Kevin P. Edgecomb – Page 31

A Pilgrim and a Prayer

Phil Sumpter at Narrative and Ontology has been reading the Russian Orthodox classic Откровенные рассказы странника духовному своему отцу (Candid Stories of a Pilgrim to his Spiritual Father, usually titled in English The Way of A Pilgrim) in what appears to be a very nice German translation. The selection he translates into English there I have also found in my own copy of the Helen Bacovcin translation (Doubleday/Image Books, 1978), beginning with quoting the staretz or spiritual father of the unnamed pilgrim (pp 18-19):

“To learn about this prayer, we will read from a book called the Philokalia. This book, which was compiled by twenty-five holy Fathers, contains complete and detailed instructions about ceaseless prayer. The content of this book is of such depth and usefulness that it is considered to be the primary teacher of contemplative life, and as the Venerable Nicephorus says, ‘It leads one to salvation without labor and sweat.'”

“Is it then more important than the Holy Bible?” I asked.

“No, it is neither more important nor holier than the Bible, but it contains clear exposition of the ideas that are mysteriously presented in the Bible and are not easy for our finite mind to understand. I will give you an illustration. The sun—a great, shining, and magnificent light—cannot be contemplated and looked at directly with the naked eye. An artificial glass, a million times smaller and dimmer than the sun, is needed to look at the great king of lights to be enraptured by its fiery rays. In a similar way the Holy Bible is a shining light and the Philokalia is the necessary glass.

Phil delightfully titled his post “Tradition as ‘sunglasses'” which I think is going to stick with me from now on because of this happy concatenation of connections between us, as it was one of my own posts of a quotation from the Philokalia which led him to mention his reading this book.

Philokalia (love of beautiful things) is a Greek word which came to be used to describe literary anthologies, and it is perfectly appropriate as a title of this collection of beautiful writings on prayer of the heart (or hesychastic prayer; most literally it is what is referred to as the Jesus Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner) from various Church Fathers dating from between the fourth to fifteenth centuries. The original collection was compiled in the eighteenth century by Saint Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain (Mt Athos) and St Makarios of Corinth, and published in Venice in 1782. A second edition was published, including additional texts from Patriarch Kallistos of Constantinople (mid-fourteenth century), in Athens in 1893. A third edition in five volumes total was published 1957-1963, also in Athens by Astir. It is this third edition, incorporating all the texts of the earlier editions, which is the source of the English translation which is in process of publication by His Eminence Kallistos, Metropolitan of Diokleia (by 1995, four volumes were released: 1, 2, 3, 4; the fifth may or may not yet be published [n.b. Volume 5 was finally published in 2024.]), who had worked earlier with the now-reposed G. E. H. Palmer and Philip Sherrard on editing the translations initially completed by a larger team. Earlier, however, an abridgement of the original edition of the Philokalia in Slavonic, Dobrotolubiye (which likewise means love of beautiful things), was published by St Paisii Velichkovskii in 1793. This was the edition carried by the Pilgrim in his trek. A translation of this volume into Russian, still using the title Dobrotolubiye, was published by St Ignatii Branchianinov in 1857. A five-volume Russian adaptation (including extra texts and abridgements and alterations to the original Greek collection) was published by St Theophan the Recluse, complete by 1883, also under the title Dobrotolubiye. The notes and introductory essays in the English edition by Metropolitan Kallistos, et al., are contemporary, and the best available texts are used for the selections included, so it is a valuable edition, and will hopefully be completed soon. I have heard of some hesitation regarding the publishing of the fifth volume, as it includes some passages on the discipline of hesychastic prayer which are considered to be potentially susceptible to abuse in the hands of the naive or those without spiritual guidance. Concern for the spiritual welfare of all readers may lead to the fifth volume of the English translation not being published.

Along these lines, the editors (His Eminence Kallistos, Philip Sherrard, and G.E.H. Palmer) provide the following cautions for those who would attempt hesychastic prayer:

It must be stressed, however, that this spiritual path known as hesychasm cannot be followed in a vacuum. Although most of the texts in the Philokalia are not specifically doctrinal, they all presuppose doctrine even when they do not state it. Moreover, this doctrine entails an ecclesiology. It entails a particular understanding of the Church and a view of salvation inextricably bound up with its sacramental and liturgical life. This is to say that hesychasm is not something that has developed independently of or alongside the sacramental and liturgical life of the Church. It is part and parcel of it. It too is an ecclesial tradition. To attempt to practise it, therefore, apart from active participation in this sacramental and liturgical life is to cut it off from its living roots. It is also to abuse the intention of its exponents and teachers and so to act with a presumption that may well have consequences of a disastrous kind, mental and physical.

There is a further point connected with this. The texts in the Philokalia were written by and for those actively living not only within the sacramental and liturgical framework of the Orthodox Church, but also within that of the Orthodox monastic tradition. They therefore presuppose conditions of life radically different from those in which most readers of this English translation are likely to find themselves. Is this tantamount to saying that the counsels they contain can be applied only within a monastic environment? Many hesychast writers affirm that this is not the case, and St Nikodimos himself, in his introduction to the original Philokalia, goes out of his way to stress that ‘unceasing prayer’ may or, rather, should be practised by all. Naturally, the monastic life provides conditions, such as quietness, solitude and regularity, indispensable for that concentration without which one cannot advance far along the spiritual path. But, provided that the basic condition of active participation in the sacramental and liturgical life of the Church is fulfilled, then this path is open to all to follow, each to the best of his or her ability and whatever the circumstances under which he or she lives. Indeed, in this respect the distinction between the monastic life and life ‘in the world’ is but relative: every human being, by virtue of the fact that he or she is created in the image of God, is summoned to be perfect, is summoned to love God with all his or her heart, soul and mind. In this sense all have the same vocation and all must follow the same spiritual path. Some no doubt will follow it further than others; and again for some the intensity of the desire with which they pursue it may well lead them to embrace a pattern of life more in harmony with its demands, and this pattern may well be provided by the monastic life. But the path with its goal is one and the same whether followed within or outside a monastic environment. What is essential is that one does not follow it in an arbitrary and ignorant manner. Personal guidance from a qualified teacher should always be sought for. If such guidance is not to be found, then active participation in the sacramental and liturgical life of the Church, always necessary, will have an added importance in the overcoming of obstacles and dangers inherent in any quest of a spiritual nature.
Philokalia, vol 1, pp 15-16

The dangers warned of are real. Every “quest of a spiritual nature” is fraught with peril when attempted without the foundation of discernment necessary to “test the spirits” (1 Jn 4.1). There is no such thing as “Eastern Orthodox mysticism.” There is only Eastern Orthodoxy. With all its dogma, its liturgies, its canons and ecclesiology, its hymnography and iconography, and its life of prayer, it is one organic whole, and indivisible. It is precisely those who would separate an imagined “Eastern Orthodox mysticism” in hesychasm from Eastern Orthodoxy who are in the most danger. Would a novice weightlifter attempt to lift 500 pounds the first day he steps foot in a gym? Never! But there are those in these modern times who would certainly attempt to practice hesychastic prayer without its foundation and its proper context in a life lived in the Orthodox Church and the spiritual nourishment and healing and protection that such entails. I shudder to think what would happen when some of these people who don’t even believe in demons would attempt hesychastic prayer. Those would be the easiest of marks, so easily deceived and destroyed.

I don’t mean at all to imply here that my friend Phil or anyone else should stop reading and enjoying the Strannik and/or Philokalia. Not in the least! They are classics to be enjoyed and loved by all. I only thought it helpful to bring up the warnings regarding the practice of the Jesus Prayer in this context, as these two works, The Way of a Pilgrim and the Philokalia deal precisely with that prayer as their primary subject. If these books interest someone, if they love them greatly, then they should also become more familiar with the Orthodox tradition that has produced them, in which the practice of hesychastic prayer, the Jesus Prayer, is an organically integrated part. Yes, yes, I admit it: I would have the whole world convert to Orthodoxy, if it would. I admit my complete partiality, rooted in joy and love. But who could not be partial to any group that produces such things as the Philokalia and The Way of a Pilgrim?! Orthodoxy is itself the love of beautiful things indeed, the most beautiful being God! And along with that love for God, the love for our fellow man prompted me to share the above warnings. I trust this concern will be appreciated in the spirit in which it is intended.

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The Gospels on the Pharisees I

I recently read and posted briefly on In Quest of the Historical Pharisees, edited by Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton (Baylor Univ Press, 2007). It’s a pithy book, a thoroughly thought-provoking one that deserves revisiting in more depth. In a short series of posts I intend to revisit precisely those issues which, in my reading, struck my contemplation like a bell, leaving it ringing ever since.

The first interest is something I mentioned in my earlier post, investigating how following the Griesbach Hypothesis minority approach to the Synoptic Problem (mentioned in passing, as we’ll see below, by both Martin Pickup in his chapter “Matthew’s and Mark’s Pharisees” and by Amy-Jill Levine in her chapter “Luke’s Pharisees”) would lead to perhaps slightly different conclusions regarding attitudes discernible through differences between the Evangelists’ mention of the Pharisees and others. Pickup and Levine both, of course, utilized the majority approach to the Synoptic Problem in their investigations, what is most often referred to as the Two-Source Hypothesis.

For those readers unfamiliar with what is commonly called the Synoptic Problem, in a nutshell it refers to the three Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which are quite similar in wording and order of pericopes, and the relationship in the origins of each one to the other. The Griesbach Hypothesis, also called the Two Gospel Hypothesis, posits that Matthew was written first, then Luke was written using Matthew, and then Mark written last using both Matthew and Luke. (This is the explanation to which I myself hold.) The Two-Source Hypothesis is more complicated. It posits that Mark was written first, and that there was a further written body of shared tradition available to both Matthew and Luke (labeled Q, from the German Quelle, source), that also available to Matthew and Luke were a set of traditions peculiar to themselves (referred to as M and L respectively when it is proposed that these sources were written documents and not just oral tradition), but that Matthew and Luke did not use one another’s Gospels. An excellent site which describes all the variations suggested as solutions to the Synoptic Problem is that of Stephen Carlson, who provides a system of didactically very helpful graphics showing the relationships between the Gospels in the various hypotheses, The Synoptic Problem Website.

So, the issue here in exegesis of any text represented in one of the Synoptic Gospels must be intimately related to the hypothesis preferred by the exegete to explain the relationships between the Gospels. In this way, a saying that is present in one Gospel in one form, and in another Gospel in a slightly different form, will be explained differently according to the relationship suggested by the preferred solution to the Synoptic Problem. When we posit Mark as the beginning, and then evaluate Matthew and Luke according to how they have “changed” what Mark said, one will suggest different alterations and motivations than what would be said in positing Matthew as the beginning, seeing how Luke adapted his writing, and how Mark made use of both in the end. So I thought it would be fun to apply this latter method, based on the Griesbach Two Gospel Hypothesis, and see how differently the data regarding the mention of Pharisees in the Synoptic Gospels will look. I’m thinking particularly that it might clear up a bit of what’s going on with the Pharisees in Luke, which Amy-Jill Levine showed was rather difficult to pin down in following the Two Source Hypothesis.

Following the series of posts describing this alternate investigation of the data relating to the Pharisees, I then intend to take a look at how the Gospels have been and are still regularly misread regarding the Pharisees. With the information found in the chapters of In Quest of the Historical Pharisees, it is not only possible, but imperative to correct those misreadings. We find, in taking account of this new picture of the Pharisees, that they are still criticized in the Gospels, but not in general for what has been attributed to them in the past, for a kind of rigid, loveless, legalistic religious hypocrisy that is familiar to every religious tradition. Rather, their problem lay elsewhere, I would suggest in a kind of cynical pragmatism tied to the maintenance of their popularity with and power over the populace.

In any case, stay tuned for the coming installments. I have to write them first!

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Love

Love bade me welcome : yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack’d any thing.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here :
Love said, you shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them : let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat :
So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert, Love (3), 1633

Here again, Herbert has the Feast of Love for the outwardly unwilling guest. The metaphor isn’t as opaque in this one, with Love (Christ) being called Lord at the start of the third stanza. It’s another setting of Christ as Love inviting the shameful sinner to the communion Feast, where the sinner actually wants to be, and where he ends up as the guest, not a servant.

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Notes on Pharisees

As you may’ve noticed, I’ve been reading the volume edited by Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton, In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Baylor University Press, 2007). If anyone is interested in what can be known about the Pharisees, this is the book to read. I found it a much more satisfying reading experience than even the relatively recent and excellent Anthony Saldarini’s Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society (Eerdmans, 2001), with nearly every chapter presenting a new and more convincing reading of the data.

The first five chapters already lead to something of a consensus. Steve Mason in “Josephus’s Pharisees: The Narratives” and “Josephus’s Pharisees: The Philosophy” covers very well indeed all the mentions of the Pharisees in Josephus’ works, the two chapters dealing with narrative and with the passages wherein the Pharisees are described as one of several Judean philosophies. Martin Pickup covers “Matthew’s and Mark’s Pharisees,” Amy-Jill Levine describes “Luke’s Pharisees,” and “John’s Pharisees” are covered by Raimo Hakola and Adele Reinhartz. The indication through these (with Luke being somewhat equivocal and hard to pin down, which makes Levine’s chapter somewhat less fun, that way) is that the Pharisees were a voluntary association of some sort with a focus on religious-social law (or halakhah, to be somewhat anachronistic), who did not in themselves comprise the ruling class (though some members did belong to it), but they exerted continuing influence over the leadership due to their influence over and popularity with the general population, an influence beginning in the middle-Hasmonean period and continuing until the Great Revolt (and beyond, in the Pharisees transformation/appropriation as the forerunners of the Rabbis). Details of their organization, membership requirements and numbers, even a precis of their standard beliefs, however, are all lost to us. But we do have some very interesting remnants preserved in the rabbinic canon, particularly several pericopes in the Mishnah and Tosefta, which Jack Lightstone describes in “The Pharisees and the Sadducees in the Earliest Rabbinic Documents”, and Neusner describes in “The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70 CE: An Overview”, and “The Pharisaic Agenda: Laws Attributed in the Mishnah and the Tosefta to Pre-70 Pharisees,” and “The Pre-70 Pharisees after 70 and after 140.” The potential recovery of such material is only possible with careful attention to the form of the pericopes. Where the form is unusual, this needs to be investigated. Neusner shows that this yields interesting possibilities indeed in the Pharisee/Sadducee dispute material and in the “domestic” narratives regarding Hillel’s family. In both cases, parts of the pericopes have not been “digested” by the editors of the pre-Mishnaic sources or by the editors of the Mishnah and Tosefta themselves into the standard format for such materials, so the likelihood is high that these are earlier sources incorporated into the texts as we have them. It’s unfortunate that there are so few! It’s also fascinating just how very blurred the line is between “Pharisees” on the one side and “Rabbis” or “Sages” on the other in the Tannaitic documents; there appears to be no real distinction, in fact. Additional interesting chapters include that of Bruce Chilton, “Paul and the Pharisees,” Chilton and Neusner with “Paul and Gamaliel,” James VanderKam’s “The Pharisees and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” and James Strange’s “Archaeology and the Pharisees.”

There are some chapters following the above on The Pharisees in Modern Theology: Susannah Heschel’s “The German Theological Tradition,” and two by Neusner “The Anglo-American Theological Tradition” and “The Debate with E. P. Saunders since 1970.” There is then also a concluding chapter by William Scott Green, “What Do We Really Know about the Pharisees, and How Do We Know It?”

One of the most interesting and beneficial results of this book would be the attention it draws to how one particular reading of the Gospel evidence, rather than the sum of the available evidence itself, and even a more generous reading of the Gospel evidence, has generated nearly two millennia of misreadings of the other materials regarding the Pharisees, too. I’ll cover some of those misreadings here, later. In the meantime, I recommend In Quest of the Historical Pharisees to everyone interested in the subject.

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Baldness came upon Gaza

Baldness shall come upon Gaza. It shall be forsaken. [Jer 47.5 MT / 29.5 LXX; Zeph 2.4] The writer, after having unconsciously rested a night on the site of ancient Gaza, as the smoothest place that could be chosen whereon to pitch a tent, was for the first time aware of the literal interpretation of the prophecy, when he saw it on the spot. Detained for a day till camels could be procured, (the plague being then prevalent in Gaza,) the author spent it in traversing the sand hills on which the manifold but minute remains of an ancient city are yet in many places to be seen. Though previously holding to the interpretation given above, and not imagining that any clearer illustration could be given, and ignorant or forgetful, at the time, of any historical testimony that the site of modern differed from that of ancient Gaza, it was impossible for him to doubt that a city had once stood where innumerable vestiges of it are to be seen. The debris of ruins recognised at first sight by every traveller in the East as clearly indicating the site of an ancient city, are abundant, but most minute. Innumerable fragments of broken pottery, pieces of glass, (some of which were beautifully stained,) and of polished marble, lie thickly spread in every level and hollow place, at a considerable elevation and various distances, on a space of several square miles. These obvious indications of the site of an ancient city, recurring over a wide extent, are so abundant, that the number of different places in which they profusely lie cannot be reckoned under fifty,—which not unfrequently are surmounted by sand on every side. They generally occupy a level space, far firmer than the surrounding sand, and vary in size from small patches to more open spaces of twelve or twenty thousand square yards. The successive sand hills, or rather the same oblong sand hill, greatly varied in its elevation, and of an undulated surface, throughout which they recur, extends to the west and west-south-west from the sea nearly to the environs of modern Gaza.

Before approaching Gaza, unconscious where the ancient city stood, it might well be asked what is meant by baldness coming upon it. But having traversed the place on which it stood, and beholding it as it rises naked and bare above the plain, the writer could not fail to see that its perfect baldness shows how truly that word of the Lord rests upon it. On his first visit, he looked in vain for any fragment of ruin one cubic foot in size, for any shrub, or plant, or blade of grass, to relieve or interrupt the perfect baldness that has come upon Gaza. He saw nothing but a jackal freely coursing over its bare surface. The sand of the desert is nowhere more smooth and bare; and the dark spots, where nothing but the vestiges of ruins lie, are so flat and level, that they form no exception to its baldness.

Alexander Keith. Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion. 39th edition. (London: Longman, Greens and Co, 1872), pp 378-379

The Reverend Doctor Keith offers an intriguing interpretation. Those familiar with life in seaside communities would be well-aware of the ability of the encroaching sands to choke the life out of arable soils and garden plots, rendering an area “bald” of vegetation, particularly when there is no human intervention to prevent such sandy encroachment. The processes are as active today as they were in the times of Rev Dr Keith and the Prophets Jeremiah and Zephaniah. As Gaza, like various other cities in the area, had been destroyed at various times in the past, it will likely have suffered its ruins to be covered by windblown sands more than once. In the word of the Lord given to the Prophets, then, we see merely a description of typical or even guranteed results, such that they would hardly require prognostication or a vivid imagination to invent: Gaza rebels, is emptied of people, and the beach sand covers all, just as before, just as will happen again. This perspective of seeing the Lord’s hand in stereotyped processes with repeated historical exempla is something to be developed. There does appear to be quite a number of these tropes in the prophetic literature especially, some of which are mirrored in literature external to the Bible (like the Mari prophecies, which I described here). Collecting and comparing those themes or tropes would be enlightening.

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The impossible dream

Iyov has tagged me, and we await the same time, too, though in keeping with our different religious traditions. For me, the “impossible” dream whose fulfillment I await, the fulfillment of which men never will accomplish, is the remaking of all, and the death of death itself:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”

Make it soon. Make it new.

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The Pearl

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

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A book that can wait

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.

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The Boundless Garden

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 editor Lambros Kamperidis 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 what has been called “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.

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Redemption

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

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