Dating Easter

Most of North America's Christians are now three weeks past Easter. Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Anglicans, as well as members of the Armenian Apostolic Church, all celebrated Easter very early this year, on 23 March. Meanwhile, it is still one week until Passover and two weeks until Orthodox Easter. I am still looking at two more weeks of fasting, while my Anglo-Catholic friends are already half-way to the Ascension!

It has long been a principle of the Church that all Christians should celebrate the Resurrection on the same day. A number of councils, such as the Synod of Whitby, tried to get all the Christians in a region on the same page with respect to the date of Easter. How did we get to the current anomalous situation?

The early rule adopted by the Churches of Rome and Alexandria was that Easter should be observed on the first Sunday after Passover. Passover, the 15th of Nisan on the Jewish calendar, would normally fall on the day of the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. At that time the date of Passover, as observed by rabbinical Jews, depended upon observation of nature, not computation.

The Roman version of the rule ensured that Easter would always be observed after Passover. If Passover fell on Sunday, then Easter would be celebrated on the following Sunday. This was motivated in part by history: According to the Gospel of John (e.g., 19:31), the Crucifixion occurred on Friday, Passover was observed on Saturday, and the Resurrection occurred on Sunday. Therefore, they reasoned, Easter should be observed after Passover. But it might also have been motivated in part by an anti-Jewish attitude that was prevalent among Christians of some regions, who preferred to separate the Christian Passover (Greek Pascha) from the Jewish Passover (Hebrew Pesach).

To complicate matters, around that time, the Jews reformed their calendar to simplify the determination of when to add an intercalary month (a 13th month to keep the lunar calendar in sync with the solar calendar). Formerly, the Sanhedrin would announce the insertion of the extra month based on four factors: the equinox, the ripeness of the barley and of the fruits of trees, and the birth of sufficient lambs for the Passover sacrifice. The new calendar, traditionally attributed to the 4th-century rabbi Hillel II (though more likely adopted gradually between the 1st and 9th centuries) was rule-based rather than astronomical. The dispersion of the Jews all over the Mediterranean world made it difficult to communicate the beginning of the ecclesiastical New Year (1st of Nisan) to everyone. The new calendar was intended to ensure that all Jews could start the new year together, and thus celebrate Passover and other festivals together. But the rule-based calendar sometimes departed from the celestial calendar, resulting in the observance of Passover before the equinox. Some Christians, especially in the East, followed the new Jewish determination of Passover, while others rejected the Jewish calendrical innovation and made their own independent determination of the Paschal full moon. (Local variations in calendrical practice among both Christians and Jews make the picture somewhat more complicated than I have described here.)

The Council of Nicea, in response to Constantine's request, addressed the issue of when to celebrate Easter. The council decided that Easter should be observed by all Christians on the Sunday following the full moon on or after the vernal equinox. That is really all the Church said about the date of Easter at the time. If you read much about this issue, you will no doubt encounter various claims that the Council of Nicea mandated more detailed formulae for determining the date of Easter (e.g., basing it on the Julian calendar or employing a 19-year lunar cycle), which just happen to coincide with the writer's biases. But such claims are entirely unfounded. Variant lunar cycles, for instance, persisted until the 9th century in some places.

A few decades later, with some Eastern Christians still taking their cue from the Jewish observance of Passover, the Church again addressed the matter in an appendix to the Apostolic Constitutions. Canon VII of the Holy Apostles states, "If any bishop, priest, or deacon celebrates the holy day of Pascha before the vernal equinox with the Jews, let him be deposed." The key phrase here is not "with the Jews," but, rather, "before the vernal equinox." The implication is that Christians are to ignore the new Jewish calendar. The Church had little choice but to make this ruling. The contrary ruling would, essentially, have given the Jews the power to determine when Christians celebrated their most important festival. Here the Church proved more conservative than the rabbinical Jews, retaining the ancient Jewish practice long after the Jews had abandoned it.

The Jews have not observed Passover before the vernal equinox since the 9th century. Their rule-based calendar has drifted, so that now they sometimes observe Passover later than the astronomically determined date, but never earlier. Like this year, for instance. The vernal equinox took place on 20 March, and the moon was full on the following day, 21 March. But the Jews will commence their celebration of Passover at the next full moon, 20 April.

Many Orthodox Christians, perhaps including most of the clergy, seem to believe that the reason we Orthodox Christians observe Easter so late is because the canons require us to observe Easter after the Jews have observed Passover. This year, for instance, Orthodox Easter falls on 27 April, a week after Passover, which is consistent with this claim. But while this might be a useful rule of thumb, it is not an actual rule, let alone a canon. The Passover date that Easter must not precede is that determined by the ancient method – 21 March this year. Far from requiring Christians to celebrate Easter after the new Jewish Passover date, Canon VII of the Holy Apostles actually requires us to ignore the innovative Jewish dating of Passover.

It is easy to demonstrate that the Church has no rule requiring Easter to follow Passover. A number of times in the 6th through 8th centuries, the Church actually celebrated Easter on the same day when the Jews were beginning their celebration of Passover. This last occurred in AD 783. It has not happened since then because the Julian calendar, which came to be used by Christians, drifted even faster than the Jewish calendar. Orthodox Christians still use the Julian calendar for determining the date of Easter. That is the real reason why Orthodox Easter always follows Passover.

It is common knowledge that the Julian calendar currently runs 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar. (Most European Catholic countries and their colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, as decreed by Pope Gregory XIII. Other countries were slower. Britain, for example, did not adopt the new calendar until 1752. Greece was the last European country to adopt the Gregorian calendar, in 1923.) What is less well known is that the Orthodox also follow a different calculation of lunar cycle, which runs a few days behind both astronomical reality and the Gregorian lunar cycle. This year, for instance, the astronomical full moon will occur on 20 April, while the Orthodox lunar tables assign the Paschal full moon to 25 April.

The difference, then, between Orthodox and Western Easter dates occurs because 1) the Julian solstice occurs 13 days after the Gregorian solstice, and 2) the Julian full moon occurs 3 to 5 days after the Gregorian full moon. (Both calendars use virtual solstices and full moons based on computation, rather than on actual astronomical observation. In practice, the Gregorian computations are usually closer to physical reality.) By my calculations, based on these two facts, Orthodox Easter should coincide with Western Easter about 20% of the time; it should fall one week later 50% of the time; it should fall four weeks later 10% of the time; and it should fall five weeks later 20% of the time. I think that is pretty close to the actual pattern of variation in recent history.

The Julian calendar, however, continues to drift away from physical reality. After the present century, the two Easters will never again occur four weeks apart. Beginning in 2437, they will sometimes come six weeks apart. And after 2698, the two Easters will never again coincide.

I have referred numerous times to the "rule-based" reformed Jewish calendar. Lest I give an incorrect impression, let me reiterate that, since at least the 5th century, Christians have also used rule-based calendars. Currently, no church determines the date of Easter through direct astronomical observation. In the early first millennium, when these calculated calendars were being devised, communication was not what it is today. Determining the date of Easter by rules, rather than by astronomical observation, was the most practical way to ensure that all Christians celebrated Easter together. But it also embodied a bit of humanistic hubris – a pride in the growing power of human reason to model the mechanics of the universe through its own ingenuity, without further reference to God's physical creation. It would seem to me that a religion based on the Incarnation should hesitate to separate itself from physical reality.

And, indeed, the men who devised the Church's calendar had no such intention; rather, they intended for their calculations to anticipate the physical reality that would eventually obtain. In reforming the Roman calendar, Julius Caesar had been attempting to implement a calendar that would conform to astronomical reality. While the Julian calendar was a vast improvement over its predecessor, it did not quite succeed in matching the movements of the heavens over the long term. The Fathers who argued for various lunar cycles (e.g., 19-year, 84-year, 532-year) did so on the basis of how closely they would conform to reality. If they were here today to see the outcome of their work, I'm sure they would want to have another go at it, to see if they could improve their methods.

And what of those who insist that the Church must retain the Julian calendar? I will never be persuaded that the measurement errors of a pagan Roman emperor constitute an irreformable element of Holy Tradition.

In the centuries following the Council of Nicea, the Church converged on a consensus of using the Julian calendar with a 19-year lunar cycle. Its leaders saw this method as the best way to implement the decision of Nicene Fathers regarding the date of Easter, given the options available at the time. And it worked pretty well for a while. Now it is not working so well, and we see that rigid adherence to these unadjusted formulae results in a growing divergence from the ruling of Nicea.

Together with the Orthodox Theological Society in America, I support the Aleppo Agreement, under which churches would abandon their virtual calendars and extrapolations, and instead base the date of Easter on actual astronomical observation. The OTSA clearly states the Orthodox rationale for Aleppo: "We endorse this proposal on the basis that it reflects most faithfully the norms for calculating the date of Pascha as set out by the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council." You can't get more Orthodox than that.

For those who want to know more, here are some suggestions for further reading:

Archbishop Peter:
Concerning the Date of Pascha and the 1st Ecumenical Council

Wikipedia: Computus

This Easter/Passover Calculator allows you to plug in a year, and it gives you the dates of Julian Easter, Gregorian Easter, and Passover.


Appendix
I decided to add a list of actual dates for 2008, which might clarify things for those who think concretely, rather than abstractly.

Ancient Jewish (Astronomical) Calendar
7 March – New Moon / New Year / 1 Nisan
20 March – Vernal Equinox
21 March – Full Moon / Passover / 15 Nisan

Reformed Jewish Calendar
Year 5768 – 11th year of 19-year cycle
6 April – New Moon / 1 Nisan
20 April – Full Moon / Passover / 15 Nisan

Julian Calendar (with Gregorian dates)
3 April – Vernal Equinox
25 April – Paschal Full Moon
27 April – Easter / Pascha

Gregorian Calendar
14th year of 19-year cycle
21 March – Vernal Equinox
22 March – Paschal Full Moon
23 March – Easter

Charitable Solicitations

I get a lot of charitable solicitations in the mail. In fact, they account for about two-thirds of all the mail I receive. In 2001 I decided to track my communications from charities. That year I received 862 communications from 240 different charitable organizations. Of these, 264 arrived in the first quarter, and 116 in March. Two different Catholic-related charities sent me 22 solicitations each.

This year, I am repeating that exercise. In the first three months of 2008 I received 233 communications from 106 different charities – 186 solicitations, 24 newsletters, and 23 receipts or thank-you letters. One organization has already sent me 8 solicitations. This is about a 3% decrease from 2001.

In determining which organizations to contribute to, my first filter is to drop any organization that sent me more than 12 solicitations in the past year. Actually, any more than 2 a year is excessive and wasteful, as far as I'm concerned. The extra letters not only waste their money on printing and postage, but they waste my time opening, sorting, and recycling them. They actually slow down my charitable giving, since the time that I could spend writing checks must instead be spent sorting excess mail.

My second filter is to check their ratings on Charity Navigator, which evaluates most American charities. It gives every charity it rates two ratings, one for efficiency and one for capacity. Each rating is on a scale of 0 to 4 stars, with sub-components rated on more detailed numerical scales. I find it especially useful when a number of organizations with the same mission want my money. I can determine which of them will use my contribution most efficiently and direct my dollars accordingly.

I'll report back again at the end of the year with the 2008 totals.

Soldier’s Bible

I recently lost another friend from my old Episcopal parish. John went home to Rhode Island nearly two years ago to look after his stepmother during her recovery from an illness or surgery or something. While he was there, he was diagnosed with cancer of the bone marrow. He went through three rounds of chemotherapy and was optimistic about his chances for recovery, but he didn’t make it. He never returned to DC.

A few months before John departed for Rhode Island, his roommate had a stroke, which left the right side of his body paralyzed. He now lives in a nursing home not far from their old apartment, which has been unoccupied for some time now. On Saturday he took me to the apartment to begin looking through John’s things. I returned on Monday and spent the whole afternoon in John’s room. At his roommate’s urging, I claimed some books, graphic novels, CDs, videotapes, and DVDs for myself (John and I had a lot of overlapping interests and tastes). I also set aside a few liturgical books for his roommate (some of them were probably his anyway). And I filled three boxes with the rest of his Bibles, books about scripture, prayerbooks, hymnals, books on liturgy, and miscellaneous books of theology and devotion. There are lots of other books, including several shelves of science fiction paperbacks, that are still there waiting to be dealt with.

One of the books I found was a 1942 Gideons’ edition of the New Testament and Psalms (KJV, naturally). It was apparently intended for soldiers. In the front, on a page facing a color image of the U.S. flag (48 stars), was this letter:

THE WHITE HOUSE - WASHINGTON

January 25, 1941

To the Armed Forces:

As Commander-in-Chief I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the armed forces of the United States. Throughout the centuries men of many faiths and diverse origins have found in the Sacred Book words of wisdom, counsel and inspiration. It is a fountain of strength and now, as always, an aid in attaining the highest aspirations of the human soul.

Very sincerely yours,

Franklin D. Roosevelt.

On the following pages were the Lord’s Prayer, five pages of “Well-Loved Hymns” (Onward, Christian Soldiers; Jesus! Lover of My Soul; Lead, Kindly Light; Abide with Me; Rock of Ages; How Firm a Foundation; Nearer, My God to Thee; Now the Day Is Over; and the Doxology - “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow”), and two “National Anthems” (America - “My country, ’tis of three” - and The Star-Spangled Banner). At the back of the Bible was a page with this message:

Your Chaplain
Look up your chaplain at the first opportunity. Your welfare is his first concern, and you will find him friendly and helpful at all times. His counsel and advice will guide you in avoiding or overcoming difficulties. In many ways you can help him in his services for others. A close friendship between and chaplain and his men preserves and promotes a fine spirit in any service unit.
- The GIDEONS

I wonder if such straightforward Presidential commendation of Bible reading would still be permitted by the courts today. Would the Gideons even be allowed to give soldiers a copy of the New Testament? When I was in fifth grade, the Gideons gave everyone in my school a copy of the New Testament and Psalms (and maybe Proverbs too). I’m pretty sure that is no longer allowed.

A River Runs Through Lent

Last week was the first week of Lent. (Those of us who follow the Julian Calendar are running five weeks behind the rest of the world this year.) All week, wherever I turned, I kept running into river imagery.

On the weekdays of Lent, the Byzantine lectionary gives us Genesis and Proverbs. On the first day of Lent, we begin with the first chapter of each, and we work our way through both over the next six weeks. I read Proverbs last year, so this year I’m reading Genesis. Once again I came upon Genesis 2:10: “A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers.” I lingered over the image, and it remained with me in the following days.

Last week’s tothesource column was a critique of Richard Dawkins’ condemnation of the politically incorrect God of the Old Testament. (Bottom line: Dawkins elsewhere describes the world as indifferent to good and evil; this leaves him no basis for condemning God or anything else.) The article cited Dawkins’ 1996 book, River Out of Eden, whose title is an obvious reference to the Old Testament he now so despises.

While doing some number crunching, I listened to The Turning, the 1987 album by Leslie Phillips (who later re-christened herself Sam Phillips). This album was her first collaboration with producer (and later husband) T Bone Burnett. The first song on the album is Burnett’s “River of Love,” which begins with the line, “There's a river of love that runs through all times.” The line itself winds through the song like a river, repeated before each verse and again at the end of the song. The song’s three verses are about different sorts of rivers – rivers of grief, tears, and fire, respectively. Each of these rivers is evoked in detail, unlike the river of love. Yet, when each verse ends, the river of love is still flowing. As if to reinforce the song in my mind, I heard it again the next day on Burnett’s own self-titled album of 1986.

The boom box on which I listened to these CDs at work is showing its age. Before I can play a CD, I need to hit the play button repeatedly for a minute or two. Recently, while waiting for a CD to start playing, I have been working my way through Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching. Chapter 34, which I read last week, begins with the image of the Tao as a flooding river. It flows everywhere, nourishing all, yet without exalting its own role.

Upon creating man, God placed him in Paradise, which was watered by the river. After our first ancestors’ expulsion from Paradise, their descendants clung to the river, eventually spreading south into Mesopotamia along two of the river’s branches. Though they were deprived of Paradise itself, they still had the river that had sustained their life in Eden. Though fallen, they were not deprived entirely of God’s love for them. Likewise, as we work our way through Lent, continually reminded of our fallen state, we are nourished by signs of God’s love, flowing through it all.

Archbishop Rowan and Sharia

Yesterday, Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered the first lecture in a series of discussions, "Islam in English Law," as part of the 2008 Temple Festival, at the Royal Courts of Justice. Entitled, "Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective," it was a long, academic think piece of the sort Abp. Rowan is known for. His topic was how and whether the legal system should accommodate the religious identities and motivations of its citizens. In keeping with the theme of day, he focused primarily on the example of Islamic sharia law, but in this increasingly secular age the topic is obviously of as much interest to Christians as to Muslims. The Anglican Communion News Service summarizes his lecture here, followed by the full text. Here is Abp. Rowan's own statement of the problem he is addressing:

There is a recognition that our social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging – even if one of those sets is regarded as relating to the most fundamental and non-negotiable level of reality, as established by a 'covenant' between the divine and the human (as in Jewish and Christian thinking; once again, we are not talking about an exclusively Muslim problem). The danger arises not only when there is an assumption on the religious side that membership of the community (belonging to the umma or the Church or whatever) is the only significant category, so that participation in other kinds of socio-political arrangement is a kind of betrayal. It also occurs when secular government assumes a monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity.

Abp. Rowan's overarching concern in this lecture is how traditional religious identity and morality might be accommodated in the face of a post-Enlightenment secular legal system that often regards religious loyalties as irrelevant or alien. He certainly realizes the difficulties and dangers that might be entailed by accommodating sharia, and his thoughtful discussion of these difficulties accounts for much of the lecture's length. His examples of legal accommodation of religion went beyond Islam, with references to Orthodox Judaism and Catholicism.

Before the lecture, he was interviewed by BBC Radio 4. In that interview he said, "It seems unavoidable and indeed is a matter of fact that certain provisions of sharia are already recognized in our society and under our law." The news site thisislondon twisted this one sentence, taken out of context, into the misleading headline, "Adoption of Islamic Sharia law in Britain is 'unavoidable'," and trumped up the dire implications of sharia while burying his caveats several paragraphs into the article. (I have not included a link to the original article because it is no longer available. Thisislondon continually revises and updates its articles to keep them current – and perhaps to bury their tracks. Here is the BBC version.) This sensationalism elicited the predictable Pavlovian response from the populace, and within a day the archbishop's enemies and detractors on both the left and the right, in both the church and the government, were calling for his resignation. It is clear from their intemperate, uninformed responses that they had neither read the lecture nor heard the interview, and probably had not even read the on-line articles beneath the sensationalistic headlines. Ignorance, unfortunately, is not a bar against political and religious posturing.

Abp. Rowan's statement that sharia is already present in Britain is hard to dispute. This article from the Evening Standard tells of an instance where a group of Somali youths who stabbed another teenager was released by the police to face justice in a sharia law court. (Their families ended up having to compensate the victim.) The article also mentioned that sharia courts in Britain already hear thousands of divorce cases every year.

What is really going on here? Rowan Williams is being borked. All of his enemies see a weakness that they hope they can exploit if they are quick enough and loud enough. They assume – probably correctly – that like Robert Bork before him, Abp. Rowan's thoughts are too lengthy and too complex to interest the average citizen, and that he can therefore easily be mischaracterized in the media without penalty.

O LORD, watch over us and save us from this generation for ever. (Psalm 12:7)

Wolfram’s Grail

On Thursday 18 October 2007, I attended a lecture at Georgetown University, sponsored by the Catholic Studies Program, entitled, “The Holy Grail versus the Crusades: Wolfram’s Concept of the Altar.” The lecturer, G. Ronald Murphy, S.J., is a scholar of German literature. A few years earlier I had attended another program by Fr. Murphy at a church in Georgetown based on his book, The Owl, The Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales. As part of that program he showed Disney’s “Snow White,” but no one could figure out how to get the sound working, so we watched it as a silent movie and he narrated, pointing out and explaining some of the symbolism. I recall talking to him at the reception afterwards about the meaning of mistletoe, which, I had heard, is canonically banned from Anglican churches. The present lecture was based on his most recent book, Gemstone of Paradise: The Holy Grail in Wolfram’s Parzival.


There are three authentic versions of the Grail story, which developed in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.

Chrétien de Troyes (writing 1185-87) was the first to write the word Grail, by which he referred to a deep serving dish, big enough to hold a fish. Like a horn of plenty, it would produce whatever food you wanted – you had only to reach in and take it. The Grail was powered by a host in the bottom. Perceval, in Chrétien, is a naive young man whose mother does not want him to become a knight and get killed. He goes into the woods looking for his mother, sees her faint dead at a bridge, and rides off to look for the Grail. Chrétien never forgives him for letting his mother die. After years spent looking for the Grail, he returns to check on his mother, not seeming to realize she had died. Chrétien did not finish the story, but several other authors wrote endings.

For Robert de Boron (writing 1190-1200), the Grail is the cup from the Last Supper. He picks up on the Eucharist in a way that is very medieval and Catholic. Joseph of Arimathea comes for the body of Christ, a centurion stabs Christ to make sure he is dead, and Joseph catches the blood in a cup from the house of the Last Supper, which he got from Pilate. Being a good orthodox Jew, he wanted to stop the blood from seeping into the ground. The cup containing the blood was buried with Christ, and it was eventually found by St. Helena. [I’m not sure what this last sentence refers to. It does not match Robert de Boron’s version of the Grail story.]

Finally, Wolfram von Eschenbach (writing 1210) depicted the Grail not as a dish, but as a stone – a flat gemstone.

Chrétien’s word graal is not standard French or Latin. It could come from the Latin gradalis (step, a course of a meal) or gratalis (agreeable, gratifying), converted into bad dialectical French and then just transliterated into German.

We must ask the Passover question: Why is this Grail different from all others?

In 1187, Jerusalem had been captured by Muslims. In 1199 it was recaptured by Christians, knights who had sworn an oath to God to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher. The Crusades were preached as an appeal to vassals who were needed by their Lord in Jerusalem. Their goals were 1) to free the Eastern Christians from the Muslims, and 2) to free the Holy Sepulcher.

The sign of the Holy Land is the palm. A “palmer” is a crusader. They did not call themselves crusaders, but pilgrims. When they took the oath, a bishop would give them a cloth cross to sew onto their clothes. It was worn on the shoulder because Christ carried the cross over his shoulder. The pilgrim would hold also his sword upside down as a cross. [Actually, a palmer can be any sort of pilgrim, not just a crusader.]

In 1204, greedy crusaders sacked Constantinople. This obviated the first reason for the Crusades. Relics from Constantinople were stolen, bought, or looted and taken to the West. Sainte-Chapelle, for example, was built to house the Crown of Thorns. It was in this context that Wolfram wrote his Parzival, in which he asserted that the Grail was a stone.

Precious metals and stones come from Paradise. (Eden means pleasure. A pleasure garden is a paradise.)

A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stones are there. (Genesis 2:10-12)
The Pishon is probably the river that ends at Colchis, home of the Golden Fleece.

Gems are a remnant of Paradise that we can still play with after the Fall. Red and green stones – the ruby/emerald and garnet/peridot – are especially associated with Paradise. The ruby was thought to be formed from coal by geothermal pressure, its red color capturing the fire that is inside coal. Magnetite was a “magic” stone that could attract iron and point north. Amethyst (Greek for “not drunken”) was the color of wine. Turquoise (“from Turkey”) contains life – it never dries out and turns brown, but remains green forever. Rock crystal (quartz) was liked better than diamond because it was easier to polish. Diamond is the hardest stone known to man, yet light passes through it unhindered. Like the Holy Sepulcher – light passed right through it. Wolfram puts a green cloth around the Grail, representing life.

Fr. Murphy’s theory is that the Muslim capture of Jerusalem in 1187 ruined Chrétien’s planned ending of the Grail story, and that was why he abandoned it. But Wolfram picked up the story, revised it, and continued it to the end. In departing from the earlier versions of the Grail as a cup or a dish, Wolfram was not abandoning the Eucharistic symbolism but re-focusing it. In addition the paten and chalice, you need an altar. Priests on the Crusades carried portable altars of stone. The altar stone was cut with five crosses and a rectangular reliquary, called a “sepulcher,” which contains three pieces of the host in addition to a relic. Wolfram is saying, “You’re going off to the Holy Land to slaughter Muslims when every priest is already carrying a sepulcher in his saddle bag.” The medieval portable altar contained a shroud, host, relics, and incense. The lid had a translucent red or green stone. Do you want to see the Body of Christ? You don’t need to go to Turin – just go to Mass. Christ’s place of enthronement is the altar. In the presence of the altar, you’re back in Paradise. To get to Paradise, drop the reins (a Parzival reference).

Wolfram’s story ends with the Christian Parzival and his Muslim rival Feirefiz discovering that they are half-brothers.

There are two portable altars in the Diocesan Museum at Bamberg, Germany. Fr. Murphy believes that one of these, the Paradise Altar, was Wolfram’s inspiration for the Grail.

To illustrate the last part of the lecture, Fr. Murphy showed us an actual altar stone, as well as a half-scale model of a medieval portable altar that he had commissioned. He also showed slides of the Paradise Altar from various angles. He gave each person in his audience two tiny stones – a garnet and a peridot. A photo of the Paradise Altar appears below. This and another color photo appear in Fr. Murphy’s article in Company magazine.

(Addendum: Company magazine has disappeared from the Web. But another Jesuit magazine article can be found here.)

What Is a Miracle?

I subscribe to a weekly electronic newsletter called tothesource. Subtitled Challenging Hardcore Secularism with Principled Pluralism, it critiques the culture du jour from a conservative, ecumenical, Judeo-Christian point of view. Dinesh D'Souza is a regular contributor, and I always look forward to his articles.

Recently, D'Souza has been debating the authors of last year's spate of pro-atheism books. He has already debated Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, as well as Michael Shermer. He is still negotiating with Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins apparently doesn't want to face him. A recurring subject in these debates is the reliance of Christianity on miracles. D'Souza agrees with his opponents that Christianity is based on miracles, and therefore he needs to argue for the possibility of miracles.

In last week's tothesource article, D'Souza took on the argument against miracles that he finds strongest – that of David Hume. Essentially, he demonstrated that Hume's own principle of skepticism can be turned against one of his premises. What interested me, however, was an assumption that D'Souza granted to Hume – the definition of a miracle as "a violation of the known laws of nature." I realize this is a commonly held understanding of miracles, among Christians as well as atheists, but I think it misses the point of miracles. I sent this brief reply, which was published in this week's issue of tothesource among the responses to last week's article:

Dear Dr. D'Souza:

To define a miracle as "a violation of the known laws of nature" misses the point of miracles. The purpose of a miracle, rather, is to demonstrate the real, but otherwise unknown, laws of nature – to correct our too-limited notions of how the world works.

Let's take the resurrection of Christ, for example. If it was just a one-off event to allow Jesus to show off his uniqueness, then neither the resurrection nor Christ himself would be particularly relevant to us. But if Christ's resurrection demonstrates an otherwise hidden reality of human nature – that we are all meant for resurrection, as suggested by the line from the Apostles' Creed, "I believe in . . . the resurrection of the body" – then we are forced to realign our whole worldview with the reality shown by this miracle.

Please, note: My understanding of miracles does not actually contradict that of D'Souza; a miracle can violate the known laws of nature (which might be known incompletely) while demonstrating unknown laws. Thus, we sidestep the question of whether it is even possible to violate the real laws of nature. (I tend to think not, though I am not committed to this position.)

I think the atheists come at the question of miracles with the assumption that if they can demonstrate a natural cause for miracles then they have ruled out any supernatural cause. I think too many Christians fall for this assumption, even though it is clearly inconsistent with the Incarnation. In a world where a person can be both fully divine and fully human, the supernatural and the natural cannot be held to be mutually exclusive.

When Half-Spent Was the Night

Antiphon. When all things were in quiet silence and night was in the midst of her swift course, thine almighty Word, O Lord, leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne. [Wisdom of Solomon 18:14-15a]

Verse. The Lord is King, and hath put on glorious apparel; the Lord hath put on his apparel and girded himself with strength. [Psalm 93:1]
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Antiphon. When all things were in quiet silence and night was in the midst of her swift course, thine almighty Word, O Lord, leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne. [Introit for the First Sunday after Christmas]


The Bible is sometimes quite specific about the time of day when an event occurred – for example, Acts tells us that the descent of the Holy Spirit took place at “the third hour” – i.e., mid-morning. But where the Scriptures offer less detail, Christian imagination has filled in the gaps in symbolically appropriate ways. Thus, we usually think of the Resurrection as happening at sunrise: It is consistent with what the Gospels do tell us, and it is fitting that the return of the Light of the World should coincide with the dawning of the new day.

It is customary to depict Jesus’ birth as occurring at midnight. This is consistent with Luke’s report that the angels appeared to the shepherds by night to announce Christ’s birth. But midnight is the appropriate time for symbolic reasons, as well. Midnight is a pivotal moment, neither part of the old day nor of the new, but a time out of time. For this reason, people in some cultures have believed that the doors between worlds are open at midnight – thus the idea of midnight as “the witching hour,” when spirits can cross into our world.

The midnight of the Nativity was the pivotal point in all of history, the moment between BC and AD, neither part of the new era nor of the old. A momentary lull enveloped all of creation in stillness. The door between heaven and earth stood open as the mystery of the Incarnation was accomplished in Bethlehem. Then the silence was broken as the hymn of the angelic choir in heaven came to shepherds on earth.

Wishing you all a joyful Christmas and a happy 2008,
Roland


Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen

There is a rose-tree springing
forth from an ancient root,
as those of old were singing.
From Jesse came the shoot
that bore the blossom bright
amid the cold of winter,
when half-spent was the night.

This rose-tree, blossom-laden,
as spake Isaiah of yore,
is Mary, spotless Maiden,
for us this Flow’ret bore:
by God’s eternal will,
a little Babe she childeth,
yet Maid remaineth still.

This Flower, whose fragrance tender,
with sweetness fills the air,
dispels with glorious splendor
the darkness everywhere;
true Man yet very God,
from sin and death he saves us
and shares our every load.

With heartfelt prayer we ask thee,
O Mary, sweetest Rose,
by this thy Flow’ret’s sorrows
– as his he bare our woes –
to come unto our aid:
that for him, fine and ready,
a dwelling-place be made.

[Four verses of a 22-verse Rheinland Marienleid as given in a manuscript prayer book (Trier, ca. 1587), of the Brother Conrad, O. Cart., Procurator of the Charterhouse at Mainz; translated cento 1986 by John H. Uhrig, after translations and versions by Harriet Reynolds Krauth Spaeth, 1875; Theodore Baker, 1894; and George Ratcliffe Woodward, 1904.]


I’m recycling this from 2002. That was a slow year for me and I didn’t have any news to share in my annual Christmas letter, so I wrote this instead. It is based on earlier versions going all the way back to ca. 1985, when I first shared something like this orally with a few friends around All Saints’ Day.

Fred Sherrer, RIP

Tonight I received e-mail messages and phone calls from a number of friends to inform me of the death of Fred Sherrer. I knew Fred from my former parish, St. Paul’s, K Street, where he had been a member for many years. He was the sort of unique character that Anglo-Catholic parishes always seem to attract in far greater numbers than other churches, proof of both the inclusiveness and the pastoral nature of Anglo-Catholicism. Tonight at Evensong & Benediction, right after the Magnificat (Dyson in C Minor for you Anglican music aficionados), he lay down in the pew and became unresponsive. His doctor administered CPR and the curate administered the Last Rites before the paramedics arrived to take him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

Fred’s life began with great misfortune: As an infant, he suffered brain damage in a car crash. Based on stories he told me of his childhood, I would surmise that he was quite a handful as a child and was lucky to have survived some of his dangerous experiments with electricity. Still, Fred continued to tinker with electrical and mechanical devices all his life. Somewhere along the line he learned to unplug electrical devices before tinkering with them!

For some reason, Fred was attracted to Catholicism as a child, even though his parents do not seem to have been Catholic. (When I knew Fred, his mother attended a United Methodist church.) But, because of his mental disability, probably exacerbated by a cantankerous streak, he faced continual rejection by the Catholic Church. One priest refused to confirm him. Later in life he looked into joining religious orders but, for obvious reasons, he was never accepted. He finally gave up on the Roman Catholic Church and became an Anglo-Catholic, which turned out to be a much better fit for him. He was often distressed by the Episcopal Church’s descent into heresy and weirdness, but as often as the subject came up he would announce his resolve to stay at St. Paul’s.

I think Fred always dreamed of being a priest. When in public, he always dressed in black. He never confessed this to me himself, but I am reliably informed that he would sometimes don a Roman collar and try to impersonate a priest!

Despite his condition, Fred managed to remain fairly independent. Between Social Security disability payments, other public subsidies, and help from his mother, he managed to live in an apartment by himself and travel a lot. He would often take the train to Philadelphia, where his mother lived, or to Richmond, where he had a number of friends, and stay for a month at a time. In the Washington area he had friends at a number of churches who welcomed him to Bible studies, concerts, and dinners.

But St. Paul’s was where he truly felt at home. While some parishioners gave him a wide berth and Fred himself avoided others of whom he had formed a negative opinion, he found many friends who would talk with him at coffee hours and receptions and occasionally give him a ride home after church. He would stay in touch with his friends from St. Paul’s and beyond by frequent phone calls, in which he would often ask for clarification about some bit of ecclesiastical news or gossip that he had heard or read but did not understand. Whenever he was reminded of a story about another priest or church or an episode from his childhood he would recount his experience in great detail – there was clearly nothing wrong with the part of his brain that governed memory!

At one point early in my relationship with Fred, I was beginning to resent his neediness and his demands on me. I thought, Why me? But it did not take me long to realize that he liked me because I had the patience to deal with him, whereas most others did not. I started to look at my friendship with Fred as a opportunity for ministry that I was being called upon to exercise in my parish. Here was a need, and God had given me the gifts to address it. After that, while Fred would occasionally try my patience, my resentment evaporated. When my phone would ring at 12:30 AM – Fred’s usual time to call, since he found by trial and error that was the time when I was most likely to answer the phone, night owl that I am – I would nearly always answer. And, unless I had to get up early the next morning to serve at Mass, I would usually listen for as long as he wanted to talk. I could sense that he was rationing the number and length of his phone calls to me and not abusing this privilege.

A visit to Fred’s apartment could be an adventure. Fred loved clocks, and he had several that went bong, ding-dong, or cuckoo every 15 minutes. Besides the clocks, his walls were filled with various religious pictures and calendars, and his shelves and coffee tables supported various statues, such as one of Our Lady of Walsingham. In the last few years, after his mother died, perhaps as a result of my influence, Fred also began to acquire icons, which displaced some of the previous art from his walls.

Fred was never particularly healthy, but he began to deteriorate markedly over the past few years. His emotional health declined first, after his mother died, followed closely by his aunt. They were the only living relatives he was at all close to, and he had depended heavily on his mother’s love and guidance. Then his arthritis worsened to the point where he could no longer walk around as he used to, and the reduction in exercise further weakened him.

When he began to need help for routine cleaning of his apartment, my spiritual director, Bill, suggested that we could take up that task ourselves. So every few months we would meet at Fred’s apartment, where I would pick up old papers and trash from the floor and vacuum, and Bill would clean the kitchen and the refrigerator. Occasionally we would do additional things, such as clean the bathroom or help him decorate for Christmas. As Fred’s needs increased, last year several young men from church, including Fred’s doctor, joined our team. Fred appreciated not only the things we did for him, but also our company and our attention.

A few months ago Fred was hospitalized following a heart attack. He told me last Saturday that he never felt he had recovered from that episode. The following morning at church, he passed out before Mass and was anointed for healing. At that time he told the curate that when he died he wanted to die at a service at St. Paul’s. Tonight he got his wish, and, in the rector’s words, he “left this life fortified by the sacraments of the church.”

May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

My New Pet Peeve about Orthodoxy

Since I have not written anything in nearly two months, I fear some of you might be wondering whether I still have anything to blog about after completing my transition to Orthodoxy. The answer is an emphatic yes, but I’ve been channeling my writing energies in other directions lately, leaving me with a growing backlog of bloggable topics that are stranded in my head, rather than flowing across your screens. I hope to resume my more-or-less weekly blogging pace soon, but I can’t make any promises about when.


I am finding Orthodox Christians, collectively, very odd in their consensus about which bits of Anglophone Christianity to embrace and which to reject. Many Orthodox, for instance, insist on saying Pascha, rather than Easter, as if these were two different, totally unconnected events. Or as if Easter somehow embodied the peculiarities of Western or Catholic or Protestant belief. Some claim to reject it because of its possible indirect connection to a putative ancient pagan goddess, Eostre. But the only testimony we have to the worship of a goddess of this name comes from the Venerable Bede, a 7th-century English monk, in his speculation about the etymology of the term Easter. Bede himself was, of course, an Orthodox Christian who called the feast by its English name when speaking English. It goes by similar names in other Germanic languages, all corresponding to their languages’ names for the month of April.

(In the early days of Anglo-Saxon Christianity, the speakers of Old English often avoided transliterating terms from Latin and Greek, instead preferring to coin new words rooted in their own language. This preference even persisted into the early modern period, resulting, for example, in the peculiarly English word atonement for reconciliation.)

Yet Orthodox Christians do not hesitate to call the Great Fast by its English name, Lent, which comes from the Anglo-Saxon name for the season of spring, corresponding to the lengthening of days at that time of year. Nor do they shrink from calling the morning office Matins, which is cognate with the name of Matuta, the Roman goddess of the dawn.

My newest pet peeve about Orthodoxy is its ubiquitous adoption of the Puritan practice of capitalizing divine pronouns, i.e., pronouns that refer to God. It seems that some people have actually been taught that this practice is a rule of English grammar! But if you look at the King James Version of the Bible or any edition of the Book of Common Prayer, you will find that the practice of official English-speaking Christianity (i.e., Anglicanism) has always been to treat divine pronouns like any other pronouns. Nor does this practice have precedent in the original Hebrew and Greek texts of Scripture. The use of mixed cases – i.e., uppercase and lowercase letters together in the same text – developed long after the Scriptures had been written and collected. No, this practice was first introduced by the Puritans, who published their own Bibles and devotional materials outside England, in defiance of the Established Church.

(I understand that those who capitalize divine pronouns intend thereby to “honor” God. I try to imagine what the prophets might say to them about the proper way to honor God. Perhaps, “This people honors me with its capital letters, but its heart is distant from me.” cf. Isaiah 29:13.)

My first objection to the capitalization of divine pronouns is practical and asesthetic: I find it hard to read a text cluttered with capitalized words that are not nouns and that do not begin a new sentence. Every time I run into Thou or Thee, I want to start reading a new sentence! But I object even more to the Protestant hermeneutic implicit in this capitalization. It assumes that one can always identify every pronoun as referring either to God or not to God. This, in turn, rests on assumptions that 1) the meaning of Scripture is transparent, and 2) Scripture is only to be read literally. These assumptions defy the Orthodox method of reading Scripture inherited from the Fathers. In addition to the literal level, we Orthodox read Scripture on a typological level. A person or event might be interpreted simultaneously on both levels. The entire book of Song of Solomon, for instance, has traditionally been read typologically as describing the relationship between Christ and the Church, yet the capitalizers do not capitalize any pronouns in this book of the Old Testament.

(If the Puritans were reading Song of Solomon literally, perhaps they were not as “puritanical” as is often supposed!)

In short, I object to the practice of capitalizing divine pronouns in texts intended for Orthodox use because 1) it is contrary to standard English usage; 2) it has no precedent in the original Greek texts of the Scriptures; and 3) it is inconstent with Orthodox readings of Scripture.

While most Orthodox Bibles and liturgical books continue to capitalize divine pronouns, I have found some exceptions, so I know I’m not alone. In the liturgical texts on the Anastasis Website, for instance, Archimandrite Ephrem’s translations follow the traditional English liturgical usage, which does not capitalize divine pronouns.