2021-10-27

VIVI BAJO LA PROTECCIÓN DE BEDA EL VENERABLE EN WILBERFOSS. BEATO Y EL BEATO DE LIEBANA CON SU ESTUDIO SOBRE EL APOCALIPSIS LIBRO DIFICIL DE ENTENDER. LOS ORIGENES CRISTIANOS DE INGLATERRA. HAY SINTOMAS DE UNA CONVERSIÓN DE LOS ANGLICANOS A LA ORTODOXIA EN BUSCA DE SUS RAICES

 


BEDE’S WORLD: EARLY CHRISTIANITY IN THE BRITISH ISLES

Fr. John Nankivell, pastor of the Greek Orthodox Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God in Walsall, West Midlands, spent over thirty years teaching chemistry and religious studies before retiring as principal of Joseph Chamberlain College in Central Birmingham to take on a full-time ministry. His first book, Saint Wilfrid, on Wilfrid of York was published in 2002, and he has served as chaplain on a number of occasions to the annual Friends of Orthodoxy on Iona pilgrimage. In co-operation with other West Midlands parishes, the Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God houses the St. Theodore of Canterbury Study Centre, running theology courses that lead to University of Wales [Lampeter] qualifications.

RTE: Fr. John, you’ve written a fascinating book on St. Wilfrid and the world he lived in. While Venerable Bede portrays him as an able advocate of the seventh-century universal Church, modern accounts of “Celtic” versus “Roman” Christianity seem far more ready to cast him as a villain. Wouldn’t we be right, though, in saying that Wilfrid, in the eye of the storm, and Bede, our chief observer, are two pivotal figures in any discussion of early Christian Britain?

FR. JOHN: There are so many exceptional figures from the sixth and seventh centuries on these islands that it is difficult to isolate one or two of them. Without Bede, ‘the first scientific genius of the Germanic people,’ as R.W. Southern calls him, we would, of course, know very little about any of them.

His homilies on the Gospels stand beside those of St. Gregory the Great as a monument of patristic writing. He was a monk and a scholar. But his scholarship was the servant of his love for the truth and the Gospel. This is why his writings were of such value to the missionaries from these lands to Germany. And it is why they endure as devotional reading to this day.

St. Wilfrid left no writings. Like Bede, he was a devout monk, whose greatest joy was to pray continuously in his cell, singing the psalms. But his abilities and his times required of him a life of ceaseless activity as a bishop, an abbot, a missionary, and someone at the forefront in dealing with matters of Church order and organization. One physical monument he has left to our day is the crypt at Hexham. It gives us some idea of his great buildings at York and Ripon, which would have inspired generations of Christians. His foundation work as a missionary in Sussex and Frisia inspired his successors and lives on in their continuing Christianity. The great monasteries he founded in central and northern England were centres of the Christian life for generations. His Vita, the first Anglo-Saxon ‘biography,’ remains an inspiration to those modern Orthodox Christians who seek to establish and nurture the faith in our multi-ethnic, multi-faith and often hostile world. But there are so many gigantic figures from these times: Columba, Aidan, Theodore, Finan, Cuthbert….

RTE: Before we delve into the world of Venerable Bede and St. Wilfrid, perhaps we should begin at an earlier point. The notion of an Orthodox Celtic Christianity co-existing in pre-schism England alongside a more “continental” model has been embraced by quite a number of Orthodox believers over the past decades. Who were the original peoples we think of as Celts, and where did they live?

FR. JOHN: As I understand it, the term “Celtic” was first used in the eighteenth century to refer to language groups. In this linguistic sense, both the inhabitants of Ireland and the inhabitants of Britannia (the “British”) were people whom we now speak of as “Celtic” folk. They were bound together by similarities in language, in which there were two distinct strands: the Gaelic Goedelic branch, and the Brythonic. The Irish and the Scots (who are Irish in origin) use the Gaelic, and the Welsh, Cornish and Bretons (of Brittany in France) use the Brythonic form.

Many people know that it was the Celts of Asia Minor, the Galatians, for whom St. Paul wrote his Epistle. There were also Celts in Galicia in northwest Spain, which had connections with the British Church. There are still many place names referring to Celts in central and western Europe: Gaul itself, Gallia, and the Pays de Galles, the French name for Wales. The name Gall (Celtic) turns up all through Europe – even today the Turkish football team Galatasaray owes its name to the Galatians.

Dates are complicated though, as there were large movements of Celtic peoples before the Romanization of Britain. No one knows when they arrived on these islands, but it was a long time before the Christian period of Venerable Bede and St. Wilfrid. Here in England we had the native British, the Irish (the Scotti) both in Ireland (Hibernia) and in northern Britain, and the Picts further north. The term Scotti came eventually to refer only to the Irish settled in north Britain. When these Scots were eventually united with the Picts, the whole area became known as Scotland.

The Picts may or may not have been Celtic. We don’t know what their language was. About the Picts themselves, very little is known, and nearly every assertion made about them is open to challenge. Their lands were never part of the Roman Empire, and the great walls of Antoninus and Hadrian were built to keep them at bay.

So, when the Romans came here to Northumbria where Bede later lived, the peoples they found were these British peoples. Although the Romans obviously structured the local government around their own cities, they also accommodated these tribal areas and some of the British names were kept by the incoming Anglo-Saxons, such as Bernicia and Deira, the two parts of Northumbria.

Roman Britain

RTE: Many of us have an idea of Roman and post-Roman Britain as being cut off from the rest of Europe, and rather wild.

FR. JOHN: This is a common idea, but it’s not true. From 63 BC to 410 AD the Roman roads were open and well-traveled, and Britain was solidly a part of the Empire. A couple of hundred years ago there was a view that once the Romans withdrew, society fell into shambles and chaos under Pictish invasions. In fact, there’s evidence for marauding Picts, and also marauding Germans. There is good evidence that the British invited the Germanic tribes to help them fight the Picts in the north, and that is one way in which they came. But, there is a lot of debate about this, and some speculation that Germanic peoples came not only as military mercenaries, but also as agricultural settlers, motivated by rising sea levels which forced them to look for new land.

Of course, the Roman troops themselves were multi-ethnic, and many of them would have retired here. They would have been pensioned off with land, and married local British women. Along Hadrian’s wall you have evidence of all the religious life that was current in Rome at that time, quite substantial Mithraic temple remains, as well as Christian elements.

RTE: When the Romans withdrew in 410, did Christianity leave with them, or was there a recognizable tradition left?

FR. JOHN: Not only were things left, but Christianity was well-established.

The Romans had been in Britain about 500 years. We don’t know when Christianity arrived here, but it was certainly aided by the fact that this was part of the Roman Empire, and there is no reason to believe that it was very different from any other part of the Roman Empire, or much further behind in its Church development. We simply don’t have the names of those very early Christians and missionaries; we can’t say that a certain person is the “Apostle to Britain.” Of course, by Orthodox tradition, Aristobulus, one of the seventy disciples of the Lord, is given that title in the Orthodox Menaion, but we don’t have British sources for this, nor does Bede refer to it. It is a Greek Orthodox tradition.

RTE: Then St. Alban, the first martyr of Britain, would be one of our earliest known Christians?

FR. JOHN: Yes. Some date St. Alban as early third century, some as mid-third century, some as a victim of the early fourth-century Diocletian persecutions.

A case can be made for each of the three dates, as there was an early Christian persecution in the 220’s, then the 251 Decian persecutions centered in northern Africa, followed by Diocletian’s. The weight of scholarly opinion shifts back and forth over the most likely date of Alban’s martyrdom. Presently, the later date seems to be favoured.

We also have Julian and Aaron, the martyrs of Caerleon, in what is now south Wales, who are mentioned by Bede as being martyred in the same persecution as St. Alban. Some people take the fact of the name Aaron to suggest a Jewish presence here, saying that Christianity may have come through the Jewish communities, as it did in much of the rest of the Roman Empire, but the only evidence for this is the name.

The real archaeological and historical evidence for early Christianity begins in the third century, and there are important fourth-century finds. The archaeological work that has been done in the past fifty years has very much increased our knowledge.

What is certain is that by the time of the Council of Arles in 314 there were three British bishops. We don’t know where these bishops came from, although it is possible that one came from York. We can say, though, that by the early fourth century, shortly after Constantine embraced Christianity, there was probably a full ecclesiastical and diocesan structure here, most probably based on the twelve Roman provinces.

In Ireland things were more complex and unclear. In the fifth century Pope Celestine sent Palladius to be bishop of the Irish. He appears to have been active in the South. At the same time, the Briton, St. Patrick, carried out his work in the North. By the sixth century there was an extensive and vigorous series of monasteries, around which the Church was largely organized. According to Bede, the bishops were under the authority of the abbots, and this has led some to assert that Ireland had no diocesan structure.

There were probably differences across the country, and a full traditional structure came into being only over a long period.

Evidence of Early Christianity in Britain

St. BedeSt. Bede
RTE: When you speak of archaeological evidence for early Christianity, what has been found?

FR. JOHN: There are some very important things in the British Museum. From Lullingstone, a village south of London, the museum now has Christian frescoes from a house church. These excavations show an active and growing Christian community; the frescoes portray figures standing in prayer, and the Chi-Rho in plaster. It’s in an amazing state of preservation and has been moved to the British Museum.

Another important find was from Hinton St. Mary, in Dorset, a fourthcentury mosaic: the Lord with the Chi-Rho, also now in the British Museum. Other work has been done, for example, at the site of one of the main Roman cities, Uriconium in Shropshire near the Wrekin. Wrekin itself is a British pre-Roman name. It was one of the four or five largest cities in Britain and, although there is not much left above ground, recent surveys seem to show major building having been undertaken in the fourth century – either a large basilica or a Roman building turned into a basilica, which suggests the presence of an important British bishop in the fourth century.

The written evidence is actually later, in the fifth to sixth centuries. One of our earliest sources is Gildas (+c. 570), called the Wise by the Church, who is commemorated in several western Orthodox calendars. As an historical source Gildas is very frustrating because his chief concern is to berate the Christians of his time. He was a British author writing for a British audience – in Latin, of course, which was the written language of communication. Most of his work consists of Old Testament quotations, including quite a lot from the Prophet Jeremiah, that Gildas freely applies to the kings of his time, saying what terrible people they are and how destruction will come upon them. He also attacks the bishops, and the impression you get from Gildas is of a wellestablished, middle-aged, flabby church that needs sorting out. So it seems to have been a long established church by the fifth or sixth century.

St. Aidan.St. Aidan.
Bede says that his History of the English Church and People is an attempt to give good examples of good men to improve us, so there is much there to admire, but in a private letter to Egbert, the Bishop at York, two or three years before Bede’s death, Bede, like Gildas, speaks of a similar sort of corruption and lack of interest on the part of some of the clergy for their people. This was a major source of concern for Bede, and when he writes to the bishop all these things come out. He doesn’t wash his own era’s dirty linen in public, but he makes use of Gildas’ in his history.

So there was an established British Church rather early, but when we talk about what it “was like,” we are talking about a church that was the same in fundamentals as the Gallic Church or the Spanish Church, the Italian Church, or the Church in Asia Minor… What was the difference between them? What was the difference, for example, between Irenaus of Lyons and anyone else in the Christian world? Obviously there were distinctive characteristics about Irenaean theology and his link with Asia Minor, but it was all part of the universal Church.

Another thing about the British Church that shows the extent to which things had developed, was the response to the Pelagian[1] heresy. Pelagius (the only British person to turn up in early patristic literature) spent much of his time in Rome, and in fact I think it’s Jerome that talks about him being “stuffed with Irish porridge,” which has misled some into thinking that he was Irish. Bishop Germanus of Auxerre in Burgundy (+448) was sent to Britain twice to help sort out the heresy. British representatives had participated in earlier councils, as well as in the reaction to the heresy, so Britain was obviously part of the main-stream Christian world.

RTE: You have said that Bede’s History of the English Church and People is so rich that it can be read over and over again, and is our basic text for the period. By Bede’s lifetime, were the original British inhabitants still there, had they been pushed out, or did they simply intermarry with the new Angle and Saxon settlers?

FR. JOHN: The Germanic peoples settled in Britain in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, from tribal groups that had settled along the coasts of Scandinavia, North Germany, and the Netherlands. They came first as mercenaries and economic migrants, but increasingly as adversaries and invaders. The Welsh, Scots and Irish called them Saxons or “Sassenachs”.

The rest of the world now knows their descendants as the English. Angles and Saxons formed the major groups and “Anglo-Saxon” is the term generally used to refer to them.

In the mid-nineteenth century there was a view, sparked by a quote of Gildas about the “ferocious Saxon,” of militarily superior Germanic peoples coming in and driving the local people (the British) west into Cornwall and Wales, leaving the Angles and Saxons (the “English”). There was bitter warfare between the Anglo-Saxons and the British, and many of the British who fled before the Northumbrian sword would have seen their churches taken over by the newly converted English. Even when both the British and the Anglo-Saxon (“English”) kingdoms were Christian, there are late seventh-, early eighth-century letters showing that they so distrusted each other that they wouldn’t eat off of the same plates.

There was also a general British move westwards to the mountain fastnesses to live separately, but the situation was more complex than this. There was probably a much stronger British presence left in Northumbria than is usually assumed, and Bede himself may be partly responsible for this under-representation of the British in the development of the Church. Although he consistently attacks them for failing to evangelize the English, there is every evidence to show that the Anglo-Saxon tribes were steadily being Christianized, but we don’t know by whom. All that Bede tells us about the Hwicce people of the Severn valley, for example, is that Wilfrid consecrated Oftfor as their bishop at Worcester. So, if they weren’t yet Christian, why did they need a bishop? This is one area where the silent evidence is very strong for a British Christian presence, strong enough to lead to the conversion of the incoming Angles.

Bede leaves us with the impression that the British were pretty much gone, and that the British churches had been taken over by the English Anglo-Saxons, as they were baptized. My guess is that there were British still around and that there had been a lot of intermingling. There is also some evidence that some of the British, including a bishop, were going to Galicia. This may have been on pilgrimage, but there were also people emigrating because of the Anglo-Saxon presence.

Formative Missions and Early Liturgies

RTE: So, in the sixth to seventh centuries in which Bede is writing, it seems we have a few very visible missionaries: St. Augustine of Canterbury sent by Pope Gregory the Great from Rome to southern Britain, and St. Paulinus who, as part of that same mission, baptized in Northumbia as well; St. Columba who left Ireland to found his monastery on Iona off the west coast of Scotland, and whose disciple, St. Aidan of Iona, in turn founded the great monastery at Lindisfarne on the east coast; and St. Wilfrid, who having received his monastic formation under Aidan, went to Rome and brought back more of the practices of the world-wide Church, founding influential monasteries in Northumbria and later becoming a bishop himself.

St. CuthbertSt. Cuthbert
FR. JOHN: Yes, and it’s important to remember that these were all strands of one intermingled Church culture. The Irish Aidan, for example, arrived in Northumbria without a knowledge of Anglo-Saxon, and in the early days the Anglo-Saxon King Oswald (who had been exiled on Iona) would interpret for him. In time, the Irish became bilingual and some of the English monks became fluent in Irish. Many Angles, including St. Chad of Mercia and his brother, St. Cedd, who brought Christianity to Essex, retained a great love for Irish ways and carried Ionan Christianity well beyond the boundaries of Northumbria. Wilfrid, who is often portrayed as an opponent of the Irish, is a more complex example of the same tradition.

There is really almost nothing in the first 700 years that we can point out now that is specifically Irish or British, other than individuals. If you pick any passage from one of Bede’s sermons, for example, without knowing who had written it, you could be reading any of the Greek or Latin fathers.

Another remarkable Northumbrian Angle was St. Benedict Biscop, who was a great traveler to the Mediterranean world, where he collected books, icons, and relics for his monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow, Bede’s own monastery. He persuaded both cantors and icon painters to come to Northumbria and teach his monks, and Biscop created one of the West’s great libraries at Jarrow, where Bede, among others, gained encyclopedic knowledge. St. Wilfrid not only went to Rome, but was also the first missionary to Frisia (northern Holland), and his disciple St. Willibrord came after him to establish Christianity there. A century later the well-known St. Boniface of Crediton was active in Germany. There would be a huge demand for manuscripts from Bede’s Jarrow monastery by the Germans, and Boniface himself wrote saying, “Please send these, I need them.” They used Bede’s History quite extensively, and there is speculation about what its importance would have been in the Christianization of the Germanic peoples. Some of these manuscripts still exist and seem to have been done in haste, with mistakes in spelling, etc.

RTE: It’s quite common for Orthodox to speak of missionaries having consistently translated the gospels and service books into local languages, but, that wasn’t the tradition in the West, was it? There wasn’t a written British, Welsh, Breton, or Irish ecclesiastical language. The liturgy and services would have all been in Latin.

FR. JOHN: Yes, always in Latin. The many small scraps of British liturgical manuscripts that we have from those early centuries are all in Latin, and probably all follow the Roman usage. They are very recognizable: “Let us lift up our hearts,” “And with thy spirit,” “Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus…” There is nothing here that is different or distinctive. They were part of the family of early western liturgies. The earliest fairly complete liturgical manuscript we have is from the eighth century.

In studying these fragments, liturgiologists may find small differences, but it is the same with our English Orthodox liturgies now. From place to place in the English-speaking world, we have small divergences of usage or expression, but there is nothing that shows a distinctive theology. We have no records of liturgical differences or of discussions about local usages, which indicates that, liturgically, everything was settled.

The earliest bit of non-Latin writing that we have is from the eighthcentury Lichfield Gospels. It is in Welsh. There is speculation that this manuscript originated in South Wales at Llandeilo Fawr, which means “the great holy place of St. Teilo,” and was probably a church. It is called Llantwit Major in English. St. Teilo had a big school there; he was contemporary with St. David of Wales, late fifth-early sixth centuries. The book is called the Lichfield Gospels because it is presently in Lichfield, England.

Seventh-Century Ireland

RTE: And what was the relationship of the Irish to the British, Anglo- Saxons, and the Picts at this time?

FR. JOHN: The Irish influence in seventh-century Northumbria was profound. The relations between Ireland and Britain go back to the earliest use of the seaways between Ulster and Argyll, between Wexford and southwest Wales, but this influence went both ways and we know that the early British (and this includes the area that is now Wales) were quite significant as missionaries, particularly along the coast of Ireland in the fourth and fifth centuries. We don’t have many details about their actual activity, but we do have names from the dedication of churches. The best-known British missionary is St. Patrick, the deacon’s son snatched by pirates from Britain and sold into slavery in fifth-century Ireland, who later returned as a free man intent on winning his pagan masters for Christ. The evidence of early churches named after certain saints links St. Patrick with Ulster and northeast Ireland. We also know of St. Patrick’s connection with Gaul, and interestingly, near St. Germanus’ relics in Auxerre, France, is an early fresco that the local people like to believe is Bishop Germanus blessing St. Patrick. In fact, there are some textual links between the two.

There were also Christians in the south of Ireland from early times. In 431 the Pope sent Bishop Palladius from Gaul to Ireland to organize an already existing church. Church dedications link this mission with Wicklow and with southwest Wales; it’s from Britain that the southern Irish had received their Christianity and learned their Latin.

Having received their faith from Britain, the Irish church became the most flourishing part of western Christendom in the sixth century. People came to Ireland from all over Europe to pray and study in the numerous monasteries, and Irish missionaries carried the faith across Europe, particularly to the Germanic kingdoms that had come into being after the collapse of Roman rule.

The great missionary movement from Ireland began in the sixth century.

The most famous examples of this are the two saints Columbanus and Columba, both named after the dove and noted for their ascetic life, but both men of authority and deep learning. Columbanus’ mission was to the Franks of Gaul and the Lombards of north Italy; Columba’s to the Picts.

St. WilfridSt. Wilfrid
One of the reasons St. Columba left Ireland in 563 and founded his monastery on the tiny island of Iona, off Mull, was to be a missionary to the Picts, whom St. Ninian, working from Whithorn (now southwest Scotland) had first preached to in the fourth century. In fact, Columba was going to an existing Irish kingdom, Dalriata, of which Iona was a part. Next to it was a British kingdom, Strathclyde, and north of that was the Pictish Kingdom, both southern and northern Picts. By the mid-seventh century, the Picts were Christian, and as southern Pictland was part of Northumbria for a time, St. Wilfrid served as bishop for Picts in the north of his diocese.

Columba’s Iona became the centre of a major monastic commonwealth stretching from north Ireland, where daughter monasteries were founded at Derry, Durrow, Tiree in the Hebrides, Pictland and Northumbria. In 616, half a century after its foundation, the Northumbrian Prince Oswald came to live at Iona, and by Wilfrid’s time, there was no need to travel to Ireland, as Oswald had invited the Irish Aidan to Northumbria and it was at Aidan’s monastery at Lindisfarne that Wilfrid was first instructed in monasticism.

Besides the followers of Columba, such as Aidan and Cuthbert in Lindisfarne and Northumbria, there were already south Irish missionaries in Britain, such as St. Fursey in East Anglia, who were independent of Iona.

But, East Anglia was also influenced by clergy from Gaul, Northumbria, and Mercia and of course, the British, who are overlooked in all of the literature.

RTE: Authors who support the idea of very distinct differences between Celtic Christianity and that of the rest of England and the continent, often cite Egyptian and Coptic influences on art and monasticism in Christian Ireland. What do you think of this?

FR. JOHN: I think the evidence for artistic influence from the eastern Mediterranean is clear, and to be expected from the importance of the searoutes we discussed earlier on. The swirls on the cover of St. Cuthbert’s pocket Gospel book, buried with him in his coffin, are often linked with Coptic design. Monasticism had its origins in the wilderness of Palestine and the deserts of Egypt, and spread out from there. The influence of St. Athanasius’ life of St. Antony in its Latin translation was crucial in the spread of the monastic ideal to the West. Doubtless there were direct connections between the monastics of the East and the Irish, as there were with southern Gaul, for example. This is rather a point of similarity between Irish traditions and those of the Continent, than of distinctiveness.

RTE: In your book on St. Wilfrid, you mention several very influential Northumbrian women. Did the role of women in Northumbria and Ireland differ from the rest of the Church?

FR. JOHN: Women were of the utmost importance in the Church of seventhcentury Britain. I tried to bring this out in the book on St. Wilfrid. Queen Eanfled was very much St. Wilfrid’s spiritual mother in his formative years, and continued to influence him throughout her life. Queen Bertha probably did as much to bring the Gospel to the Germanic people of Kent as did Augustine. The role of these powerful queens in the policy of the newlyformed Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was substantial. Better known, of course, is St. Hilda, whose monastery at Whitby was a training ground for future clergy, including bishops; she was very much a teacher of the teachers. There are other examples of such ‘double’ monasteries, that is both a monastery for women and one for men, under the joint direction of an abbess. And it was always an abbess, not an abbot. These occurred in the Frankish areas of the continent. Other examples of such important women leaders were St. Mildred on the isle of Thanet in Kent, and St. Milburgha in Shropshire. This leadership role of women seems to have been a particular feature of the Anglo-Saxon and other Germanic Christians. They also played an important part in the Anglo-Saxon missions to Germany.

RTE: What can we say about the early Church in the area that is now Wales?

FR. JOHN: We know of St. Samson, St. Beuno, St. David, St. Illtyd and St. Petroc, and others who were active in Wales, Cornwall and Brittany (northern France) in the sixth to seventh centuries. When the Anglo-Saxon pagans arrived in Britain, they found a well-established British church with its bishops, martyrs, monastics, missionaries, its hermitages, monasteries, parish churches, liturgical traditions, relics and iconography.

This we discussed earlier. Increasingly, the centre of gravity of the ancient British church shifted towards the West. There was little Anglo-Saxon influence on Wales and Cornwall. But, as I said before, the British presence in ‘England’ continued.

Orthodox Rome

Lastingham CryptLastingham Crypt
RTE: In your writing and talks you identify seventh- and eighth-century Rome as part of the Byzantine world, and have remarked that Rome was actually holding Orthodoxy in a purer form than in the East, where iconoclasm was steadily taking root. This is something to ponder, that Rome was guarding the Orthodox tradition…

FR. JOHN: …as Rome always had to. Most of the heresies were eastern inventions, weren’t they? Rome might not have been as inventive as eastern Christendom, but it held a clear Orthodox traditional position.

Going back for a moment to the previous century, St. Augustine of Canterbury had come in 597, sent by St. Gregory the Great (+603). Gregory was an important and major figure, who reformed the whole of northern Italy after the Lombard invasions. Virtually all of Europe was under Germanic influence: the Lombards in north Italy, the Anglo-Saxons and Jutes in Britain, the Franks in France, and the Visigoths in Spain. Following the Lombard invasions came famine and plague; everything fell apart. It was St. Gregory, as pope of Rome and of patrician background, who was able to bring about the revival of Italy – through the movement of grain, the feeding of the people, the rebuilding of cities and churches. He not only gave all of his family wealth for this physical revival, but he took a very active interest in the liturgical and monastic life of Rome and the development of the Church’s mission.

The Persian invasions of the Holy Land (they took Jerusalem in 614) led to a large number of Syrian, Palestinian and Greek exiles seeking refuge in Rome, where they established monasteries and other institutions. Rome became a place of great ethnic and linguistic diversity, with a variety of liturgical and ecclesiastical traditions.

Also, 621 marked the flight of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina, which was the beginning of Muslim influence. Within a decade of his death, Muslims had moved through the Middle East and North Africa. This is when many Christians, including Theodore of Tarsus, the Syrian monk whom the pope named the first archbishop of Canterbury, fled to Italy. In 641 a Greek from Jerusalem became pope, and many of the popes of the following century were also Greek or Syrian. There were quite important Greek and Syrian monasteries in Rome at this time, and Greek elements were introduced into the Roman liturgy.

There were also theological exiles in Rome from the East. In his attempts to reconcile the Monophysite Christians of Egypt and gain their support in his conflicts with the Persians and Arabs, Emperor Heraclius involved himself in theology by attempting to impose an unorthodox, compromise doctrine known as Monothelitism[2] on the Church. He persecuted the doctrine’s opponents, such as the great theologian of the seventh century, Maximus the Confessor, and many of them also made their way to Rome. The Lateran Council of 649 in Rome dealt with the question of Monothelitism, which was condemned in 681 in Constantinople by the Sixth Ecumenical Council.

Many of the seventh-century popes used their position to create impressive churches, such as St. Pancras. St. Peter’s was refurbished and great secular buildings like the Senate house were converted into churches. Much of the architecture and iconography of these new buildings was the work of Byzantine artists, and the city took on an appearance not unlike Ravenna and Constantinople.

When Wilfrid went to Rome in 702-3 to plead his case over his uncanonical deposition, he appeared in front of Pope John, a Greek. The Greek fathers of the council discussed the charges in Greek, in proceedings lasting over seventy sessions and four months. His appeal to Rome was fitting.

If Wilfrid had been in Asia Minor, he would have appealed to Constantinople; a bishop in his position in Syria would have appealed to Antioch. Protestant historians who posit an early British church independent of Rome and castigate Wilfrid for seeking to bring Britain into subservience to the pope are as far from the mark as those Roman Catholics who use Wilfrid’s appeal to Rome as evidence for a full-blown doctrine of papal primacy in the seventh century.

There was a unity of practice and understanding in the seventh century that’s difficult for us to appreciate now. It was possible for someone holding the office of bishop to be an Irishman in Gaul, a Syrian in Rome, or a Greek in Britain. For instance, Bishop Agilbert, a Frank who became a bishop in Gaul, then went to Ireland to study the Scriptures. From Ireland he went to England as bishop to the kingdom of the West Saxons, and later returned to Gaul to accept the bishopric of Paris, which he held from 664 until his death. His life is an example of the rich diversity of Christian influence on Britain – Irish, Gallic, Frankish, and Roman.

Agilbert was also the bishop who ordained Wilfrid to the priesthood in his own monastery at Ripon and brought him to the fore at the meeting often called the Synod of Whitby in 664.

The Synod of Whitby

Escomb ChurchEscomb Church
RTE: That brings us to the Synod itself, which seems to be what most contemporary writings about a Celtic church call its “death knell.” What were the real differences between the Irish-British-Welsh churches and the Roman or Anglo-Saxon usage that were settled at the Council?

FR. JOHN: They were two of the three things that Augustine of Canterbury had brought up at his meeting with the British bishops: the dating of Easter and the form of the monastic tonsure – that is, the way in which monks cut their hair after taking their vows. The completion of baptism by the bishop, probably meaning chrismation, was the third thing, but that was not raised at Whitby. The dating of Easter was by far the most serious issue.

In regards to chrismation, what is fairly clear from the texts we do have from the West, and in the Byzantine rite for baptism, is that virtually all of the churches allowed the priest to administer chrismation, in fact they expected it to be so. But Rome was distinct in saying that the sacrament should be given by the bishop.

RTE: As it remains today. A Catholic bishop administers confirmation parish by parish, to groups of young people around age 12-14.

FR. JOHN: Yes. The Anglicans follow this as well, and it’s quite easy to see how this came about. No bishop could attend every baptism, so they had to split the sacrament and put the chrismation off until he came around. Over the centuries, it was pushed further and further back.

That was the third point and interestingly, at the Synod of Whitby where the first two practices were decided, this third question was not even mentioned. Yet, we find Cuthbert, who is often claimed as an honorary Celt, going around and completing baptisms following the Roman practice. Ireland itself didn’t change to the Roman confirmation practice until the eleventh or twelfth centuries. This is another instance where the divisions between the “Celtic” and “Roman” contingents were not so clear-cut.

The main purpose of the Synod of Whitby was to resolve the question of the date of Easter. It was important that the unity of the Church should be particularly clear on the most important festival of the year. As it was, those who followed the “Irish” calendar – and they included King Oswy of Northumbria and the monastics of Lindisfarne and Whitby, whom his father King Oswald had brought from Iona – could be celebrating the Resurrection, while those who followed the “Roman” date, including Oswy’s queen, Eanfled, were still keeping the Lenten fast. This was bad for the unity of the Church, but it also caused political disunity in Northumbria.

Oswy summoned both political and religious leaders to the Synod, as Constantine and other Christian rulers had before him.

Bede gives us a rather full account of the proceedings, with St. Wilfrid acting as spokesman for the universal “Roman” date kept by the Church throughout the world, and St. Colman, Bishop of Northumbria, for the “Irish” date, which traditionally had the authority of the Apostle and Evangelist John, and was used by the northern Irish, St. Columba, and the Iona monastics. (Although, even within the “Irish” usage, there were a variety of observances.) Interestingly, this was not the practice of all of the Irish. The southern Irish had already changed to the universal Church dating of Easter. St. Wilfrid did not deny the sanctity of Columba, nor did he think that the Ionan way of keeping Easter was seriously harmful if they were unaware of the rest of the Church’s unanimity in observing the universal date. Once they were aware, however, that they alone were keeping another date, they should acquiesce.

Whitby AbbeyWhitby Abbey
Most of those on the “Irish” side agreed to use the universal date of Easter, including St. Cuthbert, St. Hilda, St. Bosa, Sts. Cedd and Chad. Only Bishop Colman and his monks (both English and Irish), out of loyalty to St. Columba and their tradition, could not submit to the decision and left for Ireland. This wasn’t a matter of ethnicity, but of where people stood on the calendar question.

It wasn’t an issue after that. Even the northern Irish, to whom Colman and his monks went after leaving Northumbria, voluntarily changed their practice within fifty years. Iona itself adopted the universal dating of Easter in 716 and Whitby was only resurrected as an issue by Protestant reformers at the time of the Reformation.

It’s extraordinary how people now get so worked up about the Synod of Whitby. It would be understandable if it were about something fundamental, like the sermons that have gone on in Durham in recent years, with an Anglican bishop speaking of the Resurrection as “a conjuring trick with bones.” This is an important divergence from the fundamentals of the Faith, but how a monk cuts his hair is not.

RTE: Orthodox Christians who see the Council of Whitby as an Armageddon that stifled a great spiritual tradition often don’t know that after the Russian Revolution in 1917, one of the conditions set by the newly independent state of Finland to recognize Orthodoxy as one of its national churches, was that the Finnish Orthodox would exclusively use the Gregorian calendar.

FR. JOHN: Which is a radical change because the Gregorian calendar is now in conflict with Nicea, although that wasn’t done deliberately. Still, once or twice a decade, Pascha celebrated according to the Gregorian calendar falls either on or before the Jewish Passover, not after, as the Nicean Council decreed it must. Pascha must follow the Old Passover. It cannot coincide or precede it. Moving Pascha to the Gregorian calendar was a fundamental change, it broke the ancient practice of the Church, whereas Whitby brought all into unity.

The Idea of a Celtic Church

RTE: Why do you think people are so drawn to this idea of a Celtic church that had a separate, almost otherworldly, existence? Is it because we live in a technological age that we long for a more wholesome and natural way of life?

FR. JOHN: I think there is a lot in that, and if you read the Frenchman Ernest Renan and the Englishman Matthew Arnold, they make a radical distinction between the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons – the Celt being nature-loving, mystical, spiritual and the Anglo-Saxon being organized, efficient and technocratic.

They even talk about industrialization, but from the standpoint of their own nineteenth-century anti-industrialization movement, which they project back onto these two peoples. What’s even more bizarre, of course, is that St. Cuthbert is always presented as a great representative of the Celtic tradition, but in fact, he was an Englishman, an Anglo-Saxon...

RTE: …who was quite in agreement with the Synod of Whitby.

FR. JOHN: Yes. And Aidan, on the other hand, who was one of the “real Celts” from Iona, was running around the peninsula organizing: converting kings, baptizing people, setting up churches, like any good “Anglo-Saxon.”

If you adhere to this notion of “Anglo-Saxon” versus “Celtic” Christianity, then you also have to decide what to think about Irish and British Christianity. Are they, or are they not the same thing? There was a definite relationship between Britain and Ireland but the Irish practices weren’t always the same as the British, but they were both Celts.... So what is this “Celtic Christianity?” It’s a confusing and not very helpful term. Neither the Irish/Scotti, nor the British/Welsh/Bretons would have ever thought of themselves as belonging to a “Celtic church” that was somehow separate from the rest of the Church.

So this is partly unclear thinking, and partly a creation of Anglican reformers in the sixteenth century who had to demonstrate a pre-Roman Church in Britain of which they were the continuation, in order to show that the medieval Catholic period had been a disruption of that. So Wilfrid, who was the spokesman for the Orthodox Easter at Whitby, was seen as “Roman” and demonized. The Celtic overlay came later.

RTE: A strong affinity with nature, and a less austere, more “warm-hearted” approach often glosses our modern view of the Celtic-speaking monks, but when one reads the early penitentials and monastic rules, there was also a rigorous asceticism – monks standing in prayer through the night up to their necks in ice-cold water, arduous fasting and strict penance for sin.

And, their prayers and poetry often seem to be a request for protection against the forces of nature. It wasn’t an endless summer.

FR. JOHN: Yes. Some of the earliest poetry we have is British, from the eighth, ninth, tenth centuries, although it could be based on something earlier.

In this, there is a strong emphasis on nature, on the Incarnation and the Resurrection, all of which makes them particularly close to the Fathers of the East. But, there is nothing in the documents up to the time of Bede that tells us much about them. As you say, we have these monastic rules which are very austere, and say traditional sorts of things about humility and so on, just as you would find in the sayings of the Egyptian desert fathers. Also, you had the centrality of the office, and above all, the psalms.

In many monasteries and hermitages the entire psalter was said twice a day, often from memory.

All of these things differ from this modern view that they were rather relaxed about rules. Nor, of course, was St. Cuthbert, who is often held up as a prototype Celtic monk. In Bede’s life of Cuthbert, Bede describes his very firm treatment of the monks when he becomes abbot of Lindisfarne.

He expected the monks to follow a much stricter rule than they had up to that time and there was a great deal of animosity towards him because of the changes he was demanding. When things got very fierce in the chapter meeting, he just got up and walked out. And he did that every day – walked out of the meeting – until they capitulated. Although there is a great emphasis on his hermit life, he was quite an attentive abbot.

It’s a little upsetting to find our own Orthodox people taking these passionate and one-sided views. It doesn’t really matter if a saint is Celtic, British, Anglo-Saxon, Roman, Greek or Syrian, if there is something in his life we can learn from. There’s a new book out, The Lost Saints of Britain by Ian Thompson, about the “Celtic” saints who have been lost because of the nasty Anglo-Saxons and a horrible Greek named Theodore who tried to destroy the Celtic tradition!

And why was it so important in this new book to vilify St. Wilfrid, for example, to the extent of putting a special appendix, a psychoanalysis saying he suffered from sexual repression as evidenced by his cold baths? Even if it were true, does this mean that everyone who takes a cold bath is repressed? The greatest cold bather was Cuthbert, standing up to his neck in freezing water. So did many of the Irish ascetics and one of the Jarrow monks who stood in the Tyne with ice floating around him.

RTE: Could you say a bit more about this horrible Greek? We often miss the point that possibly the greatest archbishop of Canterbury was neither British nor Roman, but a Syriac-speaking monk from Antioch – a highly educated and saintly eastern Church Father.

FR. JOHN: Theodore was born in Tarsus, educated in Antioch, probably studied in Constantinople and later emigrated to Rome after the Persian invasions. He was sixty-six or sixty-seven when he was sent by the pope to be the archbishop of Britain, and he died twenty-one years later. He was the expert in the west on Monothelitism.

The Lateran Council that dealt with the Monothelite heresy, had been called in 649, and the Pope assembled evidence from all over the western world. He asked Theodore to draw up a statement of faith for the council. He set up a famous school in Canterbury that Bede is very complimentary about, where he taught Greek and Latin.

We have fragments of some of his learned biblical commentaries and analysis. We are sure they are his because they were written by someone writing in Latin as a second language, who knew Syriac and the eastern Christian world. His geographical and horticultural notes about the Near East are unmistakable.

He had great authority with the Anglo-Saxon kings, and he created a diocesan structure here, to properly attend to people’s spiritual needs. In his twenty- one years as archbishop, he created a diocesan structure so well-tuned to the diverse cultural and geographical realities of the country that many of the dioceses he created remain in place to this day. He was the first primate of England to hold councils of the whole church to establish an ordered and common pattern of life in all the disparate kingdoms of the land.

RTE: And taking into account what Gildas, and later Bede in his letter to the bishop, said about the state of the Church, perhaps this was necessary.

FR. JOHN: Yes. Of course, you can also find evidence for some for the things people sometimes criticize, because Archbishop Theodore was trying to bring about a uniform ecclesiastical practice among these small kingdoms and diverse peoples, and there were quite strong rules and canons.

RTE: Going back to claims for a distinctly separate Celtic church, I remember Dr. Tarek Mitri, an Orthodox professor from Lebanon, saying that while we seem to be growing more alike in our tastes and preferences on a global level, we are actually breaking down into smaller and smaller groups as a way to locate ourselves, and this often results in a search for ambiguous “roots” or identities. For instance, now in the Balkans, there are ethnic groups which are trying to reconstruct their histories to reflect what they would like to believe about themselves.

FR. JOHN: And, of course, the internet makes it possible to create a substantial community of one or two thousand people without actually meeting them. Some people inhabit that world.

RTE: Also, after Protestant reformers minimized prayer to the Mother of God and the saints and prohibited the veneration of relics and prayers for the dead, it is understandable that some contemporary Protestants feel the need to compensate for this lost spiritual contact by emphasizing the “warm-hearted” and “green” aspects of early British and Irish Christianity.

We often don’t realize that early texts such as Bede’s History of the English Church and People, or the Life of St. Columba by Adamnan, are richer and more satisfying than what has been written about as “Celtic” in the past fifty years. Going back to these contemporary writings is a tonic, like refreshing oneself with the Gospel after a spell of cloudy theology.

FR. JOHN: I think you have touched on another very important source for these romantic views of the ‘Celtic church.’

RTE: Yet it is difficult to completely renounce this sense of “differentness” that many of us have felt in what we’ve thought of as the Celtic church.

Although the romantic view has been overstated, can you sum up the truly distinctive characteristics of Christianity in Celticspeaking lands?

FR. JOHN: I think most of them have arisen in our discussions: a love of the monastic life with all its rigours, its discipline, and its harmony with the created world; the centrality of a life of prayer, based on the psalms; a commitment to the spreading of the faith; an emphasis on the Incarnation and the Resurrection of our Lord; a devotion to learning; and a creative and open artistic imagination that was able to develop a rich harmony of its own traditions with those of the wider Christian world.

But I think that if one dips into those great illuminated manuscripts, they show the unity and harmony of the northern Christian world in Bede’s time. For instance, some of the wellknown “Celtic” pages in the Lindisfarne Gospel are not Irish, but Anglo- Saxon, and the monks producing these illuminated manuscripts in monastery workshops would have known and included earlier Christian styles, such as in the Roman mosaics along Hadrian’s Wall.

There was also a strong seventh-century Mediterranean influence on the texts that I mentioned earlier; some of this influence was from Rome and Gaul, and some from Middle Eastern and North African exiles who had gathered in Rome. Also, you’ve got the strange depictions of animals, elongated dogs and other creatures that are quite distinctly Germanic, and the threelegged, so-called, triskeles that are Irish. There was mutual influence here. There is uncertainty about where many of these manuscripts actually originated.

The Book of Kells could have come from a Northumbrian workshop via Iona. It contains an icon of the Mother of God that is pure Byzantine. So, in all these illuminated manuscripts you have the Romano-Greek Mediterranean influence, the Germanic influence, and the Irish influence, all beautifully synthesized. That is the reality and the beauty of the Church in this country – it had all of these elements.

3/30/2009

[1]Pelagianism: A heresy constructed by Pelagius, a fifth -century British lay ascetic, and Celestius, a priest, who denied the inheritance of the sin of Adam by his descendants, considering that each man is born innocent, and only thanks to moral freedom does he fall into sin. Pelagianism was condemned at the Third Ecumenical Council, along with Nestorianism.
 
[2] Monothelitism: Monothelitism was a softened form of Monophysitism. While acknowledging two natures in Christ, the Monothelites taught that in Christ there was only one will – namely the Divine will. Adherents of the doctrine included several patriarchs of Constantinople who were later excommunicated (Pyrrhus, Paul, Theodore) and Honorius, Pope of Rome. The teaching was rejected as false at the Sixth Ecumenical Council.

EL METROPOLITA DE LONDRES ANTONIO

 No conocí personalmente al metropolita Anthony pero una vieja grabación solemne de la misa de Pascua determinó mi amor hacia la ortodoxia en Londres a mitad de la decada de los 70 del pasado siglo cuando asistía yo a la liturgia de una iglesia de South Kensington de mi barrio que había sido cedida por el primado de Cantorbery. La pompa, los iconos, los himnos y tractos me apasionaron y determinaron mi conversión. Volví los ojos a Cristo. Ahora  determinaron mi conversión. La iglesia catolica trata de divinizar al hombre mientras la ortodoxa quiere humanizarlo. Ahora me entero que el metropolita o bladika falleció hace 18 años pero su voz sigue sonando en la cinta de mi grabadora. La religión ortodoxa empieza por el corazón y por los pies. Hay que dominar el cuerpo para permanecer de pie (a k a t h i s t o s) durante las dos horas que suelen durar las grandes liturgias. Sea este humilde post una loa a aquel sacerdote inglés y hombre de Dios


“HE SAW THE IMAGE OF CHRIST IN EACH OF US”

Remembering Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

The eighth conference dedicated to the spiritual legacy of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh was held at the House of the Russian Diaspora named after Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Moscow on September 17–19, 2021. This year the theme of the conference was: “Crisis: Judgment or Opportunity?” Among the speakers were well-known clergymen, scholars, publicists, along with those who personally knew Vladyka Anthony and were in contact with him. A journalist of Pravoslavie.Ru recorded the most interesting fragments of speeches dedicated to the ever-memorable Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh.

Metropolitan Anthony of SourozhMetropolitan Anthony of Sourozh    

Archpriest Christopher Hill, Moscow:

Vladyka Anthony appreciated freedom; he respected and protected it. Vladyka himself was free, and this freedom manifested itself primarily in his spiritual life—he was not burdened with anything earthly. Vladyka had a unique quality: He easily found a common language with everybody. When you were having a conversation with him you were the whole world, the whole universe. Few of us can speak with other people in this way because each of us has a lot of thoughts and concerns that prevent us from being absolutely free. For Vladyka Anthony any person who came to him was always the dearest and closest to him, and all his attention was devoted only to that person.

Vladyka was always self-disciplined and concentrated. He prayed and saw the image of God in every human being. He was modest in everyday life and didn’t like pomp and luxury. I recall how one day I helped him in the altar during his service at the Russian Dormition Cathedral in London. I noticed that he wasn’t wearing the magnificent vestments traditional for Orthodox bishops—instead of a sakkos he wore an ordinary deacon’s sticharion, and his miter was made of papier-mâché and plastic beads.

Gillian Crow, London:

Being in contact with Vladyka Anthony, I felt his faith and support and was confident in the correctness of everything he said. He always answered my questions with wise advice. Through him I felt God’s love and care for people.

He once told me jokingly that Orthodoxy begins with the feet when you learn to stand through the long services. Then it reaches the stomach when you start fasting, and next reaches the heart. After that Vladyka added with a smile: “And in some people it even reaches their heads.”

Vladyka Anthony’s parish was multinational, and he always said that we should all be one. He himself created such an atmosphere. Vladyka always spoke about the beauty of Orthodoxy: About how beautiful churches, icons, theology, church services and the whole of God’s creation are. But above all, Vladyka saw beauty in people and taught us all this vision. Despite all our shortcomings and blunders, he saw the image of Christ in each of us.

Now it’s eighteen years since Vladyka reposed, and we must convey to each other his understanding and vision, and our memory of him.

Frederica de Graaf, Moscow:

The personality of Vladyka Anthony, his books, his way of thinking, show us the inner freedom of man, of which he was a living example. He used to say that we always need to be with Christ; we need to pray, knowing that Christ is alive and hears us—only then will we have confidence, and there will be no fear of difficulties and death itself. In this case, there will be no crisis, which we are talking about today. In my opinion, the trouble is that for most people the Resurrection of Christ is not a reality... This is a real tragedy.

It seems that our common main problem is that we live outside ourselves. We are completely immersed in the digital world and gadgets. Nobody sees what is happening in front of them. We are afraid to look inside ourselves. Vladyka often said with pain that modern man doesn’t want to know God, be in contact with Him, and go to meet Him. And this is a real disaster... Not only young people face this problem. We shouldn’t be afraid! We need to believe, we need to turn to Christ. Vladyka used to say that with shining eyes alone one can show faith—a living faith in Christ.

Kelsey Cheshire, London:

Vladyka Anthony was deeply convinced that crisis and suffering can reveal to us things that we otherwise wouldn’t have seen, and give birth to a new life—of course, provided that we have courageously accepted these trials. Vladyka always said that it is necessary to overcome pain, we must endure it with patience and courage to the very end, regarding it as an exercise for growth; learn to cope with small difficulties in order to endure harder trials later.

At difficult moments, on Vladyka Anthony’s face one could see courage, concentration and will, which was so strong that it even frightened one. But at the same time, his face reflected pain, about which Vladyka used to say that he would endure it in its entirety, in all purity and acuteness; that he would allow this pain to plow him to the very depths, but wouldn’t let it stain his soul with hatred and darkness.

Vladyka also used to say that without love, suffering means nothing; and to love is much more difficult than to endure suffering because love always presupposes voluntary action, in contrast to suffering, which is passive. A great deal of suffering fell to Vladyka’s lot, but it was always quite obvious that whatever the tragedy, love would triumph. And Vladyka treated everyone with love.

Prepared by Artemy Banshchikov
Translated by Dmitry Lapa

Pravoslavie.ru

10/13/2021

See also



ABRENSE NUEVOS TEMPLOS EN RUSIA Y EN ESPAÑA SE DESACRALIZAN

 

“TO ENSURE THAT THE LITURGY BE CELEBRATED IN THE LAND OF MY ANCESTORS”

On how a former detective and prisoner became a church warden

The Church of the Holy Royal Martyrs in DiveyevoThe Church of the Holy Royal Martyrs in DiveyevoThe Church of the Holy Royal Martyrs appeared in Diveyevo quite recently—its foundation was laid in 2015, and the first Liturgy was celebrated in 2019. There is an old Russian saying, “A church is not about logs, but about ribs”. Indeed, over and over again you become convinced that the history of every church is closely linked with someone’s life.

The birth of a church is no less a miracle than the birth of a new human soul into the world. Many Lives of saints begin with a story about the miraculous birth of a saint or even earlier: with a story about how the parents of a future God-pleaser prepared for his or her birth, prayed to God for a child, made vows and humbly awaited an answer from above.

All this can be found in the history of the “Royal” church in Diveyevo. The devotees of the last Russian Tsar and his family have been praying for many years for the building to be completed. They sang akathists by the memorable larch tree planted in honor of the birth of the heir, Tsarevich Alexei, offered up prayers on the Holy Canal, and read the perpetual Psalter.

The cross procession in the early morning of July 17, 2015 to the foundation of the Church of the Royal MartyrsThe cross procession in the early morning of July 17, 2015 to the foundation of the Church of the Royal MartyrsFinally, in 2015, a benefactor was found who bought a plot of land at the intersection of Polevaya and Zarechnaya Streets for the construction of a church. On the day of the celebration of the Synaxis of the Saints of Diveyevo, June 27, 2015, a memorial cross was installed and blessed at the future construction site. And at dawn on July 17, on the day and hour of the murder of the Royal Martyrs, Metropolitan George of Nizhny Novgorod and Arzamas laid the foundation stone and blessed the foundation of the new church. It was built in just two weeks. Right before the arrival of the procession presided over by the bishop, a crane drove off from the construction site, having laid the last slabs.

A memorable moment was when the hierarch’s Protodeacon Andrei Zheleznyakov after the blessing unexpectedly sang everyone the song: “Rus’ is Called Holy...” His wonderful baritone, amplified by sound equipment, carried the words of this amazing song over the sleepy village. It seems that then I heard it for the first time, and maybe for the first time I felt it so closely that it gave me goosebumps. At sunrise on the day of the anniversary of the Tsar’s martyrdom, at the laying of his church’s foundation, among the people frozen in dead silence, it sounded like true repentance.

The new church in Diveyevo was modelled on the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in the German town of Darmstadt, built on St. Nicholas II’s initiative at the Imperial Family’s personal expense, according to the design of the architect Leonty Nikolaevich Benois (1856–1928) from St. Petersburg. In Germany the church literally stands on Russian soil—it was specially brought there in carriages—two from each Russian province. Its Diveyevo counterpart also stands on an artificial mound, with the sole difference that it was not necessary to go so far for soil; it is local, Russian and holy—from the Fourth Garden of the Most Holy Theotokos. And it is covered with paving stones from the Canal of the Queen of Heaven.

The churchwarden Alexei, a former detectiveThe churchwarden Alexei, a former detectiveThe visitor sees a majestic mosaic that fills the interior of the altar apse—the Mother of God on the throne, a copy from the original mosaic at the Darmstadt church according to a sketch by the artist Viktor Vasnetsov (1848–1926). The icons on the iconostasis were copied from the originals as well. All the church icons are unique, and most of them are with particles of relics.

Every weekday at noon the akathist to the Holy Royal Martyrs is sung here. It is sponsored by the churchwarden, Alexei Butusov, a man with an extraordinary life—he was formerly police officer who spent many years as a forensics investigator, was unjustly convicted and spent time in various prisons, from which he returned as a sincerely religious man. Alexei was a prison church warden. Now he carries out his duties here—in a new church, which has by the will of God appeared in his native village.

“Previously, this place belonged to the village of Vertyanovo, which in the 1960s merged with Diveyevo. There had never been a church in it. But there was a prophecy of St. Seraphim of Sarov that Vertyanovo would have its own church and that it would become a town. We can say that now Vertyanovo has received village status, and we are witnessing the fulfillment of these prophecies. Diveyevo has long been holiness, and Vertyanovo is the opposite. As a child I heard many stories from old people that there were many sorcerers and witches here, along with bandits and robbers. This area was especially criminal. Up to our day, blood has been spilled here—in 1996 my godfather Valery was killed at this intersection. I don’t rule out that this church has providentially appeared here for the sanctification of the area, like those ancient churches that were built on the sites of pagan temples. Here, on the present territory of the church, Schemanun Barbara lived in a tiny bathhouse. Wasn’t she the one who sanctified this place by her prayers?”

Inside, the church is rather smallInside, the church is rather smallInside, the church is rather small—it can accommodate about fifty to seventy people. But the significance of the new church for Diveyevo seems enormous. The last Russian Emperor, St. Nicholas II, is closely connected with Diveyevo and the Venerable Seraphim of Sarov. After all, it was he who signed the decree on the canonization of St. Seraphim, and he headed the celebrations of 1903. Therefore, the monarch and his family are especially revered in Diveyevo. I asked Alexei how fate connected him with the Romanovs and this church.

“Our family comes from Vertyanovo. All my ancestors lived here, and it is still home to many of my relatives. Many of them were chairmen, managers, policemen... According to tradition, our family descends from the Cossacks whom Tsar Ivan the Terrible settled here during his Kazan Campaign to preserve Orthodoxy in this area. While I was still in the penal colony, I once had a dream that I was walking through Diveyevo, and when I approached the place where the church now stands I saw many people praying here, and a pillar of light rising to heaven. When I returned, I met General Ivan Mikhailovich Shein, the benefactor of this church, and, having received the blessing of the head of the deanery, I began to read the akathist here. There was a concrete floor here, the windows were covered with plastic, and there was scaffolding. The construction didn’t move forward then—there were no funds. I lived in my parents’ apartment nearby. I would get up early and come here to read the akathist. There were many supernatural events that are difficult for inexperienced people to fathom. On the third day, when I went outside after the akathist, it was still dark and there was a strong smell of scorched brambles around the church. Even when I got home, my mother smelled it. And sometimes I came after the akathist completely exhausted, fell into bed and slept all day long. This is what happens after someone possessed has been exorcised. But I had a goal: to ensure that the Liturgy be celebrated here, on the land of my ancestors. When I converted to the faith through all these sorrows, the Lord revealed to me that everything in our world revolves around the Liturgy—it is the crown of everything. Only through the Bloodless Sacrifice will we be transformed. And the Royal Martyrs are family saints! To whom if not to them should we pray to for marriage and the preservation of a family, for the peace and prosperity of our land?”

In the service of reading the akathist Alexei has included a song he heard in places of confinement: the penetrating Serbian chant, “Faith Eternal, Glorious Faith, Our Faith is Orthodox.” When it resounded under the echoing vaults of the church, performed by pleasant male voices (Alexei’s second cousin Vasily has recently begun singing along with him), I involuntarily recalled that unexpected singing by Protodeacon Andrei at the laying of the church’s foundation. The churchwarden admitted that he had learned this song by heart in prison using the recording by Zheleznyakov, which had come in a parcel. For Alexei, prison became a “theological academy” where he not only studied the Orthodox faith, but also mastered the duties of a reader, an acolyte, and a chanter in practice.

“One priest there revealed to me why all these sorrows had befallen me. He said: ‘The Lord is giving you a “gift”, so that you will pray for your whole family.’ And I pray for all my relatives—both the departed and the living. Not everyone understands me. Some give the screw loose sign, saying that I’ve gone crackers, etc. When I came here, they said to me: ‘What do you need this for? Give it all up—find a wife, buy a car, earn money...’ They think about worldly blessings without understanding the significance of this church in our land. A benefactress said these words to me: ‘Alexei, I have built more than one church, and I know that churches are built by everyone together!’ Therefore, the involvement of each person is important—some help with money, others with physical work, others with prayer. Everyone participates in the construction. And the Holy Royal Martyrs intercede for them with the Lord.”

Pavel Sushkov
Diveyevo village
Photos by the author
Translation by Dmitry Lapa

Pravoslavie.ru

10/27/2021

See also

2021-10-26

 DIETARIO MIKELMAS 2021

 

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

 

Día glorioso de San Frutos, paseo por las calles de Oviedo a la búsqueda del tiempo perdido. No ha pasado el santo de anacoreta la hoja del libro que está leyendo ni al Cristo de les Oreilles de la catedral ovetense dio de mano a la bola del mundo que sostiene. No es todavía el din del mundo aunque suba el pan los carburantes la luz los comestibles y la peste del Covid siga viva aunque en recesión. Él sigue arriba mirando a la pobre humanidad con sus ojos grandes saltones, hieráticos, del románico ramirense, cuna del jacobeo. Ojos que expiden piedad. San Frutos tampoco pasó la hoja. Parece que no acaba de terminar de leer el libro que tiene en la mano. Oviedo y Segovia son dos ciudades literarias que marcaron mi existencia como Dublín o el Londres de Kings Roads. No eres de donde naces sino de donde paces.

Deambulé este 25 de octubre a dos meses vista de la navidad por el querido Oviedín que ya no es tan pequeño y acusa unos grandes niveles de contaminación rodada pues todo el mundo va en coche pese a las cortas distancias a la recherche du temps perdu. Pero esta alegre mañana de otoño no me guiaba Proust sino Dolores Medio una voz mágica que retumba en mis oídos. “Nosotros los Rivero” es una de las grades novelas escritas a mediados de la pasada centuria, para mi gusto aventaja a la tan traída y llevada “Nada” de Carmen Laforet. Es sin duda el mejor premio Nadal.

Dolores radiografía la ciudad desde su vivencia de la Revolución del 34, la guerra del 36 y los inicios del desarrollo económico. En sus páginas me encuentro con “Choni” el compañero de juegos de infancia de la autora el cual vino a detener a su familia que regentaba una humilde tienda de ultramarinos “La uva de oro” convertido en miliciano pistolero de requisas. A Ger, el hermano de Mag la protagonista, el estudiante de Derecho que se unió a la revolución y muere en una trinchera de la Tenderina por los disparos de los artilleros de Varela implacable en la represión.

Vemos a los pobres seminaristas fusilados, arder a las iglesias y la ciudad destruida y a los moritos de Regulares con el tarbús y el jaique desfilar airosos por la calle Uría invocando a Alá en la triste mañana del doce de octubre de 1934. ¡Qué arte narrativo el de esta mujer!

Creo que la poesía carece de género, es lo mismo en hombres que en mujeres pero Dolores Medio con sus sensibilidad femenina capta los más mínimos detalles de su entorno descritos en un lenguaje poderosamente eficaz, cinematográfico, definitorio y definitivo al plasmar cada escena, en la ternura y limpieza del alma con la que cuenta uno de los momentos más dolorosos de la ciudad destruida.

Ella  que nació de una familia de indianos venidos a menos.

El padre luchó en la guerra de Cuba y tuvo una hija mulata de aquella relación que se convierte en polo de atracción galante del elemento masculino pero al mismo tiempo es blanco de murmuración del “todo Oviedo” por ser negra.

Magdalena la protagonista nació en la calle san Francisco frente a la  estatua del inquisidor Valdés. De niña le gustaba columpiarse con Choni en las cadenas clavadas frente a la puerta. Cadenas que trajo un obispo de Oviedo que peleó en las Navas de Tolosa.

 Paso por la Corrada del obispo, los trascorrales la catedral, y me acerco a la estatua de la Regenta donde ruego a una turista mexicana que tire una foto  de mí del bracero de doña Ana Ozores.

—¿Tiene la bondad?

—No faltaba más

Explico a la señora quien era aquella mujer que acabó teniendo un asunto con el magistral catedralicio que espiaba sus movimientos desde la torre con catalejo.

—Ah pues no lo sabía. Lo buscaré en Internet.

—Calque el botón de la derecha, y viva Mexico.

—Ya está.

—Muchas gracias.

—Encantada.

Los turistas han tomado posesión de la ciudad de Oviedo una de las ciudades más visitadas de España.

Me dice que está encantada de España por su hospitalidad y belleza de sus paisajes y que Oviedo es una hermosa ciudad. Los españoles, advierte, y los mexicanos somos iguales en las virtudes y los defectos pese a los denuestos hispanofobos  de Lopez Obrador.

Ah la Regenta yo me enamoré de una Regenta de la cuenca minera pero la cosa salió mal por mi propia inconsciencia. Avanzo hacia laCorrada del Obispo y allí san Tirso que está allí en efigie ostentando la palma del martirio en una imagen de piedra, hornacina desgastada por los siglos cabe la puerta.

 Aparece en el testero el misterioso alfiz visigótico de tres arquillos, un enigma para los historiadores. Doce siglos os contemplan; el templo fue consagrado por Alfonso el Casto en el siglo IX.

Camino hacia el barrio húmedo. Cuesta abajo hacia el barrio húmedo lamiendo  la vieja muralla... aparecen pintadas emborronadas  por el latigo de los grafitos no sé que significa esta escritura en la pared: ¿síntoma de la modernidad y aviso apocalíptico? Las rondas y reveille del botellón no dejan dormir a los vecinos y hay manifestación.

Es el sector urbano más castigado de la folixia. Sin embargo el barrio está todo tranquilo. A la bajada antes de acceder al campillín entro en un chigre donde yo acostumbraba a tomar café. Pregunto por el dueño un paisano  pequeñín y muy gallaspero. No está. Falleció hace dos años.

Dios guarde su alma.

Tuvo la culpa una cirrosis que ya apuntaba en su cara demacrada y como chupada la última vez que lo vi. Se acabaron aquellos culines del tiempo que pasa. Un tanto aprensivo y nostalgico por la noticia subo al Fontán a sentarme en una terraza:

—¿Se puede fumar?

—No señor.

—Pues vale, cumplamos la norma de la municipalidad pero le participo que a mí me salvó la vida del Covid el tabaco. Purificó mis pulmones el saumerio de la cachimba.

Me acurruco entonces, un poco triste por el fallecimiento de mi amigo el tabernero aquel paisanín del que nunca hablará la historia, frente a las estatuas de las dos lecheras.

Debían de ser aquellas lecheras que cantaba Gerardo Diego y que bajaban por la calle Leopoldo Alas con el cántaro encima de la cabeza. Todo el barrio escuchaba el sonido de sus madreñas de madrugada.

 —Hora de levantar. Ya pasaron las lecheras...

Y me fumo un vegero de celebración por estar vivo yo mientras pienso en Tigre Juan y en Pérez de Ayala otro de los grandes vates que ha dado Oviedo (el estro de su numen que no cesa) a las letras hispanas.

Siguiendo ruta en el patio de la Universidad saludo a don Fernando Valdés el Inquisidor General contemplo las arcadas que custodian el empaque de su aula magna y escucho retumbar el cantarín traqueteo de las ametralladoras de de la Revolución. En el fuste de las columnarias las balas dejaron su impronta como aviso de que no vuelva a pasar.

Yo pisé suelo asturiano el verano de 1968 venía a hacer las practicas de periodismo en LNE. Ya ha llovido. Pero recuerdo que bajando al volante de mi seiscientos me detuve en el pueblo de Pajares había romería. Escuché por primera vez la danza prima y probé mi primer culín. Desde entonces Asturias se me clavó en el alma.

Y sigo degustando las dulzuras del “mexu d´angelin” hasta que Dios quiera. La sidra cantarina bien tomada, escanciada y bien llevada es un lujo, deleite de ambrosía. Sobre el vaso mea un ángel

 

Wednesday, October 27, 2021