Dionysius the Areopagite (II): the religious life

I have described elsewhere my scepticism about the sceptics in regard to Dionysius the Areopagite. I noted how Maurice de Gondillac, the translator of Dionysius’ works for the Bibliotheque Chretienne series in the 1940′s, considers the Dionysian references to religious life to be proof of the pseudonymous character of the writings. He says:-

The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy recounts in the detail the ceremonies of monastic profession… But, we know well that hermits appear only in the third century in the East, with Paul of Thebes and St Anthony, while the first religious communities go back to St Pachomius in the year 340.

Do we know this well? Eusebius of Caesarea (c.265-c.340), at any rate, appears not to be included in this ‘we’ . In book 2 chapter 17 of the Church History he recounts what the Jewish author Philo (c. 25 BC- c. AD 50), said of the ascetics of his time:-

First of all they renounce their property. When they begin the philosophical mode of life, they give up their goods to their relatives, and then, renouncing all the cares of life, they go forth beyond the walls and dwell in lonely fields and gardens, knowing well that intercourse with people of a different character is unprofitable and harmful… The whole interval, from morning to evening, is for them a time of exercise. For they read the holy Scriptures, and explain the philosophy of their fathers in an allegorical manner, regarding the written words as symbols of hidden truth which is communicated in obscure figures…. But some, in whom a great desire for knowledge dwells, forget to take food for three days; and some are so delighted and feast so luxuriously upon wisdom, which furnishes doctrines richly and without stint, that they abstain even twice as long as this, and are accustomed, after six days, scarcely to take necessary food.

Philo also describes, says Eusebius, ‘how, while one sings regularly in time, the others listen in silence, and join in chanting only the close of the hymns; and how, on the days referred to {the vigils of feasts} they sleep on the ground on beds of straw. They taste no wine at all, nor any flesh’. He adds, ‘These statements of Philo we regard as referring clearly and indisputably to those of our communion.’ He says that Philo is describing a ‘mode of life which has been preserved to the present time by us {Christians} alone’.

In other words, Eusebius, the father of Church history, says that from the first century onwards, certain Christians have been giving up their property in order to concentrate entirely on spiritual things, separating themselves from those who have not made this resolve, and regularly praying together at fixed times with others of like mind, observing together common rules of self-denial. Pace Monsieur Gondillac, it sounds rather like the religious life.

 

Radio 4 in 4 Minutes

 

Dreadnought

Recently, I noticed a book in the possession of Aelianus, called ‘Dreadnought‘. Due to my recent Hornblower obsession (I really must get to that shoe-post-y series of trivial literature and television at some point), I was immediately intrigued. It turned out to be not about sailing ships (ba!) but about Britain and Germany, and the role of their navies, on the way towards the First World War.

Yet, when I opened the book, the passage I hit upon was extremely vivid, and Aelianus assured me it was representative for the book. This has turned out to be true so far; I am at 550 of 910 pages, and find it the perfect cross between reading a novel and reading serious stuff. In fact, it is rather like reading a novel, only that it has really happened.

It is entertaining, informative, and utterly shocking.

Shocking, because I start to realize how influenced my history teachers were by their Marxist-dominated studies, apparently.

Shocking even more because it seems to me that quite generally in Germany, East or West, the dreadfulness of the First World War is entirely shadowed by the supreme dreadfulness of the Second World War.

According to what I learnt at school, and according to what every rational person in Germany believes, the Second World War was something that would not have happened without particular (Hitler) and general madness in Germany.

The First World War, on the other hand, happened because (now this is what I learnt at school) basically every one of the protagonists had an interest in it happening (imperialism! bad, BAD, Imperialism!!), only no-one thought it would be that disastrous. Now I have only got to 1902 in the book, but from that it is quite obvious that within the more-or-less-moral concerto of diplomatic relations at the time, Germany quite certainly acted on the ‘less’ extreme of that gradient, throughout.

Though Aelinus tells me he shudders at thinking of what would have happened had there  been an aliance between Britain and Germany at that point, I still do think that double-dealing, deceitfulness and hubris were even less conductive to European (and worldwide) happiness than a realization of ‘we are basically family, and that parliamentary monarchy thing you have going over there does not seem such a bad thing, probabably rather a better thing than our obsessively military absolutist culture’ would have done. But well. We will never know in this live, probably.

I mean, if, on reading such a book, you think that the ‘resignation’ of Bismarck was a thing that would make matters worse: things must be in a really, really bad state already. Poor, poor Germany, please really do pray for us!

 

Udine?

Business recently took me to Udine. Embarrassingly, I never ever had heard about this place. It turned out to be located in the very north of Italy, rather close to the borders of both Slovenia and Austria. It has some 100.000 inhabitants, and given this and its comparative obscurity, a surprising number of attractive historical buildings. [Plus rather delicious food and wine: they have cevapcici, plus, apparently, according to them, the real Tokay.] Amongst these, the 15th century castle (rebuilt in Renaissance style after a destructive earthquake) probably ranks first (though there are a number of fine Venetia-inspired palaces there as well as a Venetia-inspired clock tower).

Udine was seat of one of the earliest European parliaments, dating back to the 12 century. This parliament represented the municipality as well as the nobility and the clergy and was only abolished in 1805 by Napoleon (on whom I am particularly ill to speak due to my recent reading of the Hornblower series). With the defeat of Aquileia in 1445, the Patria del Friuli came under Venetian dominion and was ruled by a General Proveditor or a “Luogotenente”.

The old Udinese castle was destroyed in the early 16th century and rebuilt by the Venetians, still making the parliamentary chamber one of the earliest of its kind in Europe. The frescos, being done by some more or less well-known Renaissance artists, give quite a clear message: be friends with Venice, and you’ll be fine, be at enmity with it, and you are dead. From right to left, the frescoes show the Venetian ships setting sail to defeat the Turks, the Venetians conquering Aquileia, Venus between Plenty and Udine, interspersed with a panel of Marcus Curtius and Cato slitting his throat, and a LOT of allegorical paintings of Piety, Peace, Plenty, Justice, Venice and Udine, plus a bottom frieze of Christian soldiers fighting against Muslims. ‘

 

Some while ago, inspired by this post of Orwell’s Picnic, I invested a considerable amount of money in a box set of Star Trek – The Original Series, and never looked back. A minor irritant, however, was that I could only receive the delivery of the DVDs in person, showing my ID, because they were age-restricted (cue the hassle of making an appointment with the delivery service, getting up in the early morning on Saturday, and the embarrassment of signing for age-restricted DVD  packed in discrete brown envelope…)

This week I watched the one (!) episode out of 79 that earned the whole lot an ‘age 16 rating’ in Germany (nothing but definite p**n gets anything worse here, according to my -  admittedly extremely limited – knowledge).

It is this:

Patterns of Force. The Enterprise is looking for a historian who was sent to observe a primitive civilization, and who, as it turns out, was so appalled by the Ekosians’ local squabbling that, non-interference directive or not, he decided to do something about it, though, to put it mildly, not with the best historical judgement.

Not to get me wrong: the episode may be in rather bad taste and has a number of glaring faults. One is the fact that most of the characters believe the National Socialist state was an efficient, though psychotic and evil, one, which is of course utterly wrong (Albeit, apparently, an opinion that was held at the time in the States [add Star Trek fandom source I am too lazy to look up here]). Another one is that if the generally kind and good historian (Gill, I think) just wants to copy what is good (?) about the Nazis, why does he import symbology, troop types and the like wholesale?

Still, from there on, it is pretty much ‘Some anvils have to be dropped‘. The Space Nazis are probably the most unalloyedly evil evil guys in the whole of TOS. First thing we see is them battering an apparently harmless civilian in way as brutal as not otherwise shown in TOS normally. The absolutely pacifist ethnic group to be eliminated (from a neighbouring planet with the best of intentions and behaving nobly throughout) come from the planet Zeon, and have names such as Abrom, Isak and Davod. The Space Nazis, leaving dying people in the street and mocking them, plus preparing wholesale annihilation of the Zeons both on their own and the Zeons’ home planet, are also rather foolish: easily taken in by the valiant resistance double agents, and enthusiastic about the meaningless aggressive catchphrases Gill, now a mindless drugged puppethead of an evil Second in Command, spouts out. Probably the least attractive evil guys in TOS, IMHO.

So what we get is Kirk and Spock, after escaping from their prison cells, running around in SS uniforms to save the day by deceit, the morbid fascination about watching them doing this lying in the utter opposition of what they and these uniforms stand for. O.K., there is the rather blue-eyed ending assuming that Gill dead and the whole madness unmasked, everyone will be reasonable again (but then again, that was about the hope of the Stauffenberg assassination attempt, and oh if it just would have worked!).

The fact that the episode was not shown in German television until decades after the original airings, and then late at night (if ‘in rather bad taste’ was a criterion, what about ‘The Empath‘?), should elucidate to non-Germans the depth of the German National Trauma, that allows none but the most chest-beating reference to 1933-45, no fun made about that period, nor any light entertainment, be it ever so obvious about who the really, really bad baddies are. Just so that you think before you make you next Nazi/Hitler joke while we are listening.

 

Dawkins: “Any fetus is less human than an adult pig.”

Richard Dawkins tweets on abortion: ‘any fetus is less human than an adult pig’

 

First Stop: Our Lady

Pope prays at Santa Maria Maggiore

 

Giving witness – FAIL and WIN

FAIL

Some time ago a colleague of mine welcomed a delegation of students from an Arabian country to our city. She was both impressed and bewildered by that encounter: For her, it was fascinating to have first-hand contact with people involved in the Arabian Spring, but talking to them she also felt like encountering an entirely different world. As one of the most bewildering aspects she mentioned those people’s religiosity: not only that they were religious, but also the way they were religious: ‘This is just not comparable to Christianity’, she said, ‘they just thought they were right, and everyone else was wrong. And then their missionary zeal to have everybody believe as they do!’ – What a lowering thought that we have known each other for over a year and a half, and I have not got across to her that that is what we (with better justification) believe as well…

WIN

Last weekend I had a conversation with two atheists so far away from both the Church and Protestantism that they base their views on Christianity entirely on secular news coverage. Nevertheless, quite magically, conversation at one point touched ecumenism.They started comparing the situation between Catholics and Protestants in Germany to that of the Christian-Muslim-Jewish conflict in the Near East (‘religious intolerance’), which I strongly denied. Of course, they said, normal people did not think like this, but those in charge in the Catholic Church… This mildly blew a fuse in my irenical mental lookout and made me say that, au contraire, many Catholic priests and bishops in Germany were so intent on ‘ecumenism’ that they were countenancing all sorts of compromises, and sometimes right-out betrayals of Catholic doctrine, that I was often annoyed with it.

It took us several minutes to establish that this was what I actually wanted to say, so great was their disbelief.

I felt quite satisfied afterwards.

 

 

Otters from Laodicea find PhD jokes in Slough

Well, not strictly speaking. But it gets in our most favourable search-terms from 2012.

 

The Holy Innocents

Today, dearest brethren, we celebrate the birthday of those children who were slaughtered, as the Gospel tells us, by that exceedingly cruel king, Herod. Let the earth, therefore, rejoice and the Church exult — she, the fruitful mother of so many heavenly champions and of such glorious virtues. Never, in fact, would that impious tyrant have been able to benefit these children by the sweetest kindness as much as he has done by his hatred. For as today’s feast reveals, in the measure with which malice in all its fury was poured out upon the holy children, did heaven’s blessing stream down upon them.

“Blessed are you, Bethlehem in the land of Judah! You suffered the inhumanity of King Herod in the murder of your babes and thereby have become worthy to offer to the Lord a pure host of infants. In full right do we celebrate the heavenly birthday of these children whom the world caused to be born unto an eternally blessed life rather than that from their mothers’ womb, for they attained the grace of everlasting life before the enjoyment of the present. The precious death of any martyr deserves high praise because of his heroic confession; the death of these children is precious in the sight of God because of the beatitude they gained so quickly. For already at the beginning of their lives they pass on. The end of the present life is for them the beginning of glory. These then, whom Herod’s cruelty tore as sucklings from their mothers’ bosom, are justly hailed as “infant martyr flowers”; they were the Church’s first blossoms, matured by the frost of persecution during the cold winter of unbelief.  St. Augustine

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I hope as many of you as possible will recall with sorrow the continuing massacre of innocent unborn babies, our society’s greatest and deepest shame, and the one of which it most hates to be reminded. Peter Hitchens