Here was this city, Renaissance from end to end, set under clear skies and a burning sun; and the religion in it was the soul dwelling in the body. It was the assertion of the reality of the human principle as embodying the divine. Even the exclusive tenets of Christianity were expressed under pagan images. Revelation spoke through forms of natural religion; God dwelt unashamed in the light of day; priests were priests, not aspiring clergymen; they sacrificed, sprinkled lustral water, went in long, rolling processions with incense and lights, and called heaven Olympus. Sacrum Divo Sebastiano, I saw inscribed on a granite altar. I sat under priest-professors who shouted, laughed, and joyously demonstrated before six nations in one lecture room. I saw the picture of the “Father of princes and kings and Lord of the world” exposed in the streets on his name-day, surrounded by flowers and oil lamps, in the manner in which, two centuries ago, other lords of the world were honoured. I went down into the Catacombs on St. Cecilia’s Day and St. Valentine’s, and smelled the box and the myrtle underfoot that did reverence to the fragrance of their memories, as centuries ago they had done reverence to victors in another kind of contest. In one sentence, I began to understand that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”; that as He took the created substance of a Virgin to fashion for Himself a natural body, so still He takes the created substance of men — their thoughts, their expressions, and their methods — to make for Himself that mystical body by which He is with us always; in short, I perceived that “there is nothing secular but sin.” Catholicism, then, is “materialistic?” Certainly; it is as materialistic as the Creation and the Incarnation, neither more nor less. Hugh Benson, Confessions of a Convert
I have begun this blog post with this quote for it wildly and wonderfully expresses what I wanted to communicate to my Byzantine class this past Tuesday, but which Fr. Benson (a convert to Catholicism whose father had been the very-evangelical archbishop of Canterbury) says so much more beautifully. This goes hand in glove with a question a student raised about St. Constantine, whose life — brutal, calloused, and bloody – looks far removed from the sanctity we think of in the Saints, such as the ones we commemorated this past week, the two great monastic fathers, St. Paul of Thebes and St. Antony the Great. How could the church name such a thug a saint? Further, he was no theologian like his later successor St. Justinian, or two other saints we commemorated this past week Sts. Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria. Indeed, he was easily swayed by St. Athanasius’s opponents to exile him (though not so much for theological, as for some political contrivances drummed up by Eusebius of Nicomedia and Eusebius of Caesarea). Also, St. Constantine put off baptism, something the Church eventually proscribed, till the very end of his life. All the same, he is remembered as a saint because of one great thing: his legalization of Christianity and his subsequent defense of the Church against persecution.
What has this to do with the above quote? On the most basic level, it has to do with God coming to us in our weakness and our foibles. He does not expect us to remain in them, but comes to transfigure them, to make all things new. Constantine’s epithet as saint comes not with a slighting or dismissal of his brutality, nor does it come as some way to whitewash what he had done as emperor per his enemies real and perceived (and family memebers), but comes in spite of them, indeed as all our redemption does. Many a martyr, apart from their baptism of blood, had little that stands out in their lives. Certainly some, like the Great Martyr Panteleimon, the details of whose life can be found in the wonderful akathist to him as an unmercenary healer, have much rightly attached to their lives as examples, but St. Constantine has this one single thing: his defense of the Church from the empire.
The question also reflects another view, that somehow the world of action and the world of piety stand opposed to one another, and that real Christianity is a sanitized life separate from the mundane. The Bible is replete with warnings to avoid sin, avoid lust, covetousness, gluttony, drunkenness, hatred, etc. and this is no denial of the danger of any of these, for we need to strive for holiness and sanctity with all our might. But this does not mean that we are going to be able to avoid sin if we live in the world. We live in a tragedy, not a comedy, and thus we will constantly find ourselves where our intentions to do the best we can are often the only redeeming thing about some of our actions, that is, we can often find ourselves in no-win situations. Can we avoid the tragic? We cannot.
This reality embodied in the tragedy of Constantine’s life also played itself out somewhat in Western Heritage as we covered books 3 – 5 of The Consolation of Philosophy. What is happiness? Is there ever any such thing as evil fortune? Is the obtaining of felicity only a spiritual acquisition? (Boethius frequently uses felicitas, which can mean not merely happiness as beatitude and a sublime contentment, but also as good luck or fortune.) Is punishment a blessing? And is not viciousness something to be pitied, since the vicious lack the power to be virtuous? All of these speak to the basic tragedy of this life, that real happiness, and here I mean beatitude, can seemingly never be attached to the ephemeral and changeable, and can never depend on power as some imperium over others. In this regard this life will be filled with all sorts of evils (and while Boethius is indebted to NeoPlatonism his Stoicism comes out here, but all completely consonant with his Christianity). The students are havering between whether Beatitude is purely for the world to come (I would say the strong majority of them) or whether we may partake of it now through this present creation. Most of them lack any form of a theology of creation and the Incarnation to make the connection that these two cannot be so tritely separated.
It is interesting that some of the Latin my students my students are now translating hit on these themes: “Nisi malo premeremur, numquam naturam vitae intellegeremus,” and “quae (mors) bona si non est, finis tamen illa malorum est.”
Life is filled with the bitter, the caustic, and all sorts of evils, but even with these, we are called upon to see the divine Word in all things, what the fathers in the Philokalia often referred to as the inner essence of all things. St. Gregory of Nyssa in his On Virginity spoke of how temporal beauty was but eternal Beauty acting upon temporal forms, and that only the virtuous could look beyond the mere transitory to the eternal resident in it. For my students, still struggling with such things as trying to pry themselves from their phones (banned in my classes), getting beyond such trivialities is something many aspire to, but are only now coming to understand the great effort it takes even to start. They admit true Beauty informs all beauty, but how this works out in reenchanting the world without some skewed form of Platonism I’m not sure they have at all grasped. Well, another week begins and I hope that I can help them on their way.
