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.

]]> http://exlaodicea.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/dionysius-the-areopagite-ii-the-religious-life/feed/ 2 thomascordatus http://exlaodicea.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/chesterton-on-teutonophilia/ http://exlaodicea.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/chesterton-on-teutonophilia/#comments Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:13:41 +0000 aelianus http://exlaodicea.wordpress.com/?p=9850 ]]> THE CALL TO THE BARBARIANS

A BOOK was sent me the other day by a gentleman who pins his faith to what he calls the Nordic race; and who, indeed, appears to offer that race as a substitute for all religions. Crusaders believed that Jerusalem was not only the Holy City, but the centre of the whole world. Moslems bow their heads towards Mecca and Roman Catholics are notorious for being in secret communication with Rome. I presume that the Holy Place of the Nordic religion must be the North Pole. What form of religious architecture is exhibited in its icebergs, how far its vestments are modified by the white covering of Arctic animals, how the morning and evening service may be adapted to a day and a night each lasting for six months, whether their only vestment is the alb or their only service the angelus of noon, upon all these mysteries I will not speculate. But I can affirm with some confidence that the North Pole is very little troubled by heretical movements or the spread of modern doubt. Anyhow, it would seem that we know next to nothing about this social principle, except that anything is good if it is near enough to the North. And this undoubtedly explains the spiritual leadership of the Eskimo throughout history; and the part played by Spitzbergen as the spiritual arena of modern times. The only thing that puzzles me is that the Englishmen who now call themselves Nordic used to call themselves Teutonic; and very often even Germanic. I cannot think why they altered this so abruptly in the autumn of 1914. Some day, I suppose, when we have diplomatic difficulties with Norway, they will equally abruptly drop the word Nordic. They will hastily substitute some other–I would suggest Borealic. They might be called the Bores, for short.

But I only mention this book because of a passage in it which is rather typical of the tone of a good many other people when they are talking about Catholic history. The writer would substitute one race for all religions; in which he certainly differs from us, who are ready to offer one religion to all races. And even here, perhaps, the comparison is not altogether to his advantage. For anybody who likes can belong to the religion; whereas it is not very clear what is to be done with the people who do not happen to belong to the race. But even among religions he is ready to admit degrees of depravity; he will distinguish between these disgusting institutions; of course, according to their degree of latitude. It is rather unfortunate for him that many Eskimos are Catholics and that most French Protestants live in the south of France; but he proceeds on his general principle clearly enough. He points out, in his pleasant way, why it is exactly that Roman Catholicism is such a degrading superstition. And he adds (which is what interests me at the moment) that this was illustrated in the Dark Ages, which were a nightmare of misery and ignorance. He then admits handsomely that Protestantism is not quite so debased and devilish as Catholicism; and that men of the Protestant nations do exhibit rudimentary traces of the human form. But this, he says, ”is not due to their Protestantism, but to their Nordic common sense.” They are more educated, more liberal, more familiar with reason and beauty, because they are what used to be called Teutonic; descended from Vikings and Gothic chiefs rather than from the Tribunes of Florence or the Troubadours of Provence. And in this curious idea I caught a glimpse of something much wider and more interesting; which is another note of the modern ignorance of the Catholic tradition. In speaking of things that people do not know, I have mostly spoken of things that are really within the ring or circle of our own knowledge; things inside the Catholic culture which they miss because they are outside it. But there are some cases in which they themselves are ignorant even of the things outside it. They themselves are ignorant, not only of the centre of civilisation which they slander, but even of the ends of the earth to which they appeal; they not only cannot find Rome on their map, but they do not even know where to look for the North Pole.

Take, for instance, that remark about the Dark Ages and the Nordic common sense. It is tenable and tolerable enough to say that the Dark Ages were a nightmare. But it is nonsense to say that the Nordic element was anything remotely resembling sense. If the Dark Ages were a nightmare, it was very largely because the Nordic nonsense made them an exceedingly Nordic nightmare. It was the period of the barbarian invasions; when piracy was on the high seas and civilisation was in the monasteries. You may not like monasteries, or the sort of civilisation that is preserved by monasteries; but it is quite certain that it was the only sort of civilisation there was. But this is simply one of the things that the Nordic gentleman does not know. He imagines that the Danish pirate was talking about Tariff Reform and Imperial Preference, with scientific statistics from Australia and Alaska, when he was rudely interrupted by a monk named Bede, who had never heard of anything but monkish fables. He supposes that a Viking or a Visigoth was firmly founded on the principles of the Primrose League and the English Speaking Union, and that everything else would have been founded on them if fanatical priests had not rushed in and proclaimed the savage cult called Christianity. He thinks that Penda of Mercia, the last heathen king, was just about to give the whole world the benefits of the British Constitution, not to mention the steam engine and the works of Rudyard Kipling, when his work was blindly ruined by unlettered ruffians with such names as Augustine and Dunstan and Anselm. And that is the little error which invalidates our Nordic friend’s importance as a serious historian; that is why we cannot throw ourselves with utter confidence and surrender into the stream of his historical enthusiasm. The difficulty consists in the annoying detail that nothing like what he is thinking about ever happened in the world at all; that the religion of race that he proposes is exactly what he himself calls the Dark Ages. It is what some scientific persons call a purely subjective idea; or in other words, a nightmare. It is very doubtful if there ever was any Nordic race. It is quite certain that there never was any Nordic common sense. The very words “common sense” are a translation from the Latin.

Now that one typical or even trivial case has a larger application. One very common form of Protestant or rationalist ignorance may be called the ignorance of what raw humanity is really like. Such men get into a small social circle, very modern and very narrow, whether it is called the Nordic race or the Rationalist Association. They have a number of ideas, some of them truisms, some of them very untrue, about liberty, about humanity, about the spread of knowledge. The point is that those ideas, whether true or untrue, are the very reverse of universal. They are not the sort of ideas that any large mass of mankind, in any age or country, may be assumed to have. They may in some cases be related to deeper realities; but most men would not even recognise them in the form in which these men present them. There is probably, for instance, a fundamental assumption of human brotherhood that is common to all humanity. But what we call humanitarianism is not common to humanity. There is a certain recognition of reality and unreality which may be called common sense. But the scientific sense of the special value of truth is not generally regarded as common sense. It is silly to pretend that priests specially persecuted a naturalist, when the truth is that all the little boys would have persecuted him in any village in the world, merely because he was a lunatic with a butterfly-net. Public opinion, taken as a whole is much more contemptuous of specialists and seekers after truth than the Church ever was. But these critics never can take public opinion as a whole. There are a great many examples of this truth; one is the case I have given, the absurd notion that a horde of heathen raiders out of the northern seas and forests, in the most ignorant epoch of history, were not likely to be at least as ignorant as anybody else. They were, of course, much more ignorant than anybody with the slightest social connection with the Catholic Church. Other examples may be found in the story of other religions. Great tracts of the globe, covered in theory by the other religions, are often covered in practice merely by certain human habits of fatalism or pessimism or some other human mood. Islam very largely stands for the fatalism. Buddhism very largely stands for the pessimism. Neither of them knows anything of either the Christian or the humanitarian sort of hope. But an even more convincing experience is to go out into the street, or into a tube or a tram, and talk to the actual cabmen, cooks and charwomen cut off from the Creed by the modern chaos. You will find that heathens are not happy, however Nordic. You will soon find that you do not need to go to Arabia for fatalism; or to the Thibetan desert for despair.

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!

]]> http://exlaodicea.wordpress.com/2013/06/11/dreadnought/feed/ 14 notburga h63367 http://exlaodicea.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/st-bernard-and-the-evangelisation-of-the-jews/ http://exlaodicea.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/st-bernard-and-the-evangelisation-of-the-jews/#comments Mon, 10 Jun 2013 15:34:37 +0000 thomascordatus http://exlaodicea.wordpress.com/?p=9836 ]]> There seems to be an idea around that St Bernard said that we needn’t seek to evangelise the Jews because they will only be converted at the end of the world. The pope emeritus, writing in his private capacity, seems to have give credence to this idea in the second volume of his trilogy Jesus of Nazareth. It’s worth looking at the relevant passage in De Consideratione, where he is writing to Pope Eugenius III about the duty of evangelisation:-

We perceive then that you must strive to the utmost that they who have not faith may be turned to faith, that they who have turned may not turn aside, that they who have thus turned may turn back; moreover, you must see that the perverse ones be set in the paths of uprightness, and the subverted recalled to truth ; that the subverters of men’s souls may be convinced by invincible reason, so that they themselves if possible, may either be cured of their errors, or, if that may not be, they may lose their authority, and the power of subverting other men. You must certainly not allow yourself to be imposed upon by the worst sort of foolish men, I mean heretics and schismatics ; for these are they who are subverted, and subvert ; they are dogs to tear, foxes to deceive. Men, I say, of this sort must be corrected with special care lest they perish, or must be restrained that they may not do damage. As regards the Jews, I grant time may be your excuse {esto, de Iudaeis excusat te tempus}; they have their fixed limit, which cannot be anticipated. The fullness of the Gentiles must first come in. But as regards the Gentiles themselves, what answer do you make ? Nay rather, what is the verdict of your consideration on this long delay? Why did the fathers resolve to set bounds to the Gospel, and to check the word of faith, while men’s hearts are hardening in unbelief? Why, do we suppose, the word running very swiftly suddenly stopped ? Who was the first to forbid its life-giving progress ? Some unknown cause perhaps hindered them; perhaps necessity compelled them.

Clearly, there is no suggestion here of a general policy of refusing to evangelise Jews, but simply a recognition that there can be an ‘excuse’ if evangelisation is not generally successful in their regard; namely that it has been divinely foretold that the ‘fullness’ of the Jews will only come in when the times of the Gentiles have been fulfilled.

Fair play to Matt Birk, an NFL Superbowl champion with the Baltimore Ravens, who recently snubbed President Obama by declining an invitation to a celebration at the White House.  Birk explains:

“I have great respect for the office of the presidency but about five or six weeks ago, our president made a comment in a speech and he said, ‘God bless Planned Parenthood’.  I’m very confused by [Obama's] statement,” he explained. “”For God to bless a place where they’re ending 330,000 lives a year? I just chose not to attend. I am Catholic, I am active in the Pro-Life movement and I just felt like I couldn’t deal with that. I couldn’t endorse that in any way.”

Birk, a father of six, has also spoken in defense of marriage here:

“Marriage is in trouble right now — admittedly, for many reasons that have little to do with same-sex unions. In the last few years, political forces and a culture of relativism have replaced “I am my brother’s keeper” and “love your neighbor as yourself” with “live and let live” and “if it feels good, go ahead and do it.”

The effects of no-fault divorce, adultery, and the nonchalant attitude toward marriage by some have done great harm to this sacred institution. How much longer do we put the desires of adults before the needs of kids? Why are we not doing more to lift up and strengthen the institution of marriage?

Same-sex unions may not affect my marriage specifically, but it will affect my children — the next generation. Ideas have consequences, and laws shape culture. Marriage redefinition will affect the broader well-being of children and the welfare of society. As a Christian and a citizen, I am compelled to care about both.”

Can you imagine how the BBC would react if a high-profile Premiership footballer started laying into the culture of death and moral relativism?!

The necessity of explicit faith in Jesus Christ for salvation is the flip side of the gratuity of salvation. The pelagianism of those who deny it is immediately exposed by their protests at the ‘injustice’ of the doctrine, at the fate of ‘righteous’ pagans. He came not for the righteous. He came for all men. To suppose one might be saved by conscience is to claim salvation as a right and to make oneself like God. It is scarcely surprising that those who adhere to this false gospel take no trouble to preach the true. There is no good news, no vital intelligence which must be transmitted to our fellows for their salvation. To evangelise is selfishly to place in jeopardy the saving ignorance of the nations. Let the watchmen be silenced and let those for whom Christ died sleep on and take their rest. One of the saddest things about the vast gadarene lapsation of the post-conciliar springtime (at least in my generation) is the way in which my contemporaries attending Catholic schools and churches believed they knew what they were abandoning. Young people who had no idea the Mass was a sacrifice or that Jesus is God or that they might be saved by faith in Him, left the Church they thought they knew. In fact they had never experienced the Mass celebrated in a Catholic rite and never heard the Gospel preached. All they heard were (not even) eloquent words of human wisdom emptying the Cross of the Christ of its power. How often I have heard those who remained ‘in’ the church for social reasons complain that before the nineteen sixties ‘no one understood the Mass’? Of course! No one understands the Mass. Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? What more terrible deception can their be than to make men believe they can plumb the depths of the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God? No one can believe this. In the moment the attempt is made faith is lost. 

“”

Having surrendered much of Southern Northumbria into the hands of the Mohammedans in a Yaltaesque deal with Cordatus I feel I ought to pay tribute to the beauty of that place where Constantine was raised to the purple, to save whose pagan inhabitants from God’s wrath St Gregory became our Apostle, and whose faithful in the face of heresy and schism laid down their lives in myriads under the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ.

I am posting this on the request of Aelianus, who must feel quite smug about this.

Deus, qui multitudinem populorum beati Bonifatii Martyris tui atque Pontificis zelo ad agnitionem tui nominis vocare dignatus es: concede propitius; ut cuius solemnia colimus, etiam patrocinia sentiamus. Per Dóminum nostrum Iesum Christum, Filium tuum: qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti Deus, per ómnia sǽcula sæculórum.  Amen.