Friday, May 16, 2025

"do right and let nothing terrify you"

you are [Sarah's] children, if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening (ESV)

you are . . . [Sarah's] children if you do right and let nothing terrify you (RSV)

ἧς ἐγενήθητε τέκνα ἀγαθοποιοῦσαι καὶ μὴ φοβούμεναι μηδεμίαν πτόησιν.

Saturday, May 10, 2025

Spoken like a true Francophone

Felix Heinzer's Gottes Sohn als Mensch:  die Struktur des Menschseins Christi bei Maximus Confessor (1980), "departing happily from the stereotype, joins French clarity to Germanic thoroughness [(Grundlichkeit)]".

     Marcel Doucet, "Maxime le Confesseur, interprète de l’écriture," Science et esprit 37, no. 2 (1985):  128n21 (123-159).

Leo XIV

"nobody fears the Lord without being among the members of this one man. He is many people yet one individual, many Christians but one Christ. All Christians, in union with their head who has ascended into heaven, form one Christ. It is not as though he were one and we many; no, we who are many are one in him, who is one. Christ, head and body together, is a single individual."

"nemo timet dominum, nisi qui est in membris ipsius hominis: et multi homines sunt, et unus homo est:  multi enim christiani, et unus Christus. ipsi christiani cum capite suo, quod adscendit in caelum, unus est Christus; non ille unus et nos multi, sed et nos multi in illo uno unum. unus ergo homo Christus, caput et corpus."

     St. Augustine, Exposition of Ps 127.3 (128.2 in NPNF?) as trans. Boulding, WSA III/20, p. 101.

Friday, May 9, 2025

"Savior! Save me!"

Σῶτερ σῶσόν με.

Healer!  Heal me!

     St. Romanos the Melodist (fl. 536–556), Kontakion 23 (sometimes 12) on Mk 5:25-34 (the woman with a hemorrhage; cf. Mt 9:20-22 & Lk 8:43-48).  See SC 114 (=Romanos le Mélode Hymnes 3), ed. Grosdidier de Matons (1965), pp. 79-101 (Hymne de l’hémorroïsse).  Also, Songs about women:  Romanos the Melodist, ed. & trans. Thomas Arentzen, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Harvard University Press, 2024), pp. 298-315; Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine Melodist 1, On the person of Christ, trans. Marjorie Carpenter (University of Missouri Press, 1970), pp. 119-126; etc.  This powerful refrain is worked in at the end of each of the 21 strophes of this composition.

    Image:  Evangelist Painter T'oros of Taron, The healing of the woman with a hemorrhage (c. 1300), from Thomas F. Matthews and Alice Taylor, The Armenian gospels of Gladzor:  the life of Christ illuminated (Los Angeles:  Getty Publications, 2001), plate 57 (p. 216 in the manuscript).

Tuesday, April 29, 2025

John the Baptist, twice Precursor, the second time to the Psalm-praying righteous (and unrighteous?) dead in Hades

     "The prophets and all the righteous [dead] prayed (constantly) to God from [Hades] with unceasing prayers, asking for deliverance from that very dolorous (and) miserable domination of the enemy and from the deepening [(πανεσπέρου)] of th[at] very gloomy darkness.  And one of them said to God, 'Out of the belly of Hades my cry, thou didst hear my voice(; thou didst cast me back into the deep, into the heart of the sea)' [(Jon 2:2-3 =Cant. 6:3)].  And the other:  'Out of the depths I cried to thee, O Lord!  Lord, hear my voice!' [(Ps 130:1)].  And the other:  'Let thy face shine, and we shall be saved!' [(Ps 80:3, 7, & 19)].   And another:  '[Thou] who art enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth!' [(Ps 80:1)].  Another:  'Stir up thy might, and come to save us!' [(Ps 80:2)].  And another:  'Let thy compassion go speedily before us, O Lord' [(Ps 79:8)].  And the other:  'Deliver my soul from deepest Hades' [(Ps 86:13)].  And another:  'O Lord, thou hast brought up my soul from Hades' (Ps 80:3).  And the other:  'Thou dost not give me up to Hades' (Ps 16:10).  And another: 'Let my life rise from corruption towards thee, O Lord my God' [(Jon 2:6? =Cant. 6:7)].
     "Hearing them all, [our] very merciful [Lord] decided to proclaim his love of men not only to the dead of his time and after him, but also to those that hell possessed before his coming and who 'sat in darkness and (in) the shadow of death'.  This is why [our] God and Word on the one hand visited [on earth] the men who were in the flesh with an ensouled flesh, [and] on the other hand illuminated in hell the souls who were without flesh with his own divine and very pure soul, separated from [its] body, but not from [its] divinity," John the Baptist (who preached to the dead as well as to the living, and was thus twice precursor), having been "sent [before him] from the prison of Herod to the prison of the souls of the just and the unjust" to preach "Christ to all those of the tomb".

     Pseudo-Epiphanius, Homilia in diuini corporis sepulturam (In Sabbato magno, Homily for the Great and Holy Saturday, Ancient homily on Holy Saturday, The Lord's descent into Hades, On the burial of the divine body, Homily on the burial of Jesus, etc.) 9 & 8, as translated from the French of A. Vaillant, L’homélie d’Épiphane sur l’ensevelissement du Christ:  Texte vieux-slave, texte grec et traduction française (Zagreb:  1958), 93.  For the helpful footnotes associated with the Greek and Old Slavic (which I have not closely examined), see pp. 54-55.  Cf. Dindorf, p. 20 ll. 32 ff.  The quotations from the Psalms have been taken from (and cited in accordance with) the RSV, but modified in the direction of the French translation of Vaillant, not his Old Slavic and Greek originals.  For an online English translation of the Greek provided by Vaillant, go here.

Sunday, April 27, 2025

"abundant sweetness"

"For all who fear him he has stored up abundant happiness, which he will reveal to those who hope in him, bringing it to completion when we have attained the reality which even now we possess in hope."

"seruauit enim multam dulcedinem timentibus se, aperturus et perfecturus eam sperantibus in se, cum id quod nunc in spe accepimus etiam in re acceperimus."

     St. Augustine, Sermon 260A (393/405).1 =Sermon 8.1.4 on the octave of Easter =sermo a Denis editus 8.1 =Miscellanea Augostiniana 1 (1930), p. 36, ll. 1-2, as trans. Liturgy of the hours.  =WSA III/7, trans. Hill, p. 187:

You see, he has kept in store abundant sweetness for those who fear him, and he is going to open it up and complete it for those who hope in him, when we receive in actual substance what we have now received in hope.

Saturday, April 26, 2025

"two turtledoves, our soul and our flesh"

Morgan Library M.385 (1440-1460), fol. 12v
     "At the time of [his] first birth, Christ entered after forty days into the earthly Jerusalem, into the Temple, and conveyed as first-born two turtledoves to God.  But at the time of his rebirth from among the dead, too, Christ, after forty days, was taken up into the Jerusalem on high—from which he was n[ever however] separated—into the true Holy of Holies, and, as incorruptible ‘firstborn from among the dead,’ conveyed to God and to the Father [as it were] two turtledoves [without blemish], our soul and our flesh [(ὡς δύο ἀμώμους τρυγόνας τὴν ψυχήν καὶ τὴν σάρκα τήν ἡμετέραν)]. . . ."

     Pseudo-Epiphanius, Homilia in diuini corporis sepulturam (In Sabbato magno, Homily for the Great and Holy Saturday, Ancient homily on Holy Saturday, The Lord's descent into Hades, On the burial of the divine body, Homily on the burial of Jesus, etc.) 3, as translated from the French of A. Vaillant, L’homélie d’Épiphane sur l’ensevelissement du Christ:  Texte vieux-slave, texte grec et traduction française (Zagreb:  1958), 87.  The Greek (presumably of Dindorf (p. 13, ll. 3 ff.) or PG 43 (Petau)) is given at p. 31 ll. 13 ff.  In the next line, Pseudo-Epiphanius distinguishes intriguingly between such claims considered as "[articles] of faith" (which, apparently, they aren't) on the one hand and "[figures] of rhetorique" on the other (μυθικῶς . . . οὐ πιστῶς).  "For just as Christ was born of a Virgin the bolts of [whose] virginity [were] marked with a[n unbroken] seal, so the rebirth of Christ took place with the seals of the tomb unbroken."  For an online English translation of the Greek provided by Vaillant, go here.