Influenza, Greek & Roman Plagues, Cyprian, & Mortality
by Erin Doom
Feast of St Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow & Enlightener of North America; Holy Tuesday in WestAnno Domini 2020, April 7
1. Essays & Reflections: “Influenza: History Matters” by Mark Mosley
Do you know the history of influenza? Did you know the “Spanish flu” didn’t originate in Spain? Do you know where it started? Find out in this concise and excellent piece of history by our friend Dr. Mark Mosley: “Influenza: History Matters.”
2. Essays & Reflections: “What the Great Plague of Athens Can Teach Us Now” by Katherine Kelaidis
Speaking of “history matters,” here’s an important essay on the Great Plague of Athens, which ultimately destroyed Athenian democracy. Katherine Kelaidis, resident scholar at the National Hellenic Museum, opens with this:
This is not the right time for a pandemic. Not that there is a right time for a pandemic, but some times are definitely the wrong one. And no time is worse than when a nation is already in crisis, when trust in its leaders and itself is already low. A time when international relations are strained and internal strife widespread. Basically, if the social and moral fiber of a society are already being tested, the widespread fear of death at the hands of an invisible killer makes everything exponentially worse. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately; it is very hard to tell at this point), history offers us a number of examples of when a plague arrived at the wrong time.
And none of these examples is better than the Great Plague of Athens.
She ends by noting that ancient Athenians “abandoned the values that had been at the heart of their ability to govern themselves. They failed in their responsibility to one another…”
With the United States in its own crisis of identity, the coronavirus thus offers a test not unlike that put to the Athenian democracy. How will we respond? What can we learn from ancient Athens? Find out by reading the full essay here.
3. Essays & Reflections: “Plague of Cyprian, 250-270” by John Horgan
More history, but this time we turn from a plague in ancient Greece to one in ancient Rome. Named after St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, who provides important testimony to its devastating effects, this plague lasted nearly two decades and killed as many as 5,000 people per day in Rome. Horgan lists two important effects of this plague:
- The disease episode of the mid-200s CE caused political, military, economic and religious upheaval. In addition to the thousands of people dying per day in Rome and the immediate vicinity, the outbreak claimed the lives of two emperors: Hostilian in 251 CE and Claudius II Gothicus in 270 CE. The period in between the emperors witnessed political instability as rivals struggled to claim and hold the throne. The lack of leadership and the depletion of soldiers from the ranks of the Roman legions contributed to the deteriorating condition of the empire by weakening Rome’s ability to fend off external attacks. The widespread onset of illness also caused populations in the countryside to flee to the cities. The abandonment of the fields along with the deaths of farmers who remained caused the collapse of agriculture production. In some areas, swamps re-emerged rendering those fields useless.
- Only the nascent Christian church benefitted from the chaos. The illness claimed the lives of emperors and pagans who could offer no explanation for the cause of the plague or suggestions for how to prevent further illness much less actions for curing the sick and dying. Christians played an active role in caring for the ill as well as actively providing care in the burial of the dead. Those Christians who themselves perished from the illness claimed martyrdom while offering non-believers who would convert the possibility of rewards in the Christian afterlife. Ultimately this episode not only strengthened but helped to spread Christianity throughout the furthest reaches of the empire and Mediterranean world.
4. Books: The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire
by Kyle Harper
One of the questions on the exams for my M.A. in ancient and medieval history focused on the cause(s) of the Roman Empire’s fall. There have been innumerable arguments for various specific sources, ranging from barbarians to lead poisoning. Harper’s book on this subject takes the right approach, arguing for a wide range of factors including not just emperors, soldiers, and barbarians, but also volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. For a taste of this book, see his article on the Plague of Cyprian, “Solving the Mystery of an Ancient Roman Plague.”
Like Horgan above, Harper suggests that the “church experienced a growth spurt during the generation of the plague, and the mortality left a deep impression in Christian memory.” And be sure to order your copy from Eighth Day Books.
5. Poetry: “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats.
I started memorizing this one yesterday...you're welcome to join me!
6. Bible:Is. 49:6-10, Gen. 31:3-16, Prov. 21:3-21. Online here.
7. Liturgy: For the Memorial of Sts. Cornelius and Cyprian
Responsory
We are warriors now, fighting on the battlefield of faith, and God sees all we do; the angels watch and so does Christ. What honor and glory and joy, to do battle in the presence of God and to have Christ approve our victory.
Let us arm ourselves in full strength and prepare ourselves for the ultimate struggle with blameless hearts, true faith and unyielding courage. What honor and glory and joy, to do battle in the presence of God and to have Christ approve our victory.
Collect
O God, who gave Saints Cornelius and Cyprian to your people as diligent shepherds and valiant Martyrs, grant that through their intercession we may be strengthened in faith and constancy and spend ourselves without reserve for the unity of the Church. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
8. Word from the Fathers: Excerpt from Mortality
by St. Cyprian of Carthage
The fear of God and faith ought to make you ready for all things. Though it should be the loss of private property, though it should be the constant and violent affliction of the members by wasting diseases, though it should be the mournful and sorrowful tearing away from wife, from children, from departing dear ones, let not such things be stumbling blocks for you, but battles; nor let them weaken or crush the faith of the Christian, but rather let them reveal his valor in the contest, since every injury arising from present evils should be made light of through confidence in the blessings to come. Unless a battle has gone before there cannot be a victory; when a victory has been won in the conflict of battle, then a crown also is given to the victors.
Read more here. You can read the entire treatise tomorrow through the link at the bottom of the reading.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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