Before presenting the third annual St. John of Damascus Award (SJDA), I’d like to say a few words about St. John of Damascus—you really should know who he is and why we named this award after him. I’d also like to briefly turn to two Catholics who have been important to me as I continuously—maybe better put, obsessively—reflect on the EDI mission of “cultural renewal.”
Let me prepare the introduction to St. John of Damascus with an expression from the first Catholic. Charles Taylor is an immensely important and prolific philosopher. It’s in his grand magnum opus,
A Secular Age, that we encounter an important expression: “impersonal order.” This is one of the numerous ways he describes the world in which we live today. Our secular age is characterized by an “impersonal order.” And this flies in the face of the historic Christian tradition.
Christianity is a religion of persons, beginning with the Trinity. This is what the early Church, especially the Cappadocians (St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, and St. Gregory of Nyssa), hammered out theologically in the fourth century. We worship a Triune God who is three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These three persons are in eternal communion. And we are made in their image. That is to say, we are created to be persons in communion.
One of our past Symposium speakers, James K. A. Smith, correctly placed memory at the heart of the Eighth Day mission to renew culture. Memory is vital for cultural renewal. And memory is integral to the Christian tradition. It’s why the church celebrates the lives of the saints. We remember them to spur us on in our faith.
I want to supplement that emphasis on memory by arguing that personhood—persons in communion—is just as central to our mission of renewing culture.
It’s why we have an image of Jesus here. It’s why we also have an image here of His mother, the Theotokos (literally “Bearer of God,” i.e., the Virgin Mary). It’s why we have an image of St. John of Damascus. It’s why we have an image of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicea.
And it’s why we have an image of the Holy Trinity (based on the O.T. story of the hospitality of Abraham).
It’s at the heart of almost everything we do at Eighth Day Institute: remembering our faith and its history, remembering the heroes of our faith, remembering PERSONS.
And it’s why this evening we are honoring the PERSON of Jerillyn Holladay.
Now, who was the person of St. John of Damascus. He’s one of my great heroes. He’s my patron saint. He’s the patron saint of EDI. You can learn a bit more about him in this handout. Let me here just say four quick things about this 8th century Damascene monk, two of them directly from
this "About" page on our website:
- He was a true philosopher. A philosopher, according to the Greek etymology, is one who loves wisdom. And according to St. John, true wisdom is God. Therefore, he concludes, the true philosopher is the one who loves God.
- He was also a true theologian. This is based on a definition offered by the 4th century desert father Evagrius Ponticus: “A true theologian is one who prays, and one who truly prays is a theologian.”
- He was the great defender of icons. He defended the color painted representation of PERSONS: the PERSON of Christ, the PERSON of the Theotokos, and the PERSONHOOD of all the saints. There are many books to recommend on St. John of Damascus, but his
Three Treatises on the Divine Images is a great place to start…after reading the handout, of course!
- Finally, he embodies EDI’s mission of cultural renewal. More specifically, he embodies Fr. George Florovsky’s call for a Neopatristic Synthesis. By that, we mean a return to the early Church Fathers as a way to creatively and ecumenically engage the pressing issues of our secular age.
And that leads me to the second Catholic influence on me, the historian Christopher Dawson.
I was somehow introduced to him during work on my Masters degree at WSU. I only know this because I recently found a paper I wrote about Dawson for that degree. At the time I was working at Eighth Day Books so I’m guessing I should be thanking Warren Farha for introducing me to him.
Dawson’s 1960 book The Historic Reality of Christian Culture: A Way to the Renewal of Human Life should be read by all Christians. But alas, it’s been long out of print (and used copies are rare and not inexpensive). The remainder of this reflection will simply be several passages from the first chapter of this important book.
Early in the first chapter, Dawson discusses the complexity and profundity of the first introduction of the Christian faith in Europe:
When St. Paul sailed from Troy in obedience to a dream and came to Philippi in Macedonia, he did more to change the course of history and the future of European culture than the great battle which had decided the fate of the Roman Empire on the same spot more than ninety years before. Yet nothing that he did was notable or even visible from the standpoint of contemporary culture. He incurred the hostility of the mob, he was sent to prison and he made at least three converts: a business woman from Asia Minor, a slave girl who was a professional fortuneteller, and his jailer. These were the first European Christians—the forerunners of uncounted millions who have regarded the Christian faith as the standard of their European way of life.
All this took place, as it were, underneath the surface of culture. The only people who seem to have realized the importance of what was happening were the half-crazed slave girl and the hostile mob at Philippi and Salonica, the riffraff of the market place, who attacked St. Paul as a revolutionary, one who turned the world upside down and taught there was another king than Caesar—one Jesus (p. 15).
So one PERSON led to conversion of three PERSONS which led to the conversion of a CONTINENT which led to the conversion of a CIVILIZATION!
Dawson next compares modern culture to the ancient Roman world and then addresses the loss of Christian culture, for which he argues we bear the blame and have a duty to overcome…a duty that echoes the mission of EDI:
The Roman world was living in the tradition of the pagan past, and Christianity came to it as a new revelation and the promise of new life. But today it is Christianity that seems to many a thing of the past, part of the vanishing order of the old Europe, and the new powers that are shaping the world are non-Christian or even anti-Christian.
It is no wonder that the conscience of Christians is uneasy. On the one hand there are those who still retain an internal bond with the Christian culture of the past, and a deep love and reverence for it; and in that case they must feel that something in the nature of a national apostasy has occurred and that they bear some share of the guilt. And on the other hand there are those who have lost contact with that social tradition and who know only the new secularized world. These are likely to feel that the Christian culture of the past failed because it was not really Christian and that it is for us and our successors to discover or create for the first time a new way of life that will be truly Christian.
I believe both these points of view are fundamentally true. They represent the two aspects of the problem of Christian culture in our time, and they are wrong only in so far as they are one-sided. I do not think it is possible to deny the fact of Christian culture, as an objective social reality. It is hardly too much to say that it is Christian culture that has created Western man and the Western way of life. But at the same time we must admit that Western man has not been faithful to this Christian tradition. He has abandoned it not once, but again and again. For since Christianity depends on a living faith and not merely on social tradition, Christendom must be renewed in every fresh generation, and every generation is faced by the responsibility of making decisions, each of which may be an act of Christian faith or an act of apostasy (pp. 16-17).
So we must acknowledge that we’ve not been faithful to the Christian tradition, that we have repeatedly abandoned it. This is precisely why we find ourselves in a decadent culture. And it’s our duty to renew that tradition. To do so, EACH OF US MUST MAKE DECISIONS, decisions that will contribute to either the
renewal or the
degeneration of Christian culture.
In Dawson’s words elsewhere, “The spiritual achievement of today finds its social expression in the cultural achievements of tomorrow, while today’s culture is inspired by the spiritual achievement of yesterday or the day before (15).… The creative activity which is the essence of the Christian life takes place far below the surface of culture; and the same thing is true of the spiritual failures and apostasies which are the other side of the picture (17).”
Now, my favorite part:
But to the Christian the hidden principle of the life of culture and the fate of nations and civilizations must always be found
in the heart of man and in the hand of God. There is no limit to the efficacy of faith and to the influence of these acts of spiritual decision which are ultimately the response of particular men to God’s call, as revealed in particular historical and personal circumstances. Burke wrote very truly and finely that the so-called laws of history which attempt to subordinate the future to some kind of historical determinism are but the artificial combinations of the human mind. There always remains an irreducible element of mystery. “A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn have changed the face of the future and almost of Nature.”
But to Christians the mystery of history is not completely dark, since it is a veil which only partially conceals the creative activity of spiritual forces and the operation of spiritual laws. It is a commonplace to say that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church, yet what we are asserting is simply that
individual acts of spiritual decision ultimately bear social fruit. We admit that in the case of the Church and we have admitted it so long that it has become a platitude. But we do not for the most part realize that it is equally true in the case of culture and history.
For the great cultural changes and the historic revolutions that decide the fate of nations or the character of an age are the cumulative result of a number of spiritual decisions—the faith and insight, or the refusal and blindness, of individuals. No one can put his finger on the ultimate spiritual act which tilts the balance and makes the external order of society assume a new form. In this sense we may adapt Burke’s saying and assert that
the prayer of some unknown Christian or some unrecognized and unadmitted act of spiritual surrender may change the face of the world.
No doubt any great change of culture, like the conversion of the Roman world or the secularization of Western Christendom, is a process that extends over centuries and involves an immense variety of different factors which may belong to different planes of spiritual reality (pp. 18-19).
So cultural renewal depends on individuals, on PERSONS. It depends on people like the recipients of the St. John of Damascus Award: Warren Farha (Orthodox), Christian Kettler (Protestant), and now Jeri Holladay (Catholic). And it depends on people like me and you. It depends on each and every one of our “individual acts of spiritual decision” which will undoubtedly bear fruit in some fashion sometime in the unknown future. It will be the “cumulative result” of all of our “spiritual decisions—the faith and insight, or the refusal and blindness” of individual PERSONS.
But cultural renewal also takes TIME…a LONG TIME. If we are serious about cultural renewal we have to be committed to the long haul. It’s going to require fortitude, persistence, patience…qualities embodied by our SJDA recipients, qualities we too must embrace and embody.
Cultural renewal also requires a commitment to the life of the mind. Let me finish with one last paragraph from Dawson (remember, this was written in 1960!):
The return from a secular civilization to a Christian way of life no doubt involves a reversal of many historical forces that transcend the limits not only of our personal experience but even of our particular society. But in spite of the modern totalitarian tendency to control the development of culture by the external methods of legislation and international organization and the control of parties and political police, it is still the individual mind that is the creative force which determines the ultimate fate of cultures. And the first step in the transformation of culture is a change in the pattern of culture within the mind, for this is the seed out of which there spring new forms of life which ultimately change the social way of life and thus create a new culture (20).
Let me re-read that last sentence: “The first step in the transformation of culture is a
change in the pattern of culture within the mind, for THIS IS THE SEED out of which there spring new forms of life which ultimately change the social way of life and thus create a new culture.”
According to Dawson, a change in the pattern of culture within the mind leads to cultural renewal. This is exactly what St. Paul says in his epistle to the Romans (12:2): “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
This is the mission of EDI. And this is the mission that the life and work of Jeri Holladay has embodied.
Now for the AWARD…with my toast.
I met Jeri at EDB, of course!!!
While peddling books from behind the counter at EDB, I was also formulating and peddling the ideas that would give flesh to what is now EDI.
And like so many other friends I made from behind that counter, Jeri had to listen to me constantly—obsessively—talking about a gap-year program, about a return to the Fathers, about cultural renewal.
We hit it off from the beginning…two minds passionate about theology, the Fathers, and the pursuit of God, or in the words of one of Jean Leclercq’s book titles,
The Love of Learning and the Desire for God—it happens to be available for purchase at
Eighth Day Books.
And so she’s been alongside me for the entire ride of the evolution of EDI.
She was a part of the creation of EDI, serving as a founding board member back in 2008.
She had a key role in the formulation of our original bylaws…she founded the Gerber Institute and that experience gave her important insights into how we should shape our organization to protect it from the slippery forces of modernity.
She was SO important for our annual Eighth Day Symposium. She served on the committee that made it happen and helped us come up with so many of the speakers and themes. To this day she continues to be a sounding board for me in the planning of both the Symposium and Ad Fontes.
She’s also been one of the more prolific contributors to our Eighth Day blogs. When I searched for her reflections on our current website I was surprised by how few of them there were. I knew she had contributed more. After some digging, sure enough, there were more on our old website that have yet to be transferred. Out of the nine posts I have from Jeri, eight of them are biblical reflections. I’ll work on getting those onto the current site and at some point in the near future will send them to Eighth Day Members.
Jeri is a dear friend and I’m extremely honored to be able to present her with this third annual St. John of Damascus Award.
Come on up Jeri so I can present you the award! Let’s all raise our glasses to Jeri:
My toast to you is this banquet, this icon of St. John of Damascus, this plaque with a passage from St. John of Damascus that describes you and your work.
To Jeri Holladay, my friend, the “Prayerful & Faithful,” and based on those eight biblical reflections, I want to add “Biblical”—to my “Prayerful, Faithful, and Biblical Theologian & Friend.”
Cheers!
