Going Viral, St John's Conception, & St Maximus on Church and Authority

15th century Russian Icon of the Conception of St John the Forerunner and Baptist

1. The Bible

Sunday: Gal. 2:16-20. Mk. 8:34-38; 9:1. Online here.

Monday: Gal. 4:28-31; 5:1-10. Lk. 3:19-22. Online here.

Tuesday: Gal. 5:11-21. Lk. 3:23-38; 4:1. Online here.

Wednesday – Conception of St John the Baptist: Gal. 4:22-27. Lk 1:5-25. Online here.

2. The Liturgy: Conception of St John the Forerunner & Baptist

This came to pass fifteen months before the birth of Christ, after the vision of the Angel that Zacharias, the father of the Forerunner, saw in the Temple while he executed the priest's office in the order of his course during the feast of the Tabernacles, as tradition bears witness. In this vision, the Archangel Gabriel appeared to Zacharias and said to him, "Thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elizabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John" (Luke 1:13). Knowing that Elizabeth was barren, and that both he and she were elderly, Zacharias did not believe what the Angel told him, although he had before him the example of Abraham and Sarah, of Hannah, mother of the Prophet Samuel, and of other barren women in Israel who gave birth by the power of God. Hence, he was condemned by the Archangel to remain speechless until the fulfilment of these words in their season, which also came to pass (Luke 1:7-24).

Apolytikion of Conception of the Forerunner - Fourth Tone: Rejoice, O thou barren one who hadst not borne until now; for lo, in all truth thou hast conceived the lamp of the Sun, and he shall send forth his light over all the earth, which is afflicted with blindness. Dance, O Zacharias, and cry out with great boldness: The one to be born is the blest Prophet of God Most High.

Kontakion of Conception of the Forerunner - First Tone: Great Zacharias now doth rejoice with resplendence; Elizabeth his glorious yoke-mate exulteth; for she hath conceived divine John the Forerunner worthily, whom the great Archangel had announced with rejoicing, whom, as it is meet, we men revere as a sacred initiate of grace divine.

3. The Fathers: The Holy Church Is an Imprint & Image of God” by St. Maximus the Confessor

Today’s Patristic Word comes from St Maximus’ commentary on the Divine Liturgy, The Church’s Mystagogy. Here’s the opening lines of the first chapter:

A blessed old man used to say that at the first level of contemplation holy Church bears the imprint and image of God since it has the same activity as He does by imitation and in figure. For God who made and brought into existence all things by His infinite power contains, gathers, and limits them and in His Providence binds both intelligible and sensible beings to Himself and to one another. Maintaining about Himself as cause, beginning, and end all beings which are by nature distant from one another, He makes them converge in each other by the singular force of their relationship to Him as origin.

Read the whole chapter here. And get the full text from Eighth Day Books in the Classics of Western Spirituality edition of St Maximus the Confessor: Selected Writings.

4. Books & Culture: On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through the Great Books by Karen Swallow Prior

This book is a perfect complement to the first essay below by Jeff Reimer. Here are the opening sentences of this Eighth Day Books review:

The reading of literature—considered a chore, an escape, or an out-of-date pastime in our fast-moving world—matters more than ever, according to Karen Prior. The very act of sitting down with a book requires attention, patience, and reflection; great books, read rightly, offer us keys for how to live a virtuous life.

Read the rest of the review here. And get your copy from Eighth Day Books.

5. Poetry: “Where My Books Go” by William Butler Yeats

All the words that I utter,
And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,
And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
Storm-darken’d or starry bright.

6. Essays et al: “Going Viral: A Post-Morten of the Effects of a Twitter Post on My Soul” by Jeff Reimer

Last week my friend Jeff Reimer tweeted some photos of custom bookshelves his father built to hold Jeff's personal library. And the post went viral. Viral as in over 25,000 likes and over 4,000 retweets. So he wrote a great piece reflecting on the experience. Here’s a snippet from the beginning:

I do not have an expansive social media presence. I am on Facebook and Twitter, but I try to keep a certain critical distance, knowing that I will not regret conversations had or books read, but I will regret hours spent scrolling through feeds and arguing with strangers. The irony was not lost on me that as I watched the likes tick into the thousands I became glued to Twitter. I hovered over my computer screen counting the clicks from people otherwise unknown to me who pined to luxuriate in the very room I was sitting in. I observed in a follow-up tweet (currently at twenty-four likes) that Walker Percy could have made a lot of hay with this scenario. Even the person who luxuriates in the beautiful room with beautiful bookcases (i.e., me) will be aware of their luxuriating in it, and will take as much pleasure from the idea of luxuriating as they will from luxuriating itself. In order to reassure themselves of their own luxury, that same person (again, me) feels the need to further certify the space by photographing it and publishing it online so that it (or rather he, or rather I) becomes a real, actual thing in the world. Every like is a certification that I exist.

This desire to see your own reality mediated back to you is a distinctly modern impulse, and a really weird one at that. I got twenty-five thousand certifications, and boy did it feel good. But it was also unsettling to me that it felt so good. Practically all I did the two days while the tweet was peaking was look at comments and likes and retweets and follows, and reply when necessary. And when I wasn’t doing that, I was happy just to sit there watching the ticker go up, every notification providing a little hit of endorphins.

If my own very small experience had such a powerful social and psychological pull, how does anybody who’s even a very minor social media celebrity have anything approaching a normal life? How would they ever be able to view their own sense of validation through anything other than their own existence being mediated back to them by strangers?

While it was gratifying, almost immediately I could tell it was awful for me.

A bit more:

It occurs to me that this surreal, absurd world of constant mediated performativity is the one we already live in. Our national discourse is now shaped by these psychological dynamics. And success is gauged by how good we are at putting ourselves into this bizarre moral situation. This experience of mine is really just social media on hyperdrive. It makes me wonder how much of this mindset I’ve already assimilated. Probably more than I think.

What a weird society we live in.

It turns out it really is a discipline to curtail the deleterious social effects of social media. The discipline of attention to the present moment and to the desires of others rather than oneself is not innate. It is a virtue that takes effort and practice to develop.

Read the whole thing here. It’s really great!

7. Essays et al: “Council or Father or Scripture: The Concept of Authority in the Theology of Maximus the Confessor” by Jaraslov Pelikan

This essay is included in a 1973 Festschrift offered in honor of the Very Reverend Georges Vasilievich Florovsky on the occasion of his Eightieth Birthday. Excerpts:

By common consent, St. Maximus the Confessor (ca. A.D. 580-662) must be regarded as the leading theologian of his era in the Greek East, probably in the entire church. In his history of the Byzantine Fathers, Georges Florovsky selected him as the only seventh-century figure deserving an entire chapter unto himself; Irénée Hausherr termed him “the great doctor of philautie [i.e., the love of self for the sake of God], doctor in the sense both of professor and of physician”; Hans-Georg Beck called him “the most universal spirit of the seventh century and probably the last independent thinker of the Byzantine church”; Werner Elert referred to him as “probably the only productive thinker of the entire century”; and Aldo Ceresta-Gastaldo identified him as “the most significant theologian of the seventh century.”

More:

These accolades to Maximus as original and independent would not, however, have seemed to him to be an unqualified compliment. What was required of a theologian was not that he be independent or productive or original, but that he be faithful to the authority of orthodox Christian dogma as this had been set down in Scripture, formulated by the Fathers, and codified by the Councils. Yet this did not mean that the mind of the theologian was to be put into suspended animation or to act as nothing more than a passive transmitter of what had been received. “The life of the mind,” in Maximus’s axiom, “is the illumination of knowledge, and this is derived from love toward God” (On Charity 1.9). In opposition to every species of pietism, he insisted that “the grace of the Holy Spirit does not effect wisdom in the saints without the mind that grasps it, nor knowledge without the power of the reason that is capable of it, nor faith apart from the fullness of conviction in mind and reason concerning future things” (Qu. Thal. 59). It was essential, even and especially in a theology that strove to be orthodox, to make precise distinctions among the possible meanings of words and phrases; otherwise the controverted issues would remain as confused after the debate as before it. The failure to make such distinctions was “often the cause of error” (Opusc. 25). It is this combination of orthodox dogma with a fides quaerens intellectum [faith seeking understanding] that makes Maximus so interesting; and because the honorand of this Festschrift [i.e., Florovsky] has, in his own unique way, managed to combine an orthodox fidelity to tradition with theological creativity, the concept of authority in the theology of Maximus would seem to be an appropriate subject of investigation for an essay in his honor.

After exploring Maximus’ perspective on authority in the Councils, the Fathers, and Scripture, Pelikan concludes:

Such, then, was the structure of authority in the theology of Maximus: the teaching “of a council or of a father or of Scripture” (Opusc. 15), but in fact of all three in a dynamic interrelation by which no one of the three could be isolated as the sole authority. Scripture was supreme, but only if it was interpreted in a spiritual and orthodox way. The fathers were normative, but only if they were harmonized with one another and related to the Scripture from which they drew. The councils were decisive, but only as voices of the one apostolic and prophetic and patristic doctrine. Yet this schematization of Maximus’ teaching would not do him justice if it did not include one additional element, which reached beyond this argumentum in circulo. In a remarkable passage in his Ambigua, Maximus raised, but left to “wise men” to answer, the question why “if this dogma [of θἐωσις - theosis] belongs to the mystery of the faith of the church, it was not included with the other [dogmas] in the symbol expounding the utterly pure faith of Christians, composed by our holy and blessed fathers” (Ambig. 42). The symbol had declared that the Son of God came down “for the sake of us men and for the purpose of our salvation,” but it had not specified the content of that salvation as healing, forgiveness, and divinization. Yet this content clearly belonged to the faith and doctrine of the church. But dogma was not very well equipped to define it; its definition belonged more properly to the worship and piety of the church. “This release from all evils and shortcut to salvation, the true love of God with understanding”—this was, Maximus declared, “a worship that is true and genuinely acceptable to God” (Qu. Thal. pr.). For it was through worship that the church and its theologians acknowledged “theological mystagogy,” which transcended the dogma formulated by councils (Qu. dub. 73). Here it was also that one came to see how “every word of God written for men according to the present age is a forerunner of the more perfect word to be revealed by Him in an unwritten way in the Spirit” (Ambig. 21). And finally, the true fathers in the faith were those who, like Dionysius the Areopagite, taught that “negative statements about divine matters are the true ones” (Ambig. 20). Therefore “who knows how God is made flesh and yet remains God? … This only faith understands, adoring the Logos in silence” (Ambig. 5). Beyond the teaching “of a council or of a father or of Scripture” stood the authority of this reverent and orthodox but apophatic worship: “A perfect mind is one which, by true faith, in supreme ignorance knows the supremely Unknowable” (Carit. 3.99).

Read the whole thing here before it’s moved to the Florovsky Archives on the membership page.

8. Essays et al: “The Life of St. Maximus the Confessor” by Fr. Georges Florovsky

This is the opening section of a full chapter on St Maximus in a work based on Florovsky’s patristic lectures on the Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to Eighth Century, delivered in the 1930s at St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute. We’ll eventually post the second part of those lectures on St Maximus’ writings, and then the third (and long) part on his theology. Here’s the end of the first part on St Maxius' life:

With the victory over the Monothelites and the triumph of orthodoxy at the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 680/681 St. Maximus’ great martyr’s ordeal was appreciated, and he was highly honored in Byzantium as a great teacher and preacher of Christ who incinerated the impudent paganism of the heretics with his fire-bearing word. He was respected both as a writer and thinker and as a mystic and ascetic. His books were the favorite reading both of laymen and monks. Anna Comnena, for example, tells us: “I remember how my mother, when she served dinner, would often bring a book in her hands and interpret the dogmatic places of the holy fathers, particularly by the philosopher and martyr Maximus.”

Read the whole thing here before it’s moved to the Florovsky Archives on the membership page.

And here’s a supplemental essay that provides a good summation of St. Maximus’s teaching.

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