Poetry, Liturgy, and the Sacred in Philip Sherrard

Philip Sherrard (23 Sep. 1922 to 30 May 1995)

1. The Bible

Tuesday: Gal. 5:22-26; 6:1-2. Lk. 5:12-16. Online here.

Wednesday: 1 Cor. 16:13-24. Matt. 24:42-47. Online here.

2. The Liturgy: The Falling Asleep of St John the Evangelist and Theologian

This past Saturday, September 26, the Orthodox Church commemorated the death of St. John the Theologian. Here are the festal hymns:

Apolytikion - Second Tone: Beloved Apostle of Christ our God, hasten to deliver a people without defense. He who permitted you to recline upon His bosom, accepts you on bended knee before Him. Beseech Him, O Theologian, to dispel the persistent cloud of nations, asking for us peace and great mercy.

Kontakion - Second Tone: Who can tell thy mighty works, O virgin Saint? For thou pourest forth miracles, and art a source of healings, and thou dost intercede for our souls, as the Theologian and the friend of Christ.

You can read more about St. John’s death here.

3. The Fathers: “Dead to the World” by St Isaac the Syrian

If we are die to the world, it’s important we understand what we mean by the term “world,” which is precisely what the 7th century St Isaac the Syrian does in today’s Patristic Word:

According to contemplative inquiry, “world” is said to be a general word which refers to distinct passions. When we want to speak of passions in general we call them “world.” But when we speak of particular passions, we use their distinctive names. The passions are part of the ongoing course of the world; and where the passions have ceased there the world has ceased proceeding on its course. The passions are: love of riches, amassing of possessions; the fattening of the body, from which proceeds carnal desire; love of honors, which is the source of envy; administration of government; pride and pomp of power; elegance; popularity, which is the cause of ill-will; fear for the body.

Read the whole passage here.

4. Books & Culture: The Sacred in Life and Art by Philip Sherrard

Here’s an Eighth Day Books review of one of my all-time favorite books, one that I re-read on a regular basis.

And here’s a passage from the book which was included in an old issue of Synaxis: The Presuppositions of the Sacred.

5. Poetry: “Memory I” by George Seferis

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963, the Greek poet George Seferis (1900-1971) was constantly exploring his (classical) Greek heritage. His poetry has been translated into English by the Orthodox poet and theologian Philip Sherrard. Check this poem out and then get a copy of his Collected Poems from Eighth Day Books.

6. Essays et al: “Poetry and Soil: A Brief Introduction to the Early Life and Literary Work of Philip Sherrard” by Joshua Sturgill

Recently at the Hall of Men, Joshua Sturgill presented one of my great heroes, Philip Sherrard. That lecture will appear in its entirety in the forthcoming issue of the Eighth Day Moot on “Oikophilia: The Love of Home” (released to Eighth Day Members at the Inklings Festival on Oct 16-18). Here’s a little teaser:

And Sherrard’s literary output was immense, so I’m going to switch now from the “early life” to the “literary work” that I advertised in the title of this lecture. Since the title also says “introduction,” I’ll keep things brief by mentioning just two aspects of Sherrard’s work and then explaining why it was so important. 

These two are his poetry translation and his environmental philosophy. You ask, poetry and environment? Even as I’m saying the words, they sound vague, innocuous, and “liberal.” But for Sherrard, promoting and writing on these subjects was a kind of taking back of cultural territory. Poetry and the natural world are natively Christian, and Christians should never have abandoned them.

Outside his translation work on the Philokalia, Sherrard is best known for bringing modern Greek poetry to the attention of Western Europe. Here, it’s very important to make a note. Though the current nation-state of Greece is geo-technically part of Europe, culturally Greece is a 4,000-year-old amalgam of Asian, African, and European influences. This shouldn’t surprise anyone with a little education, but we rarely consider what it means. Christianity, which the Greek communities were first to embrace after the Jewish communities, is itself an Asian religion. After all, except for a brief visit to Africa in childhood, Jesus never left a small corner of Western Asia.

The important point for this evening is that this ancient and inter-continental ethos still saturates the modern Greek Christian mind. English speakers are accustomed to think of “Greco-Roman History,” but the Roman period is only one of (and a very brief one of) many epochs in Greek life. And Sherrard wanted this timeless, ancient, modern story to be told, in order to wake up the West from its cultural confines. 

How did the Greeks come to accept a Jewish messiah to begin with? This is an extraordinary question. And just as extraordinary, how did the Greeks manage to hang on to their faith in Christ up until the present day—despite invasions, heresies, conquests, crusades, plagues, and not infrequent bad bishops and bad emperors? Sherrard thought postmodern Christians in America and Europe might have something to learn from their brothers still living in the earliest Christian lands. It was the Greek poetry that, Sherrard felt, could best communicate the timelessness of the Greek heart to a greater audience. Cultural critics agreed. Giorgos Seferis, to name just one of the poets brought to the attention of the West through Sherrard’s efforts, later won a Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Join the community of Eighth Day Members here and you’ll receive a physical copy of the Eighth Day Moot with this essay and many others. Here’s a preview of a draft of the contents.

7. Essays et al: “The Desert Fathers and Ourselves” by Philip Sherrard

This essay was written shortly before Sherrard’s repose and appeared in 1997 in the inaugural issue of the journal Divine Ascent. That journal is unfortunately now defunct and this article is unavailable anywhere else that I’m aware of. Here’s the opening paragraph:

It is sometimes said that the forms of evil with which the desert fathers had to contend are basically the same as those we face today. But is this the case? The evils with which the desert fathers had to contend—death, pestilence, demons, and so on—are endemic to human life in its fallen state and are “natural” consequences of the fall. They could be made sense of, were within the scope of human comprehension, and through a process of askesis leading to purification could be allayed or transcended. And such an askesis did not involve participation in, or contributing to, activities and practices whose consequences are the perversion or abuse of the natural order. There was a correspondence between the way the ascetic perceived and related to the created world, the forms within which he lived his life, and the actual reality of the created world; he recognized that the will of the Creator is the nature of each thing that is created, and that unless things are treated and used in a way that accords with their nature, we violate God’s will and blaspheme against His nature.

A good portion of this essay focuses on the eucharistic liturgy (as a drama or re-enactment of the Incarnation and Resurrection), much of it echoing content in his book The Sacred in Life and Art. But the paragraph on candles is what I remember standing out when I first read it back in 1997. Here’s that paragraph:

Candles—of which beeswax, distilled from the nectar of numberless flowers, is the virgin soul, their light the spirit that, nourished by the purest essence of the soul, strives heavenward—are lit, among other reasons, so that the eye can perceive such meanings speaking through shapes and colors. When they are lit or put out of the creation of light and the coming of darkness are not only thought of but seen. By seeing ideas we experience them more deeply and richly. They become more than mere signs in the computations of the brain. Replace candles by electric light and all the significance of the candle is nullified. It is nullified even if candles are still lit, for it is not they that light up the church: their flames, flickering like the spirit that lives in peril, no longer repel the shadows—their function is performed by electric bulbs which replace the flicker with their deadly cold effectiveness. The mysterious breathing candle no longer has any use. It survives as a left-over, a quaint relic. The presence of electric light makes the candle ridiculous, functionless, a bit of nostalgic folklore and even then more often than not shorn of its symbolism since it is made not of beeswax but paraffin wax. A church lit by electric light blacks out the liturgy.

Read the whole thing here (it’s a fairly long one, coming in at 3800 words).

8. Essays et al: “John Tavener Meets Philip Sherrard” by Peter Levi

If you received the digital content of our Seminar from the 2020 Florovsky-Newman Week, you may have heard John Tavener’s arrangement of the Akathist Hymn of Thanksgiving. If you didn’t, listen to it here.

Late last week I learned in a YouTube video that Tavener lived with Sherrard for a period of time and viewed him as a sort of spiritual father. In that video Tavener argues that the whole purpose of sacred music is to lead us to the threshold of prayer and of God. According to Tavener, “Although art cannot renew the sacred, it can be a vehicle for the sacred.”

I also learned that Tavener had a spiritual mother:

One can’t write music in isolation. I’m lucky enough to have met an Orthodox nun, Mother Thekla, the abbess of the Monastery of the Assumption in Yorkshire. She is not only my spiritual mother, but is also able to inspire, help, collaborate, and give me the theological answers that I don’t know so that I can create in my music a theological truth.

More Tavener in that same video on iconography, music, and tradition:

When I became Russian Orthodox and began to understand something about icon painting, I realized that writing music wasn’t a question of expressing oneself, trying to express an idea; it wasn’t a question of trying to hang one’s dirty linen on the line in public. Rather, it was a question of being molded by the tradition and allowing God to work within one

If you want to see and hear the living Philip Sherrard at his home in Greece go to the 3:15 mark in the YouTube video here and watch until 5:10.

The next issue of Synaxis (for members only) will include two more rare pieces by Sherrard, one on “W. B. Yeats and the Search for Tradition” and the other on "Constantinople and the Kingdom of God."

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