1. Essays & Reflections (& Interviews): "The Germs that Destroyed an Empire"
A couple weeks ago I recommended a book by Kyle Harper (
The Fate of Rome: Climate Disease, and the end of an Empire) and gave a link to an article he wrote on the Plague of Cyprian (
both those posts are in #4 at this link). Harper happens to be a next-door neighbor of my daughter’s boyfriend – what a small world! – and I’m looking forward to meeting him. He was also recently interviewed by our friend Rod Dreher over at The American Conservative. The interview was published today.
In addition to exploring some connections between the Roman Empire and the American "Empire," specifically the impact plagues had then and may have today, the interview turns to Pope Gregory the Great, who served during the Justinian Plague. Harper’s responses to the following two questions, i.e., the manner in which the Church responded to plague in the sixth and seventh centuries, provide good and challenging fodder for our Christian thinking as we continue to respond to COVID-19:
You write about how much it meant to the plague-stricken city of Rome that their bishop, the Pope, led penitential processions around the city to ask God to deliver them from plague. Why was this important?
These were very authentic intercessory prayers meant to mobilize an entire community to a change of heart, to repentance. He thought that was the medicine called for. It would certainly have galvanized the energy of the community. Gregory didn’t invent these kinds of rituals himself, but they were still fairly new. He was inventing a model of how to behave in this kind of crisis. What does a leader do? Gregory was very visible.
The apocalyptic mood of the era was not just confined to religious figures, you write, but was general throughout Roman society. "The sense of impending doom was not a weight around the neck; it was more like a hidden map, a way of orienting motion in confused times." What do you mean?
What we have are a number of texts, mostly by bishops, that present events in the world around them in apocalyptic terms. But this was widely shared. Sometimes they are in inscriptions by lay people, or show up in cultural practices. It’s easy for us to think about Christians back then being apocalyptic in the sense that they were desperate, or giving up because the world was about to end. I don’t think that’s how it was. For them, it was a positive program. This life was always meant to be transitory, and just part of a larger story. What was important to the Christians was to orient one’s life towards the larger story, the cosmic story, the story of eternity. They did live in this world, experience pain, and loved others. But the Christians of that time were called to see the story of this life as just one of the stories in which they lived. The hidden map was this larger picture.
The interview ends with Dreher asking Harper where he, as a Christian and an ancient historian, finds hope in today’s pandemic. Harper answers as if he had actually read The Benedict Option (and if he hasn’t, it certainly has a B.O. sensibility):
We just have to do what we are called to do in good times and in bad. You just try in the little ways that you can to love everyone around you all the time. This just gives Christians a chance to exhibit that in little ways. That’s always a ground for hope. You get different chances in life to be given the gift of trying to love others. I don’t think that’s profound theology, but it’s the truth.
2. Essays & Reflections: "St. George, Shakespeare, & the Plague"
What do St. George, Shakespeare, the Plague, and the Resurrection have to do with one another? For one thing, the feast of St. George is on the traditional birth and death days of William Shakespeare. For another, Shakespeare was born during the bubonic plague, which was far more deadlier than today’s COVID-19. According to Kenneth Colston,
Death famously concentrates the mind, and when the plague of 1597 closed the theater, the source of William’s livelihood, he turned to writing sonnets. Mortality, sin, lust, and even plague work themselves into the beginnings and endings of his poems. The poet makes the London epidemic a euphemism for venereal disease:
Only my plague thus far I count my gain
That she that makes me sin awards me pain. (141, 13-14)
I believe that plague and death, and sin and lust provoke in William, as they would have in any serious son of the Old Faith, a religious crisis that fuels the decade of the world’s greatest drama, beginning with Hamlet, whose first act may be read as a medieval allegory of belief in a bold new style.
3. Essays & Reflections: "The Plague, Oriental Rat Fleas, & PPE"
You may have heard that a horseshoe bat is the carrier for the virus that causes COVID-19. Bud have you heard that the oriental rat flea is the carrier of the bacteria responsible for "the plague"? Dr. Mark Mosley notes:
2,500 species of flightless types of fleas exist, each having its own specific host (a particular warm-blooded mammal upon which they prefer meals). The oriental rat flea gets its blood meal preferentially from the "black rat" as a requirement to trigger ovarian and testicular maturation in the flea. The fleas must "drink before having sex."
The oriental rat flea can become infected with the Yersenia Pestis bacteria when it bites the infected black rat. Multitudes of the Yersenia Pestis bacteria begin to reproduce and live in the foregut of the flea. There are so many bacteria in the foregut that the digestive tract of the flea is mechanically obstructed by the collection of bacterium. The flea begins to starve to death and frantically takes more blood meals, which in turn feeds the Yersenia in an orgiastic feast rivaling anything in the bathhouses of Rome. The flea is active only in a very narrow range of temperatures: 59-68 degrees Fahrenheit (one reason it may have spared Arabia).
A single rat is home to hundreds if not thousands of fleas, with a portion of those fleas infected with Yersenia bacteria. Each time the flea bites the rat, it injects up to twenty thousand bacteria into the rodent’s bloodstream. The original black rats, which were infected and carried the fleas to Constantinople during the Justinian Plague, were believed to have come from Egypt on boats of grain, which is the rat’s favorite feeding source. In the Great Plague (Black Death) the same black rat and flea are believed to have been onboard twelve ships in the 1300’s coming from the Black Sea to Europe as part of the Oriental Trade Route.
4. Books: Justinian’s Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire
Echoing both Kyle Harper (The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire) and Dr. Mosley ("The Plague, Oriental Rat Fleas, & PPE"), Francis X. Maier encapsulates the thesis of William Rosen’s book Justinian’s Flea:
Sometime in the early 6th Century in Africa, a bacterium that caused mild illness found a promising new host: a flea. Through that flea and countless others, it morphed into something quite different. Migrating up the Nile River on the bodies of rats, it came to the granaries of Alexandria. Then it crossed by ship in A.D. 542 to the markets of Constantinople.
Within five months, it killed up to half of the Byzantine capital’s populace. The plague derailed the Emperor Justinian’s efforts to restore the Roman Empire in the West. It crippled both the Byzantine and Persian Empires for generations. It left both empires ripe for Islamic expansion in the next century. And it effectively ended the age of Late Antiquity.
Or so argues William Rosen in his compelling 2007 story of Europe’s first great pandemic, Justinian’s Flea.
Maier goes on to reflect on the difference between a plague in a Christian culture (i.e., ancient and medieval) and one in today’s secular culture. He ends with the following quotation from the Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos: as long as Christian faith and love
hadn’t grown cold in the world, as long as the world had its share of saints, certain truths could be forgotten. Now [those truths] are reappearing again, like a rock at low tide. It is sanctity and the saints who maintain the interior life without which humanity must debase itself to the point of extinction.
COVID-19 thus offers us an opportunity, Maier suggests, to pray for our pastors and those suffering with the virus, to treasure the time we have with those we love, and to examine the infection of worldliness in our hearts. It is a time to remember the saints and to pursue a life of holiness like never before.
5. Poetry: "Spring and Death" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Here are the opening lines:
I had a dream. A wondrous thing:
It seem'd an evening in the Spring;
—A little sickness in the air
From too much fragrance everywhere:—
As I walk'd a stilly wood,
Sudden, Death before me stood:
In a hollow lush and damp,
He seem'd a dismal mirky stamp
On the flowers that were seen
His charnelhouse-grate ribs between,
And with coffin-black he barr'd the green.
‘Death,’ said I, ‘what do you here
At this Spring season of the year?’
‘I mark the flowers ere the prime
Which I may tell at Autumn-time.’
7. Liturgy: Oikos for Paschal Orthos
To the Sun before the sun, as it set for a time in the grave, the ointment-bearing maidens came at dawn, seeking Him as they would the day. And they shouted one to another, "Come, let us, O friends, anoint with spices the life-bearing body, now buried; the body that raiseth fallen Adam, lying in the sepulcher. Come, let us hasten, as did the Magi, and fall down in worship; let us offer of our spices like unto their offerings, to Him who is no longer wrapped in swaddling clothes, but in finest linen. Let us lament; let us weep; and let us cry, ‘Master, arise, O Thou who dost grant resurrection to the fallen.’"
8. Word from the Fathers: Christ’s Resurrection – Sermon 74 on Matt. 28:1-4, Part II
Today’s Word continues and completes a sermon on the resurrection by St Peter Chrysologus. While the role of women in the resurrection struck me yesterday, the role of angels (and a continued role of women) stands out today in this second half:
"For an angel of the Lord came down from heaven." Through the Resurrection of Christ and the defeat of death, men once more entered into relationship with heaven. Moreover, woman, who had entered into a deadly plan with the Devil, now enjoyed a life-giving conversation with the angel.
[…]
"For an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and drawing near rolled back the stone, and sat upon it!" An angel does not weary. Then why did he sit? He was sitting as a doctor of faith and a teacher of the Resurrection. He was sitting upon a rock, that its very solidity might impart firmness to those who believe. The angel was placing the foundations of faith upon the rock, on which Christ was going to build His Church, as He said: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church" (Matt. 16:18).
But the material world also played a role in the resurrection, even something as mundane as a stone:
"For an angel of the Lord came down from heaven, and rolled back the stone." […] Blessed is the stone which could both conceal Christ and reveal Him! Blessed the stone which opens hearts no less than the sepulcher! Blessed is the stone which produces faith in the Resurrection, and a resurrection of faith; which is a proof that God’s body has arisen! Here, the order of things is changed. Here, the sepulcher swallows death, not a dead man. The abode of death becomes a life-giving dwelling. A new kind of tomb conceives one who is dead and brings Him forth alive!
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