A Word from Adrian Fortescue

I was invited to be keynote lecturer at the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary's annual conference this past weekend at the lovely Catholic college in Newburgh, NY.

I chose as my topic a question that has long perturbed me: why did Pope Pius IX feel he had the right to proceed with a unilateral dogmatic declaration in 1854 concerning the conception of the Theotokos when:

a) no pope before had dared to dream of doing such a thing; and
b) no dogmatic crisis--whether in Mariology or theology proper in the strict sense--was at hand, and thus the old rule of "nothing is defined until it is denied" was not applicable.

Various traditions and scholars agree that there was no crisis to hand, and thus no obvious dogmatic or theological reason to proceed with a definition. The Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission, in several places between 1981 and 2004 (helpfully studied in Studying Mary: The Virgin Mary in Anglican and Catholic Theology and Devotion) agreed that the Immaculate Conception arose when there was no crisis to hand.

The great Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov says the same thing, rather wearily and acerbically, in his book The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God. And even conservative Catholic scholars such as Sr. Sara Butler agree that there was no crisis to hand, and thus the justification for a definition must be sought on quite other than theological grounds.

The short answer I proffered, drawing on an article I published last year (“Sovereignty, Politics, and the Church: Joseph de Maistre’s Legacy for Catholic and Orthodox Ecclesiology,” Pro Ecclesia 24 [2015]: 366-389), was that the French Revolution, combined with widespread revolutionary turmoil in 1848, led the pope to realize that there was a crisis to hand, a crisis centred precisely on papal power in the temporal realm, which was rapidly coming to a disastrous end, and therefore some new modus operandi in the world and Church must be sought. Thus we see 1854 as the beginning of the popes as global teachers, a notion well described by the irreplaceable studies of Eamon Duffy and Owen Chadwick.

It would, of course, be too much of a stretch, especially in a short lecture, to suggest there is a direct route between 1854 and 2016, but I did sketch out enough evidence, I thought, to indicate some highly probable links between the 1854 definition, the 1950 definition of the Assumption by another pope named Pius, and also the burgeoning papacy commenting on everything under the sun and inserting itself into all manner of thing well and truly beyond its brief. This problem began with Pius IX in 1854, increased under Leo XIII, and then became more and more acute with every pope from him to the current incumbent of the Roman bishopric who seems to have missed all the warnings in the Apophthegmata Patrum about the importance of bridling one's tongue lest that organ become a σκάνδαλον to the brethren.

Then, for effect on a hot summer evening after three days of a conference, I threw in some spicy bits at the end calling for an overhaul of the papacy to prevent any future popes not only from proceeding with unilateral dogmatic definitions, but also from hosting flying press conferences, having Twitter accounts, giving interviews to anyone for any reason about any topic, and much else besides. I concluded with an especially bon mot from Adrian Fortescue, the English priest-scholar and Orientalist whose views on the papacy were much more acerbic, and much more polemically conveyed, than anything I have ever done in, e.g., my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy. (It seems a great pity that many of his choicest phrases are to be found in his correspondence, very little of which seems to have been published except in excerpts here and there--as in Aidan Nichols intellectual biography, The Latin Clerk: The Life, Work and Travels of Adrian Fortescue.)

Writing--note well--in 1920, Fortescue, a stout defender of the papacy and Church in other contexts, was forced to admit, “I wish to goodness that the pope would never speak at all except when he means to define ex cathedra. Then we should know where we are.”

To which let all the weary brethren say: Amen, Amen!

Byzantium's Saintly Spectacular Empire

Interest in all things Byzantine remains constantly high, not least when it concerns Byzantine art, subject of two recently released books, the first by Carolyn L. Connor, Saints and Spectacle: Byzantine Mosaics in their Cultural Setting (Oxford UP, 2016), 232pp.

About this book we are told:

Saints and Spectacle examines the origins and reception of the Middle Byzantine program of mosaic decoration. This complex and colorful system of images covers the walls and vaults of churches with figures and compositions seen against a dazzling gold ground. The surviving eleventh-century churches with their wall and vault mosaics largely intact, Hosios Loukas, Nea Moni and Daphni in Greece, pose the challenge of how, when and where this complex and gloriously conceived system was created.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, Connor explores the urban culture and context of church-building in Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, during the century following the end of Iconoclasm, of around 843 to 950. The application of an innovative frame of reference, through ritual studies, helps recreate the likely scenario in which the medium of mosaics attained its highest potential, in the mosaiced Byzantine church. For mosaics were enlisted to convey a religious and political message that was too nuanced to be expressed in any other way. At a time of revival of learning and the arts, and development of ceremonial practices, the Byzantine emperor and patriarch were united in creating a solution to the problem of consolidating the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire. It was through promoting a vision of the unchallengeable authority residing in God and his earthly representative, the emperor. The beliefs and processional practices affirming the protective role of the saints in which the entire city participated, were critical to the reception of this vision by the populace as well as the court. Mosaics were a luxury medium that was ideally situated aesthetically to convey a message at a particularly important historical moment--a brilliant solution to a problem that was to subtly unite an empire for centuries to come. Supported by a wealth of testimony from literary sources, Saints and Spectacle brings the Middle Byzantine church to life as the witness to a compelling and fascinating drama.

The second book is a collection edited by Robin M. Jensen and Lee Jefferson: The Art of Empire: Christian Art in Its Imperial Context (Fortress Press, 2015), 368pp.

About this collection we are told:

In recent years, art historians such as Johannes Deckers (Picturing the Bible, 2009) have argued for a significant transition in fourth- and fifth-century images of Jesus following the conversion of Constantine. Broadly speaking, they perceive the image of a peaceful, benevolent shepherd transformed into a powerful, enthroned Jesus, mimicking and mirroring the dominance and authority of the emperor. The powers of church and state are thus conveniently synthesized in such a potent image. This deeply rooted position assumes that ante-pacem images of Jesus were uniformly humble while post-Constantinian images exuded the grandeur of power and glory.

The Art of Empire contends that the art and imagery of Late Antiquity merits a more nuanced understanding of the context of the imperial period before and after Constantine. The chapters in this collection each treat an aspect of the relationship between early Christian art and the rituals, practices, or imagery of the Empire, and offer a new and fresh perspective on the development of Christian art in its imperial background. 

Classifying Christians and Heretics

The University of California Press continues to publish impressive and important studies in early Christian history, not least, as I noted earlier, the Syriac Christian tradition.

From California I recently received in the mail a new study: Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity by Todd S. Berzon (2016), 320pp.

About this book we are told:

Classifying Christians investigates late antique Christian heresiologies as ethnographies that catalogued and detailed the origins, rituals, doctrines, and customs of the heretics in explicitly polemical and theological terms. Oscillating between ancient ethnographic evidence and contemporary ethnographic writing, Todd S. Berzon argues that late antique heresiology shares an underlying logic with classical ethnography in the ancient Mediterranean world. By providing an account of heresiological writing from the second to fifth century, Classifying Christians embeds heresiology within the historical development of imperial forms of knowledge that have shaped western culture from antiquity to the present.

In the Beginning Was the Image

As I have often noted over the years, interest in icons is at perhaps an all-time high as Protestants, Roman Catholics, and others have "discovered" icons in the last two decades, with many books written by authors from these traditions about icons, and many classes in icon painting being taken by them in parish workshops across the country. To the extent that this helps the West over come its ongoing difficulty with Nicaea II's theology of images, and thus its iconoclasm (an ongoing problem even today), these must be counted encouraging developments.

Along comes another development in Western uses of iconography. Released this year in paperback is a book first published two years ago in hardback: Sigurd Bergmann, In the Beginning is the Icon (Routledge, 2016), 320pp.

About this book we are told:

Icons provide depictions of God or encounters with the divine that enable reflection and prayer. 'In the Beginning is the Icon' explores the value of these images for a theology of liberation. Iconology, art theory, philosophical aesthetics, art history and anthropology are integrated with rigorous theological reflection to argue that the creation and observation of pictures can have a liberating effect on humanity. In presenting art from across the world, 'In the Beginning is the Icon' reflects the ethnocentricity of both art and religious studies and offers a new cross-cultural approach to the theology of art.

Transfigured in Glory

With Vespers tonight, we begin to celebrate what is the loveliest of the summer festivals, the luminous and splendid feast of the Transfiguration. I am put in mind again of the collection amassed by the great patrologist Brian Daley, Light on the Mountain: Greek Patristic and Byzantine Homilies on the Transfiguration of the Lord. Published in 2013 in the Popular Patristics Series of St. Vladimir Seminary Press, this rich collection repays careful reading and meditation from year to year.

As the publisher tells us:

The episode of the Transfiguration of Jesus plays a key role in the narrative of the Synoptic Gospels. Peter and his fellow Apostles have just acknowledged Jesus to be Israel s long-awaited Messiah, and have been shocked by Jesus immediate prediction of his coming passion and death. Now Peter, James and John are allowed to share an extraordinary vision, marking him out as truly God s own Son, radiant with divine glory. Early Christian commentators and preachers recognized the crucial importance of this incident for Christian faith and discipleship, as pointing in advance to the power of the cross and resurrection of Christ. The liturgical feast of the Transfiguration, anticipating that of the Exaltation of the Cross by forty days, came to be celebrated in the Eastern and Western Churches, beginning in the seventh century; yet since at least the third century, theologians have reflected on the significance of this event for the life of faith.

This volume brings together, in a new translation, a comprehensive collection of homilies on the Transfiguration of Christ from the Greek Patristic and Medieval Church, from Origen in the third century to St. Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth. Together they form a profound and moving set of meditations, from many perspectives and in many voices, on the light of the recognition of the glory of God in the face of Christ (II Cor 4.6), and on its importance for our lives.

Orthodox and Catholic: Sisters Temporarily Separated

I count it as a joy to know the author of a new study whose timeliness, especially in view of ecclesiological debates and controversies at the recently concluded Great and Holy Council of the Orthodox Churches, could not be greater. We were doctoral students at the same time a decade ago working in closely overlapping areas, and began communicating then, exchanging draft chapters and bibliographic suggestions. Since that time we have had the great good fortune to meet several times, usually at OTSA gatherings in New York and Boston, and I have always found Will to be an enormously gracious human being.

His new book has just been published in a prestigious series from one of the leading European presses devoted to ecumenism, and I am greatly looking forward to reading Will T. Cohen, The Concept of ""Sister Churches"" in Catholic-Orthodox Relations since Vatican II (Aschendorff Verlag, 2016),

About this book the publisher tells us:

Often used from Vatican II to the end of the 20th century by both Orthodox and Catholic officials, the expression “sister churches” reflected their growing rapprochement, as well as a shift on the Catholic side from a more centralized ecclesiology to one more attentive to the local church and conciliarity.  But in the year 2000, the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith put strict limits on how the expression could be used by Catholics.  The move coincided with a bold reassertion in official Catholic documents of the unique identity of the Catholic Church as the only one in which the Church of Christ “subsists” and of the crucial importance of Rome’s primacy for the universal church.  In the Orthodox world, meanwhile, use of “sister churches” in ecumenical exchanges with Rome had always had adamant detractors for a different reason, namely, that the Roman Catholic Church in their view (not shared by all Orthodox) had been in heresy since the schism.  In his comprehensive treatment of the rise and fall of the expression “sister churches” over half a century of Catholic‐Orthodox relations, Dr. Will Cohen explores why the concept developed as it did, why it was so fiercely contested, and what remains vital about the concept today.  In the process, Dr. Cohen illuminates pitfalls of both Catholic and Orthodox ecclesiology in mutual isolation and the promise each holds when open to the authentic gifts of the other.  

I also hope, with the press of the academic year about to begin, that I shall have a chance to interview Will on here, and will post that in due course.

Arab Views of the Crusades

I taught a course this past summer entitled "ISIS and the Crusades," looking at the uses and abuses of history by ISIS in its talismanic invocations of "the Crusades." The scholarship on those centuries-long highly complex series of events has been expanding for some time now, but that has not touched at all the tendentious invocation of them by terrorists.

We are still in need of further work in Arab and Islamic views of them, and as of September we will have an affordable paperback edition of an important study first published in 2014: Paul Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford UP, 2016), 360pp.

About this book we are told by the publisher the following:

In 1099, when the first Frankish invaders arrived before the walls of Jerusalem, they had carved out a Christian European presence in the Islamic world that endured for centuries, bolstered by subsequent waves of new crusaders and pilgrims. The story of how this group of warriors, driven by faith, greed, and wanderlust, created new Christian-ruled states in parts of the Middle East is one of the best-known in history. Yet it is offers not even half of the story, for it is based almost exclusively on Western sources and overlooks entirely the perspective of the crusaded. How did medieval Muslims perceive what happened?

In The Race for Paradise, Paul M. Cobb offers a new history of the confrontations between Muslims and Franks we now call the "Crusades," one that emphasizes the diversity of Muslim experiences of the European holy war. There is more to the story than Jerusalem, the Templars, Saladin, and the Assassins. Cobb considers the Arab perspective on all shores of the Muslim Mediterranean, from Spain to Syria. In the process, he shows that this is not a straightforward story of warriors and kings clashing in the Holy Land, but a more complicated tale of border-crossers and turncoats; of embassies and merchants; of scholars and spies, all of them seeking to manage a new threat from the barbarian fringes of their ordered world. When seen from the perspective of medieval Muslims, the Crusades emerge as something altogether different from the high-flying rhetoric of the European chronicles: as a cultural encounter to ponder, a diplomatic chess-game to be mastered, a commercial opportunity to be seized, and as so often happened, a political challenge to be exploited by ambitious rulers making canny use of the language of jihad.

An engrossing synthesis of history and scholarship, The Race for Paradise fills a significant historical gap, considering in a new light the events that distinctively shaped Muslim experiences of Europeans until the close of the Middle Ages.

Desert Mothers, Daughters, and Granddaughters

I have often noted on here collections devoted to the Desert Fathers and Mothers. In October of this year we will have another scholarly collection devoted to a desert mother and her daughter: Catherine M. Chin and Caroline T. Schroeder, eds., Melania: Early Christianity through the Life of One Family (U California Press, 2016), 314pp.

About this book we are told:

Melania the Elder and her granddaughter Melania the Younger were major figures in early Christian history, using their wealth, status, and forceful personalities to shape the development of nearly every aspect of the religion we now know as Christianity. This volume examines the influence that these two women had on the development of Christianity and provides an insightful portrait of the their legacies in the modern world. Instead of the traditionally patriarchal view, this perspective gives a poignant and sometimes surprising view of how the rise of Christian institutions in the Roman Empire shaped the understanding of women's roles in the larger world.

How Foul the Flatulence of Heretics?

For some reason or other, the role of the body, and of particular senses, continue to come in for scholarly study in the last many years, perhaps because of the groundbreaking work of Peter Brown from 1988,The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity.

A decade ago now, the Orthodox scholar Susan Ashbrook Harvey gave us her well-regarded study Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination, released in paperback last summer.

Now, just released this month, we have Mary Thurlkill's new book, Sacred Scents in Early Christianity and Islam (Studies in Body and Religion)

About this book we are told:

Medieval scholars and cultural historians have recently turned their attention to the question of “smells” and what olfactory sensations reveal about society in general and holiness in particular. Sacred Scents in Early Christianity and Islam contributes to that conversation, explaining how early Christians and Muslims linked the “sweet smell of sanctity” with ideals of the body and sexuality; created boundaries and sacred space; and imagined their emerging communal identity. Most importantly, scent—itself transgressive and difficult to control—signaled transition and transformation between categories of meaning.

Christian and Islamic authors distinguished their own fragrant ethical and theological ideals against the stench of oppositional heresy and moral depravity. Orthodox Christians ridiculed their ‘stinking’ Arian neighbors, and Muslims denounced the ‘reeking’ corruption of Umayyad and Abbasid decadence. Through the mouths of saints and prophets, patriarchal authors labeled perfumed women as existential threats to vulnerable men and consigned them to enclosed, private space for their protection as well as society’s. At the same time, theologians praised both men and women who purified and transformed their bodies into aromatic offerings to God. Both Christian and Muslim pilgrims venerated sainted men and women with perfumed offerings at tombstones; indeed, Christians and Muslims often worshipped together, honoring common heroes such as Abraham, Moses, and Jonah.

Sacred Scents begins by surveying aroma’s quotidian functions in Roman and pre-Islamic cultural milieus within homes, temples, poetry, kitchens, and medicines. Existing scholarship tends to frame ‘scent’ as something available only to the wealthy or elite; however, perfumes, spices, and incense wafted through the lives of most early Christians and Muslims. It ends by examining both traditions’ views of Paradise, identified as the archetypal Garden and source of all perfumes and sweet smells. Both Christian and Islamic texts explain Adam and Eve’s profound grief at losing access to these heavenly aromas and celebrate God’s mercy in allowing earthly remembrances. Sacred scent thus prompts humanity’s grief for what was lost and the yearning for paradisiacal transformation still to come.

Epiphanius of Cyprus

July must be the month for books about Epiphanius of Cyprus. This month, from the University of California Press, we have Epiphanius of Cyprus: A Cultural Biography of Late Antiquity by Andrew S. Jacobs (352pp.).

About this book the publisher tells us:

Epiphanius, Bishop of Constantia on Cyprus from 367 to 403 C.E., was incredibly influential in the last decades of the fourth century. Whereas his major surviving text (the Panarion, an encyclopedia of heresies) is studied for lost sources, Epiphanius himself is often dismissed as an anti-intellectual eccentric, a marginal figure of late antiquity. In this book, Andrew Jacobs moves Epiphanius from the margin back toward the center and proposes we view major cultural themes of late antiquity in a new light altogether. Through an examination of the key cultural concepts of celebrity, conversion, discipline, scripture, and salvation, Jacobs shifts our understanding of "late antiquity" from a transformational period open to new ideas and peoples toward a Christian Empire that posited a troubling, but ever-present, "otherness" at the center of its cultural production.

A year ago at this time, we had Epiphanius of Cyprus: Imagining an Orthodox World by Young Richard Kim (U Michigan Press, 2015), 296pp.

About this study we are told:

Epiphanius of Cyprus offers the first complete biography in English of Epiphanius, lead bishop of Cyprus in the late fourth century CE and author of the Panarion, a massive encyclopedia of heresies. Imagining himself a defender of orthodoxy, he became an active heresy-hunter, involving himself in the most significant theological and ecclesiastical debates of his day.

Young Richard Kim studies the bishop as a historical person and a self-constructed persona, as mediated within the pages of the Panarion. Kim’s “micro-readings” of the Panarion present a close look at autobiographical anecdotes, situated in historical contexts, that profoundly shaped both Epiphanius’ character and how he wanted his readers to perceive him. “Macro-readings” examine portions of the Panarion that reflected how Epiphanius imagined his world, characterized by an orthodoxy that had existed since Creation and was preserved through the generations. In the final chapter, Kim considers Epiphanius’ life after the publication of the Panarion and how he spent years “living” the pages of his heresiology.

Kim brings a more balanced perspective to a controversial figure, recognizing shortcomings but also understanding them in light of Epiphanius’ own world. The bishop appears not as a buffoon, but as someone who knew how to use the power of the rhetoric of orthodoxy to augment his own authority. Quintessentially late antique, he embodied the contentious transition from the classical past to the medieval and Byzantine worlds.

This book will be of broad interest to students and scholars of ancient history, classics, and religious studies.

And then half-way between these two books, in January of this year, the Society of Biblical Literature published Frank Williams, The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis: Book I (Sects 146).

About this work, we are told:

Epiphanius, monastic founder and bishop of Salamis on Cyprus for almost forty years of the fourth century, threw heart and soul into the controversies of the time and produced the Panario or Medicine Chest, a historical encyclopedia of sects and heresies and their refutations. Book I deals with material that is also found in Nag Hammadi, other Gnostic writings, and in such patristic authors as Irenaeus and Hippolytus. Students of Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism, patrologists, historians of religion, church historians, and Judaism have found this translation useful.

In the Beginning Was the Beginning of Genesis

For those of you who read books on a Kindle, it is worth noting that a Kindle edition of a book by Andrew Louth, one of the leading Orthodox scholars of our time, was issued earlier this year, some fifteen years after it appeared in print: Genesis 1-11 (Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture).

About this book the publisher tells us:

The rich tapestry of the creation narrative in the early chapters of Genesis proved irresistible to the thoughtful, reflective minds of the church fathers. Within them they found the beginning threads from which to weave a theology of creation, fall and redemption. Following their mentor, the apostle Paul, they explored the profound significance of Adam as a type of Christ, the second Adam. The six days of creation proved especially attractive among the fathers as a subject for commentary, with Basil the Great and Ambrose producing well-known Hexaemerons. Similarly, Augustine devoted portions of five works to the first chapter of Genesis. As in previous volumes within the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, the range of comment contained in Genesis 1--11 spans from the first century to the eighth, from East to West, and from Greek and Latin speakers to Syriac. Especially helpful in this volume is editor Andrew Louth's supply of Septuagintal alternative readings to the Masoretic text, which are often necessary to understanding the fathers' flow of thought. Genesis 1--11 opens up a treasure house of ancient wisdom--allowing these faithful witnesses, some appearing here in English translation for the first time, to speak with eloquence and intellectual acumen to the church today.

Eastern Christian Suffering in the Violent Decline of the Ottoman Empire

I've just had a chance to finish Eugene Rogan's splendid study, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East (Basic Books, 2015), 512pp.

It is a very cogently written study that begins in the late 19th century, but is of course largely concentrated on the First World War, though with considerable attention paid to the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.

Parts of the book revisit well-trod territory for those who have some background in the history of the Great War--e.g., the chapter on the Allied attempt to invade by the Dardanelles and the related Gallipoli campaigns in 1915.

Parts of the book also show the great (and relatively underwhelming and only partially successful) attempts made by the Young Turks and their German patrons to arouse Muslim hatred against the Entente Powers by repeated calls for jihad, a term with which, alas, we have only become ever more familiar in the last hundred years. In the case of British India, this campaign produced almost no uprisings, so loyal were Indian subjects to the king-emperor George V. In most other places, it aroused only minimal attention for a variety of reasons. In all places, it seems, it was recognized by Arabs, Turks, Germans, and Brits alike as a political tool to be trotted out when convenient and retired when necessary. It does not seem to have had quite the same purchase as it does today in the hands of some (e.g., ISIS). Once again one sees the ease with which all parties--Muslim and non-Muslim alike--are able to use Islamic terminology, concepts, and practices as ideological tools in the service of empires and would-be nation-states.

The chapters on the Arab Revolt, which began 100 years ago this past June, are very interesting to watch the intrigue between Britain and the Hashemite tribes of Arabia. This gives rise to plots between Arabs and Brits against the Ottoman Turks; between Arabs and the Turks against the British; between the British and the French (e.g., the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement) against the Arabs; and then between the British, French, and Russians against the Turks and possibly with the Arabs onside, but clearly in a dependent role. Fascinating too is the sudden creation of a "king" in the Arab world in the person of Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, who gave himself the regal title and status. Most monarchies tend to be shabby (if disguised) ramshackle affairs of sordid origins, but this one is especially déshabillé.

There is also a very well done chapter on the Armenian Genocide which also gives considerable attention to the slaughter of the Assyrian Christians at the same time--to say nothing of the campaign to drive the Greeks out of western Anatolia. For those who want to understand the genocide in its wider context, this book does a very good job. But for those who want the genocide summed up without reading any number of the many lengthy studies of it, this book's chapter does a good job in conveying the details succinctly without sparing the reader some of the details of the horrors faced--horrors that stagger one to this very day.

Rogan's treatment of the slaughter of Armenian Christians draws considerably on a first-hand eye-witness report, Armenian Golgotha, one of the first ever written, by Grigoris Balakian, an Armenian priest who barely survived, and who was forced to witness the genocide in all its manifold horrors

Bartholomew's Authorized Biography

I confess that I am not indifferent to the author of this forthcoming biography of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew insofar as John Chryssavgis asked me last year to write a chapter for a book that he edited and has just appeared in print, about which more soonest. He has always been very gracious to me over the years in a number of other capacities. He is the author of numerous other well-received books, and if the forthcoming biography (set for release early October) is at his usual standards, it will be a major accomplishment indeed. Thus I greatly look forward to reading John Chryssavgis, Bartholomew: Apostle and Visionary (Thomas Nelson, 2016), 272pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The Orthodox Church, that great beacon of the East, now boasts 300 million members worldwide. In one of the most remarkable tenures of the patriarchate it has been more than twenty-five years since Bartholomew first accepted this ministerial position, which is considered “first among equals” of all Orthodox leaders around the world. He is viewed by many to be a strong, humble leader who is well-loved across a wide variety of political and religious boundaries.

With unfettered access to church files, Bartholomew’s personal notes, and the patriarch himself, author John Chryssavgis has woven together a picture of a man who has longed to serve God, the Church, and the world his entire life. Through personal and institutional challenges, Bartholomew continues to strive toward unity within the Orthodox community and build bridge to others. It is a task that can be as daunting as it is important. This book removes the veil that some may have placed upon this joyful man of God who is anything but mysterious, as evidenced by the heartfelt contributions to the book from world dignitaries, influencers, and religious leaders:

Marcus Plested on East-West Estrangement

Marcus Plested's splendid study, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, which I discussed here, and whom I interviewed here, came back to mind tonight as a friend sent me a link to a lecture that Plested gave on East-West estrangement, and the role of Aquinas and Palamas, this May in Moscow:

From Pontus to Vienna: Evagrius and Freud

Going, as I was, to Vienna in early June, I ordered two books to read. The first, discussed here, was Peter Gay's lovely and winsome biography of Mozart. As I noted, Vienna has hosted many giants of Western culture, and Mozart was certainly among them.

More recently, it was also home, until the last 18 months of his life, of Freud, whose legacy and influence in giving rise to psychoanalysis remain towering after having been increasingly discounted since the latter part of the 20th century. I made a point of visiting that home of his, Bergasse 19, when I was in Vienna last month, and you can see a few pictures I took and read a few thoughts here. (For further thoughts about possible uses of psychoanalytic thought for Eastern Christians, see here and here. For possible uses of psychoanalytic categories in spiritual direction, see here.)

The second book I took with me, and finally recently finished, was George Makari, Revolution in Mind: the Creation of Psychoanalysis (Harper, 2008), 624pp.

It is a fascinating, carefully written study that avoids the rather polemical tone and exaggerations of, e.g., Phyllis Grosskurth's 1991 book The Secret Ring: Freud's Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis. 

Makari, the director of Cornell's Institute for the History of Psychiatry, lays out a wide cast of characters--not just Jung and Freud, but, inter alia, Adler, Abraham, Reich, Horney, Rank, Klein, and Anna Freud, these last two engaged in a long-running and rather hostile debate about children and psychoanalysis that only grew worse when Anna accompanied her father in 1938 as they fled the Nazis and wound up in London, where Freud was to die in 1939 and where Klein, according to Makari, had long been accustomed to seeing herself as the queen of psychoanalysis there.

Freud and many of the people in the book spent most of their time in Vienna, though as things developed, Berlin, Zurich, and later London, New York, and other American cities came to prominence; indeed, after the war, the Germanic centres of psychoanalysis were virtually wiped out, leaving the American institutes and analysts to assume a position of dominance (and to use that dominance to force upon the IPA positions that Freud himself disagreed with--especially the question of so-called lay analysis). But while it was still king, Vienna was a place of great intrigue, according to Makari; and having wandered some of the streets he describes, and seen some of the places he mentions--the University of Vienna as well as Bergasse 19--I found the book that much more haunting.

I was, moreover, struck by two things in the book. First, once again, Freud emerges at least somewhat better than he often has (something I noticed earlier this year in reading his correspondence with Pfister) in later portrayals. Though he has been rightly criticized for many things, he was not quite as hard-core and doctrinaire as some of his followers were. He could indeed stubbornly cling to his ideas when they were increasingly debunked, but eventually he could change.

And that is the second take-away from this book: even those who--such as many of Freud's early followers, including Jung and Rank--most readily brandish the label of "scientific endeavor," who most earnestly denounce others for unscientific adventures, who most adamantly insist they are doing nothing but science according to the strictest academic canons, readily, quickly, blindly collapse into unbending and unscientific ideology, lacking any kind of epistemic humility or even basic self-awareness it seems. They then go on ideological crusades against their enemies.

Such crusades, alas, are not a phenomenon limited to psychoanalysis at its founding, nor to others since then--climate science, say. They affect and infect all human disciplines and endeavors, it seems, including theology which can just as easily be reduced to an ideology in the hands of some. It is a salutary reminder that good scholarship is a profoundly ascetic exercise, requiring, as Evagrius showed, discipline of the logismoi, the passions, especially pride and vainglory, and what Augustine so memorably called libido dominandi.

David Rieff and the Duty to Forget (III)

Let us turn, finally, to such brief considerations of forgiveness in conjunction with forgetting as we find in David Rieff's In Praise of Forgetting (part II here; and part I here).

As we recall, Rieff (and other recent authors, including Manuel Cruz) says that forgetting:

• is more mature
• is more likely to bring peace
• is no more likely to ensure repetition of a traumatic, violent event than enforced remembrance is to prevent it

If all this is so, then it would seem that a fortiori forgiveness will do likewise, and perhaps do so with better results than forgetting alone. But Rieff does not attend to forgiveness as much as he does to forgetting. Nonetheless, he does end his important and stimulating book with a few lapidary suggestions.

As with his emphasis on forgetting, Rieff is a socio-political pragmatist with regard to forgiveness. Noting that few people are more uncontrollable or more dangerous than "a social group that believes itself to be a victim" (117), he argues that such "victims," whose collective memory has most likely been ginned up or exaggerated in key aspects, must learn to forget those episodes and, more important, the resentment that they engender. In this regard, Rieff's book could equally be titled "in praise of letting go of resentment" insofar as resentment often spurs victims to become perpetrators themselves. If they can let go of resentment and attempt something like forgiveness, then the cycle of vengeance can be broken--or, rather, quoting Borges, "'forgetting is the only vengeance and the only forgiveness'" (145).

That is, of course, rather weak tea. Christians would have a much stronger, more robust theology of forgiveness based on its divine example and dominical mandate.

As I continue to think with and through Rieff, Cruz, Ricoeur, Vivian, Volf, and others on these questions, I have in mind two test cases: the Union of Brest-Pseudosobor of Lviv trajectory in Russian-Catholic relations and imaginings; and then the Crusades. I shall have more to say about both later.

Michael Plekon on the Uncommon Prayers We Pray

It is one of the great delights of my life that I have known Michael Plekon for a decade now, and continue to benefit from his friendship and counsel, to say nothing of his books. I have in the past written in his honour and also interviewed him about previous books, any and all of which are more than worth your time--both the ones he has written himself, and the many others he has edited or translated.

Two weeks ago the publisher sent me advanced page proofs of his forthcoming book, set for release on 15 September 2016: Uncommon Prayer. Prayer in Everyday Experience (UND Press, 280pp.). Amazon will let you pre-order a copy now and ship it upon release; but in case you forget I'll try to post a reminder of the book's release two months hence.

I asked Fr. Michael for an interview about this book, and here are his thoughts:

AD: In the few years since our last interview on here, discussing your Saints as They Really Are, what have you been up to? How did you get from that book to the present one, Uncommon Prayer, and what if any threads link them?

MP: Saints as They Really Are was the last in a trilogy of books about holy women and men in our time, how they pursued a life in and with God. I started out with persons of faith from the Eastern Church in Living Icons, but wanted to expand horizons. Thus those profiled and listened to in Hidden Holiness and Saints are ecumenically diverse, some even at odds with the institutional church. Given the conflict at the recent Pentecost Pan-Orthodox gathering in Crete over whether non-Orthodox Christian communities could even be called "churches," whether they were in any way Christian, bearers of the Spirit, the commitment to authentic and ecclesial ecumenical perspectives is all the more necessary! There is no reason, within the church's tradition, to doubt the faith of, say, a Thomas Merton or Dorothy Day, a Rowan Williams or Michael Ramsay any more than a Mother Maria Skobtsova or Alexander Men, an Alexander Schmemann or Nicholas Afanasiev or Elisabeth Behr-Sigel.

I mention not only Western Christians here but some of those associated with the "Paris School" and the "religious Renaissance" among the Russians, as Nicholas Zernov called it in the early 20th century. I do so because even these faithful Eastern Church figures have been called into question as "innovationists" or even "heretics" by some Orthodox traditionalists. Listening to these "ecclesial beings" or "people of the church," as Paul Evdokimov called them, it is clear that in both East and West, such women and men were attending to the "signs of the times." They were trying to bring the church into encounter with political revolutions and those fleeing them into exile, a destructive economic Depression, the rise of fascism and two horrendous world wars, followed by a cold war and buildup of nuclear arms.

Contrary to what one might suspect, the processions of these persons of faith was anything but a march of fearful, introverted believers. Rather, those already passed into the kingdom, as well as those still with us, despite their marked differences in vision, nonetheless converged in many ways. They celebrated the life of Christ lived out in the details of everyday life. Rather than condemn secular institutions, they remembered the preaching and enacting of the Gospel in the church's earliest years. They also connected the Gospel with peacemaking, with the fight for human/civil rights and social justice more broadly.

So as it usually is, "one thing leads to another" for me. The books about persons of faith and their experiences of looking for God and trying to live with God in daily life led me to prayer, I supposed the language of faith, the heart of spirituality. I think many are turning away from making a hard distinction between being "religious" and being "spiritual." Jesuit Roger Haight's new book on this, Spiritual and Religious: Explorations for Seekers, (Orbis, 2016) goes a long way toward getting back to inherent connections, commonalities, a lot of shared space, thinking and action.

This is exactly where Uncommon Prayer came to be. I very much wanted to look at how prayer is lived out after services are ended, after the scriptures and prayerbooks are closed--there in our daily round of existence. So I went back to some persons of faith I had written about before, such as Evdokimov, who wrote specifically on "becoming what you pray," also Dorothy Day and Maria Skobtsova, who refused to pit love of God against that of the neighbor--rather seeing the two as inseparable.

I also consulted Sara Miles and Barbara Brown Taylor, really fine writers on the experience of living what you believe, and Richard Rohr, Sara Coakley and Rowan Williams, who were explicit in describing the very personal aspects of prayer. But I also went, for the first time, to poets Mary Oliver, Christian Wiman, Mary Karr, but also Heather Havrilesky, who has done memoirs, criticism, and advice-columns!

And, wanting to share some of the rich experience with which I have been gifted, I take the reader into the maybe surprising liturgical work of food prep--the “liturgies” and community built up in parish pirogi making, baking of Easter breads and other pastries and the food fairs, post-funeral repasts and weekly coffee hours. After so many years in parish ministry, I wanted to share how there really is a “liturgy after the liturgy,” not only that of the “8th sacrament,” the coffee hour, but all those other adventures in food prep and eating that are at the core of my parish’s strong sense of community.

AD: Yes, I remember only too well how stuffed I was after a BBQ and picnic at St. Gregory's one Sunday two or three summers ago! I was also amazed at the gracious hospitality extended to me, a stranger. What a parish you have! 

MP: I also did some digging into my own prayer life, excavating what lies behind a now tattered, soiled prayerlist that is at least 30 years old. This list opened up both my learning to do pastoral ministry years ago, but more importantly how both forgetting and remembering are core elements of prayer and our lived prayer. I was also led to reflect on the experience of prayer in my “day job,” in the classrooms of a large, secular, public university of great ethnic and religious diversity. This is where I have worked for the past 40 years, and hopefully it can serve as a point of departure for readers to consider their own workplaces and homes and neighborhood as locations of prayer.

AD: As a former Anglican, I hear your title and immediately think of it as a riff on Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer. What was your intent in speaking of "uncommon" prayer? 

I explain this title and yes, as you suspect, I did want to suggest that just as much as we need and depend on the “common prayer” of the church, of the community here and over time, that prayer of course is never restricted to the liturgical services and books, that is, to the formal contexts. If St Paul says we should pray always and everywhere, then let’s have a look at how this appears in practice. I also think what is implied here is that we all too often imprison ourselves in the “formal” language and forms of prayer, not knowing we are doing that. And often the consequence is that we are tormented by how little we pray outside the church building and the prayers we recite or read from the books. That, in my own personal experience and in my pastoral experience, is simply NOT true! We pray a lot, in many other circumstances and locations. But often do not think of what we are saying, feeling, and doing as prayer.

AD: Your introduction notes the tendency of moderns to see religious practices such as prayer as more or less private hobbies, undertaken outside of a communal context. Do you have any thoughts on what can be done to overcome this tendency towards splitting off, towards privatizing and individualizing the faith and its practices?

We all know the old line of Tertullian, is it, about “a Christian alone is no Christian.” But it is no longer the case that the community of the local church, the parish, doubles as the same community of the village, the same community of local industry, work, factories, mines, mills. We are so much more diverse in just about everything, from language to culture to political perspective.

Robert Putnam would say we have lost community. But Nancy Ammermann would say, no, just look more closely. There are all kinds of ways we bridge our individuality to others, so many ways in which connect beyond ourselves. I think it’s silly to dismiss how we do this electronically, through social media and email and all the resources online. That is an enormous marketplace, a very real public square.  Think of the capacity we have to access books, images of paintings, pieces of music. But we also are drawn more to each other—concerts, sporting events, really an array of gatherings. And we continue to see urban areas growing in population.

All this said, our community life is NOT what it was even a generation or so ago. While some communities of faith and language and ethnicity continue as enclaves, the community of homogeneity and similarity has given way as we intermarry and move. As I see it, our faith and our prayer life is portable, adaptable. We are able, especially in America, to sing, pray, collect and distribute food and clothing with diverse others. We don’t need to question their faith; in practice we do not, but cooperate. This is the proverbial “other side” of what often appears to be an isolated, hyper-individualist culture. Putnam and Campbell in American Grace found this ability to work with others in the research they studied. I see that while there are more “religious nones,” who do not join a congregation, there are many people who try to live out what they believe, whether that takes identifiable religious/spiritual forms.

AD: I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about the importance of forgetting in Christian memory, and so I was struck by your introduction's noting the importance of "the experience of God's absence, God's silence" (p.7), when it often feels to people like they have been forgotten by God. Why is it important not to gloss over these experiences, these kinds of prayers? What can be learned from them?

First of all, the experiences of seeming to be forgotten by God, of God’s silence and absence are among the most frequent, the most common we have—and not just us in the 21st century but, I think, universally, and across time. The scriptures are replete with expression of just such forgetting, absence, silence, distance, especially the Hebrew Bible, and in particular, the Psalms.

Likely those who regularly pray the psalms, like monastics and others in religious communities, have been the most aware of the forgetting/absence/silence as only one side of the reality of life with God. Julian of Norwich, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Alexander Men, and more recently, Christian Wiman, Richard Rohr, Barbara Brown Taylor—these are just a few who give powerful expression to the experience of this kind of alienation from God. So, yes, as you say, this experience of silence and absence, of being forgotten, should be essential to our prayer language. Paul Evdokimov’s essay on God’s “foolish” or absurd love for us is subtitled as being linked to the “mystery of God’s silence” in contemporary spiritual experience.

AD: You note you are drawing on a wide array of people from diverse traditions. Are there any links between the English Anglicans, American Roman Catholics, and Franco-Russian Orthodox (inter alia) you draw on? Did you find common experiences of prayer across these lines?

Yes, there are some direct, documentable connections, say between Rowan Williams and Thomas Merton and the “Paris School” figures of Bulgakov, Mother Maria Skobtsova, Paul Evdokimov and Vladimir Lossky, also between Richard Rohr and Merton, perhaps his primary inspiration, but also between him and Julian of Norwich from centuries back. But even when there were no traceable connections, there are nevertheless strong similarities in perception and vision. A few colleagues and friends have noticed that so many of the figures to whom I listen, writers but also activists, in this book and the two before it, are women. I have found a preponderance of women writers doing good memoirs. I also think that when you look at the ecclesial backgrounds, it is not surprising there are so many Anglicans, then Catholics, and finally Orthodox--not a lot of Baptists or Evangelicals. Somehow, I think it must be the importance of the historical liturgies and with them, the important places of Mary and the saints, as well as monastic practices that fire such fascinating writing.

AD: Several times you mention that for at least some of the authors you draw on, prayer may be conceived as mindfulness or attentiveness to what one is doing as one goes about the day. Is it just me, or has such a discipline of attentiveness become vastly more difficult in this age of constantly beeping, endlessly updating text messages, social media, and other technical distractions? Is prayer of any type fighting a losing battle with our cellphones and tablets?

Our “devices” can be disruptive, interferences with real conversation, preventing presence to each other, substitutes even for actual encounter. Now I am neither a technomaniac nor a technophobe. I am immensely grateful for what the internet, what social media can allow me to see, access, even store and come back to later on. But I recall that even the desert mothers and fathers of the 3rd-8th centuries, in the stark desert landscape, with few texts or other distractions, were well aware of minds drifting, of boredom, depression, anxiety, temptation of very powerful sorts and more.

But mindfulness is a goal at which we can always aim. In Thomas Merton’s journals and some of his letters, one can chart his struggle to acquire greater mindfulness, more awareness of the presence of God at every moment. Merton, probably more than anyone else, restored the contemplative spirit and life to not just monastic but more general, even universal practice. I would note, too, there was not much Buddhist or Sufi about his doing so—he still has critics who react badly to his openness to Asian and Eastern religious traditions.

AD: You include wonderful selections from the "prayers of the poets." But--unless I'm wrong--apart from Dante, Ephraim the Syrian, and St. Gregory Nazianzus, all long dead, modern Christians tend to pray in prose (and unless they have the genius of a Cranmer or Chrysostom, often rather banal and prolix prose!). What is it about poetry that may be unsettling for some? And yet what gifts does it offer? 

Yes, much of our formal praying is in prose, though we surely sing a great deal and listen to a great deal of lyrical, poetic material from hymnwriters and the scriptures. Perhaps the poets I listen to in Uncommon Prayer, especially Mary Oliver, Christian Wiman and Mary Karr produce poetry that is more prosaic—simple, but precise, free verse and continuous form. What I find distinctive is the power of even short lines with only a few syllables—particularly true of Oliver and Wiman—that carry enormous weight in emotion and reflection. But in addition to these more technical points, what strikes me is the ability, especially of these here poets, but also of other writers I listen to, to sense so strongly the divine in most ordinary, inconsequential details of a field, a dog cavorting across a beach, a brief encounter with a neighbor or clerk. Again, the lesson here being the experience of God and of communion outside the accustomed confines of nave and prayerbook.

AD: I loved your chapter on the community and communion discovered when making perogies! For that made me feel far less crazy in reflecting back on an intense and memorable experience of communion and community I had at an Anglican parish in Ottawa washing dishes long into the night after a potluck one Maundy Thursday evening. Do we tend to gloss over such experiences too easily, seeing them as too ordinary, too banal, and thus inconceivable places for theophany?

Only because we compartmentalize our lives do we somehow think, this is “religious,” this is “secular.” The scriptures don’t know such segregation, nor does the liturgy. Things are of God or not. And most things are of God. Now as I say that, I can hear someone in my parish insist to me that, of course pirogi making, baking, and the big December Food Fair are fine, but what we’re really here for is what goes on upstairs, i.e. in the nave of the church, the liturgy. And I can also hear myself retorting that of course, the Eucharist is the center of everything, communion with Christ and each other, but it is only an hour and some minutes most weeks. What about all the rest of the days? Years ago when I was in formation in the Carmelites, the texts and the teachers made this point, the same as in Benedict’s Rule. The kitchen pots and pans are as sacred as the communion vessels. Cleaning a room was not inferior to chanting a psalm or reading a chapter of the gospels. But when I look at church and diocesan websites, it’s clear that vested clergy, services, and icons trump soup kitchens and clothing pantries.

AD: Having finished Uncommon Prayer, what are you at work on now?

Oh, as I said, one thing for me always leads to another. Going back to some familiar figures as well as on to ones I had not yet examined, in Uncommon Prayer, prompted me to do likewise in yet another book, The World as Sacrament: Ecumenical Paths towards a Worldly Spirituality that Liturgical Press will publish in spring 2017.

I was struck, as I returned to figures I had written about, even translated some years ago, how fresh and powerful they still sounded to me, though I found myself looking for different things from them. And I was struck by their unanimous stress that faith be put into action, that the world be “churched,” that is, become the arena for love, mercy, and forgiveness. With some this was obvious—Maria Skobtsova, Paul Evdokimov, Dorothy Day, and Elisabeth Behr-Sigel.

But it was less apparent though real with the likes of Alexander Men, Lev Gillet, and Nicholas Afanasiev. From review of the proposal and sample chapters, Liturgical Press staff suggested I create an ecumenical selection of writers to consult, adding to these Eastern Church authors a comparable number from the West. Thus joining the gathering were Merton, Barbara Brown Taylor, Richard Rohr, Kathleen Norris, Joan Chittister and Marilynne Robinson.

Robinson’s trilogy of Gilead, Home and Lila became a very beautiful way, through fiction, of looking at grace, suffering, hope and mercy at work in the lives of a number of Midwesterners back in the 1950s. These are really parables retold in not too distant American heartland settings, with characters that have become unforgettable to readers. It was particularly helpful to have Robinson’s voice, imbued with the Reformed tradition, Calvin in particular, to listen to. The Franciscan and Benedictine and Anglican streams also came through with the inclusion of Rohr, Chittister, Norris, and Taylor.

Somewhere in winter of 2017 Cascade Books should be publishing “The Church Has Left the Building”: Faith, Parish and Ministry in the 21st Century, to which I contributed an essay, a collection of reflections I gathered and edited from an ecumenical group of laity and clergy on pastoral ministry, the parish and faith today. There are particularly personal and powerful reflections in this collection, one I have been trying to bring to light for several years now and finally am, with a great sense of relief and hope. No matter the demographic changes that are shrinking, reshaping the local churches, the church as communion and community endures. And I have to say this is the focus of the book I am hoping to write in the next year or so.

After 31 August 2017, I will be retired from the City University of New York, almost to the day of my starting teaching there 40 years ago, on 1 September 1977. I intend to keep writing, and giving retreats and talks as invited, even teaching at the parish level and occasionally in college settings. But Jeanne and I would like to have more time for family and for writing, her painting and pottery and other crafts.

The last several of the book projects I have described here and my own almost 35 years of experience in parish ministry have brought me to think that the principal charism or gift the Spirit is giving to and through the churches now is that of community and communion. As we see ethnic belonging, the tribalism of language disappearing, along with multi-generational presence in a town, a congregation, we see shrinkage, many small parishes simply becoming redundant due to other neighboring duplicates of who they are.

Some clergy friends, working in the Hudson valley where I live, have shared their on-going efforts to sustain parish communities, but not without sometimes painful closings of individual congregations, mergers and rebirths, reinventions. For me, as at once a sociologist of religion, theologian and pastor, there is a lot to mine here. Another colleague, interviewed here, Nicholas Denysenko, had likewise been exploring how religious identity is fed, shaped by liturgy and prayer—this another example of trying to make sense of the profound changes the churches are undergoing now and in the foreseeable future.

Yearbook for Orthodox Churches

I came into my office today to find a surprise from a publisher of a book I didn't even know was in the works. In its size, red colour, typeface, and organization, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the Vatican yearbook, the Annuario Pontificio, though this new book is about one-third the size of the Annuario. But it fills the same function, offering contact information for, and background information on, Orthodox bishops, dioceses, and institutions around the world, including both Byzantine and Oriental Orthodox churches.

Compiled by the Institute for Ecumenical Studies at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, Orthodoxia 2016-2017 (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2016, vi+404pp.) is just the sort of thing you need to have to hand to find out what graduate degrees the Greek Orthodox bishop of Buenos Aires holds, or what the e-mail address is for the Armenian Apostolic primate in Sydney, Australia.

To read the preface of this volume, and learn a little bit more about its genesis and contents, go here.

A Byzantine Monastic Office

Of all the Eastern liturgical traditions, the Byzantine of course continues to command the greatest scholarly attention in part because it has the greatest number of faithful today--to say nothing of its historical-political prominence as the ritual tradition of empire. Scholarly attention has long focused heavily on the history of the Byzantine eucharistic liturgies, though more recent scholarship has been focusing on funerals, baptismal, and other rites, including monastic offices as in this book set for release later this month: Jeffrey C. Anderson, A Byzantine Monastic Office, A.D. 1105 (Catholic University of America Press, 2016), 368pp.

About this book we are told:

This book centers on a Greek text that was likely compiled in Constantinople, in 1105, for use in one of the monasteries located there. The book consists of a liturgical psalter, containing the fixed structure (the ordinary) in both the Greek original and in English translation, as well as a description of the hours themselves. The extensive commentary explains the development of the divine office, and the particular history of the translated manuscript, while brief notes clarify and explain, in a way suitable for non-liturgists, the more-technical aspects of the divine office.

Based on a single dated manuscript, the book presents the first, full example of the daily structure of monastic hours as they were celebrated at a time when services had reached a degree of maturity. The book, by presenting the ordinary of the office, compliments recent work on the propers of the office, and thus helps to complete our picture of the medieval monastic office in Byzantium.