant to the king’s commands, and preached to him and his attendants there present, the word of life, the king answered thus: ­ “Your words and promises are very fair, but as they are new to us, and of uncertain import, I cannot approve of them so far as to forsake that which I have so long followed with the whole English nation. But because you are come from far into my kingdom, and, as I conceive, are desirous to impart to us those things which you believe to be true, and most beneficial, we will not molest you, but give you favourable entertainment, and take care to supply you with your necessary sustenance; nor do we forbid you to preach and gain as many as you can to your religion.” Accordingly he permitted them to reside in the city of Canterbury, which was the metropolis of all his dominions, and, pursuant to his promise, besides allowing them sustenance, did not refuse them liberty to preach. (Historia I.XXV)

Two things to note in this story: first, the dependence of the missionaries upon the goodwill of the king, and second, the kings unwillingness to abandon religious practices he regards as inherently English.  A sustained reading of Bede shows that the first fact remained important through the history of the Anglo-Saxon church: royal and noble patronage were vital, and a bishop too eager to make the king’s business his own would find his intrusions most unwelcome. (St. Wilfrid’s famous feud with King Ecgfrith of Northumbria is the clearest example of this.)  However, the second fact also remained troublesome, with notable instances occurring in Bede’s account of St. Laurence.

Before Augustine of Canterbury’s death, he went ahead and anointed Laurence as his successor: Augustine feared that leaving his episcopal see empty even for a short time might destabilize the English church.  It seems that Augustine should have feared empty thrones more: after his death, so too died Ethelbert of Kent and Sabert of Essex, and those Christian kings left heirs who were still unconverted and also hostile to Christianity.  The sons of Sabert, in particular, saw the church’s authority in matters spiritual as an affront to their royal dignity: they refused baptism, for which they saw no need, but resented being excluded from communion:

And being often earnestly admonished by him, that the same could not be done, nor any one admitted to partake of the sacred oblation without the holy cleansing, at last, they said in anger, “If you will not comply with us in so small a matter as that is which we require, you shall not stay in our province.” (Historia II.V)

This sudden hostility caused some of St. Laurence’s bishops to flee across the channel to Christian France, and St. Laurence planned to follow, but chose to have a prayer vigil first:

LAURENTIUS, being about to follow Mellitus and Justus, and to quit Britain, ordered his bed to be laid the night before in the church of the blessed apostles, Peter and Paul, which has been often mentioned before; wherein having laid himself to take some rest, after he had poured out many prayers and tears to God for the state of the church, be fell asleep; in the dead of night, the blessed prince of the apostles appeared to him, and scourging him a long time with apostolical severity, asked of him, “Why he would forsake the flock which he had committed to him? or to what shepherds he would commit Christ’s sheep that were in the midst of wolves? Have you,” said he, “forgotten my example, who, for the sake of those little ones, whom Christ recommended to me in token of his affection, underwent at the hands of infidels and enemies of Christ, bonds, stripes, imprisonment, afflictions, and lastly, the death of the cross, that I might at last be crowned with him?” Laurentius, the servant of Christ, being excited by these words and stripes, the very next morning repaired to the king, and taking off his garment, showed the scars of the stripes which he had received. The king, astonished, asked, “Who had presumed to give such stripes to so great a man?” And was much frightened when he heard that the bishop had suffered so much at the hands of the apostle of Christ for his salvation. Then abjuring the worship of idols, and renouncing his unlawful marriage, he embraced the faith of Christ, and being baptized, promoted the affairs of the church to the utmost of his power. (Historia II.VI)

In this skeptical era, we may look askance at this story of visions and miraculous stigmata.  But the king, Eadbald son of Ethelbert, has (I think) a telling reaction, and one that parallels the attitude of Sabert’s heirs : “Who would presume to give stripes to so great a man?”  For Eadbald, St. Laurence is the man who gave orders to his father, and who has tried to give orders to him.  Doubtless this assertion of ecclesiastical authority rankled Eadbald, as it did the sons of Sabert.  Yet this man, who presumed to command kings, was flogged like a slave.  This, I suspect, is what jarred Eadbald so, and led to his repentance: ocular evidence of an authority beyond his own.

The authority of bishops to command was not the only threat the posed to the traditional Anglo-Saxon kings, as can be seen in Bede’s account of King Redwald of Essex, who even St. Laurence failed to fully convert:

Redwald had long before been admitted to the sacrament of the Christian faith in Kent, but in vain; for on his return home, he was seduced by his wife and certain perverse teachers, and turned back from the sincerity of the faith; and thus his latter state was worse than the former; so that, like the ancient Samaritans, he seemed at the same time to serve Christ and the gods whom he had served before; and in the same temple he had an altar to sacrifice to Christ, and another small one to offer victims to devils; which temple, Aldwulf, king of that same province, who lived in our time testifies had stood until his time, and that he had seen it when he was a boy. (Historia II.XV)

Here we see Redwald adopting Christ as yet another of his gods, to be propitiated in the same manner as the other gods.  More importantly, though, it is Redwald’s temple and Redwald’s sacrifices: Redwald is his own bishop, serving as a spiritual authority for his people as well as a secular authority.  In other words, Redwald is Church and State: his co-opting of Christianity allows him access (he thinks) to the Christian god without submission to the ethnically Roman, politically Kentish archbishop.

* It is also the feast day of several others saints, notably St. Werburh (Werburga) and St. Ansgar (Oskar).*  My selection of St. Laurence is based solely on my interests and don’t necessarily reflect the relative prominence of this saint in this era or those past.