biblicalia

When reading, one must “look at oneself and reflect on one’s soul as in a mirror”. Here Symeon follows the teaching of Mark the Monk about “attributing everything written in Scripture to oneself”. The Bible is a message addressed to the reader personally; it is not just a book which someone reads to demonstrate his erudition to others.

This is why Symeon would reject what we now call the historical critical handling of Scripture. He regards the Bible not as an object of critical analysis but as prophetic inspiration leading to ever more profound faith:

Let us now lay aside all vain and useless research . . . Let us obey the Master who says: “Search the Scriptures”. Search them but do not discuss them too much. Search the Scriptures but to not organize arguments concerning their external meaning. Search the Scriptures in order to learn about faith and hope and love.

Secular scholars who dare to interpret Scripture without having received the grace of God are very often an object of Symeon’s sharp criticism:

When without having received grace from the Spirit consciously and knowingly, I run to interpret Scripture without any shame and give myself the rank of teacher with no other claim to it than this falsely-called knowledge [ψευδωνυμω γνωσει], will God leave such conduct unjudged and demand no account of me? Certainly not.

. . . How can one achieve a true understanding of Scripture? Symeon compares Scripture with a house built “in the midst of secular and Hellenistic knowledge”, and a true understanding of Scripture with a closed chest, which is impossible to open using only human sagacity. There are two keys to open it: the fulfilment of God’s commandments and the grace of God. The first depends on man, the second on God: there is a συνεργεια (co-operation) of man and God in opening the hidden meaning of Scripture. When the chest is unlocked, one gains access to true “knowledge” (γνωσις), and “the revelation of mysteries that are hidden and veiled in the letter” of Scripture.

Therefore the mystery of Scripture is opened only to those who try to embody what is read by practicing it and who receive a revelation from God. In fact, Symeon incorporates here the notion of the true gnostic who possesses knowledge hidden from the majority. He quotes a maxim, in which God is the speaker: “My mystery [belongs] to Me and to My own.” There are God’s “own” people, to whom the meaning of Scriptures is opened, and “others”, from whom it is concealed:

For the divine things . . . are recorded in writing and are read by everybody, but they are disclosed only to those who have warmly repented, and who through sincere repentance have been well purified . . . For them the depths of the Spirit are revealed, and from them flows forth the word of God’s wisdom and knowledge . . . But for others it is unknown and concealed, and in no way is unlocked by Him Who opens the mind of the faithful to understand the Scriptures.

. . . Thus the reading of Scripture becomes a source of mystical inspiration. We can distinguish several steps by which, according to Symeon, one can ascend to such a level of understanding of Scripture. On the first step a man reads the Bible, paying attention to the “words and their combinations”, that is, trying to understand the literal meaning of the book. On the next step he starts to attribute scriptural texts to himself and to fulfil the commandments as if they were given to him personally. The more carefully he follows the Gospel in his life, the deeper his knowledge of the “hidden” meaning of Scripture becomes. Then God Himself appears to the man, and, by the grace of the Holy Spirit and through communion with the divine light the man becomes γνωστικος, that is, acquires perfect knowledge of the mystical meaning of Scripture.

Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev. St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition. Oxford Early Christian Studies, 2000. Selections from pages 49-50, 51, 52.

Rejoice! His Eminence Archbishop Hilarion of Sydney, Australia and New Zealand has been elected Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, which election has been confirmed by His Holiness Patriarch Alexy of Moscow and the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, along with his elevation to the rank of Metropolitan. His Eminence the Most Reverend Hilarion, Metropolitan of Eastern America and New York, will be enthroned this coming Sunday 18 May 2008.

I know the ways of learning; both the head
And pipes that feed the press, and make it run;
What reason hath from nature borrowed,
Or of it self, like a good housewife, spun
In laws and policy; what the stars conspire,
What willing nature speaks, what forc’d by fire;
Both th’ old discoveries, and the new-found seas,
The stock and surplus, cause and history:
All these stand open, or I have the keys:
        Yet I love thee.

I know the ways of honour, what maintains
The quick returns of courtesy and wit:
In vies of favours whether party gains,
When glory swells the heart, and mouldeth it
To all expressions both of hand and eye,
Which on the world a true-love-knot may tie,
And bear the bundle, wheresoe’re it goes:
How many drams of spirit there must be
To sell my life unto my friends or foes:
        Yet I love thee.

I know the ways of pleasure, the sweet strains,
The lullings and the relishes of it;
The propositions of hot blood and brains;
What mirth and music mean; what love and wit
Have done these twenty hundred years, and more:
I know the projects of unbridled store:
My stuff is flesh, not brass; my senses live,
And grumble oft, that they have more in me
Than he that curbs them, being but one to five:
        Yet I love thee.

I know all these, and have them in my hand:
Therefore not seeled, but with open eyes
I fly to thee, and fully understand
Both the main sale, and the commodities;
And at what rate and price I have thy love;
With all the circumstances that may move:
Yet through the labyrinths, not my grovelling wit,
But thy silk twist let down from heav’n to me,
Did both conduct and teach me, how by it
        To climb to thee.

George Herbert. The Pearl. Matt. 13. 1633

The earliest confession of Christian faith — κυριος Ιησους — meant nothing less radical than that Christ’s peace, having suffered upon the cross the decisive rejection of the powers of this world, had been raised up by God as the true form of human existence: an eschatologically perfect love, now made invulnerable to all the violences of time, and yet also made incomprehensibly present in the midst of history, because God’s final judgment had already befallen the world in the paschal vindication of Jesus of Nazareth.

David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Eerdmans, 2003), page 1

There are several problems here:
1.) It is a stretch to call κυριος Ιησους “the earliest confession of Christian faith.” A title and name do not a confession make.

2.) It is not “Christ’s peace” that suffered rejection upon the Cross, but Christ Himself. Nor was this “peace” raised up, but Christ Himself was. A work in which an “Eastern Orthodox theologian” loses focus on Christ on page 1 is not promising.

3.) “…an eschatologically perfect love, now made invulnerable to all the violences of time, and yet also made incomprehensibly present in the midst of history…” — buzzwordy blather. That “incomprehensibly present” is a classic. How would you comprehend it to note its presence were it incomprehensibly present? Incomprehensible polysyllabic pseudo-postmodern piffle is more like it. I can see how this book gained so much attention, now!

4.) “…because God’s final judgment had already befallen the world…” — uh, no, it hadn’t, nor has it yet, but it will someday, when there’ll be no mistaking that it is God’s final judgment.

5.) “…in the paschal vindication of Jesus of Nazareth.” — Wrong. In the theology of the Orthodox Church “Jesus of Nazareth” didn’t need “vindication,” being God and Man. The statement smacks of adoptionism.

Five strikes in one sentence on the first page. This book can wait.

This boundless, magnificent garden formed by the deep furrows of the waves, bordered by the caves and rocks of the sea, its surface mirroring the dome of heaven, is no ordinary garden. Just as Yannios’s garden-plot, softly caressed by the sea-breezes which crease it into seductive, innumerable lines, as on the forehead of some king’s lovely bride displaying a capricious temper, so the liquid garden of the sea, the unpredictable sea, displays a childish temper and obstinacy, at times furious and at other times seductive. The sea is the garden, and Yannios’s donkey, plunging ‘its feet among the coll petals which waved and rustled around its hooves’, is no ordinary donkey but a little boat: when he tethers it to a post, he is actually securing it in some spot of the harbour, and when he untethers it he is taking it into the sea in order to harvest his ‘vegetables’, ‘cauliflowers and melons’, ‘the fruits of his labour’, fruits de mer, as the gastronomically-informed French would have it.

Homer is invoked from the beginning of the story with his comparison of the waves of the sea with the waves of undulating wheat in an unharvested field. Elsewhere Homer has compared the foamy waves of the sea with a flock of little white sheep. Although not of the same etymology, the affinity between skáros, the sleeping quarters for a flock of sheep, and skarí, the name usually given to a large boat, evokes in modern Greek a common homophonic derivation between terms referring to the worlds of both land and sea. A similar analogy can be seen between skáfos (skiff) and skáfi (wash-tub), confirming the ancient association where the lines between the two elements are blurred. This correspondence can also be seen in Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’ (oinops pontos), and in the representations on Attic vases of Dionysos sailing on a boat whose mast is a grape-covered vine seemingly growing out of the ship’s hull. The land enters into the sea and the sea into the land. Papadiamadis takes this correspondence one step further by turning the sea into the land. In a horizontal sense, the expanse of the sea is the garden and in a vertical sense the dome of heaven is mirrored in the sea; the sun at the end of its laborious course plunges through this dome to rest at the bottom of the sea, and the moon grows ever more radiant over it and the distant light of the Pleiades sparkle in its unexplored depths.

This is an ancient, primeval garden that dates ‘from the beginning, from the creation of the world’, and contrary to the assertion of Bacon according to whom nature is an open book in which everyone can read the history of creation, this primeval Homeric garden is ‘an open book written in hieroglyphic characters’ that ‘you cannot read . . . unless you are a seer’. The antiquity of the garden is further emphasized by the hieroglyphic characters in which it is described as well as the cryptic sayings of Homer, who is then conjured again become those ‘hieroglyphs’, literally ’sacred engravings’, are compared with the ‘”emblems of sorrow”, the cracked lines engraved on the naked skulls of the dead, of which it is said that although they indicate the fate of the dead person, you cannot read them unless you are a seer . . . and anyhow it is too late then, since the dead man’s life is over.’ Unless this passage is read in an eschatological way it is totally devoid of meaning. How can anyone read the engravings on the skull while the person is alive? The engravings, like the hieroglyphic characters, have no useful purpose since the reveal the fate of the dead person post mortem, when nothing can be done about their life. It is the same with the scriptural garden. Death cannot be read in the garden of Eden which is full of life. But in the fallen garden, which is marked by death, the remnants of this once living garden can be read eschatologically, for the emblems of sorrow are there for all to see and interpret.

Yannios’s hardships have revealed to him the meaning of exile from the living garden; the garden that he finds in the sea is but a vestige of the original garden of life; it is a garden that is harvested with toil, with the sweat of one’s brow, that yields its once living fruits as dead ‘vegetables’—all the sea-urchis, oysters, octopuses—as a reminder that in the fallen garden it is necessary to consume dead matter in order to live. And it is this garden which is rife with the ‘emblems of sorrow’ for the seer who knows how to decipher their meaning, one which is inhabited and epitomized by the solitary, sorrowful figure of a woman, her head covered with the black scarf of mourning, whose body is coated with weeds and scales as with a coat of skin (see Genesis 3:21), the ‘oyster-covered bride with shells for eyes’, who becomes unmarried Yannios’s ‘unbedded’ companion, the once living garden that will threaten to engulf the life of a drowning child and spew it out as dead matter. It is for all these reasons that the book, albeit open, retains its eschatological meaning hidden within its sacred engravings, and must be read as signs of the Kingdom of God, of our exile from this Kingdom which will be given back to us. For the unfortunate Yannios, who has suffered so much in this exile from the lost garden, the meaning of the earthly garden has already been revealed as in ‘a book written in shining capital letters, clear, intelligible . . . .’

An explanatory endnote from translator Liadain Sherrard on Alexandros Papadiamandis’ short story “Black Scarf Rock,” in The Boundless Garden: Collected Short Stories, volume 1 (Limnia, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey, 2007), available here.

The stories of Alexandros Papadiamandis are brimming with bright sadness. What else is there to say, but, “read them”? Though we will not enjoy in this volume (except vicariously through such notes as above) the elaborate intermillennial wordplay of Papdiamandis’ Greek which defies labeling much less translation, we can still appreciate his mastery of the short story format. These stories are certainly gems. Whether we call them pearls from the deep or peas from Yannios’ boundless garden, they are beautiful. This collection is a labour of love for those involved, and their loving selection of the best of Papadiamandis’ myriad stories is appreciated, leading more of us to love this author.

The volume is beautifully printed on smooth, creamy paper, a delight to the touch as well as the eyes, and the softcover is a gently textured thick paper, something like watercolor paper, actually. Publisher Denise Harvey has done a wonderful job in not only producing a beautiful selection of stories in translation, but a beautiful book. This first volume of English translations of Papadiamandis’ stories is also volume seventeen of Harvey’s Romiosyni Series, a series of apparently English works (whether translations or originals) involving the history, culture and ethos of post-Byzantine Greece. I’ll certainly be looking for more of the volumes of the series, myself, if this volume is any indication of the quality of the others. My thanks to all involved.

Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
      Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
      And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’ old.
In heaven at his manor I him sought:
      They told me there, that he was lately gone
      About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.
I straight return’d, and knowing his great birth,
      Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
      In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts:
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
      Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied
      Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.

George Herbert, 1633

My apologies again, everyone. I realized that my import of the correctly formatted unicode-compliant XML backup of my blog entries, comments, etc, actually created new page addresses so that all links to my pages were broken. How rude!

So, I’ve reloaded a database copy with the right numbers (fortunately I’ve kept them), and will deal with the unicode mess later, so all the Greek and Hebrew texts are messed up at the moment, temporarily. I noticed that some early posts on the blog are now out of order, too, which is weird, and I can’t tell when that happened, but it must’ve been in one of my earlier moves.