Past Elder

Candlemas (2 February) 2012. A 40 Days of Purpose.

2012-02-01T00:37:00.001-06:00

The Law Of Moses Observed.

In the Law of Moses, when a woman gives birth to a boy, she is ritually unclean for seven days, then in the "blood of purification" for another thirty three days, total of forty days, at which time she goes to the mikveh for a ritual bath of purification.

What's a mikveh? The word, also given as mikvah, means collection -- what is collected is water, not just any water, but water from a natural source, such as rain, or better yet "living water" from a spring or well, which must be naturally transported, not pumped or carried. Total immersion in the water of a mikveh -- anyone thinking Baptism? -- is considered so important, restoring ritual purity after ritually impure things have happened, such as childbirth, that a Jewish community must provide a mikveh even before it builds a place of worship (synagogue).

So, to observe and fulfill the Mosaic Law, Mary was purified in a ritual bath in a mikveh, after which her first-born Son was presented in the Temple to dedicate him to God. In the Western Church, since the birth of Jesus has been set on 25 December for its celebration, the celebration of the Purification of Mary and the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple is fixed forty days later, 2 February. Easter, however, does not have a fixed date, and Holy Week, and the preparation for it, Lent, and the transition to it, Gesimatide, are reckoned backward from Easter's date in any given year. That is why in some years, like 2010, it may happen after the transition to Lent, Gesimatide, is underway. Or in this year, 2012, it happens only three days before Gesimatide begins with Septuagesima on 5 February.

In the Eastern Church, we saw in an earlier post that Epiphany, 6 January (at least until 1960s Rome got a hold of it), originally contained all the events of the early life of Jesus including his birth. And, 25 December in the Gregorian calendar of the West, now in civil use in most of the world, falls on 7 January in the Julian calendar still in liturgical use in the East, so, the 40th day after it falls on Gregorian 15 February in the East, and is called The Meeting of the Lord.

Either way, either part of the church, either calendar, forty days after Jesus' birth celebration.

The Gospel Fulfillment Of The Law.

The Gospel account of it is Luke 2:22-40, the Gospel reading for the day. Part of it relates Simeon the Elder, who had been promised that he would not die before seeing the Messiah. When Mary brought Jesus for the meeting, Simeon saw him and recognised him as the Messiah, saying what is now called the Canticle of Simeon, or, from its first words in Latin, nunc dimittis: Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy word, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people, a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of Thy people Israel. This reference to light gave rise to the custom of blessing the candles on this day for use in the church during the year, which in turn has given the day yet another name, Candelemas, or mass of the candles. Some observances include a procession with candles to the church.

The nunc dimittis has also become a feature of the Office of Compline, the completing church office of prayer for the day. In the Lutheran Common Service, that most wonderful version of the Western liturgy, in its current edition known as Divine Service Setting III in Lutheran Service Book, the nunc dimittis is also sung after Communion. A practice which continues even in our Vatican II wannabe services of late, though of course with the Vatican II-esque option of doing something else instead. 1960s Rome downplays the candles and Mary stuff for the Simeon thing. Simeon did no such thing. He got the purpose about Mary and light to the people.

The Prophecy of Simeon.

Simeon said something else too, and it should not be forgotten. The joy of the Messiah cannot be separated from the reason why he came, which isn't all that pretty. Saviours are great, as long as it's not about being saved from sin. Jesus would run into this again, to put it mildly, and Satan would even tempt him about it during another forty days the church is about to celebrate in imitation of his forty days in the desert, Lent. Simeon said:

Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be spoken against -- yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also (this to Mary) -- that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.

The cross, the crucifixion, the payment for redemption from sin, is present here too, as the central event in the life of Jesus, the life of Man, and the life of each man. Bishop Sheen once remarked that the crucifix is the autobiography of every Christian.

Ain't It Just A Christianised Groundhog Day Or Other Pagan Stuff?

As with Christmas, Candlemas is sometimes taken as simply a Christian version of pre-existing observances. 2 February is the date of Imbolc, a Celtic observance of the mid-point between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox. It was associated with the goddess Brigit, where sacred fires were maintained by 19 consecrated women in Kildare -- sort of an Irish Vesta -- some of whose legends seem to have been passed to the Christian St Brigit. And Brigit, through mingling of Irish and African slaves in the New World, may be the source of Maman Brigitte in Voodoo. Imbolc was also a time of weather forecasting, with Spring coming on, when snakes or badgers or other animals were watched to see if they would come out of their Winter hibernation, indicating a short Winter, or not, indicating a longer one.

Well, as with superficial similarities with pre-Christian Winter solstice observances, the content of fulfilling the Mosaic Law by the newborn Messiah is rather different than simultaneous pagan observances, including the references to light. But, as to watching animals for a clue to the length of the remaining cold weather -- hello, Groundhog Day, which is also, guess what, 2 February!

And then there's the Roman Lupercalia, the Wolf Feast, honouring the she-wolf who raised Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, celebrated this time of year too. In it, the Luperci, the priests of the wolf (lupus in Latin) sacrificed, well, originally people, but then two male goats and a dog, whose blood was put on the foreheads of other Luperci, then there was a feast, then the Luperci cut thongs from the animal skins -- called februa, from which comes our month name February! -- and put on the rest, running around town, with women coming forward to be lashed by the thongs to insure both fertility and easy childbirth.

Hey, this lasted well into Christian Rome and beyond, and some think Pope Gelasius in the 490s -- after the sack of Rome by the Visigoth under Alaric in 410 and by the Vandals under Geiseric (aka Genseric or Gaiseric) in 455 and the deposing of the last Roman Emperor in the West, Romulus Augustus, by the Arian Germanic-Italian King Odoacer on 4 September 476 -- used Candlemas to replace and remove Lupercalia.

So What's A Candlemas? This.

So what do we have here? Later, Christianed-over versions of universal themes, or, universal themes that derive from natural knowledge of God, and therefore have something to them, but could never even have guessed the Law and Gospel in the revealed word of God in Scripture.

Well, as we saw with Christmas and will see with Easter, both. You got your choice. Yeah, there is 2 February as modern and presumably more civilised and less superstitious observances that Winter will end sooner or later and nice weather come back -- Groundhog Day, which also has the advantage that you're way less likely to have the cops called on your Groundhog Day party than if you try to have a Lupercalia.

And, there's 2 February as something to which these things have only the crudest of inklings in the fallen heart of Man -- The Presentation of Our Lord and the Purification of Mary.

Collect for Candlemas, to collect our thoughts for the day. (From The Lutheran Hymnal)

Almighty and ever-living God, we humbly beseech Thy majesty that, as Thine only-begotten Son was this day presented in the Temple in the substance of our flesh, so we may be presented unto Thee with pure and clean hearts; by the same Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end.

The Transfiguration of Jesus, 29 January 2012.

2012-01-20T00:09:00.000-06:00

There are many miracles recorded in the New Testament, but this one is different in that it is the only of those miracles which happens to Jesus himself.

The Gospel accounts of this event are Matthew 17:1-9, Mark 9:2-8, and Luke 9:28-36. 2 Peter 1:16-18 and John 1:14 may also refer to this event.

There is much to be learned from this miracle. For one thing, it gave the Apostles, and now us as we read Scripture, something of a preview of the glorified and complete life in heaven. For another, it shows Jesus as the Messiah, he to whom the Law, represented by Moses, and the Prophets, represented by Elijah, point.

Those two things tell us much about Jesus, but there is something about us we can learn too. What was the Apostles' reaction to this event? They wanted to stay there, and devote themselves to basking in this event. But they were told not to, that there was work ahead in Jerusalem, and not only that, they were told to not even speak of it until after the Resurrection which they did not yet even understand.

Are we not also like that? We want to preserve sublime moments in this life and create conditions to produce them, literally or in monasteries of the mind, isolating and exempting ourselves from, even protecting against, what we are called to do in the rest of life. And are we not also told that we cannot remain in these mountain-top experiences but must now go into the Jerusalem of our own lives where there is much to be done, some of it endured? And though we live after the Resurrection, do we not also not fully understand what lies ahead in our own lives?

Jesus both calls us to these sublime moments, and also calls us to go forth from them.

There's more, which relates to all three points and drives them further home. In Lutheran observance, the commemoration of this event is located within the church year where it falls in the progression of the life of Jesus. Which is, between Advent and Christmas and Epiphany and his Baptism, and the Gesimatide preparation for Lent, Lent itself, the Holy Week commemoration of his suffering and death, and Easter his resurrection.

But in the Roman rite and Eastern Orthodoxy, it is celebrated on 6 August. This was always one of several dates on which it was celebrated. But, on 6 August 1456 news reached Rome that the Kingdom of Hungary had broken the Siege of Belgrade by the Ottoman Empire, which actually happened on 22 July. In honour of hearing the news, Pope Callixtus III made the Transfiguration a feast to be celebrated in the Roman rite on 6 August. In Eastern Orthodoxy it is the 11th of the Twelve Great Feasts, and also the middle of the Three Feasts of the Saviour in August.

We of course are not bound by that, and there is good reason to locate it where we have, since the point of the church year in the life of the church is to celebrate and know the life of Jesus. There are though a couple of interesting co-incidences (?) about the 6 August thing, Centuries later, on 6 August 1945, another type of transfiguration would happen. About 70,000 people died instantly and tens of thousands died later from the effects of the transfiguration, so to speak, of the first use of atomic weapons, in Hiroshima, Japan.

Thus the date of the news of one key military victory becomes the date of another. Even if either or both of these victories are seen as a turning point for the right side, Jesus calls us to another type of bodily transfiguration altogether, one not brought about by breaking a siege or nuclear radiation, and not a turning point in worldly events but the final triumph of God over the sin and its wages spiritual death brought into his Creation by us.

The other coincidence (?) is, 6 August 1991 was the start of the World Wide Web, a service available to the public on the Internet, which allows us to go down into "Jerusalem", where there is much to be done, in ways previously not possible. Now, for example one can go to the top sidebar element on this blog and donate to our beloved synod's efforts to bring relief to people in the aftermath of disasters both in the U.S. and around the world.

Some things to ponder about transfiguration and going down into Jerusalem, whether we celebrate the Transfiguration in the traditional Lutheran way on the last Sunday before Gesimatide, which this year is 29 January, or on 6 August. Or even if one is subjected to a wannabe version of the miserable revisionist Roman novus ordo, which does away with Gesimatide altogether (a post on what is Gesimatide and why you don't want to miss it is coming shortly here) and celebrates it as the last Sunday of a revised Epiphany Season on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, this year 19 February.

Eastern Church/Empire, Western Church/Empire, 2012.

2012-01-07T00:26:00.002-06:00

Festschrift on the Anniversary of the Roman Empire, 16 January 27 BC.

Preface.

Judas H blogging Priest, who writes a blog post THIS long then calls it a Festschrift and starts it with a Preface?

A little explanation. This post first appeared on 1 September 2007. It became the most consistently hit page on this blog. Material related to it had appeared in "A Wonder of the World and Forest Fires" on 27 August 2007, and then more came in two more posts, "25 July A.D. 306 in Eboracum, Britannia" on 25 July 2008, and "More Twelve Days of Christmas, 2008" on 27 December 2008. And there was more stuff not included in any of the four. So, in 2009 this post appeared as an entirely new entity, consisting of the new material and material rewritten from the four earlier posts, within the structure of the original Eastern/Western post, and published on 16 January, the date of the founding of the Roman Empire. For 2010, additional new material on the current state of the old secular powers was included. For 2011, the post was expanded yet again within the original format, to include related material from posts on Jerome, Augustine, and Boethius and their times that appeared in 2010. The 2012 version has only slight revisions, mostly updates on "where are they now".

Introduction.

This is then the keynote post, as it were, of this entire blog. Long as it is, this post demonstrated a simple point.

Which is, what we have in Western Christianity is simply the continuation of the state religion of the Western Roman Empire and in Eastern Christianity the continuation of the state religion of the Eastern Roman Empire. Both of them the continuation of the state church created mutually by both halves of the Roman Empire in the Edict of Thessalonica in 380. The reformation of the faith and church to its true self would then need to happen outside the former empire, which it did in the Lutheran Reformation, originating in Germany, restoring the faith and church of Jesus Christ from its "Babylonian Captivity" while retaining those later developments that do not contradict the Gospel, and not mistaking some of the former for the latter and rejecting them, as did the later Reformation.

This post will examine this development in fifteen sections.

I. The Founding of the Roman Empire on 16 January, 27 BC.
II. Diocletian Splits the Empire into East and West, July 285.
III. Constantine, 306.
IV. Constantine is Emperor both East and West, 325,
V. Theodosius, Last Emperor East and West, Opens New State Religion, 380.
VI. Who Is Damasus?
VII. The New State Religion, The Catholic Church, Tries To Shore Things Up. Jerome.
VIII. Elsewhere in 380, The New Church Gets A New Guy Named Gus.
IX. Theodosius, Last Emperor East and West, Closes Old State Religion, 392/3.
X. Western Empire Collapses in 476, Eastern Empire Continues to 1453.
XI. West Makes Comeback As Holy Roman Empire, 800, Lasts Until 1806.
XII. Successor Empires East And West Last Until World War I.
XIII. Where Are They Now?
XIV. Summation nostra aetate, In Our Time.
XV. Conclusion.

I. The Founding of the Roman Empire on 16 January, 27 BC.

Rome was founded from early settlements on 21 April 753 BC by the twin brothers Romulus (hence the name) and Remus. Romulus was the first of seven kings, the remaining six being elected. He divided the men into those fit for military service and those not, then from those not established the Senate as an advisory council of 300 men, 100 from each of the three Roman tribes, the Ramnes or Latins, the Tities or Sabines, and the Luceres or Etruscans, from the best men as he saw it. The word senate comes from the same root as senile, btw, meaning old man, take that as you will, and he called its members patres, fathers, their descendants being patricians. He also established a legislative body, the Comitia Curiata. If you're hearing modern English words committee and curia, you're right: it literally means a co-meeting of an assembly of men. There were 30 curiae, 10 for each tribe. The Senate proposed the new king to the Comitia Curiata, then the people voted and if successful the candidate would be determined by an augur to see if it was God's will, and if so he would then ask the Curia to grant him imperium, rule. The new king (rex) was pretty much everything -- top executive, lawmaker, judge, and king of sacred rites or rex sacrorum.

In 510 BC, the Senate and people of Rome changed this and established Res publica romana, the Roman Republic. The Senate governed, and the king's power was split, held by two consules (singular, consul) for a one year term, and the rex sacrorum as well as other chief priests and the virgins of Vesta were run by a new office, pontifex maximus, the supreme bridge builder literally, and in emergencies a dictator could be chosen for a six month term. Yes, there's still a pontifex maximus in Rome.

Some consider the Roman Empire to have begun with Julius Caesar's appointment by the Senate as dictator in perpetuity in 44 BC. Julius accepted this position in the Temple of Venus Genetrix, and the denarius was minted with his image and "dictator perpetuus" on one side and the goddess Ceres -- goddess of growth, agriculture and maternal love, the Roman version of the Greek Demeter -- and the title "augur pontifex maximus", high priest of the college of pontiffs, the highest position in the Roman religion, on the other. He did not rise to accept his position, and Senators fearful that he would make himself king assassinated him in the Senate on the Ides, aka the 15th, of March 44 BC.

Others consider the Roman Empire to have begun 2 September 31 BC when Octavian defeated his rival Marc Antony and his ally Cleopatra of Egypt at the naval Battle of Actium in the Ionian Sea, and also ordered the execution of Cleopatra's son Caesarion, who was 17 and was held to be, and very likely was, the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, though Julius had named Octavian, actually his grand nephew, his son and heir.

Others yet, and these are the guys who are right, consider the Empire to have begun with the Senate giving Octavius, or Octavian, the title augustus (honoured, or august, one) on 16 January 27 BC. With any rival claimants dead by suicide, execution or military defeat, Caesar Augustus, Octavian, was the undisputed ruler, and became pontifex maximus in 13 BC. And the rest is history, as they say.

Caesar Augustus was the first real Roman Emperor, though for some time the facade of the Roman Republic continued. Despite frontier fighting with those outside the Empire, the Empire itself enjoyed a peace, the pax augustana or pax romana, that would last from 27 BC to 180 AD, attaining its greatest extent under the emperor Trajan (98-117).

But by the third century, things became unworkable. The sheer size of the empire, the lack of any clear method of succession of power, and consequently frequent civil war, and the inability of the military to preserve internal order since they were concentrated on the borders to preserve external order, which in turn became impossible to maintain against invaders, about destroyed the empire.

II. Diocletian Splits the Empire into East and West, July 285.

Diocletian put a band aid on things, and in July 285 in Milan, then called Mediolanum, split the Empire in two, with his friend and fellow general officer Maximian first as "Caesar" of the West, then on 1 April 286 Maximus as "Augustus" of the Western half too, Diocletian remaining "Augustus" of the Eastern part. Diocletian set up Nicomedia, in modern Turkey, as the Eastern Roman capital in 286, and Milan as the Western Roman capital in 293, though Maximian largely ruled from Trier, then called Augusta Treverorum, in modern Germany. However, Maximian would commit suicide on Constantine's (we'll get to him) orders, and Diocletian it seems committed suicide over it, so retirement wasn't so good.

Diocletian also considered the expansion of Christianity a threat to the state and launched possibly the most violent persecutions in history, certainly the most violent since Nero.

The arrangement yielded no new pax romana, although the persecutions would end with Galerius in 311. The underlying problems remained. Running such a far flung empire would be a big job to-day, but then there was no Internet, no TV, no radio, no phones, no air travel, no railroads, no motor vehicles, etc. The split of the empire to manage it better resulted in an arrangement called the Tetrarchy: each half would have its Augustus, with a Caesar as an assistant. Diocletian was the last Emperor of an undivided Roman Empire. Going forward, Diocletian was Augustus in the East, with Galerius the Caesar, and Maximian was Augustus in the West, with a guy named Constantius the Caesar.

On 1 May 305, Diocletian and Maximian retired as Emperors simultaneously in Milan and Nicomedia -- the first to leave power voluntarily. This left the Caesars to become the Augusti, Galerius ruling the East and Constantius ruling the West.

Now, this Constantius had this wife Helena. Well, maybe. I mean, he had this Helena, but whether she was wife or concubine is not documented. Anyway, they had this son in 272 and he was named Constantine. But, in 293 when Diocletian named Constantius as Western Caesar, part of the deal was he divorce Helena and marry Theodora, the step-daughter of Maximian, the Augustus whose Caesar he was to be. Which he did. Helena did not remarry and lived afterward in obscurity, though her son Constantine was very devoted to her, and also wanted to become Caesar, but a military officer named Severus got the nod instead at the insistence of Galerius, the Eastern Augustus.

III. Constantine, 306.

Constantine served with his father's military campaigns in England, where he was trying to solve part of the mess described above, which historians call the Third Century Crisis. Their base of operations was a town called Eboracum.

Eboracum was the name of a city founded by the Romans in AD 71 in England. The Romans began conquering what is now England in AD 43. A group called the Brigantes originally collaborated with the Romans but became more troublesome and eventually the Roman Ninth Legion under General Quintus Petillius Cerialis was sent to put and keep them in order. This accomplished, a fort was established and given a Latinised version of the native Celtic name for the place, "field of yew trees". General Cerialis was named Governor of Britain by Roman Emperor Vespasian, who ruled from 69 until he died in 79, and was himself a distinguished military officer and had participated in the original Roman invasion in 43. Eboracum was a centre of Roman power in England for some time to come.

When Constantius died there on 25 July 306, his army immediately proclaimed Constantine his son Augustus, but, Galerius said Severus had the job. Constantine notified Galerius, and Galerius got so mad he about burned the portrait Constantine had sent. In the end, he gave him the title Caesar, not Augustus, which still went to Severus.

Constantine conquered his way back toward Rome, showing an ever more clear disgust for the "barbarians" beyond the Empire's frontiers. In Rome he was put down as the son of a harlot, a reference to Helena's unclear status, and Maxentius, son of Maximian, claimed the title Emperor. Maximian proposed a deal -- his daughter Fausta would be Constantine's wife, though he already had one, but hey, and he gets the title Augustus and will lay off Maxentius.

Constantine took the deal, dumped his wife and married Fausta in Augusta Treverorum (Trier) in 307. The next year Galerius was so concerned about the West's inability to settle down that he called a council with himself, Maximian and the retired Diocletian, whose compromises no-body accepted. By 310 Maximian was in open revolt, said Constantine was dead, took back the royal purple, but the army remained true to Constantine, who was of course very much alive. In July 310, captured at Massilia (now Marseille, France), Maximian hanged himself. At first Constantine said it was a personal tragedy, but then said it was the result of a conspiracy to kill him and he was offered suicide rather than be tried and executed, then issued a damnatio memoriae, a damnation of memory, sort of the original airbrushing out of the photos, where all coins, statues, inscriptions etc with a person's name were defaced or destroyed, against him.

When Diocletian, in retirement in a palace he had built in his native Dioclea (hence his name) near Salona, Dalmatia (modern Split, Croatia), heard of this he went into a deep despondency, and seeing the Tetrarchy once hailed as bringing order to the whole world in ruins through the actions of Constantine and his longtime friend and colleague Maximian dead, he died on 3 December 311, most likely by suicide too. So retirement didn't work out too well for either retired emperor.

This though left Constantine without the prop of legitimacy through Maximian, whose son Maxentius was ready to take up the fight, and on 25 July Constantine began to appeal to a supposed ancestry and a vision from Apollo as the authority for his rule rather than the tetrarchy and councils. Constantine won over Maxentius' forces throughout Italy and took Rome.

Constantine went to Milan, the Western Roman capital, to forge an alliance with the new guy in the East, Licinius. That was the marriage of Constantine's sister to Licinius. Supposedly this meeting is the origin of the Edict of Milan, granting tolerance to Christianity. Actually, it wasn't an edict, wasn't from Milan and wasn't the granting of tolerance. Galerius had done that just before his death in 311, and the Edict of Milan is actually a letter to the governor of Bithynia, a Roman province in what is now Turkey containing a town named Nicaea, by Licinius granting tolerance to all religions and restoration to Christians of property taken from them during persecutions, and signed by both emperors. The "Edict" was more of a middle ground from tolerance per se into a favoured status with special provisions for Christians, leading to the eventual proclamation of Christianity as the state religion.

But the alliance fell apart. War broke out between the two, Constantine in the West and Licinius in the East, and by 320 Licinius began persecuting Christians again, allied with Goths of the native pagan religions, and by 324 full scale civil war was underway. Constantine's forces won, sporting a symbol said to have been revealed to him, the labarum, or chi-rho. Licinius surrendered, on a deal that his life be spared, but Constantine had him killed the next year anyway.

IV. Constantine is Emperor both East and West, 325.

That next year, 325, was a big one. From that point on, Constantine was the emperor both West and East. He began to rebuild Byzantium, close by Nicomedia, as the second or New Rome (Nova Roma), later renaming it Constantinople, Constantinopolis actually, meaning Constantine's City, imagine that. The ceremony of dedication on 11 May 330 was partly Christian and partly pagan -- and you thought Yankee Stadium was syncretism! He also, though not a bishop, not a priest, not even a baptised Christian, called a church council to settle correct theology about Jesus against primarily the Arians. Well, it just might have helped him politically to have one religion for his realm too. You get to do that when you rule your known world.

To top that, next year in 326 he did something even more amazing than calling a council of the Christian church when you're not a Christian -- that is, if you believe Baptism is a means of grace uniting one to the life of Christ rather than through a personal decision -- namely, he had his son and wife killed, with his mother's prodding. Exactly what that was all about will probably never be known, but it was one of two things. Supposedly Fausta his wife was raped by Crispus his son (how classically Greek) or the two were having an affair, and either he discovered this and had them both killed, or, Fausta lied that it happened to keep Crispus, who was not her son, from being named emperor over her sons, he believed it and had his son killed, then found out she lied and had her killed. Either way, wow.

Days Of Our Lives and then some more. Crispus was the son of Constantine and his wife Minervina, whom Constantine divorced to marry Fausta to get on with his upward career mobility. And here's Helena his mother, who got dumped by gramps Constantius for exactly the same reason. How bizarre is that? Fausta won though -- Crispus was executed but her three sons all became Roman emperors. Oddly, none of them revoked the damnatio memoriae of her enacted by Constantine. At any rate, the whole thing changed Constantine forever, and he never set foot in the Western Empire again.

So he who was first proclaimed emperor in a far flung northwest outpost of the Western Empire by an authority that had no authority to do it, the army, ends up solidifying the Roman Empire in the East as the West slowly crumbles. By 337 Constantine was wearing out from being Great and all, and he finally sought Baptism on 22 May just before he died, from not one of the victorious Trinitarians at the Council of Nicaea he called, but from Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, long a court favourite despite a brief exile and chief apologist for Arius. Really. I'm not making this up.

Not to mention Constantine retained the title pontifex maximus, the title of Roman emperors as head of the pre-Christian Roman pagan state religion priesthood. Maybe that's why there's no pope in the East. Well, actually there are "popes" in the East, but in the pontifex sense, not in the pontifex maximus sense of the one in Rome. After Constantine's death, the Western Empire was split between two of his sons, and the East went to his middle son, all three having variants of his name. Constant power struggle from within and invasions from without destabilised everything.

Eventually, a Spanish military officer in the Roman army named Theodosius became Augustus/Emperor in the East in August 378 by Gratian the Western Emperor after Valens the Eastern Emperor was killed in battle. Later, when Valentinian II, the remaining Western ruler, was found hanged on 15 May 392 -- the preacher at his funeral in the Western capital Milan, the bishop thereof, who had been its territorial governor before he changed jobs, Ambrose, as in "Saint" Ambrose, steering clear of whether it was murder or suicide -- he became Emperor of both East and West, the last to do that. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

V. Theodosius, Last Emperor East and West, Opens A New State Religion, 380.

While the end of the persecutions was welcome per se, the favoured status of Christianity also transformed the religion from one for whose truth one would rather die than betray to a religion one joined for political and social gain. The transformation of Christianity's status was complete on 27 February 380, when the Eastern Emperor Theodosius, in concert with his Western co-Emperor counterparts Gratian and Valentinian II, issued the Edict of Thessalonica, which declared that Nicene Christianity is the official state religion of the Roman Empire overall, that all subjects of the Empire must hold this faith as delivered from the Apostles to Rome and preserved by then current Pope Damasus I and then current Bishop of Alexandria Peter, that these alone shall be called "Catholic Christians", because they alone would be of the catholic, meaning universal, faith of the Empire, and that all others are heretics and not even churches, subject to such punishment as the Empire should choose to visit upon them. He deposed some bishops and appointed others in the new state religion, and ended state subsidy for the former state religion. Goodbye my kingdom is not of this world, hello apostolic succession in communion with the Roman state pope. Goodbye catholic church, hello Catholic Church.

VI. Who Is Damasus?

So who's this Damasus dude in Rome? Man, papal elections just ain't what they used to be. Twice over actually. Once upon a time, they were a matter of the clergy and people of the area choosing a bishop, or overseer, with overseers from nearby areas confirming it. But by this time we have Constantine, and Christianity attaining respectable state-recognised status, and the Emperor confirmed newly elected bishops. That's helpful because sometimes more than one guy claimed to be elected, sometimes in more than one election!

That's what happened with Damasus. When Pope Liberius, whom the Emperor Constantine had thrown out of Rome, died on 24 September 366, one faction supported Ursinus, the previous pope's deacon, while another, which had previously supported a rival pope, Felix II, supported Damasus. The patrician class, the old noble families of Rome, supported Damasus, but the plebian class, the regular folks, and the deacons supported Ursinus. Each was elected, in separate elections. Some real apostolic succession there, oh yeah.

It gets worse. There was outright rioting between supporters of the two, each side killing the other, so bad that the prefects of the city had to be called on to restore order. Damasus got formally recognised, and then his supporters commenced a slaughter of 137 of Ursinus' supporters, right in a church. Damasus was accused of murder, and hauled up on charges before a later prefect, but, being the favourite of the wealthy class, they bought the support of the Emperor and got Damasus off. He was known as Auriscalpius Matronarum, the ladies' ear scratcher.

Damasus was "pope" from 366 until he died on 11 December 384. It was during this "papacy", we have to remember to really get what was going on here, the Emperors East and West made the church as headed by Damasus, and Peter in Antioch, the official state church and the one recognised as "catholic", in the Edict of Thessalonica on 27 February 380. That date, and not the words "tu es Petrus" in the Gospel, not Pentecost, or any sort of succession from the Apostles but simply from the Roman Empire, is the birthday of the Catholic Church, as distinct from the catholic church. It was also during Damasus' papacy that the Emperor Gratian. one of the signatories to the Edict of Thessalonica, refused the traditional title of pontifex maximus, which then became associated with the bishop of Rome as the chief priest of the Roman state religion. In sum, this is the era of the beginning of the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (Babylon of course being a figure for Rome).

VII. The New State Religion, The Catholic Church, Tries To Shore Things Up. Jerome.

In 382, Damasus called a guy named Jerome back to Rome to help him shape things up. What was being shaped up was the new Catholic Church, which by Imperial edict was now the only church entitled to the name, all others being heretics and deserving of such punishment as the Empire should choose to inflict and this "Catholic Church" the official state religion. The Western Roman Empire was falling apart and just decades away from going under, so, as with Constantine, a lot of this was politically motivated and had to do with staving that off.

So who's this Jerome dude? Jerome was born a pagan in a town called Stridon, which was in the Roman territory called Dalmatia. The town no longer exists because the Goths trashed it in 379, and no-body knows exactly where it was, except that it was in Dalmatia, which was more or less modern Croatia and Bosnia and Slovenia. As a young man he went to Rome to pursue classical education, and by his own account pursue the various extra-curricular activities often found in student life then as now. Somewhere along the line he converted to Christianity and was baptised.

After some years in Rome he set out for France, well, Gaul, and ended up in Trier. Man, everything happens in Trier, which is about the most magnificent and enchanting place it has been my good fortune to visit, ever, anywhere. Just the place itself blew me away when I was there and I didn't know even half of this stuff then. Anyway, here in this most wonderful place Jerome seems to have taken up theology. Then about 373 or so he sets out for what is now called the Middle East, particularly Antioch, in what is now Turkey and one of the oldest centres of Christianity. It was there that he came to give up secular learning altogether and focus on the Bible, learning Hebrew from Jewish Christians, and, apparently seized with remorse for his past behaviour, got into all sorts of ascetic penitential practices. Always a danger -- the Good News just isn't news enough, gotta have works in there to really be forgiven and saved!

But in 382 he goes back to Rome again, this time as assistant to Pope Damasus I. Jerome was no slouch at matronly ear tickling himself, and once back soon had a little group of wealthy patrician widows around him, whose money supported him, a Paula in particular. And he had this ascetic works-righteousness thing going, into which he got them all. Nothing like having lots of someone else's money to support you if you want a monastic ascetic life. Hell yes.

In fact, the daughter of Paula, a lively young woman named Blaesilla, after just four months of having to live this way, died! Yeah, died. On top of which Jerome tells Paula not to mourn her daughter. This got the Romans really pissed, there was an inquiry into just what was really going on between Jerome and Paula, and then when Damasus died in 384, with that support gone, Jerome was forced out of Rome!

So where's he go? Where else, the Eastern Empire, where they really get into all this monkery and fasting and stuff. Paula and her money follow. The whole sham of a works based sparse life funded by patrician wealthy-class money. There's some real apostolic stuff for you. Lemme tell ya, if somebody wants to convince you of their mistaking the physiological effects of self induced glucose denial for some sort of spiritual state of attainment, you'd be better off running right to the nearest McDonald's and ordering a double quarter pounder, which, if memory serves, is combo 4 on the menu. Personally I like Burger King or Arby's or our Nebraska favourite Runza better.

This sort of stuff is not self-denial, it's life denial. Utterly pathological. It is no curb whatever to excess and greed, but rather an equally odious extreme reaction to it, both extremes equally devoid of the Gospel altogether. It comes rather from an empire about to collapse under the tension of its classic past and Christian present and efforts to reconcile them from within, with huge civil unrest in its wake, and threats from without in the West. Which was bad enough, but in the East, which did not collapse for another thousand years or so, this nonsense continued unabated, which is equally bad. The opposite of greed and excess is not this pathological repression, but Judas H Priest, just eat a normal balanced diet and go about a life of use to God and your fellow Man, stay in your parish where you find everything that made the saints saints, the Word, the Word preached, the Sacrament, and your fellow Christians.

VIII. Elsewhere in 380, The New Church Gets A New Guy Named Gus.

A Roman citizen, from what are now called Berbers, named Augustine is teaching in Carthage in 380, seven years away from being baptised by the state bishop, Ambrose, of the state church in the state's Western capital by then, Milan. Remember, Emperor Diocletian, the last of an undivided Roman Empire, had made Milan, then called Mediolanum, the Western capital in 293 and Nicomedia, now Izmit Turkey, the Eastern capital in 286. And, btw, called his new provincial units diocese, after himself. A secular unit, not a church one, and the modern church diocese is but an echo of the religious part of the Roman Imperial state unit.

Constantine moved the Eastern capital to Byzantium, renamed it Constantinople, which is now Istanbul Turkey. The Roman Senate, however, still in Rome, was not shall we say comfortable with this new state religion in the two capitals of the Empire, and lots of academic disputes and apologetics on both sides went back and forth, but no violence. During this unsettled time Augustine gets appointed to the most prestigious professorship in his world, at the Western capital Milan in 384, and is all caught up in the swirling controversy between the old state religion and classic philosophy and the new state Catholic Church, just four years old.

He also gets caught up in his mother Monica's designs for his career. Now with a prestigious academic position, his longstanding relationship with a woman he never names but called "the one", of some 14 years complete with son, called Adeodatus, meaning "given by God", hasta go according to mom. So he caves and sends her away, she saying she will never be with another man, he finding a new concubine to tide him over until the proper social marriage his mom, "Saint" Monica, arranges with a then 11 year old girl, can happen. I'm not making this up!

And about concubines. Ain't what you think. A concubine in ancient Rome was simply a wife that Roman law forbade you to marry due to your or her social class. These marriages denied legality by Imperial law were rather common, and the church didn't come down on them since it wasn't the couple's fault they weren't legally married. Something to keep in mind when "the one" gets called concubine in the modern sense, their relationship passed off as merely lustful, and the son as "illegitimate".

No wonder the dude was confused! His whole world swirling in unsettled controversy and mom's running his life like a beauty pageant mom. And then, as he's all upset about his life, he has this really weird experience where he hears a kid's voice saying "Take, read" (the famous tolle, lege). Now what he was told to take and read you won't likely find in your local Christian bookstore, but was among the most widely read books, first in the Imperial Christian state church and then through the Middle Ages, being a Life of St Anthony of the Desert, written by St Athanasius about 360, the original in Greek but best known in a Latin translation made about ten or so years later.

Hoo-boy, old Tony. He was a wealthy Egyptian who became Christian at about age 34, so far so good, sold everything and took up with a local hermit. Tony in NO way was the "Founder of Monasticism", as religious hermits of various religions were common on the outskirts of cities; Philo the Jewish-Egyptian writer mentions them all, sharing the Platonic idea of having to get out of the world to get into an ideal. Pure Platonist Idealism. Sure glad Jesus didn't do that or let his Apostles do it either when they wanted to, but went back to Jerusalem where real life had things for them to do.

But old Tony went the other direction, and left even the outskirts for the desert itself to get away from it all to get into it all. But the crowds followed -- everybody loves an exotic "holy man" -- and Tony took on the more advanced cases of this mania and left the rest to his associates, a Christian Oracle of Delphi, which "guidance" was later variously collected as the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, or Apophthegmata, if you want a word to impress somebody in a combox or something.

Anyhoo, Gus reads this in 386, and on the Easter Vigil of 387, Ambrose baptises Gus and his son. The next year, 388, he determines to return home to North Africa. Which he did, but along the way both his mother and his son died, so he arrives alone in the world, and understandably unsure of himself once again. Next he sells the family stuff and gives the money away, except the house which he turns into a sort of lay monastery. I guess that's what you do when you read about dudes in the desert, rather than go through the grief and live on in the world of people.

Meanwhile, the struggling Roman Empire and its new state Catholic Church are on a roll. The Imperial state Catholic Church destroys the Temple of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi in 390 and the Serapeum and Great Library in Alexandria in 391, in which same year Augustine was ordained presbyter, or priest, in the official state church, in 391 in Hippo, now Annaba, Algeria.

This mostly academic and political controversy, in which Gus' unsettled life had its context and of which it is typical, changed when Western Emperor Valentinian II was found hanged in his home on 16 May 392, as we saw above. His half brother and co-Emperor Gratian was already dead, killed 25 August 383 in Lyon France by forces of Roman generals who thought he was losing his grip. The official word was Valentinian was a suicide, but his wife and others though he was done in by his military power behind the throne, the Frank Arbogastes, and the Imperial Milan court church's bishop, Ambrose, as we saw left the question open, suicide being a no-no for a Christian Emperor held up as a hero.

IX. Theodosius, Last Emperor East and West, Closes Old State Religion, 392/3.

On 22 August 392, Arbogastes, who being a Frank and not Roman could not be Emperor, names a Roman Christian named Eugenius Western Emperor, who though Christian was sympathetic to traditional Roman religion and started replacing officials sympathetic to the Eastern Empire in the West. The Eastern Empire put off recognition of the new Western regime, and finally in January of 392 Theodosius declared his two-year-old son Honorius as Western Emperor and begins preparing an invasion of the Western Empire, which began in May 394 and concluded in the victory at The Frigidus 6 September 394. Arbogastes commits suicide and Eugenius is beheaded by the Catholic forces of Theodosius.

Also in 392, Theodosius and his Roman Empire and its Catholic Church shut down the Eleusinian Mysteries. Huh? What the hell were they and why is shutting them down a big deal? The Eleusinian Mysteries were one of the two great foundational rituals of Rome dating actually from ancient Greece before it, the other being the Olympic Games (yeah, they get shut down too, but we'll get to that shortly).

The basis for the Eleusinian Mysteries was the story about Hades seeing Persephone out one day picking flowers, went nuts for her and took her away to, well, Hades, the realm of death, with the OK of Zeus, her dad. Her mom Demeter, aka Ceres by the Romans, goddess of life, therefore fertility and agriculture, went looking for her and abandoned her duties, causing famine and drought, and finally with the help of Zeus found her and thus ended the calamity of the first Winter with the first Spring. However, Persephone had to abide by certain terms. She had to spend four months with Hades in the Underworld, four months with Demeter, and the last four she could choose, and she chose Demeter. The four months with Hades are the hot, dry Greek Summer, prone to drought and forest fires, during which the saddened Demeter neglects her duties until Persephone comes back.

So what were The Mysteries? Nobody knows the details for sure. They were secret initiation rites into the deal about Demeter and Persephone, thought to unite the initiate with the gods, with divine power and a good outcome in the afterlife. Nobody knows exactly how they started, but they drew from all over, open to all, free and slave, male or female, as long as you hadn't murdered anyone and weren't a barbarian, which is not what you may think, it's someone who can't speak Greek and instead makes stupid sounds like bar-bar, literally. There were Greater and Lesser Mysteries, the Lesser being done every year around March, when Summer is just around the corner, and the Greater every five years in late Summer, when the Fall rains and planting come and the new year (in the local calendar) begins.

Next, in 393, Theodosius, his Roman Empire and its Catholic Church, shut down the Olympic Games? OK, what the hell were they and why was shutting them down a big deal?

The Olympic Games began in 776 BC. The Greek city states were almost constantly at war, but for the Games, there was peace. In addition to athletic qualification, one had to be male, of the free class, and Greek speaking to participate. There are several myths as to why the games began, but why the games ended is clear. The Emperor Theodosius I, aka Theodosius the Great, the last Emperor of both the Eastern and Western Roman Empire, outlawed them after the games of 393 AD as part of the establishment of Christianity as defined at the Council of Nicea as the state religion, as we saw.

This also ended a practical effect of the games -- time was counted in Olympiads, the four year interval between games, giving a unity to the various calendars of the city-states, and this of course ended with the games no longer being held. The site remained, however, until it was destroyed in an earthquake in the Sixth Century. In the 2004 modern Olympic Games, the shot put contest was held in the ancient stadium. What's a stadium? Where the stade (stadion) race is run, the original single event of the Olympics, a sprint of somewhere around 200 metres, the exact length unknown. Over time other events were added, and the games were one of the two great rituals of ancient Greece, the other being the Eleusinian Mysteries.

The Games of course have their modern version, though one no longer needs to be male or Greek speaking to participate. Or wait for Summer -- there's Winter Games now too! So we now can have something like neither the Greeks nor the entire ancient world ever had, the incomparable Katarina Witt. Beyond her many accomplishments in the Olympics and since, the free programme at the 1994 Winter Olympics to "Sag mir wo die Blumen sind" (Where Have All The Flowers Gone) was not only a stunning accomplishment of art and athletics, an expression of a Germany re-united from the latest of its many sad episodes throughout history, a message of peace and hope to Sarajevo, then torn by war and the site of her first Olympic gold medal, but, Sarajevo being the match for the fire that consumed the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire made from the remnants of the Roman Empire that had emerged from the Greek and Roman antiquity before it resulting in two horrific world wars and the emergence of the contemporary world from the ruins of all that, connects to and is expressive of the enduring human spirit through the entire march of events we are covering here.

You might say, this post is exactly about where the flowers went.

Theodosius, as we saw, shut down the Eleusinian Mysteries too the year before in 392 There were a few holdouts from the Nicene Christian end, but they were stomped out four years later by Alaric, King of the Goths, who was an Arian Christian. So, between Nicene and Arian Christianity and an earthquake, the more or less thousand year era of the Olympic Games and two thousand year era of the Eleusinian Mysteries came to an end.

And speaking of forest fires, in Persephone's four months with Hades, aka Summer, of 2007, massive forest fires nearly destroyed the site of the ancient Olympics, which hosted one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the twelve metre tall ivory and gold Statue of Zeus, but thanks to modern firefighting, unless you think Zeus relented to save what's left and let Persephone come back and then Demeter got active again, what's left is still left and made it through this most recent threat.

On 6 September 394 the Eastern Emperor Theodosius I defeated the Western Emperor Eugenius at the conclusion of the two-day Battle of The Frigidus. Judas, more stuff, what the hell is that? It's the conclusion of Theodosius' preparation to stamp out Western resistance the Edict of Thessalonica. The Frigidus is a river, the Latin name means "cold" as its English descendant "frigid" suggests. It is in northeastern Italy and Slovenia and is now called the Vipacco in Italian and the Vipava in Slovene, and of course I gotta tell ya it is called the Wipbach in modern German, or, as b and p get sort of interchangeable in German sometimes, the Wippach. At the end of which, remember, Arbogastes commits suicide and Eugenius is beheaded by the Catholic forces of Theodosius.

Right after that, the same year, 394, the Imperial state Catholic Church, still on a roll -- having destroyed the Temple of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi in 390 and the Serapeum and Great Library in Alexandria in 391, the year Augustine was ordained a priest in the official church, and having ended the two great rituals of ancient Greece, the Eleusinian Mysteries in 392 and the Olympic Games after the ones in 393 -- puts out the fire considered essential to Rome's survival at the Temple of Vesta, and disbands the women who were personally selected by the pontifex maximus, when that meant the head of the traditional Roman religion rather than the head of the new state Catholic religion.

Hey, Vestal Virgins, I've heard of that! Well, there's more that just the pop culture reference and the jokes. The Temple of Vesta. So who was Vesta, why build her a temple and who did it. Vesta, though she resembles somewhat the Greek goddess Hestia, is a real Roman thing moreso than the Olympic Games and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Vesta is the goddess of hearth and home, but, not just one's own hearth and home, but the whole Roman thing too, and her sacred fire was the connexion to life itself, and the gods.

The original temple, called Aedes Vestae in Latin, was built by Numa Pompilius, the second King of Rome, from 715 to 673 BC. The fire was tended by women specially selected by the pontifex maximux and bound to celibacy for 30 years. One of the early ones, Rhea Silvia, according to Livy in Ab Urbe Condita -- which means "from the city (Rome, of course) having been founded" -- was found by the god of war Mars in the forest, had sex, and gave birth to the twins Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, but, as she wasn't supposed to be doing stuff like this, and when her uncle Amulius heard of it ordered a servant to kill the boys, but the servant instead put them in a basket in the River Tiber, whereupon they were discovered by a wolf, who, having just lost her own cubs, raised them.

So this whole thing goes right to the heart of Rome's self-concept, individually and corporately. To shut it down is to shut down Rome, people, city, empire, the works. So when Theodosius shut it down, what with his Catholic Church he himself proclaimed and all as the new Roman religion, this was either the end of everything, or a last step in the victory of the new religion over its pagan past.

Theodosius had started out fairly tolerant of pagans, whose support particularly among the ruling class he needed, but got himself excommunicated by St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, in 390. His governor in Thessalonica had been assassinated, and he ordered massacres in retaliation, but after excommunication did public penance for months and his orders against pagan institutions probably were an extension of this.

Guess what? The next year, 395, Augustine becomes religious head, which is called bishop, of the Roman Imperial administrative unit called a diocese, in Hippo. Guess Gus knew on which side his bread is buttered. You damn well better believe because of the authority of the "Catholic Church" when it has the authority to pull off stuff like this!

The Battle of The Frigidus effectively ended any Western resistance to the new state church. But, this enormous civil war though left the Western Empire greatly weakened, and it collapsed a thousand years before the Eastern Empire did, starting with the Visigoths, under their King Alaric, an Arian Christian, sacking Rome on 24 August 410. Augustine, by then 56 and still Bishop of Hippo, then writes more Platonism to assure the shocked Romans that though the joint was a mess, the real and ideal City of God was the real winner despite the total mess. Ideal behind the apparent real, neo Platonic junk like that, rather than one reality, some of which we see and some we don't, but all one thing, and none of it to be despised because God made it all.

What's of Lutheran interest about this? Well, whaddya think, on Sunday morning do we have a toned down Greek mystery religion filtered through Nicene Christianity and the new Imperial state religion, loosely based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish messianism that would have passed into history long ago were it not so reinvented through Greek mythology, or, do we have the revealed religion of God through Jesus Christ, completing and fulfilling the incomplete hints of it found in human religion in Greek antiquity and everywhere and in the previously revealed religion of the Old Covenant?

I'll go with the latter. And I'm glad the site of the classic Games made it through the 2007 fires.

But those old Roman families knew a thing or two about survival and they became papal families, eventually supplying Pope Gregory (another Great), made Pope 3 September 590, who ruled the state church like a real Roman indeed though the state whose church it was, was in ruins.

X. Western Empire Collapses in 476, Eastern Empire Continues to 1453.

The Western Empire continued until 4 September 476, when Romulus Augustus (what a name, combining one of the traditional founders of Rome with Octavian its first emperor!) was deposed deposed by the Germanic king Odoacer and never succeeded. So he was the last Western Roman Emperor. Well, sort of. His father, Flavius Orestes, was appointed by Julius Nepos as a senior general officer, magister militum, working with the Germanic foederati. The foederati -- see the word federal in there? -- were non-Roman tribes bound by a treaty (foedus) where though they weren't citizens they weren't colonies either. But they had to supply troops to Rome, and by this time the Western Roman military relied heavily on them. Orestes struck a deal with a Germanic foederati king, Odoacer, to overthrow Julius Nepos, which they did on 28 August 475 in Ravenna, which had become the Western capital in 402. Nepos fled to, guess where, Dalmatia, same as old Diocletian. Orestes put his son Romulus Augustus on the throne though he was barely a teen. But then Odoacer turned on Orestes and captured and killed him on 28 August 476, then deposed Romulus on 4 September 476, though letting him live in consideration of his young age. The Roman Senate, acting for Odoacer, asked the Eastern Emperor Zeno to reunite the Empire, but Zeno said Julius Nepos was the rightful ruler, yet allowed Odoacer to rule in Zeno's name though Nepos was recognised as Emperor.

So, you could say Julius Nepos was the last Western Emperor too. Nepos, btw, was killed in exile by his own soldiers, caught in the middle of his own efforts to retake power from Odoacer and the efforts of the Emperor before him, Glycerius, to exact revenge. Glycerius was not a rightful Emperor, having been appointed by a previous magister militum, Gundobad, rather than the rightful appointer, the Eastern Emperor Leo I, who eventually appointed his nephew Nepos (hence the name). Glycerius surrendered to him without a fight, Gundobad having abandoned him, in consideration for which Nepos made him bishop of Salona, Dalmatia. When Nepos was killed 25 April 480, Odoacer, who wasn't even a Nicene Christian but an Arian, made him bishop of Milan, Ambrose's old seat. Helluva deal.

Ah yes, bishops in a direct line of succession from the Apostles.

Didn't go so well for old Odoacer though. His popularity with what was left of the Romans and his treaties with the Franks and Visigoths (more Germans) got the Eastern Emperor really worried. So he started a political campaign against Odoacer in 488, which in the end got the Ostrogoths (East Goths, more Germans) under Zeno convinced they had to get rid of Odoacer. So, the king of the Ostrogoths, Theodoric (another Great), takes up arms against Odoacer, with the promise he would get Italy if successful, which would conveniently too get rid of the Ostrogoths for Zeno. By 490, Theodoric had defeated Odoacer in three major battles, and laid seige to Odoacer's capitol Ravenna, which lasted three years, but neither side could totally defeat the other. So, on 2 February 493 the two signed a treaty to share rule, and a banquet was arranged to celebrate peace. At the banquet, Theodoric proposes a toast, then personally kills Odoacer, becoming the sole ruler in the West, based in Ravenna! Both these guys were Arian Christians btw.

Theodoric, though technically a vassal of the Eastern Empire, in effect was the new if unofficial Western emperor. But the tensions between the old Roman culture and the new Roman culture imposed from the East remained. Being an Arian, he was not an insider with the Nicene East, and became suspicious of his Western Nicene subjects, to the extent that he had his own magister officiorum, director of government services, a Roman named Boethius, who was a man of great learning, executed in 525. Many other similar but lesser Romans followed. All of them, Roman and Germanic types alike, were real big on preserving the old Roman world (Rome is in the West after all!) but now modified by its new synthesis with Christianity, to carry on into the future. But the East/West, Arian/Nicene, Roman/Germanic tensions were enormous, and it would take several centuries for this effort to come to be, as we shall see below, with the coronation of Charlemagne in 800, and then Otto and the Holy Roman Empire in 962 as the final transfer of imperial succession from the old to the new Rome, "apostolic succession" in the state church part of the imperial succession, and this successor had a pretty long run, until 1806, outlasting the Eastern Empire which fell in 1453, and the state churches of both still survive without their states!

The Eastern Empire considered itself and called itself Roman to the end. Latin was for some time its official language, though Greek was used outside the court and eventually became official. Yet in Rome, the elite spoke Greek, though in time that passed too. Each half, while sharing many common elements, took on its own culture even though the Roman borrowed much from the Greek, and the eventual prominence of each's language both symbolises and contributes to the outcome.

The East outlasted the West by about a thousand years. It continued until its defeat by the Ottomans in 1453. The Ottoman Empire itself lasted from 1299 to 1922 when the British Empire, having won World War I, partioned it into the Middle Eastern countries that are in the news almost daily right now.

After the Eastern Empire fell, Czarist Russia, having long since become Eastern Orthodox from the Eastern Roman Empire, considered itself the "third" Rome -- Rome itself being the first and Constantinople being the second. Constantinople, the Eastern Empire capital itself a rename of Byzantium by Constantine after Constantine, got renamed again as Istanbul on 28 March 1930 by the secular Republic of Turkey, which would no longer deliver mail addressed to "Constantinople" and had moved the capital of Turkey to Ankara, the new name for Angora.

XI. West Makes Comeback as Holy Roman Empire, 800, Lasts Until 1806.

Hey, whatever happened to Eboracum, where his father's army had proclaimed Constantine Emperor? It's still there! After the Western Empire fell in 476, the Angles -- more Germans -- invaded and took over and called the city Eoferwic. Then the Vikings -- not more Germans exactly, but Germanic -- blew in in 866 and called it Jorvik, probably a re-pronunciation easier on Viking ears. Then in 1066 the Normans -- not a bunch of guys named Norman but people from Normandy just across the English Channel -- really blew in and took over, William the Conqueror sacking the place, and in time the name morphed from Jorvik to York, with variant spellings. And that's what it is to-day -- York, England. And everyone knows about the new York in, well, New York. Guess what, there's a York here in Nebraska too!

So what's that all about, a French smoothing over of rough Germanic edges? Some see it that way, but that's not really the deal. The Normans themselves result from Vikings -- there you go, more Germanic types -- raiding the area, joining up with the locals, providing a hedge against yet more Vikings raiding the area, taking on the local culture and adding their original one, and becoming The Northmen, from which the names Norman and Normandy derive.

So it's Frenched-over Vikings on top of Vikings on top of Germans on top of Romans on top of Celts on top of, some say, the Old Ones. That's where my ancestors came from. And they say the US is a melting pot! True that, but where we came from is a melting pot too.

Well, once the Western Empire fell, the West attempted to come out of what are called the Dark Ages of overrun by the "Huns", those formerly outside the Empire, with the formation of the Holy Roman Empire when on Christmas 800 Leo III, the Bishop of Rome, an office which to this day bears the title pontifex maximus, crowned the King of the Franks Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor (imperator augustus, to be exact). This was a conscious attempt to re-establish the Western Roman Empire -- though someone famously said it was neither Roman nor holy nor an empire -- and lasted about a thousand years, until the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, dissolved it in the Napoleonic Wars in 1806.

Things were off to a roaring good start, with the chief religious functionary of the state religion crowning the head of state and all. Charlemagne put to-gether a pretty good empire, emphasising -- in case you thought this was a new idea with the current European Union -- a pan-European identity. Well, actually, his grandfather Charles Martel, which means "The Hammer", put it to-gether for him but did not take the title Emperor, or even King as his son Pepin did at Pope Zachary's nomination. Charlemagne completes the transition from his grandfather and father as Roman Emperor, Imperator Augustus to be exact, so crowned by the Roman Pope in 800.

But we all die, even emperors, and Charlemagne died 28 January 814 in Aachen (Germany), his capital. He was buried the same day in Aachen Cathedral -- hell, call it right, the Kaiserdom, Imperial Cathedral -- which he had begun as his palace chapel and was consecrated in Mary's (as in Jesus' mother) honour by Pope Leo III in 805. In 1978 it was among the 12 places designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. An eyewitness account says when Emperor Otto III opened the vault in 1000, Charlegmagne was sitting upright as if still ruling, only the tip of his nose having decomposed. It's been opened since without similar report.

Back to the story, Charlegmagne the year before he died had named his only surviving son who wasn't a bastard -- not what you think, I mean in the technically correct sense of not the legitimate offspring of a husband and wife -- his successor. Well, sort of. It's always "sort of" when it's "Roman". Charlemagne was actually married to Desiderata, princess daughter of the Lombard (a Germanic tribe in northern Italy) king Desiderius as part of a peace with him, in 770, but the next year the marriage was annulled, Pope Stephen III having said Pepin said he was to be married to someone Frankish, and she went home to her dad's court and war came in 774. This getting rid of inconvenient first wives is sort of a pattern, isn't it -- right along with the church finding it OK, in case you thought Henry VIII started it. But, there were no kids and the next year he married the 13 year old daughter of Swabian (Southern Germany) Count Gerold, Hildegard. There were nine kids, though he appears to have had this Himiltrude in there somewhere as a wife or concubine, so maybe Hildegard was Wife #3. Oh well.

Anyway, this son and successor is Louis, known as the Pious. Originally, following the usual custom, Louis was to share his father's rule divided with his brothers, and such were Charlemagne's provisions in the Divisio regnorum (Division of the Rule) of 806, but by 814 his two brothers who also weren't bastards were dead so Louis got the whole pie. He rushed to Aachen and crowned himself, though on 5 October 816 Pope Stephen IV, who followed after Leo III who had crowned his father, crowned him officially in Rheims. Then ordered everyone to be loyal to Louis.

Louis tried real hard, but most of his rule was plagued by continual frontier wars with those outside his realm and civil wars, three of them, with those inside his realm. Starting to sound like the problems that always get Roman Empires -- running a big realm with no modern communications or travel, keeping the lid on externally and internally, and specifically re internally providing for an orderly succession, Gets 'em every time. Louis had his unmarried sisters and bastard brothers enter convents and monasteries, to avoid power brokering marriages -- he also ordered all cloisters to follow the Rule of St Benedict, kick ass Louis! -- and provided for an orderly succession in his ordinatio imperii of 817, which both followed the custom of dividing among sons and also the custom of the first-born taking pride of place, that being Lothair who would be Emperor.

But there were problems. His nephew Bernard was also in on the succession deal, but when he revolted and wanted more, Louis had him blinded, from which he died two days later. So in 822 he does public penance before the Pope (Paschal I this time), and let his relatives out of their monastic orders, both of which lost him his cred with the nobles and pretty much everyone. On top of that, his wife Ermengarde died in 818, whom he seems to have genuinely loved, and in 820 he marries Judith, daughter of Count Welf of Altdorf (way southern Germany, called Weingarten since 1865 from the name of the wealthy abbey, Benedictine of course, founded there in 1065), which leads to a son Charles in 823. Which led to the civil wars, the existing sons of the deceased wife having none of this new guy horning in on what's theirs. Louis died on 20 June 840 and war over who got what continued for three years until the Treaty of Verdun in 843 settled things among the three surviving sons and pretty much set the Europe we know now, along with its conflicts. Lothair got the Emperor title and the Middle Frankish Kingdom, Louis "the German" got the Eastern Frankish Kingdom which is pretty much Germany now, and Charles "the Bald" got the Western Frankish Kingdom which is pretty much France now.

But no real empire emerged. The Middle Frankish Kingdom fell apart and the other two and about anyone else with some money and an army were at it all the time, including the damn Vikings from the North. The guy who really re-established things was Otto I, son of Heinrich der Vogler (Henry the Fowler) out of East Francia, Louis the German's third. Heinrich ensured the recognition of West Francia by East Francia which was still under Carologian rulers. But when his son Otto was crowned with the title Emperor on 2 February 962 by Pope John XII at St Peter's Basilica in Rome, this was the translatio imperii, the transfer of rule, in which this German empire was considered -- especially by those who ran it and/or hoped to benefit from it -- as the new Roman Empire in direct succession from the old Roman Empire, though of course the actual Eastern Roman Empire was still up and running at the time.

For that reason, Otto is considered by some the real first Holy Roman Emperor. The Holy Roman Empire -- Das Heiliges Roemisches Reich in German, or Sacrum Romanum Imperium in Latin -- earned the quip of not being holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire by largely being held to-gether by the same three forces Otto put it to-gether. One was his control over bishops and abbots and their investiture into office not to mention selection for office; Two was proprietary churches, meaning they belonged to the ruler who owner the land on which they stood unless otherwise agreed by charter; Three was the use of an appointed rather than hereditary advocatus, or Vogt in German, to run church properties and estates. Power was a balance of concessions to local rulers for support in order to have power over local rulers, with the Pope in the balance too.

For example, Pope John XII who had crowned Otto soon turned on him, so Otto went back to Rome, deposed Otto, and had a layman elected Pope, that being Leo VII, but then John attempted a comeback, but died and was followed by Benedict V, so Otto heads back to Rome again to get rid of Benedict and make them promise to quit electing popes without the Emperor's approval.

Silver and gold have I none indeed.

So on it goes, back and forth. Eventually, the Golden Bull of 1356, passed by the Reichastag, the legislature of the HRE, and Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, fixed the election of "Roman Emperors" to be by seven electors who would elect a "King of the Romans" (rex romanorum, roemischer Koenig) in Frankfurt in the old East Francia. Emperor-elect was sufficient for rule, but the Pope would then officially crown the King of the Romans Holy Roman Emperor. The electors are: the Archbishops (who were also temporal rulers, hence the term Princes of the Church) of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the King of Bohemia, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg. The papal coronation was not specified, and the last HRE to be crowned by a Pope was Charles V, crowned HRE by Pope Clement VII in Bologna in 1530.

Charles V, he to whom the Augsburg Confession is addressed? Yes, the same. He was Spanish too -- yay -- the son of Felipe I and Joanna (sometimes called The Mad) of Castille, though he was born and raised in Ghent, Flanders (modern Begium then under Spanish control) and never did speak Spanish very well despite being King of Spain too, as Charles I. He is said to have said "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse".

Charles' reign would have been peaceful except for a few things: by his time the Eastern Roman Empire had collapsed in defeat to the Ottomans in 1453, who were then threatening to conquer Europe itself; colonisation of the Americas and the Pacific had opened up an entirely new world to manage, literally, and the combination of Christian, non-Christian, and political elements from the state religion of the Roman Empire through the same state religion of the Holy Roman Empire had finally sparked an effort to recall the church to its nature and mission as established by Christ, not by Romans of varying descriptions. And that effort is called the Lutheran Reformation.

Charles more and more left dealing with the Reformation to his brother Ferdinand. He hoped the Council of Trent would solve everything and put everything back to-gether. It didn't. How to handle the worldwide empire, and the wealth that flowed from it, in the Americas (including Nebraska where I am right now) and the Pacific, almost continual war with France, and almost continual war with the Ottoman Empire -- led by Suleiman the Magnificent, no less -- was an enormous job, and eventually took its toll, not to mention lifelong health problems such as epilepsy, arthritis, and an inability to eat well due to an enlarged lower jaw. Charles abdicated all his titles on 16 January 1556, leaving his son Felipe II King of Spain and its empire and his brother Fernando Holy Roman Emperor, and retired -- not as you or I do, but with an entourage of fifty or so to special apartments -- to the monastery of Yuste in Spain, not a Benedictine one but of the Hieronymites, the Order of St Jerome, a Spanish order which took St Jerome as its patron saint and lived under the Rule of St Augustine, like the Augustinians of whom Martin Luther was a member. He died there 21 September 1558.

16 January. Remember that? 16 January 27 BC, when the Roman Senate make Octavian Emperor, Augustus. 16 January 1556, Charles to whom the Augsburg Confession is addressed as a statement of Christian teaching abdicates everything.

The Holy Roman Empire continued until Napoleon. Francis II was the last Holy Roman Emperor, and after his defeat by Napoleon at Austerlitz abolished the HRE on 6 August 1806. Ironically, the monastery of Yuste, where Charles V, also a Hapsburg, had retired was also destroyed in the Napoleonic Wars.

XII. Successor Empires East And West Last Until World War I.

Francis II though, thinking the HRE was about at an end, set up shop as Franz I, Emperor of Austria in 1804, "emperor" being "Kaiser", a Germanisation of "Caesar" expressing the idea of continuity with the HRE and the Roman Empire itself. This became the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867 during the reign (1848 - 1916) of the third Kaiser, Franz Joseph I and this Habsburg dynasty lasted until Karl I, the fourth and last Kaiser, when it was defeated in the First World War. On 11 November 1918, Armistice Day, he relinquished the throne, but he did not say abdicate, hoping to be recalled. He never was, the Austrian parliament enacted a law 3 April 1919 banning any Hapsburgs from Austria unless they accepted simple status as citizens, and he died in poverty in forced exile in Madeira, an island off Portugal, 1 April 1922.

Total span of this empire, 1804 - 1918.

The Germans per se went through decades of disunity and unrest before the establishment of the German Empire on 18 January 1871, under the leadership of the Kingdom of Prussia through the efforts of Otto von Bismarck, with the coronation of the King of Prussia of the House of Hohenzollern as Kaiser -- same deal on the word -- of the German Empire (Deutsches Kaiserreich). This lasted until the third and last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, officially abdicated on 29 November 1918, though did not formally renounce his titles, fleeing to the neutral Netherlands, hoping to return someday. He never did, not even in death though the new German ruler, Hitler, who hated him, wanted his funeral in Germany to lend credence to the Nazi state as heir to the Kaiserreich, though his wish that no Nazi symbols be used was ignored at his Dutch funeral.

Total span of this empire, 1871 - 1918.

As to the Russians, we saw above that when the Eastern Roman Empire fell to the Ottoman Empire Moscow began to see itself as the "Third Rome" replacing it, even adopting the Eastern Empire's double headed eagle as its coat of arms. Peter the Great, Tsar of the Tsardom of Russia, sometimes called the Tsardom of Muscovy (as in Moscow) proclaimed the the Empire on 22 October 1721, if you use the Gregorian calendar, or 11 October if you use the older Julian calendar (and I ain't going into all this calendar stuff again, see the New Years post for that). Tsar, where did that word come from? A Russianisation of, guess what, Caesar! It lasted until the Bolshevik October Revolution overthrew it on 7 November 1917 -- how do you have an October Revolution in November, same calendar stuff, the day is 25 October in the old Julian calendar. The last Tsar, Nicholas II of the House of Romanov (hear "Rome" in there?) itself part of the north German House of Oldenburg, was executed with his family 16 July 1918.

Total span of this empire, 1721 (or 16 January 1547 if you include the Tsardom of Russia) - 1917.

As to the Ottoman Empire, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and its allies in World War I -- an irony in itself, the Ottoman Empire allied with, along with the Kingdom of Bulgaria, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the German Empire, the then current version of two powers it had scared the living hell out of for centuries -- the surrendering Sultan, Mehmed VI, hoped to preserve the sultanate by co-operating with the victors, and the caliphate too. However the Ottoman lands of the Middle East and Balkans had been structured into new countries by the Allies, the British in the lead, the countries we have to-day, and the Turkish National Assembly abolished the Sultanate, the imperial head of state, on 1 November 1922, Mehmed VI left the country on 17 November 1922, on 24 July 1923 the Assembly was internationally recognised by the Treaty of Lausanne, and it proclaimed a republic 29 October 1923 with Ankara the new capital, which was the end of the Ottoman Empire after 700 years but not the Ottoman Caliphate.

That happened when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, very Westernised in his thinking (he invited American educational reformer John Dewey to advise the reform of public education in the new country, for example) and the father of modern Turkey, had the National Assembly abolish the caliphate on 3 March 1924, sending the last caliph, Abdul Mejid II, along with any remaining members of the royal Ottoman family, the Osmans, into formal exile. This was despite appeals from other Islamic sources to retain the caliphate for the sake of Islam, which only fuelled opposition as foreign intervention and helped seal the fate of the caliphate. Although various efforts have been made to agree on a new caliphate, there has been no consensus to date.

Total span of this empire, 1299 - 1922/3, depending on which event one takes as final.

XIII. Where Are They Now?

Yes, now. This stuff just didn't vanish. It's only been roughly 90 years since the whole thing fell apart, not a long period in terms of the whole of human history. We'll get to the main point, the religious implications, in the next section but for now, the current state of these ruling houses.

As to the Austrians, on 3 October 2004 Karl I was beatified, one step before being declared a saint, by Pope John Paul II on the basis of the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints 2003 conclusion of his heroic virtue and one miracle through is intercession, who also declared 21 October, the date in 1911 of his marriage to Princess Zita, as his feast day. On 31 January 2008 a second miracle (one won't do it for sainthood) was formally certified, the miraculous cure through his intercession of a woman in Florida -- who's a Baptist!

His oldest son, Otto, headed the family for many years, opposed Hitler, who sentenced him to death, and was active as a Member of the European Parliament of the European Union until 1999, and in January 2007 passed the torch of head of the House of Hapsburg to his oldest son, Karl, though remaining Crown Prince and pretender to the throne. He lived in Bavaria until he died on 4 July 2010. Archduke Karl, born 11 January 1961, was also a member of the European Parliament and serves as director of the non governmental organisation (NGO) UNPO, Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation.

As to the Germans, the current head of the House of Hohenzollern is Georg Friedrich, great-great grandson of Wilhelm II, born 10 June 1976 in Bremen, Germany. He became head of the house on 26 September 1994 when the previous pretender, his grandfather Louis Ferdinand I died, and survived lengthy legal challenges by his uncles in German courts for the role. He is quoted as saying he sees no need for change of the current political system in Germany, and as thinking he is probably happier than many of his ancestors. He was married on 27 August 2011, the 950th anniversary of the founding of the House of Hohenzollern. He's also 152nd in line for the British throne.

The House of Oldenburg has had kings on the thrones of Russia, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Greece and Iceland, as well as dukes of all sorts of duchies all over the place, including the land from which my ancestors the Angles moved to England, now known as Schleswig-Holstein. The current head of the ducal house as well as the whole House of Oldenburg is Christoph, born 22 August 1949, living in Schwansen, Schleswig-Holstein, with extensive business interests in agriculture and real estate. By a bunch of stuff I'm not even going to get into, except to say they result from Queen Victoria being among their ancestors, both he and Georg Friedrich are technically in line for the British throne too, though at 181st in line Christoph is a bit of a long shot.

Matter of fact, there's Oldenburgs still on thrones, Margrethe II of Denmark and head of the state Lutheran church, and Harald V of Norway and head of the state Lutheran church, not to mention Queen Sofia of Spain, who may queen there because she married Juan Carlos the king but is the sister of the unpopular last king of Greece, the Oldenburg Constantine II, deposed in 1973 and now living in London. Interesting how some of the most liberal countries in Europe, like Denmark, Norway and Sweden, also have monarchs and liberal state "Lutheran" churches. The King of Sweden btw is not an Oldenburg but from the House of Bernadotte, set up by the French to be a client monarchy to Napoleon. The Church of Sweden (Lutheran) only became independent of the state in 2000.

And in Bavaria, good old Bavaria, the kingdom of which has been kicked around a bit, the House of Wittlesbach was the ruling house from 1180 to 1918, including good old King Ludwig whose money got where I got my university education, or if not that spent a hell of a few years, started in the New World. The current head of the house is Franz, Duke of Bavaria, born 14 July 1933 in Munich, active in many civic and religious organisations, and lives in an apartment in the former Summer palace of the monarchy, Schloss Nymphenburg (Nymph's Castle), which is also where, on the south pavillion of which, King Ludwig assembled Die Schoenheitengalerie (The Gallery of Beauties), a collection of 36 portraits of what Ludwig considered the most beautiful women of his, um, acquaintance in varying degrees, including the actress Lola Montez, who inspired the catch phrase "Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets". Oh, and some say he's heir to the House of Stuart and thus the true King of England instead of the House of Windsor, which is from Hanover in Germany, monarch, but as Franz doesn't get into that, I won't either. And hey, who of us doesn't have a Gallery of Beauties on the south pavillion of his mind?

As to the Russians, wow. There is dispute as to who, and if anyone, heads the house now. When the Grand Duke Vladimir died in Miami on 21 April 1992, a huge dispute ensued. His daughter and only child, Maria Vladimirovna Romanova, born 23 December 1953 in Madrid, claimed pretence to the Russian throne, with Vladimir the last male heir and her cousins invalid as the children of marriages with commoners, not nobility. However, Nicholas Romanov, her cousin, born 26 September 1922 in France, claims headship as the senior male heir. And God bless me sideways if Maria isn't also in line for the British throne, at #112.

Complicating all this is the fall of the Soviet Union, the Communist regime that emerged from the overthrow of the Russian Empire, in 1991 and Russia's re-emergence as the Russian Federation. On 17 July 1998, the 80th anniversary of their murders, the bodies of Tsar Nicholas II and the Tsaritsa Alexandra, and the bodies of their children then discovered, were reburied with full state honours in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in the imperial capital city known again by its name St Petersburg. Nicholas led the Romanov family members at the funeral, with the then president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, there too. Maria had written to him, protesting that her cousins are not even legitimate family members, and did not attend. On 14 August 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church declared Nicholas and family saints, and on 16 June 2003 Russian Orthodox bishops consecrated what is known as the Church of the Blood on the site of their executions. So the "Third Rome".

As to the Turks, on 23 September 2009, at age 97, as our media were all abuzz about upcoming speeches at the UN by Middle Eastern leaders, Ertugrul Osman died. Were there still an Ottoman Empire, he would have been known as Osman V, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and Caliph of Islam. He will be now the last pretender to the throne to have been alive when the throne was abolished by the modern secular Turkish state on 19 November 1922, and the last to have been born in the Ottoman Empire.

The current head of the House of Osman, the 44th, and pretender to the throne, Bayezid Osman, was born 23 July 1924 in Paris, the first to be born in exile. He moved to the United States in 1941, even serving in the US Army. Were there still an Ottoman Empire, he would be known as Sultan Bayezid III and Caliph of Islam (or at least the Sunni part of it). He's 87, is not married and has no children, and heir will be Duendar Aliosman, born in Damascus, Syria on 30 December 1930. He married, but has no children.

Thus the disposition of the royal houses and their current heads, but now on to the disposition of their churches.

XIV. Summation nostra aetate, In Our Time.

The Roman Empire, the Eastern and the Western Roman Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire, spanned over 1,800 years, and are now gone. Great guys like Otto and Karl, Georg Friedrich, Christoph and Franz, seem worlds removed from the carryings-on of some of their ancestors. We all seem worlds removed. The current Pope Benedict hasn't crowned any emperors. So what has this we've gone through above to do with anything at all now?

The state religion of the Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Roman Empire, Czarist Russia and the Holy Roman Empire after them, respectively, has outlasted the empire which created them, and is still with us in their respective churches. Tu es Petrus, thou are Peter, Christ said to Peter in the phrase often cited for their legitimacy. Legitimacy? Who in their right minds looking at all we've looked at find the slightest thing about Thou art Peter about it? Who in their right minds would find such fleshly goings-on at all related to God become Man in the flesh? Yet this perversion of the Incarnation from a truth and an event into a theological and ecclesiastical principle, a fabrication for the benefit of those who would benefit from it by those who would benefit from it, is a captivity from "Babylon" that continues to captivate many. Until it is recognised as such.

What one finds is Christian elements mixed up with pagan elements of the old state religion, largely focussed on matters of succession, the longstanding bane of the empires, with generous helpings of political necessity and expediency thrown in too, into a hybrid or synthesis continuing to this day.

This is not at all to say that the faith of Jesus Christ delivered to the Apostles disappeared. It is to say that Christianity took on much, some of which it would regard as essential and not cultural, from the state which adopted it as its new state religion, the Roman Empire East and West.

Tertullian first applied the pagan Roman religious term pontifex to a "bishop" about 225 when the Roman bishop, aka pope, Callistus relaxed the penance for adulterers -- as a derogatory reference, not a good thing, describing him as acting like a pagan religious leader. Pope Damasus (366-384) is said to have been the first to use the term, though others say this is unsubstantiated. Nonetheless, Theodosius, he who ended the Olympic Games etc, called him pontifex, and the term became a reference to a bishop, summus pontifex or the original phrase pontifex maximus for the bishop of Rome, the pope. Leo I and Gregory I are also cited in this regard.

And behave like the officers and head of the old pagan religion they did, for centuries, as we saw. The idea of a bunch of pontifices in a collegium pontificum headed by a pontifex maximus/summus derives not at all from the institution of Christ but from the morphing of leadership and ministry in the church after the Roman Imperial state religion appropriated the model for its pastors as Christianity took on the role of state religion, then further took on its Eastern and Western characters due to the collapse of the Western Empire and its subsequent history centuries before the collapse of the Eastern Empire.

The differences between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism as a religious image of the differences between the culture of the Eastern and Western Roman Empire. The Western Church, complete with a pontifex maximus, inherited Rome's administrative and legal bent, and the Eastern Church inherited Constantinople's more philosophical and artistic bent. The formal schism between the two in 1054 had immediate theological causes, but was culturally inevitable, bound to happen theology or not.

Remember, in the East, the Eastern Empire still existed at this time, but the Western Empire was gone, with the intended reincarnation as the Holy Roman Empire in its place, and the recognition of the bishop of Rome as "first among equals" at world-wide, called ecumenical from the Greek, church councils was then also extended to the bishop of Constantinople, the new Rome. In the lands of the former Western Empire the modern languages spoken are derived from Latin, which remained its liturgical language, whereas in the lands of the former Eastern Empire the languages are not derived from Greek, which was not its liturgical language other than for Greeks.

Thus the primary remains of this in the West is the Roman administrative, legalistic flair, and in the East the philosophical, mystical flair. In Roman Catholicism, even with the moderating and revisionist slant given it by Vatican II, one hears the religion of the Western Roman Empire, and in Eastern Orthodoxy one hears the religion of the Eastern Roman Empire.

While the Roman Empire, as a unified whole and as a divided empire, has passed into history, their eventual religions have not. And so the reformation of the church, the freeing of it from the accretions of Imperial culture East and West, was to happen from outside the Empire, had to happen from outside the Empire. And so it did, the Reformation being then not an event in the Western Church surviving the Western Empire, but an event in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church from outside the Empire, undivided, Eastern, or Western.

And about those accretions. They aren't necessarily bad. What's bad is if they contradict the books the church has said we can rely on, the Bible. Not if they are not found in the Bible, if they contradict the Bible. Big difference. What's also bad is, whether they do or don't contradict the Bible, if they are made into essentials. On these points, the Reformation would go well beyond the Lutheran Reformation to a near eradication of them, and then a replacement of them with other forms of righteousness before God through works rather than Jesus Christ, either way confusing justification before God with santification, personal growth in faith and grace -- confusing participation in the sacraments, personal decisions for Christ, avoidance of immorality and doing good works in general, with justification before God through faith given by the Holy Spirit apart from any external or internal work or act on my part in the saving Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This post- and non-Lutheran Reformation resulted first in new state churches, sometimes forcibly including Lutheran ones (the Prussian Union comes to mind) and later in churches influenced by the "Enlightenment" political and theological theories which have become the unofficial state religions of the modern Western secular liberal states, abandoning even their prior confessions of faith, one broad group representing the religious Left and another the religious Right.

XV. Conclusion.

So, confessional Lutheran churches uphold and teach the faith of Jesus Christ taught in the Bible and accurately stated in the Book of Concord, and uphold and maintain the usual customs, rejecting only what contradicts the Gospel and recognising that the rest are customs, not Gospel or even Law. We are the churchly echo of neither the ancient empire nor the contemporary liberal state. And we worship accordingly, in the historical liturgy of the Divine Service, where God the Divine serves us his Word and Sacrament, not the other way around.

And after all this stuff, the great thing is, all you really need to know is laid out in the Little Catechism. The thing I like in poking around in all this stuff is that you appreciate ever more fully that all you really need to know is laid out in the Little Catechism, and that, in view of all this stuff that happened, what a miracle of the Holy Spirit it is that we have it!

Some asides. You pick up some interesting tidbits along the way too. Like the Roman goddess of agriculture, Ceres, a figure of which tops the capital of Nebraska, is why we call it cereal. Or that July is for Julius Caesar and August for Caesar Augustus. You get to have your own month when you're a founding emperor and then proclaimed a god, otherwise we'd call the old fifth and sixth Roman months Quintember and Sextember, as we still do the remaining months September (7th), October (8th), November (9th) and December (10th). So besides all the big stuff we just waded though, this stuff is still in our lives right down to what's for breakfast and what we call what day it is.

Happy Epiphany / Theophany / Los Tres Reyes, 2012!

2012-01-04T00:14:00.001-06:00

Huh? Ain't The Holidays Over?

Gee whiz. Everyone took down their Christmas trees already because everyone knows Christmas is over. So what's an Epiphany, what's a Theophany, and who are these three kings, or los tres reyes as one says if one has the good fortune to speak Spanish.

Well, guess what, we're not sure they were kings and we don't know for sure that there were three of them -- that's inferred from there having been three gifts in the Biblical story. All we know is the Christian Church has for over 1,500 years celebrated a major feast on 6 January, but not always celebrating the same things. Man, sounds like one of those things we can just leave to the dustbin of history and stick to the Gospel, just preach Jesus, deeds not creeds, huh?

What's An Epiphany?

Maybe not. Consider. The word epiphany is an English form of a Greek word meaning appearance or manifestation. The word theophany is more specific, coming from the Greek for an appearance or manifestation of God. The former is more common in the Western Church, and the latter in the Eastern. The earliest known reference to the feast comes from a non Christian source, the soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman of Greek descent, who in his later years wrote a history of the Roman empire to continue the work of Tacitus.

His Res Gestae Libri XXXI covers the years we know as 96 to 378, but, of the thirty one books only the last eighteen, covering 353 to 378, are still around, or extant, as they say. His reference in the year 361, which was still in his lifetime, is the earliest known reference to a Christian feast celebrated on 6 January. OK, so we've nailed down that from at least the fourth century Christians were celebrating something that had to do with the manifestation of God, which, being Christians, would have to do with Jesus, on 6 January.

The original feast on 6 January was a combination of all the events of the young Jesus, from his birth, to his circumcision, the visit from whoever it was that visited from the East, his naming, his baptism, and his first public miracle changing water to wine at the wedding in Cana. From there, various local churches in various places spun off some of these events, or didn't, on to their own days, resulting in a celebration on 6 January but not of the same things. So we can nail this down too, that 6 January is among the oldest and most important of the Christian church's celebrations, which over time took on varying significance in various places.

Unfortunately, we can also nail down that, in the West anyway, even among those who have a liturgical calendar, 6 January now passes relatively unnoticed. Even more unfortunately, if one follows the Roman Church, ever ready to act like the state religion of the Roman Empire that it is, and even yet more unfortunately willingly followed into the abyss by other Christian bodies even with no state forcing it to do so, 6 January isn't even the feast day any more, after over a millennium and one half of observance!!!

The mitred monkeys changed it from a fixed to a moveable feast, having it fall on the Sunday after the first Saturday in January, bumping what was the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus on that day, poor guy -- which in years where there was no Sunday between the Circumcision on the 1st and Epiphany on the 6th was celebrated on 2 January, btw -- in the 1970 novus ordo, a new mass with a new calendar and lectionary to fit, all in the service of the new religion re-invented from the old at Vatican II.

Well, I guess when you're the Whore of Babylon you can pretty well do what you want, you will do pretty well what you want, but why those of us out here in the ecclesial unions -- Rome's term for churches Rome says aren't really churches, not being in union with the one church, themselves of course, but preserve some truth along with their respective errors in churchy associations -- would have the slightest inclination to follow this madness either exactly or in adaptations for own use defies all explanation since it makes us brothelial unions following the Whore in its further retreat from the Gospel of Christ.

Who Are These Three Kings Or Magi Or Whatever?

Now, back to Epiphany, in the Western Church, not to be confused with the Roman Church, 6 January has come to celebrate the arrival of the Magi. OK, so what's a Magi and where did they arrive. Well, we don't know for sure. Great -- after all the above, we actually do find more dustbin of history stuff, let's just preach Jesus?

Maybe not. Consider. What's a Magi? The word Magi -- did you notice it's pretty close to the word magic? -- comes from a Latin version of the Greek plural of a word they derived from the Persian word for the priests of Zoroaster. These guys are sometimes called astrologers, but that can be misleading because then the term had no reference at all to storefront fortune tellers and the like, but rather to the application of astronomy and mathematics to phenomena in the best science of the time, which later lead to the term being applied to all sorts of occult religion and what came to be called magic.

Now, Matthew is the only one of the four Gospels that records the visit of the Magi. Interesting that he does not record the birth of Jesus itself, where Luke does but does not record the Magi, and Mark doesn't bother with any of it, starting with Jesus' Baptism. In my scripture classes at a Catholic university, also attended by pre-seminarians, we learned that this of course shows the evolution of the story by writers of the Christian community as a pious expression of their faith rather than anything to be taken literally or written as some kind of accurate record as we now understand accurate.

Yeah, well, getting back to the Christian faith and church, Matthew only says they were from the East, which means they weren't Jews, unlike the Jewish shepherds in nearby fields who also came. So here is the next thing we can nail down. The Magi represent the manifestation of Jesus the incarnation of God to the Gentiles, non Jews, for the first time. These men, whatever their origin, were not followers of the religion God revealed to the the Jews, but of the best wisdom and science of their own place. So in the visit of the Magi we see two things: one is that God became Man in Jesus for all people, not only his own, and the wisdom of all people, even apart from the revelations of the Law and the Prophets, both leads to Jesus and is completed in Jesus.

St Paul would later preach accordingly to Gentiles, not first instructing them in the Law and the Prophets, but taking their own religious ideas and pointing out how it both leads to Christ, but is not able to be complete without Christ and is fulfilled and made complete in Christ. Being a Gentile, that Jesus' birth from the outset showed that this is from God for Jews and Gentiles alike is a pretty big deal to me, certainly on that alone worth celebrating in a major way.

Where Did They Come From?

In the West, the names of the Magi are traditionally given as Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar. Not Biblical but fairly well settled on by the eighth century. The Eastern Church has other names for them, not the same ones in all places, and with the exception of the Syrian ones none of them show any clear Persian derivation. Here's something I find fascinating: among some Chinese Christians, it is believed that one of the Magi was Chinese. Liu Shang was an astrologer (in the sense above) in the Han dynasty at the time of Jesus' birth and discovered a star that was supposed to indicate the birth of a king, whereupon he was absent from the imperial court for about two years -- about enough time to follow the Silk Road (man, I gotta post about the Silk Road some time) and make it to Palestine!

On the other hand, Marco Polo said he was shown the tombs of the three Magi about 1270 south of modern Tehran. On the other hand (yeah, I know, that makes three hands) St Helena supposedly found the remains of the Magi on her trip to Palestine -- Helena being the mother of Constantine, and 80 at the time of this trip -- and took them to the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which were later taken to Milan, then by order of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I in 1164, before Marco Polo, taken to the cathedral at Cologne, where they are, or something is, to-day.

Interesting indeed, but not something to get all caught up in, because the significance of the Magi isn't their names or where their remains are, but the manifestation of God to all people, of which they were the first example.

Where Did They Go To?

One interesting custom follows from the Western names for them. At the New Year there is the custom of writing the initials of the three, CMB, above the door to one's house to ask for blessings in the new year. Now, this follows the idea of the Magi coming to Jesus' home, but we represent them usually at the manger, not his home, and this custom probably reflects the tradition that they arrived some time later after the Holy Family had either returned home or were staying elsewhere around Jerusalem after the birth itself. So there is some variation in just where they arrived, as well as when they arrived and who they were.

But again, the point isn't in the details, it's in that they visited the Holy Family where they were living at the time. CMB, their initials, is then an acronym for Christus mansionem benedicat, may Christ bless this house. This is done by Sternsinger, German for star singers, a reference to the star which guided the Magi, children who carry a star and dress like the Magi, who write the initials and collect donations for charitable work. The custom of house blessings continues to this day with some of our LCMS pastors.

Got Your Epiphany Shopping Done?

Also, in many places, especially those of Spanish derived culture, Epiphany is the gift giving day, after the example of the gifts of the Magi. This is Los Tres Reyes, the three kings. You put your shoes out, and if you're smart put a little hay in there for the camels, in some places (like PR) it's a box of hay under the bed, and you can leave a little note for the present you'd like, and on Epiphany you wake up and there's your presents, brought by the three kings! How about that, no clown in a red suit jumping down the fireplace, but the Magi coming by with presents for you just like they did for Christ.

I read in Spain there have been demonstrations against Santa Claus, a McWorld displacement of bringing gifts to children by the Magi. Jolly good show, I say! The whole world doesn't have to follow the secular Christmas customs of the United States, and, the Magi are considerably less removed from their Biblical character than Santa Claus is from St Nicholas.

But apart from these customs in other places, Epiphany isn't going to be much of a deal here in the US. However, there are signs of hope! Epiphany may be saved from cultural invisibility by the same commercialisation that has saved Christmas. Yes, you read it right, saved Christmas -- think how Christmas would disappear entirely in the secular "politically correct" world were if not for the revenue it generates for the economy and business. And, as the Latin presence in the US continues to expand, many retailers are finding that by making more of Epiphany with its gift giving traditions they can extend the harvest of the season besides the "white sales" and such!

Yes, that will come at the expense, so to speak, of the "real meaning of Epiphany" just as with Christmas, but it keeps it visible in a world that doesn't really want to hear the meaning of any of this, and that's where the church can come in, you know, preaching the Word and stuff like that. Myself, though of English descent, and later culturally adopted by the Puerto Rican contingent at university, I was adopted by a couple of Irish descent, and Dad always called Epiphany "Little Christmas" following Irish custom, and there was one more present on Epiphany.

I continue that with my own boys, though we don't do the whole box of hay thing -- they don't even speak any Spanish! Yet. But the idea is to tie it to the Magi, the manifestation of God to all people, the giving of what one has to Christ, the giving to each other as he gave to us, and most of all, his giving himself to us and for us. On 6 January.

What's A Theophany?

Finally, what's this Theophany stuff? In the Eastern Church, while in some places it is still along the multifaceted lines of its original observance, 6 January is not associated with the Magi at all but usually a celebration with focus on the Baptism of the Lord in the River Jordan by John. Theophany is a wonderful name for this feast, being as we saw more specific than Epiphany -- specifying who is being manifest here, God. And on the event of Jesus' Baptism, we have the only time when all three Persons of the Trinity were manifest to Man at the same time: God the Father speaking from the heavens, God the Son in Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove descending from the heavens.

The West has come to celebrate the Baptism separately from the coming of the Magi, but this beautiful celebration of the Eastern Church has much to show us about the Baptism of Jesus, whether we celebrate it this day or separately.Theophany and Epiphany both celebrate manifestations of God, though different ones, and both are on 6 January. However, the Eastern Church liturgically uses the older Julian calendar, in which 6 January falls on what is 19 January in the Gregorian calendar in secular use pretty much everywhere now.

So, between the Great Schism of 1054 and Vatican II, equally disastrous splitting events in Christianity, ain't nobody gonna be in church for nothin on Gregorian 6 January unlike hundreds and hundreds of years of those who came before us in faith and thought they were passing it on -- except for the years when it falls on a Sunday anyway, or if you're a red hymnal or die type (I raise my hand here), or if you follow that part of the LSB that follows the Christian Church rather than Vatican II, or belong to groups in other churches attempting to maintain the faith amid the onslaught of revisionism and Vatican II wannabeism.

Conclusion.

Whatever their names, wherever they came from, whoever they were, whenever they got there, and wherever that was, and whether it's the coming of the Magi or the Baptism of the Lord, let us celebrate and rejoice in the appearance of God, the manifestation of God to Man in Jesus Christ, 6 January and every other day too!!

Wilhelm Löhe, 2 January 2012.

2012-01-02T00:05:00.001-06:00

Pastor Loehe died on 2 January 1872 at age 63. Following the traditional custom of the church of regarding what the world calls the date of death as the date of birth to eternity (dies natalis) and commemorating its great models on those dates, our beloved synod commemorates him to-day.

I don't have a single profound thing to say about him. But he's right up there with Robert Barnes and CFW Walther on my list of Lutheran heroes. From what I can tell, I just gotta like this guy.

For one thing, his wife died after six years of marriage and he had four kids to raise by himself. I get that. Same thing happened to me after four years of marriage and two kids. Check.

But that's not all. Like me, he was a convert. Check.

He was real taken with our Confessions, and, like people like that tend to be, was real taken with Lutheran liturgy, especially the mass, and making it central to parish life. Check.

He had a real concern to get this message out, not just get a message out, get this message out. Check. To the extent that some saw him as a little too rough, too combative, and too conservative. Check, double check, and a hell yes.

This also seems to have run him afoul of church trends. Check.

Yet he also had a concrete concern for physical as well as spiritual needs, not always found along with "conservatives". Check.

He was Bavarian. Well, sorta kinda. He was actually Franconian, however, Franconia (Franken) has been part of Bavaria since 1803 as Napoleon broke up the Holy Roman Empire, and King Ludwig of Bavaria re-established the old name in 1837, yet it remains a distinct cultural entity from historic Bavaria (Atlbayern). Loehe was born in Fuerth, Middle Franconia (Mittelfranken) and was stuck by his church body in the little town of Neuendettelsau in the same region. Check -- hell, I'm not even German however I grew up in Minnesota and ended up at a university sponsored by a Benedictine abbey founded out of Abtei Metten in Bavaria with money from King Ludwig himself, with German still commonly heard at the time I was there.

But the big deal about him is not at all just that I like him. Confessional Lutheranism is always under threat of being watered down, and often from church bodies with "Lutheran" in the name or history. Happened to Loehe, happens to us. But when this guy's church body headed down a revisionist, unionist path, and banished him to the hinterlands for not being with it, he promoted liturgy and works of service with such a passion that its results endure over a century later on every inhabited continent. Which is encouragement to those in his position now, even in the very synod he helped start here. And yeah, I just gotta like the guy and it encourages me to find people like him, confessionally regardless of background, behind our beloved synod and makes me feel at home.

And since it's only the second day of the new calendar year, and, in the interest of spreading confessional Lutheranism, unmodified by earlier errors of Rome or later errors of Protestantism and of Rome, here is my list of essential Lutheran reading:

"MELL" My Essential Lutheran Library

1. Holy Bible. The Lutheran Study Bible (2009)
2. Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, 2 ed. (2006)
3. The Lutheran Hymnal (1941)
4. God Grant It. Daily Devotions from CFW Walther (2006)
5. Luther's Small Catechism with Explanation (1991, 2005, with ESV 2008)
6. Law and Gospel. A Reader's Edition. CFW Walther (2010)
7. The Augsburg Confession (booklet of AC from #2, 2006)
8. Portals of Prayer (quarterly periodical)

All available from Concordia Publishing House.

A little footnote: Past Elder began -- none of this not by design, I wasn't thinking of it -- in blue and white, the colours of Bavaria, and is now red and white, the colours of Franconia.

Happy Whatever Day This Is, 2012!

2012-01-01T03:07:00.000-06:00

Huh? Ain't It New Years?

In the world, it's simple -- Happy New Years!

The Gregorian Calendar, the Western calendar that is pretty much the conventional standard the world over now even when alongside traditional calendars, counts this the first day of the new year. It wasn't always so, even in earlier Western calendars.

How New Years Went From 15 March To 1 January.

New Years Day was 15 March in ancient Rome. But in 153 B.C., the date of the new year was changed to 1 January, that being the date when the two ruling consuls were chosen. "Were chosen", passive voice, indicates an agent, someone who did it, so who did it? Originally they were elected. Passive voice again, who's the agent, who elected them? The Comitia Centuriata, that's who, made up of all Roman citizens and divided into centuries, which are theoretically voting groups of 100 though not in practice, which voted first within itself and then as a unit in the election.

But, the consuls did not assume office until being ratified by election by the Comitia Curiata, which was made up only of members of elite families. There were two other assemblies in old Rome, the Comitia Calata and the Comitia Tributa, the former under the leadership of the pontifex maximus and concerned mostly with ceremonies and the latter administrative and judicial. There were two consuls, not one, and they ruled to-gether. The plural of consul, consules, literally means walking to-gether. However, as the Roman Republic waned and the Roman Empire emerged, while the facade of the republic remained, power moved from the people to the Emperor.

In fact, the word "calendar" comes from all this. The first day of each month was called out by the pontifex, pontiff of the state religion, at a place called the Curia Calabra where the pontiff called the Comitia Calata. Hence the first days of the months were called Kalendae, the called, and the rest of the days of the month called from them.

Gee, curia, pontifex maximus, what was once the real deal becoming a facade with real power in a single man, elected officials giving way to appointed ones -- does that course of events in Rome sound like Church as well as Empire? Well, that's another story. Or maybe it isn't. BIG post on that coming right here in a couple of weeks. Now, back to New Years.

How New Years Went From 1 January Back To 25 March.

Dionysius Exiguus -- Dennis the Short, in the sense of humble -- in his tables for the dates of Easter in 525 A.D. (anno domini, year of our lord, A.D. being his invention too!) came up with a new system for numbering years to replace naming them after consuls and the system of the Emperor Diocletian, who had been a major persecutor of Christians. He set the start of the new year in the Julian (as in Julius Caesar) calendar at 25 March to co-incide with the Feast of the Annunciation. Annunciation of what? The announcement by the angel Gabriel to Mary that she would bear Christ, count 'em, nine months, the period of human gestation, before the celebration of Christ's birth on 25 December. The years themselves though continued to be lined up from January to December Roman style.

(Dennis was not a Benedictine -- he was one of the so-called Scythian Monks, named after the region where they were, where the Danube meets the Black Sea, the modern Dobrogea region mostly in Romania -- but apart from that there is only good to say about him, and on 8 July 2008 was he canonised a saint by the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church.)

Why New Years Day three months into the list of months of the year? Because years of Our Lord do not begin from his birth but from his conception, which is the beginning of a life. Thus God's entry into human history in the Incarnation as Jesus begins with the conception, not the birth, and therefore dating the years since his coming into humanity starts, as does all life, from conception, not birth. How's that for a "pro-life" witness!

We English call The Annunciation Lady Day, and it was New Years Day until 1752 when the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar was official. In fact, the tax year in the UK still begins on 6 April, which is 25 March in the Julian Calendar adjusted to the Gregorian one.

How New Years Went Back To 1 January.

Well, that's the way it was until the Gregorian Calendar we use now came about. Who's Gregory? It's Pope Gregory XIII, who on 24 February 1582 decreed it in the papal bull "inter gravissimas", which means "among the most serious". Ancient practice in Rome and many other places was to name a document after its first word or two (the names of the books in the Hebrew Bible are this way) and the bull starts "Among the most serious duties of our pastoral office ... ". A papal bull, btw, doesn't mean what you might be thinking, chucklesome as that is. It's a formal charter by a pope, taking its name from the bulla, a cord encased in clay and stamped with a seal, used to prevent tampering and thus ensure authenticity. Call it a low tech anti hacking device.

The new calendar, a revision of the old calendar of Julius Caesar, wasn't immediately adopted in the civil realm, although it was during this period that adoption of 1 January as the start of the new year really took hold. Not without controversy though, which has a remnant to this day. The original "April Fools" were those who, in the minds of Gregorian calendar advocates, still foolishly insisted New Years was 25 March, which falls in April in the Gregorian calendar, or were confused about it, and tricks were sometimes played on them.

The new calendar corrected the drift of the Julian calendar, but the original motivation had nothing to do with changing New Years but with establishing a common date for Easter throughout the Christian Church, following what it took to be the provisions of the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. It met with resistance from non Catholic countries, Protestant and Orthodox alike, seeing it as a Catholic power play, and of course had no relevance to the traditional calendars outside the Christian world of the time. In fact even in Europe the last country to adopt the Gregorian calendar, Greece, only did so in 1923, even after Japan (1873), China (1912) and the newly Communist Russia (1918)!

One thing that didn't change, we still start numbering things with 1. So it's 2012 because it's the 12th year of the 21st century, just like 2000 was the 100th and last year of the 20th century and the 1000th and last year of the last millennium, and 2001 was the first year of both the first decade of this millennium and the millennium itself.

So the story's over, the world now has one calendar functionally, while other traditional ones can continue to be used locally. Well, almost.

What 1 January Is In The Church Calendar (None Of The Above)!

What a hoot -- the "secular" calendar is of religious origin in the Christian Church! And the church has a calendar too, which isn't really a calendar! It's better called the church year, and the new year starts with the First Sunday of Advent. Some things have a fixed date taken from the secular calendar and fall on that date every year. This is the proprium sanctorum, so named because they are usually but not always about a saint, like the Annunciation is always 25 March. Other things do not have a fixed date from year to year because they are seasons or times in the life of Christ with reference to Easter which does not have a fixed date. This is the proprium de tempore, of time, like Ash Wednesday, which is 22 February in 2012, but was 9 March in 2011, 17 February in 2010, and 25 February in 2009. Calendars put out by churches are generally like secular calendars, with the de tempore given on the date they fall that year.

1 January falls eight days after the celebration of the birth of Jesus. OK, it's the eighth day of Christmas, let's continue our Christmas celebration as we saw in the previous post. But guess what? In the Law -- Law of Moses -- on the eighth day after birth a male child is to be circumcised, according to the Law, to put him within the Law, and is also given his name. So on what we call 1 January now, the Church celebrates the Circumcision of Jesus, wherein he is under the Law that he will fulfill, and his blood is first shed for us as he is put under the Law as it will be shed in his Crucifixion as he redeems us from the condemnation of the Law -- the good news, the Gospel!

And with it, is celebrated his naming, either on the same day, or the day after, or the Sunday after but before Epiphany if there is one. Jesus, a form of Joshua, who, as Joshua took over from Moses and completed the journey to the Promised Land, so this Joshua takes over to complete the journey for us, that due to sin we cannot make, to the promised land of eternal life with God.

And also, the maternity of Mary as mother of this fully human and fully divine child who would do this for us is honoured too, originally stemming from the claim of the Patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius, the Mary was the mother of Jesus as a human only. The Maternity of Mary was to emphasise that Jesus born of Mary is fully human and fully divine.

So for the Christian, it's Happy Feast of the Circumcision (and Naming) of Jesus!! So the story's over, there you have it! Well, uh, just one more thing.

Rome, be it Empire or Church, is ever at the ready to tinker with stuff, and tinker they did. First, in 1931 Pope Pius XI moved the Maternity of Mary itself to 11 October. Then, at Vatican II, in replacing the church calendar and lectionary in its various forms for centuries with a whole new one with three different versions of the year, guess what -- they ash canned the Circumcision altogether too! And put in a local Roman practice from about 1500 years ago, the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God! Which is not exactly the old Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and, to top off the tinkering. to be celebrated the same day, in 1967 began the brand new World Day of Peace. I'm sure she loved that one! It ain't about me, you clowns, it's about him, and by the way, he said the peace he leaves is his peace, not as the world gives peace but the Holy Spirit sent from God after he returns to the Father. Or, as she had to say to those serving the wedding at Cana, Do whatever he tells you.

And that is her message, for which we honour her this day, but above all listen to her. Happy Feast of the Circumcision -- even amid our infatuation in some circles with reworking the novus ordo, we still got it! -- and whether you include it this day, to-morrow, or next Sunday, the Name of Jesus!!

And do whatever he tells you, like his mother said.

The Twelve Days Of Christmas, 2011.

2011-12-25T11:01:00.001-06:00

If you, like good king Wenceslaus in the song, look out on the Feast of Stephen -- that's 26 December, but we'll get back to that -- you might think Christmas is over. Already on the evening news on Christmas day the local stations are posting Christmas tree pick up sites and times. Some hang around for a week to give a festive atmosphere to New Year's Eve and Day, then come down. On 2 January, Valentine's Day candy is in the stores.

That fits with the world's Christmas season. The church has a little different season going on. December is largely taken up with Advent. The idea is preparation there too, but not as in buying presents and food. It's about a preparation of repentance for celebrating the coming in the flesh of God as Jesus who will die to save us from our sins, for the coming of faith in him into our hearts, and for the coming of Jesus again in glory to judge the living and the dead on the Last Day.

For which reason the colour of Advent is purple, the colour of royalty and also of repentance. Neither his coming in history or our hearts nor his return is prepared for by buying stuff.

Christmas Is Not Just One Day!

The church's celebration of Christmas does not begin with December and end on Christmas with New Year's tacked on. It begins on Christmas and continues for several days! Our Christmas manger scenes often have the "humble" shepherds and the "important" visitors -- called Magi, Wise Men, or Kings most often -- all there. But as the story reads, the Three Kings were not there at Christmas! They arrived twelve days later, 6 January, which we celebrate as Epiphany. These twelve days from Christmas through Epiphany are the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Now how did that happen? No-body knows. The thing is, Epiphany is a much older feast than Christmas, yet is now largely forgotten by most, lost in the shuffle by many, and celebrated by a few. Now how did THAT happen?

The Original Christmas.

Well, to me it looks like this. By the late fourth century after Christ, 6 January as the Epiphany existed. The earliest known reference dates from 361, and in those days the references indicate not just the appearance of the Three Kings -- epiphany is an English form of a Greek word meaning "appearance" or "manifestation" -- but rather the appearance or manifestation, the epiphany, of God, including his birth!

It's not that there wasn't Christmas, it's that this is "Christmas" as well as a celebration all the other events of the young Jesus up to and including his Baptism and his first public miracle at the wedding in Cana. A very big day!

Developments In The Western Church.

In the Western Church, these events began to be spun off from Epiphany. By the sixth century 25 December had become the celebration of his birth. His baptism began to be celebrated after Epiphany, so Epiphany itself in the West fairly early on narrowed its focus to the arrival of the Three Kings (Magi, etc.), who, not being Jews but Gentiles, give it the significance of the appearance or manifestation of the Messiah to the Gentiles.

I'm of English descent, but I was adopted by people of Irish descent, and my Dad, growing up pre-conciliar RC, always referred to Epiphany as "Little Christmas", an Irish custom from when 6 January in the pre-Gregorian calendar was also Christmas. In later life I was to find out this is one echo of all the stuff mentioned above. Growing up, decorations were always left up through Epiphany, and there was one more "Christmas" gift. I do the same in my house now. And I'll post about Los Tres Reyes (Spanish for The Three Kings) on 6 January, having been culturally adopted by the Puerto Rican contingent at university.

Developments In The Eastern Church.

This did not happen in the Eastern Church, where it retained its original character much longer, with many places much later adopting 25 December as the feast of his birth but keeping the celebration of his baptism on Epiphany, and in a few places yet keeping the Nativity on this day. And there's the added complication that 6 January in the older (Julian, as in Julius Caesar) calendar still used liturgically by the Eastern Church is 19 January in the Gregorian (as in Pope Gregory) calendar used in the West and now pretty much world wide as a convention.

In the Eastern Church the day is more commonly called the Theophany -- divine appearance or divine manifestation -- and is considered the third most important feast in the church's observance, Easter (Pascha) being first and Pentecost second. There ain't no Twelve Days of Christmas for our brethren in the Eastern Church, it's a Western thing, but on the other hand Theophany is more in line with the original of what we in the West call Epiphany, if we remember it to call it anything at all.

And Then Came Vatican II, Oy.

And to complicate it further, after a millennium and one half of usage, Rome, ever at the ready to tinker with the very tradition it says it conserves, decided at its last council, Vatican II in the 1960s, to make it a moveable feast, not on 6 January but on the Sunday after the first Saturday in January. So, if you listen to Rome (and if you listen to Rome, quit!) there ain't no Twelve Days of Christmas in the West now either! Nice going, guys.

For us confessional Lutherans -- those who seek to hold to the catholic, as distinct from the Catholic, faith and church -- while our latest service book, Lutheran Service Book, is infected with the latest Roman virus (please support research that a cure may be found in our time!) it appears that Epiphany has survived as 6 January.

So What's This Feast of Stephen Thing?

"Good King Wenceslaus looked out, on the Feast of Stephen". Getting back to that, you think Epiphany got lost in the shuffle, what about this Feast of Stephen? It's 26 December, the day after Christmas. Why? Well, the Stephen remembered on this day is the first recorded martyr for the Christian faith, in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, and, it being the custom in the church to commemorate someone not on the day of his earthly birth but the day of his birth to eternal life -- generally called death in the world -- the first person known to have been born to eternal life by martyrdom for his faith is celebrated right after the earthly birth of him who came to make eternal life available to us.

So Who's This Wenceslaus, Why Is He Good and Why Is He Looking Out?

Wow, has this guy got a story. Right here, call it ironic, coincidence, or one of those divine consistencies that look like loose ends until you know what they are, but he ended up being a martyr for the Christian faith just like the first one, Stephen, on whose feast he looked out.

Here's a short version of the rest. Wenceslaus, also Wenceslas, is English for his name Vaclav. He was functionally king of Bohemia, which is now part of the Czech Republic. But, as he was backed by the German Holy Roman Empire, his title was not actually king but duke, which is just below a king.

This was first via the Duke of Saxony and King of the Germans Henry the Fowler/Heinrich der Vogler. But then via his son Otto I, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor on 2 February 962 by Pope, aka bishop of Rome, John XII -- who, btw, then turned on Otto. So Otto went back to Rome and had a layman elected pope instead as Leo VII -- Otto being used to naming bishops and abbots. Then, when John staged a comeback but died and left Benedict V on the papal throne, Otto went back to Rome yet again to get rid of Benedict and make them promise to quit electing popes without the Emperor's (his) OK! There's some hermeneutic of continuity for ya, to paraphrase another Pope Benedict, XVI. Otto was the first clear Holy Roman Emperor since Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus, Charles the Great, Karl der Grosse) was crowned the first Imperator Augustus in the West since the Fall of Rome on 4 September 476 by the bishop of Rome Leo III on Christmas in 800.

Wenceslaus being backed by such a power did not sit well with some Bohemians, including in his own family, all of them caught between changing religions along with their entire social order.

He's called good because he stayed with the Christian faith of his grandmother who raised him, St Ludmilla, who was herself converted by Saints Cyril and Methodius no less, the "Apostles to the Slavs". His brother Boleslaus (Boleslav) though stayed with the native Bohemian religion of their mother Drahomira, who had Ludmilla killed. Boleslav didn't like the Germans or their state-run Christian church. The martyrdom happened when Boleslav arranged to have Vaclav killed, then took the throne. But, he ended up having to work with the Germans anyway and then his son, also named Boleslav, became Christian and took over from him and established the bishop's seat in Prague!

The irony, coincidence, or divine consistency continues to our time. This man Vaclav who in his own time was killed for selling out to the Germans and their power and new religion is now the patron saint of the Czech Republic, which in 2000 established his feast day of 28 September as Czech Statehood Day, a national holiday.

Yeah, that's a short version. Oh, and what was he doing looking out on the Feast of Stephen? Checking things out after he woke up. But the rest of the story isn't told in the "Twelve Days of Christmas" song. That was first published in England in 1780. Despite recent speculation, there is no evidence the gifts were code words for Catholic catechesis under persecution. Lyrical peculiarities come from its being an adaptation of a French song. It was introduced in the US in 1910, as part of the Christmas programme at Downer in Milwaukee, now part of Lawrence University.

The rest of the story is told in the carol by John Mason Neale, same guy who wrote O Come, O Come Emmanuel based on the O Antiphons posted about earlier. Small world, huh? Or another of those consistencies. Ain't it great when loose ends become consistencies!

Anyway, good duke Vaclav spotted a guy scrounging for food and asked his page where the guy lived. He then set out with his page to bring the man and his family aid. The page started faltering due to the cold and snow, but when he followed in Vaclav's footsteps found the ground warm to his feet. Now how's that for being, uh, ablaze!

We Still Got 'em, The Twelve Days of Christmas!!

Guess what, you can still follow in the good king's footsteps. Neale's carol concludes:

Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.

So let's get on with the Twelve Days of Christmas like, give him his due, Good King Wenceslaus!

NOW is when all the fun and festivities are supposed to happen! LEAVE those decorations up, right on up through Twelfth Night! That's the night of 5-6 January, in case you weren't counting, and yes, it's that from which the title of Shakespeare's great play is taken. So far, Twelfth Night has not been retitled First Sunday After The First Saturday In January Eve, though who knows, sillier revisionism happens all the time. Maybe even GIVE A GIFT to someone special for Epiphany, which in some places in the gift giving day, not Christmas, just as God gave himself to us and the Three Kings brought gifts to him. BAKE A CAKE; that's how Kings Cake started and still is done in some places. HAVE FRIENDS OVER -- you get the idea! And like good king Wenceslaus, DO SOMETHING TO HELP SOMEONE IN NEED! If you don't know someone in need, ask your pastor, he will. Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.

The appearance or manifestation of God is just too big to contain in one day!!

And therefore the church doesn't, but extends the celebration of God's coming among us over twelve days, so don't let the world, or, sadly, some entities called church, take a bit of it away from you!

Textual Note: I am most honoured that The Lutheran Witness asked if they could print this post as an article in the December 2010 issue. That article is not the same as this post, but was based on the 2009 blog version of this post by their excellent editorial staff. The print version was approved by me, and you can read it online. Generally I revise the annual posts in my Blogoral Calendar somewhat from year to year, so this is not the exact text of the printed version.

Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Fröhliche Weinachten 2011!

2011-12-23T10:40:00.001-06:00

Here is the 2011 edition of my Christmas post.

In addition to the many other things remarkable about Christmas, it is so rich in significance for the Christian faith that over time the church has evolved, unlike any other feast in the church calendar, three distinct masses, or divine services, at three distinct times of the day to contain it all.

That's exactly what the word Christmas is, a contraction of Christ's Mass. The first appearance of the word in English, Old English, to be exact, that survives is from 1038, Cristes maesse, which became Christemasse in Middle English, and now Christmas.

25 December is not Jesus' date of birth. The actual date is unknown. Scripture does not record it according to any calendar, although context clues would suggest sometime in about what we call October. But we just don't know, though many theories abound. From which I think it is safe to conclude that the exact and actual date of Jesus' birth is not important since if it were God would have seen that it got recorded in Scripture.

So why 25 December? Well, in the larger culture around the Hebrews in which Christianity first took hold, both the day and the general time of year already had religious significance. In a world ruled by Rome, every year at the time of the winter solstice was the Saturnalia. What's a Saturnalia? Originally it was held on 17 December and later expanded to one week. Saturn, known as Cronus to the Greeks, was the son of Heaven, Uranus, and Earth, Gaia. Saturn took power from his father Uranus/Heaven and castrated him. But a prophecy arose that a child of Saturn's would one day overthrow him, so to prevent this Saturn ate his children.

That's right, ate his children. But Saturn's wife, Opis, known to the Greeks as Rhea, hid their sixth child Jupiter, known to the Greeks as Zeus, on Crete and gave Saturn a big rock in a blanket instead. Yeah, he ate it. Jupiter/Zeus thus survived and, with his five brothers and six sisters, all called Olympians from their hang out Mount Olympus, did indeed overthrow Saturn/Cronus and his own five brothers and six sisters, all twelve called Titans. (If you're hearing modern words like Titanic and Olympics in here, you're right.)

Now in the Greek version of this story the losing Titans got sent to Hell, well, Tartarus actually, meaning a deep place. But in the Roman version Saturn escaped the rule of Jupiter/Zeus and the Olympians and went to Rome where he established a rule of perfect peace called the Golden Age. In memory of this perfect age, Romans celebrated Saturnalia, when no war could be fought, no business conducted, slaves ate with their masters, and everybody set aside the usual rules of propriety for eating, drinking, gift giving and even getting naked in public.

Right after this came Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, The Day of Birth of the Unconquered Sun, celebrated on 25 December, which in the calendar of the time was winter solstice, the day with the shortest daylight hours of the year, demonstrating that darkness cannot completely overcome light. A number of the early Christian Fathers, St Cyprian among them, spoke of the parallel that Jesus the Son of God and Light of the World was born on the same day as the physical sun and light of the world, neither to be overcome by the forces of darkness.

In addition, other religions in the Roman world had a god's birthday on 25 December, for example the Babylonian sex goddess Ishtar, and the Persian mediator god Mithras, whose mystery cult was popular in the Roman army and carried throughout the Empire. On top of that, the barbarians living to the north of the formal boundaries of the Roman world (sorry, Germanic types) where Winter is harsher had their own winter solstice observances.

So it can look like the whole Christmas thing originated with the Christian Church adopting and adapting familiar material from the world around them, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, Saturnalia, and the widespread observance of Winter Solstice, to create a time of celebration for the birth of Jesus. Is that it then? Is Christmas and the observances that go with it simply another step in the evolution of stories about the sun and light not going away but coming back, gods getting born and golden ages, another recasting of universal human themes -- maybe just like Christianity itself?

Don't think so. But also I don't think it is at all necessary to become defensive about the fact that other new life and new light stories pre-existed it, or to insist that Christmas was entirely independent of them, or (yeah, I know, too many ors) to fasten on to one or the other of the many attempts to theologise, like Cyprian, the date of 25 December.

Consider. What did Saturn do? Here's a god who had kids all right -- then ate them to prevent them from doing to him what he did to his own father. In contrast to the stories Man makes up about gods, the story God reveals to Man is just the opposite. Man is a creation, not a child, of God, lost in his own nonsense, some of which he encapsulates in mythology and some of which he considers the latest of enlightened thinking, Man who will thus destroy himself, to avoid which God becomes Man in Jesus, whose body and blood will be given for our salvation on the Cross that the creation of God may become children of God, and in the mass as the pledge of that salvation.

A child of God who does not overthrow his father but lives in perfect submission to his will;`who does not banish his father's rule but proclaims his kingdom; a God who does not eat his child in fear but gives him to us in love so we could eat his body and blood as the food of eternal life, a real golden age to come; a mother who has to hide her newborn son not from God but Man for his survival. And the imagery of light, not validating all sun gods but demonstrating that even in its fallen and broken state Creation still shows that the Creator will not be overcome no matter how the darkness gathers.

These pre-Christian observances are not the real roots and story of Christmas, but rather aspects of God's truth written into both Man and Nature even in its fallen state, which we now see in retrospect point to the truth we could not see in prospect, looking forward and trying to make sense of our situation, so God reveals it to us. Which the liturgy will exactly sum up in the Introit, the introductory Scripture passages, for the first mass of Christmas: Why have the Gentiles raged, and the people devised vain things? -- The Lord has said to me, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten Thee (Psalm 2:1,7. See below, or with my fellow geeks and wannabes, vide infra).

We call this coming of God into Man's flesh the Incarnation, from the Latin that means exactly that, to become in the flesh. To be born. For which another word is Nativity, from the Latin to be born. Christ comes into Creation, into the flesh, is born into our world, on three levels: his historical birth in the flesh as a human baby, his spiritual birth in the hearts and souls of those justified by faith because of Christ, and his eternal birth or generation from the Father in the Godhead.

Consequently, the church celebrates a mass for each of these three, as it prepared for them in Advent.

The First Mass of Christ's Mass, at midnight.
The Historical Birth in Bethlehem.
Introit Psalm 2:7. Psalm verse 2:1.
Collect
O God, Who hast made this most sacred night to shine forth with the brightness of the true Light, grant, we beseech Thee, that we may enjoy His happiness in heaven, the mystery of whose light we have known upon earth.
Epistle Titus 2:11-15.
Gospel Luke 2:1-14.

The Second Mass of Christ's Mass, at dawn.
The Spiritual Birth in the Believer.
Introit Isaiah 9:2,6. Psalm verse 92:1 Septuagint, 93:1 Hebrew.
Collect
Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that we, who are filled with the new light of Thy Incarnate Word, may show forth in our works that which by faith shineth in our minds.
Epistle Titus 3:4-7.
Gospel Luke 2:15-20.

The Third Mass of Christ's Mass, during the day.
The Eternal Generation in the Trinity.
Introit Isaiah 9:6. Psalm verse 97:1 Septuagint, 98:1 Hebrew.
Collect
Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that the new birth of Thine only begotten Son in the flesh may deliver us who are held by the old bondage under the yoke of sin.
Epistle Hebrews 1:1-12.
Gospel John 1:1-14

May I take this opportunity to wish all who visit this blog Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Fröhliche Weinachten!

O What's An Antiphon, 2011.

2011-12-10T07:30:00.004-06:00

Antiphon is a word transliterated from Greek words that mean "opposite voice". What does this mean? Or for you non-Lutherans, what does that mean?

The Original Antiphon.

Well, originally, which is to say in ancient Greek music theory, it means something sung and also sung an octave higher, like C and the next C on a piano. That's antiphonia, as distinct from symphonia, singing in unison, or paraphonia, singing a fifth higher, like C to G on a piano.

Doesn't seem to describe what we mean by antiphon, does it? So how did we get from what the word actually meant to what we mean by it now?

What Happened Next.

The Psalms aren't texts, they're lyrics -- all that survives of musical compositions whose music is lost. They have a parallelism in structure that suggests they may well have been performed by alternating singers or groups of singers. As Christian worship emerged from the synagogue, that's exactly what they were, performance of the Psalms by alternating choruses. At first this was repetition of the males by boys an octave up, hence it was called antiphonia, not because it was alternating choruses but because the boys sang an octave higher than the adult males, just like the term means.

Then, by about the 300s, they started adding another verse, generally a related Scripture verse to the Psalm, sung by all before, and generally after each Psalm verse or two. Before you know it, antiphon doesn't have a bloody thing to do with octaves which is what it really means, but is associated with the idea of two alternating choruses singing back and forth, and also with the added prefatory text and tune which was called antiphon all by itself.

Confused? It gets worse, or better, as you may see it. Books containing the texts to the sung parts of the Mass came to be called antiphonales, and books containing texts to the spoken part of the Mass were called lectionaries, literally, stuff that is read, not sung. Then, antiphonale came to mean a book of chants for the Divine Office (Matins, Vespers, Compline etc) as distinct from a graduale, a book of the chants for Mass.

Enough to drive you nuts, or reach for the St Louis Jesuit stuff, huh? A word that means at the octave means alternating choruses except when it means added prefatory verses unless you mean the book of chants for Divine Office. Don't worry, took me a while to catch on too -- and I was a music major in the pre-conciliar Roman church.

Some say antiphonal singing of the Psalms started with St Ignatius of Antioch, who was an Apostolic Father and traditionally is said to have been a student of St John the Apostle. It really only caught on in the Western Church with St Ambrose, who compiled an antiphonale, yeah that word again and here with a different meaning yet, that being a collection of stuff suitable for antiphonal, as in alternating choruses, singing.

The "O" Antiphons.

OK. Now to the "O" antiphons -- antiphon here in the sense of the prefatory text itself. There are various versions in various places going back centuries, so far that my man Boethius mentions the practice.

I say my man because the title of my doctoral dissertation is "On a Contemporary Boethian Musical Theory". Boethius was born the same year as St Benedict, founder of the grand and glorious Order of St Benedict, the SOBs, I mean OSBs, as well as of the wider even grander and gloriouser "Benedictine tradition" found cited in all the recruiting material of universities sponsored by the Benedictines, like the one I graduated from. (A false comparative and a dangling participle in the same sentence: we Benedictines may not always follow the rules but we know what the hell they are.) That would be 480 or thereabouts, in case you got lost there.

Boethius died in 524 or 525, depending on who's counting. It would have been later except the Western Roman Emperor, Theodoric the Great, who was an Arian, had him executed on grounds of treason for conspiring with the Eastern Roman Emperor, Justin I, who was orthodox and catholic, as distinct from Orthodox and Catholic because we all know he'd be Missouri Synod Lutheran to-day. While he was awaiting execution he wrote his most famous work, On the Consolation of Philosophy. You can read a lot more about all this in a post I added in 2011, called Boethius, Terence, Wheel of Fortune, posted a little before 23 October, the feast of St Boethius in some places. Why is my namesake Terence, who'd be my patron saint except he ain't a saint or even Christian, in there? Because he had a lot to say about Fortuna, the goddess who is the "fortune" in Rota Fortuna, or Wheel of Fortune, that Boethius takes up.

OK Now the "O" Antiphons.

But I digress. Some form or another of "O" antiphons have been around for almost the entire history of the church, the Biblical basis being Isaiah 7:14, but the Benedictines arranged what has become the standard, one each at Vespers each day from 17 through 23 December, right up to Christmas Eve. Each one starts with a salutation of Christ by "O" and one of his Biblical attributes. In order, they are: O Sapientia (Wisdom), O Adonai (Lord), O Radix Jesse (Root of Jesse), O Clavis David (Key of David), O Oriens (Morning Star), O Rex gentium (King of the Nations), O Emmanuel (God With Us).

Now, it's Advent, right, and late in it, and about to be Christmas. So looky here -- starting with the last antiphon, from the day before Christmas Eve, go back each day and put the first letter of each attribute of Christ to-gether and what do you get? Ero cras, that's what. Latin, and guess what that means in English -- I will come to-morrow! Benedictines man, are we good or WHAT! The whole series sums up the Advent preparation then concludes it, right down to a Psalm-like acrostic in the titles!

Never heard of such a thing? Sure you have. We sing it all the time! The popular Advent/Christmas hymn "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" is a composite of the whole series!

Hell Yes There's A Santa Claus, 6 December 2011.

2011-12-02T01:48:00.000-06:00

6 December is the feast of Bishop St Nicholas of Myra. Yeah, jolly old St Nick, except Myra is not at the North Pole, but a town in Lycia which was in what is now the southwestern coast of Turkey.

OK "everybody knows" that "Santa Claus" has his origins in the stories about St Nicholas, "St Nick" or -- nicknames in some languages coming from the last rather than the first part of a given name -- Santa Klaus morphing into Santa Claus, and he went around giving anonymous gifts to kids tossing them over the transom into their shoes, which is where putting the shoes out or hanging stockings comes from.

Now what was his point in doing that, so there's be kids like you see in the commercials waking up in nice homes and being all happy with their yet more stuff for Christmas?

Hell no. St Nicholas came from a wealthy family, and as a pastor gave pretty much all his inheritance away to help poor children and families. And particularly, in those days, poor girls without a dowry would likely not end up wives and mothers in nice households, and likely would end up as prostitutes. So the gifts had a real rough practical edge to them, to help turn a life around by giving them a start their circumstances couldn't.

And the same guy who did this -- whaddya wanna call it, outreach, winning souls, meeting needs -- also was at the Council of Nicaea at a time when it seemed the whole church was heading into heresy of Arianism. And what did they do, say wow look at how those Arians connect with people, maybe we should quit worrying about all these doctrinal barriers we put up and preach and worship more like they do but with our content?

No, St Nick was among the most vocal standing for the catholic faith against Arianism and Arius himself, which led to the formulation of the Nicene Creed we confess at mass. So next time someone says we gotta get rid of all this hang up on doctrine and liturgy and get with the mission field and outreach, take a bloody clue from St Nick.

Or Wilhelm Löhe, whose half-fast Lutheran church body found him just not quite with it and stuck him in a little town in Bavaria, from which he arranged spiritual and temporal missionaries all over the world and worked mightily for authentic Lutheran liturgy and doctrine, whose good effects are bearing fruit to this day.

Funny thing is, there's about as much myth and stories about St Nicholas himself as there is about Santa Claus, or Father Christmas, if you will.

On the gifts thing, some versions of the story say it was at one time, for a poor man with three daughters, some say it was three times as each daughter grew up, some say it was through an opened window, and some say the third time the dad was waiting to see who was doing this so Nick tossed it down the chimney and it fell in the girl's stockings hung by the fire to dry, but other versions say the dad found out who it was only to be told by him to be grateful to God, not him personally.

On the Arius thing, some say he slapped Arius and was thrown in jail for it, whereupon Jesus and Mary appeared to him, loosened his chains, gave him a copy of the Gospels and a bishop's stole (omophorion) respectively, and when the Emperor (Constantine, no less) heard of it released him and reinstated him, but others say this was a vision to Constantine directly, and some say to all the "bishops" at the Council.

Not to mention after his death, when even the real St Nick got caught up in commercialism. He was buried in Myra, and it is said that every year his remains exude what is called myrrh, a rose-smelling watery liquid, to which miracles are attributed. In 1087 Myra was overtaken by Muslim powers -- the Eastern Roman Empire was pretty much losing control of Asia Minor generally at this time -- and his remains were removed to Bari, in Italy on the southern Adriatic coast, which had been under Byzantine control but had been taken by the Lombards and Normans. Stories disagree whether these were pious sailors to whom St Nick himself appeared telling them to keep the saint's remains under Christian control, or pirates.

Good for the local pilgrimage industry though. The Venetians started saying his remains were actually brought there, with only an arm left in Bari, and built a big church about it. An examination in the 1950s revealed the skeleton in Bari is intact. And the myrrh secretions continue there. Not to mention, on 28 December 2009 the Turkish government announced it will seek the return of the remains from the Italian government, to Demre, the modern town near Myra's ruins. While St Nick's stated wish to be buried there is noted, and the questionable removal of his remains, it has been noted too that it would be good for that descendant of the pilgrimage industry, tourism. Indeed there is both a statue of St Nicholas and "Santa Claus" in town!

What does this mean, a Lutheran might ask. A bunch of saint stuff coming out of the decadence and corruption against which the Reformation stood? Or does it show that be it St Nicholas or Santa Claus, the whole thing is simply story and myth, elaborated by a culture as a means of transmitting certain values, with religion being culture and myth taking itself way too seriously?

Or is it that the stories and myths are taken way too seriously and the values lose their point? We can get all caught up in whether it was three daughters on three times, or three daughters on one time, through a window opening or down the chimney into stockings, whether Jesus and Mary came with the Gospel book and the omophorion to Nick himself or in a vision to the Emperor or came anywhere to anyone, whether he struck Arius or was even at the Council at all.

Point is, none of that is the point. Somewhere in there is a pastor from a wealthy background who was a steward of the gifts God had given him as a response to the gift of salvation through faith in the merits of Christ God had given him -- good works because we are saved, not in order to be saved -- and who directed gratitude for the gifts through him to Christ who is the gift of God who saves, and not to an abstract "value" or himself which don't. And somewhere in there is a pastor, call him "bishop" or whatever you want, who stood fast for the truth of Jesus as God and Man by faith in whose merits in his death and resurrection we are saved (the Gospel).

Hell yes there's a Santa Claus. It's you, me, us, St Nick and the whole communion of saints. So get out there because you're saved and do something for somebody in a tight spot, and stand for the pure Christian faith and worship confessed in our Confessions, among which is the Nicene Creed btw, instead of all the bogus feel-good happy-clappy crap and Vatican II wannabeism.

Advent 2011.

2011-11-25T20:22:00.003-06:00

Here's the 2011 version of my Advent post.

Why Have An Advent?

Scripture records the birth of Jesus, but it records no direction to celebrate either it or a preparation for it. But it records no prohibition of doing so either. The Christian Church has evolved various practices to commemorate one of its most outrageous claims, that God became Man in Jesus, the Incarnation, and, considering the magnitude of what is celebrated, has evolved a season of preparation for it universally, both Eastern and Western church. These celebrations have taken on various forms in various places, and even various forms over time in the same place. But they all have the same idea, for Christ's church to celebrate to-gether and proclaim one of the world and life changing events of Christ. Which is the idea of all of the church's liturgy.

What Is Advent?

Advent comes from the Latin adventus, which means a turning toward, a coming, and translates the Greek word parousia, which designates not the coming of Jesus at his birth but his coming again to judge the world on the Last Day. Advent is in fact a preparation for three comings of, or turnings toward, Christ and the three will culminate in three distinct liturgies for Christmas, Christ's Mass. No other season or celebration in the church year is like this.

Here are the three. Our Advent preparation for the historical coming or birth of Jesus culminates in the celebration of that event in the mass in the night, Midnight Mass. Our Advent preparation for the coming or birth of Jesus in the heart of believers, in us, culminates in the mass at dawn, as evidenced in the first believers, the shepherds who went to the manger. Our Advent preparation for his second historical coming, in judgement and in glory, which has been the subject of the final Sundays of the church year before Advent, culminates in the mass during the day, which celebrates the eternal generation of the Son in the Trinity in the being of God in which redeemed Man will fully participate after the end of time.

Advent then precedes Christmas as Lent precedes Easter, a time of repentance and preparation. For both seasons, church vestments etc are purple, the colour associated both with penance, our part, and royalty, his part as King of kings. However, the purple is the darker royal purple rather than the Roman purple of Lent, the colours like the seasons they reflect being both similar yet distinct in kind of event to which they lead.

The rite of Salisbury, called Sarum in Latin, England, has a hybrid liturgy of English and French influences following the Norman Conquest in 1066. Duke William II of Normandy, aka the "Conqueror" and King William I of England, the first of the Norman kings of England, created the diocese out of two earlier ones and appointed a fellow Norman its bishop, "Saint" Osmund, the Count of Seez and Earl of Dorset and his Lord Chancellor, with the approval of Pope Gregory VII. Well sort of approval. This was part of the Normans' rather systematic assertion of control over everything -- more on that below.

Meanwhile, old Pope Greg was having a hard sell on his championship of clerical celibacy and the supremacy of church, meaning the Roman Church under the pope, over state among the Germans -- hell, he excommunicated Heinrich (Henry) IV, King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor, not once but twice -- and so as not to spread his efforts too thin he cut the Normans some slack. How's that for "apostolic succession"! And oh yeah, Greg's a "saint" too in the Roman church.

William being a duke in Normandy was still under the French king, Phillip I, (duke ranks just below king) but now as king of England, which he was crowned on Christmas 1066, he was not, but on an equal basis. William also messed up our good Germanic language English by making French the language of the ruling class, which it remained for about 300 years, and by the end of his reign (1087) about 90% of England was under a French-born aristocracy with which he replaced the native English one, forever changing English culture. Yeah, the Anglo-Saxon culture was an import too, but hey, we Angles were ASKED by the original English to come over from Germany, and gave the place its name, Angle-land, England. The Saxons and Jutes can speak for themselves. But I digress.

The Sarum rite Scripture readings and other prayers proper to the day are different than the Roman rite, as is the colour of vestments, not purple but blue. This use of blue as the colour for Advent has had a more general usage in the West in recent years, though with the Roman propers. Well, the new Roman propers, from its new three year cycle from the 1960s, the basis of the common new lectionary for all heterodox liturgical churches, which will not be considered here -- one can look them up and put on a little Simon and Garfunkle or other holdovers of the time if one is so inclined.

This is not the first time the Sarum rite has influenced Western usage, generally through its appropriation into the Church of England. The traditional Lutheran practice of counting Sundays in the rest of the church year from Trinity Sunday rather than Pentecost is a Sarum influence too.

The Old Advent, "St Martin's Fast".

In fact, Advent in the West used to be even more like Lent. From the fourth or fifth century or so there was, and as we shall shortly see still is in the Eastern church under the name Nativity Fast, a 40 day time of fasting and penance much like Lent. In the Western church it started on 11 November, the feast of St Martin of Tours, Martin Luther's baptismal namesake, with the day being something like Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, in Lent. The fast started the day after. This "quadragesima sancti Martini", the forty days of St Martin, died out by the late Middle Ages, and Advent as it is generally known in the West took shape and is what we use to-day.

To this day, in some places the traditional main dish for Christmas is goose. In fact, one of my favourite phrases in English, not suitable for reproduction here, derives from this custom, let the reader understand. The Christmas goose may derive from Advent when it was St Martin's Fast. Martin didn't really want to be a bishop, and is said to have hidden himself in a flock of geese from those seeking him to persuade him to accept the post, whose noise nonetheless gave his location away. So goose became the main food for St Martin's Day kicking off Advent.

The Eastern Church follows to this day a similar, but not the same, 40 day pattern of a season of preparation and penitence before Easter and Christmas, and our former Western "St Martin's Fast" was closer to it. In the Eastern Church, it isn't called Advent, but the Nativity Fast, and lasts 40 days, just like the St Martin's Fast, but they count them consecutively, from 15 November to 24 December. That's why it also has a similar but not the same nickname: 15 November is the day after the feast, East or West, of St Philip the Apostle, so it is sometimes called "St Philip's Fast". The liturgical colour is neither purple nor blue, but red, and, where in the Western church the liturgical year begins with the First Sunday in Advent, in the Eastern church the liturgical year begins 1 September.

The Current Advent.

Anyway, each Sunday emphasises a different aspect of the preparation and the comings noted above. Below are listed the Scripture passages used for the Introits and Scripture readings. Roman usage (which Rome ditched at Vatican II) has the same Introits but varies as noted from ours in the Epistles and Gospels for the Western Advent.

I had never understood this variation and mentioned that once in the combox on a blog. Pastor Benjamin Mayes responded citing Reed, The Lutheran Liturgy, p.438, which states our usage follows the Comes attributed to St Jerome and its final version, The Lectionary of Charlemagne, which Rome later modified to accommodate its new feasts.

What's a comes (pronounced KO-mays)? It's a Latin word meaning companion, here, a companion book of readings for mass to the rite's service book itself. Now we more commonly call such a book a Lectionary, from the Latin for "readings". The list of the readings is still often called by its Greek name, pericope, meaning section, here, the sections of Scripture appointed to be read.

In Latin and Hebrew, the title of a text is usually the first word or two of the text, called the incipit, which means "it begins" in Latin, rather than a separate title. Accordingly, some of the Sundays of the church year are called from the first word of the first proper text to them, the Introit. The Sundays of Advent, Lent, and after Easter are nicknamed from their Introits. This practice has fallen into disuse with many churches following Rome's 1960s revisionism of the lectionary. Or one can as my former synod did abolish Introits altogether!

Another similarity between Advent and Lent is that a little over halfway through these preparation/penitential seasons, the coming joy peeks through in the readings, starting with the Introit, and so the liturgical colours reflect that with the purple yielding for that Sunday to rose or pink, which is also why the so-called Advent wreath has a rose or pink candle among the rest. It's for the third Sunday in Advent, which is called Gaudete Sunday from the incipit of the Introit for it, which means "rejoice" and quotes Philippians 4:4-6. The Lenten parallel with rose vestments is Laetare Sunday, from the incipit of the Introit, Laetare Jerusalem, which means "Be joyful Jerusalem" and quotes Isaiah 66:10-11.

Psalm numbers in the old Roman usage followed the Septuagint, whereas we follow the numbering of the Hebrew Bible. That usage counts what we call Psalms 9 and 10 as one psalm, likewise 114 and 115, and divides both 116 and 147 in two, so between 10 to 148 the numbering is different by one. Since Vatican II Rome generally uses the Hebrew Bible numbering too, but below both will be given in the format: Hebrew numbering (Septuagint numbering).

Here are the names and readings of the Sundays in Advent, with this year's dates.

Ad te levavi. The First Sunday of Advent. 27 November 2011.

Introit Psalms 25 (24):1-3 psalm verse 25 (24):4, Epistle Romans 13:11-15, Gospel Matthew 21:1-9.

Roman usage Gospel Luke 21:25-33 our second Sunday Gospel.

Populus Sion. The Second Sunday of Advent. 4 December 2011.

Introit Isaiah 30:30 psalm verse 80 (79):1, Epistle Romans 15:4-13, Gospel Luke 21:25-36.

Roman usage Gospel Matthew 11:2-10, our third Sunday Gospel.

Gaudete. The Third Sunday of Advent. 11 December 2011.

Introit Philippians 4:4-6 psalm verse 85 (84):1, Epistle First Corinthians 4:1-5, Gospel Matthew 11:2-10.

Roman usage Epistle Philippians 4:4-7 Gospel John 1:19-28, our fourth Sunday readings.

Rorate coeli. The Fourth Sunday of Advent. 18 December 2011.

Introit Isaiah 45:8 psalm verse 19 (18):1, Epistle Philippians 4:4-7, Gospel John 1:19-28.

Roman usage Epistle First Corinthians 4:1-5 Gospel Luke 3:1-6, our third Sunday Epistle, the Luke passage not used by us.

Away in an Animal Feeding Trough, or, The Real Meaning of Christmas.

Christmas is a warm time filled with comfort, family, presents, good food, along with our religious sentiments, for many of us. Christmas as in the event we celebrate was nothing like that. It was rough. Joseph wasn't the glowing saint of paintings and icons, he was a working guy with a pregnant wife about to give birth -- I've been there twice and that ain't easy under any circumstances, and my observation would be it ain't easy being the about to deliver wife either -- in town to follow the law and get counted in the census with all the hotels full and no place to put his family up but a stable for animals, and after the baby was born they had to put him in a feeding trough for animals. That's what "away in a manger" was. A manger is a feeding trough for animals, the word coming into English from the French to eat, in turn from the Latin to chew (mandere). Fact is, our word "munch" has the same root.

So the King of kings is put in a feeding trough for animals in a cold stable. You don't make up this kind of stuff. Humans who are gods in myth are emperors and such, not working class kids born in a barn. Top it all off, this child "away in a feeding trough" will one day give himself to be the food of eternal life, giving his body and blood for us to eat and drink at mass as the pledge and promise of our salvation through the merits of his death and resurrection. Guess it kind of fits then.

For those of you whose Christmas isn't going to be all warm and cozy and filled with cheer, guess what, you're right in there with those at the first Christmas. That was a little rough too. Born in a stable, a feeding trough for a crib, and pretty soon his family having to high tail it out of town into political exile too. So you're not excluded at all, and you can take it right to him, because he knows all about when Christmas isn't so merry. And he also knows all about how merry doesn't really get determined by what happens in this life, on Christmas or any other day!

To Thee have I lifted up my soul, in Thee, O my God, I put my trust. Let me not be ashamed, neither let my enemies laugh at me, for none of those that wait on Thee shall be confounded.

Psalm 25 (24):1-3 as used in the Introit for the First Sunday in Advent.

A Thanksgiving That Lasts An Eternity.

2011-11-24T00:54:00.001-06:00

I remember things better by the day than the date.

For example, to me my wife Nancy died the night before Thanksgiving, 2140 hours, 1997, rather than 26 November 1997. Dates fall on different days in different years, and the night before Thanksgiving always seems more like the anniversary of it rather than 26 November, which this year is the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

In addition to the obvious, what amazes me about it, then, now, and all points in between, is that it has not produced a crisis of faith in me, let alone a loss of faith. Now, if you haven't gleaned it from some of my posts, crises of faith and loss of faith were pretty much constant for me from Vatican II in the 1960s to professing the faith of the evangelical Lutheran church in 1996.

Vatican II tore up and stomped on pretty much everything that was the basis of my life back then. However, the death of your wife and mother of your children, toss in that their ages were fifteen months and three months at the time, is a tearing up and a stomping on at a whole different level and place.

I've been me for a while now, and "me" no doubt about it would take that as the final insult after all the rest from a god who probably doesn't exist anyway so forget the whole thing, it's a cruel joke that ain't funny.

But it didn't happen. Not Thanksgiving Eve when she died, not the next day when I spent Thanksgiving afternoon at the funeral home picking out caskets and stuff like that before arriving late for some turkey at the family dinner like everyone else. Not in the first few weeks of not having a clue how this single working dad with two babies will work beyond just getting through each day. Not later as routines emerged that worked but obviously aren't the ones we hoped and planned for. And not later as other difficulties and challenges emerged and still emerge.

That's not me. No way I can be like that, guaranteed, take that to the bank, I cannot do that. But it happened. Since other spiritual forces and powers do not bolster faith in Jesus Christ, I think we're going to chalk this up to the Holy Spirit. When they say faith is entirely the gift and work of the Holy Spirit, believe it, they ain't kidding.

Her funeral was the following Saturday. It was right by the service book at the time, all about faith in Jesus Christ for the salvation from sins unto eternal life. You couldn't have been there without getting the message that the only dead people present aren't in caskets but dead in sin unjustified by faith in Jesus Christ through whose merits alone they are counted saved unto eternal life, a promise He extends to all including right here and now.

The sermon concluded as follows, which I hear fourteen years later as clearly as the moment the pastor said it:

A few days ago, most of us celebrated a thanksgiving that lasted one day, but Nancy began one that lasts an eternity.

Amen.

May your Thanksgiving be a prequel to a Thanksgiving that lasts an eternity!

Thanksgiving 2011.

2011-11-15T23:35:00.000-06:00

As a counterpart to my post on what became of Sukkot as the Christian liturgical calendar emerged out of the Jewish one, here's a little something on the secular Sukkot here in the US called Thanksgiving.

Guess what! There were two "first" Thanksgivings before the "first" Thanksgiving in 1621 at Plymouth, Massachusetts! The second first Thanksgiving before the first Thanksgiving was two years earlier. On 4 December 1619, English settlers arrived at Berkeley Hundred, roughly 20 miles up the James River from Jamestown, the first permanent settlement, begun 14 May 1607. The ship's captain, John Woodleaf, led a service of thanksgiving and the settlement charter directed the date to be observed thereafter. Thereafter lasted until 1622 when the native population, not so grateful for their arrival, forced their retreat to Jamestown.

The first first Thanksgiving before the first Thanksgiving was 54 years earlier. Spanish settlers celebrated thanksgiving for their safe arrival 8 September 1565 at what is now St Augustine, Florida. This the first recorded thanksgiving in America, but, as this was Spaniards in a Spanish colony, La Florida, which didn't pass to English control until 1763 or become a state until 1845, it doesn't get much airplay.

Thanksgivings were held at various times and places in the English colonies, after the harvest, but as days of prayer, not eating! The Continental Congress proclaimed the first national thanksgiving, which was Thursday 18 December 1777. The first national day of Thanksgiving in the United States as such was proclaimed by President Washington for Thursday 26 November 1789.

Presidents and governors proclaimed thanksgivings off and on after that, but then starting with President Lincoln's designation in 1863 of the last Thursday of November that year as a day of national thanksgiving, all presidents since had year by year designated the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day. Until FDR. In 1939 the last Thursday in November would be the 30th, and President Roosevelt was persuaded by business leaders that a longer Christmas shopping season -- once upon a time it was considered inappropriate to start the Christmas season before Thanksgiving -- would help the economy out of the Depression with more sales. So he declared Thanksgiving the next to last Thursday in November that year.

The new Thanksgiving was widely derided as "Franksgiving" -- Roosevelt's first name being Franklin -- and had no force of law, some states observing the new "Democrat" Thanksgiving and some the old "Republican" Thanksgiving. A Commerce Department report in 1941 found no significant difference in sales from the change, and Congress passed a law designating the fourth Thursday in November, which some years is the last and some the next to last Thursday, as Thanksgiving Day every year. 1942 was the first Thanksgiving under the current law -- by which time a new world war had maybe redirected things away from retail sales to graver matters.

You know what, Washington didn't have a thing to say about sales, Christmas, Christmas sales, food or football regarding Thanksgiving when "Washington" referred to a man and not a city. Neither did President Lincoln, whose example had been followed since. Below is the original proclamation of the original national Thanksgiving Day by President George Washington. Amazing stuff. Beautiful stuff. Our stuff.

But where among our stuff now does one will find talk of:
- a duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of, to be grateful for the benefits of, and humbly to implore the protection of, Almighty God,
- a duty to observe a day of public thanksgiving and prayer for his favour particularly in being able to form our kind of government,
- service of a great and glorious Being who is the beneficent Author of all good,
- joining in prayers to the great Ruler and Lord Of Nations to pardon our wrongs, enable us to perform our duties, make our government a blessing of wise, just and constitutional law, to guide all Sovereigns and Nations in good government, to promote true religion and virtue, to increase science and such prosperity as he knows best among all mankind.

This is what Thanksgiving is meant to be. This is what Thanksgiving was proclaimed to be. And not as a matter of Lutheran belief, or any other belief, but as just being American, our stuff. Yet one does not find such specific talk in the public discourse now. On the one hand are those who think such talk has no place in our stuff, and on the other those who think this is a specifically Christian nation, and both equally missing what our stuff is all about.

And either way, Washington the city sounds rather different than Washington the man and first president of these united states. May we find something of President Washington in our national celebration in 2011 as we did 222 years ago at the first one in 1789.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor, and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me "to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed, for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually, to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed, to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shown kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord. To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and Us, and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

What's An Armistice? Veterans Day / St Martin's Day 2011.

2011-11-02T01:01:00.002-05:00

Here is what the world knows about it, I hope. 11 November was originally Armistice Day, from the armistice that ended hostilities in the First World War on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, GMT (or UTC), in 1918. Later, with another and even worse World War having been fought despite a War to End All Wars, in 1954 Congress changed the observance to include all veterans, hence Veterans Day.

What's An Armistice?

The English word armistice is transliterated from the Latin armistitium, which literally means a stopping of arms. It's a truce, a cessation of hostilities. Now, if you're one of those getting shot at, that's a good thing -- but, it's not a comprehensive social and political solution to what led to the hostilities, and not even necessarily permanent, let alone that universal aspiration of beauty pageant contestants, world peace. Which means, hostilities may well resume at some point. And always have.

Here is what the world probably does not know or care about. 11 November is the feast day of St Martin of Tours, who is the patron saint of, guess what, soldiers! Hmm.

Who Is St Martin of Tours and Why Is He Patron Of Soldiers?

Martin was born a pagan around 316 in what is now Hungary, and was what is now called a military brat. Then as now, military families move a lot, and Martin grew up where his father was stationed, at Ticinum, which is now Pavia, Italy. His father was a tribune, which is roughly equivalent to a modern colonel, in the crack Roman unit the Imperial Horse Guard (equites singulari Augusti). Being a military kid, he was named Martin, from Mars, the Roman god of war.

The year of his birth, 316, was also the year it became legal to be a Christian in the Roman Empire, but it was a decidedly minority religion, and in the army the cult of Mithras was common. When Martin was ten, he ticked off his parents by starting to go to church and taking instruction as a catechumen (you know, the Sunday School, mid-week, etc of the time). However in 331 at 15 he joined the army, as sons of senior officers did, in a provincial cavalry unit (ala, or wing) and about 334 was stationed at Samarobriva, the Roman name for Amiens, in northern France.

One day, by the city gate of Amiens, he passed a man freezing on the road, tore his military issue cloak in half and gave half to him. That night, he had a dream seeing Jesus wearing the half a cloak. This shook him up, and he got baptised that year, 334, at 18. He remained in the army, but in 336 when it looked like the army and the local Gauls were about to engage at Worms, he declared he was a soldier of Christ and could not fight. He was thrown in the brig (military jail) and charged with cowardice. He offered to be in the front lines but unarmed, and the army was going to do just that with him, but the Gauls made peace with Rome and the battle did not happen.

After that Martin was discharged from the service. He went to Tours, and began to study with the renowned, even in his own time, St Hilary. Hilary was a convert too. who vigourously opposed the Arian "Christianity" of the Visigoths and was elected by the faithful of Poitiers as their first bishop (they did that then), married with a daughter and all (they did that then too). Martin set about combating the Arian heresy too, which about did the church in at the time, thinking he was God's soldier now.

He and Hilary were both forced into exile by persecution. Martin lived as a hermit but when Hilary was restored in 361 Martin joined him. He started a monastery in nearby Liguge, which is still there as the now Benedictine (of course) St Martin's Abbey, from which he preached Christianity all around the area. Later, the people of Tours made him their third bishop when the old one died in 371 and he was finally persuaded to accept. From there he soldiered on to preach the true Gospel in Gaul, and, to get away from the attention of his office, he established another monastery, Marmoutier, which also later became Benedictine, on the other side of the River Loire in Tours, about 372, which lasted until the French Revolution in 1799 and is largely in ruins now.

A good insight into Martin is this: uncompromising as he was in preaching the true doctrine, when Priscillian, bishop of Avila in Spain, and his followers were brought before the Emperor on charges of false doctrine, heresy, stemming from their severe asceticism, the penalty was beheading, but Martin, though he was quite opposed to Priscillian, hurried to Trier, where the Imperial court held forth at the time, not Rome, to protest the sentence as both unjust and an unjust imposition of civil power in a church matter. The Emperor relented, then beheaded them in 385 after Martin left. This was the first time ever that a Christian executed another Christian for heresy, and Martin was absolutely disconsolate after he heard the news.

We should remember that 385 is just five years since the Imperial Edict of Thessalonica defined what is and is not the Catholic Church and made the Catholic Church the state religion. Hence, heresy is a state offence punishable by the Empire.

Martin died 8 November 397 and was buried 11 November, which became his feast day, though the date of death is the usual practice. He was widely venerated for centuries, which I will not go into except for this, soon after his death it became the custom to begin a 40 day fast in preparation for Christmas, the quadragesima sancti Martini or St Martin's Fast, with his feast day being the last non-fasting day until Christmas. This eventually shortened into what we know as Advent now. More on that in the "Advent" post coming up.

An Armistice on St Martin's Day 1918.

So, 11 November, feast of the patron of soldiers for centuries, date of Armistice Day, now Veterans Day? Hmm. Coincidence, or one of those little things that pokes through from what is beyond the surface? Wanna know something else just a little too co-incidental? The military campaign that led to the armistice is the Hundred Days Offensive, aka the Grand Offensive, from 8 August to 11 November 1918. Guess where the Hundred Days Offensive started. With the Battle of Amiens, where the Roman officer Martin had given the freezing beggar the cloak. Hmm.

The armistice of 11 November 1918 turned out to be just that, a cessation of hostilities. What was fought as The War to End All Wars would become World War One, as hostilities resumed in an even worse World War Two. Along with the millions of lives lost, millions more lives were forever changed, and, something changed in what might be called the spirit of Man too. The great sense in the age leading into these cataclysms that Man was on an upward spiral of progress toward an enlightened future lay rotting like the wreck of that great expression of the age the RMS (Royal Mail Steamer) Titanic.

The "Titans" had lost, but unlike the mythological battle, who the victorious Olympians were, or if there even were victors or Olympians, was not clear. The old world order, and its certainties both temporal and eternal, were gone. Man began to speak of life as absurd, and the search for "meaning" was on, amid an apparently essentially meaningless existence. One could simply accept that life is absurd and meaningless; one could understand that meaning is something Man, or each man, creates for himself; one could deny the whole thing and remain irrelevant and inauthentic in either a religious faith or, equally, in holding on to the secular faith in the progress and perfectibility of Man.

The resolution? Well, 93 years later in 2011 hostilities continue amid the arrangements worked out nearly a century ago following the War to End All Wars in Southeast Europe, the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent.

So the Twelve Titans. So the Twelve Olympians, who this time apparently aren't going to show up. If Genesis isn't witness to Man as fallen, the world history of Man surely is. A history filled with the universal intuition that Man is less than he is meant to be or can be, filled with however many religious, philosophical, social and political programmes to accomplish his fulfillment -- and filled with the dashing of all of them.

There's twelve something else who had something to say about that. The Twelve Apostles. They got told to go into the world with the message that Man just isn't going to get himself out of his self-constructed mess, that God has seen that and became Man in Jesus to die to pay for all that and rise again, so that Man can by the gift and power of God repent of his own self-destructive efforts and start over, be reborn in faith in the One God has sent, that because of Him one can be washed clean by being covered in his sacrificial blood, and even amid the brokenness of this world live in partial experience of that which is beyond it, dying with him to rise with him. That message continues to-day as God calls and feeds Man in the church wherever his Word is properly preached and his Sacraments properly administered.

Interesting that in that context, 11 November, St Martin's Day, in 1483 was the day that Mr and Mrs Luther brought their day old baby boy to be baptised, and following the traditional custom he was given the name of the saint of the day -- Martin Luther, who too would devote his life to preaching the true Gospel against false doctrine and corruption from state control of the church.

Conclusion.

So on 11 November, Armistice Day now Veterans Day and also St Martin's Day, as we rightly remember and celebrate in gratitude those who have served to preserve and defend our temporal freedom, let us also remember that armistice is the best we can do, the hostilities cease for a while only to resume, and let us remember and celebrate in gratitude Him who gained our true spiritual freedom for now and all eternity, who gives peace not as the world gives peace, but for real and for ever.

Pacem relinquo vobis, pacem meam do vobis. Peace I leave thee, my peace I give thee. (John 14:27, used in the liturgy after the Agnus Dei before Communion)

Here is the Collect from the mass propers for the feast of St Martin of Tours:

Lord God of hosts, who clothed Your servant Martin the soldier with the spirit of sacrifice, and set him as a bishop in Your Church to be a defender of the catholic faith: Give us grace to follow in his holy steps, that at the last we may be found clothed with righteousness in the dwellings of peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever.

Reformation Day / Reformationstag. 31 October 2011.

2011-10-24T00:18:00.001-05:00

Yeah, everybody knows 31 October is the day Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the church door and started the Reformation. Everybody knows it's Halloween too. What does this mean?

What does "Halloween" mean?

Let's start with Halloween. The word is a contraction actually, the "een" being short for "even" which is in turn short for "evening". Evening of what? Evening before the Hallows, that's what. So what or who in the hell are the hallows? "Hallow" is the modern English form of a Germanic root word meaning "holy", which also survives in modern German as "heilige". The Hallows are the holy ones, meaning the saints.

1 November has for centuries been celebrated in the West as the Feast of All Hallows, cognate with the German word for it, Allerheiligen, which is now usually expressed in English as the Feast of All Saints. The term Hallowmas was once common for it, the mass of all hallows. Halloween then is a contraction for the Eve of the Feast of All Hallows, the night on 31 October before the feast on 1 November.

About the only other times you hear "hallow" in some form or other in modern English is its retained use in the traditional wording of the Our Father, "hallowed be thy name", or in the phrase "hallowed halls" in reference to a university or some esteemed institution. "Hallowed be thy name" literally means held holy be thy name, "thy" being the second person familiar form of address modern English doesn't use.

The Origin of All Saints' Day. Lemuralia.

So when did we start having a Feast of All Hallows on 1 November? Well, we started having a Feast of All Hallows, or Saints, before it was on 1 November. In the Eastern Church, all the saints are collectively remembered on the first Sunday after Pentecost. It really got rolling when the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire Leo VI (886-911) built a church in honour of his wife when she died, but as she was not a recognised saint he dedicated the church to all the saints, so that she would be included in a commemoration of all saints whether recognised as such or not.

In the Western Church, the whole thing got rolling when Pope Boniface IV got permission in 609 AD from the Roman emperor Phocas -- again this would be the Eastern Roman Emperor, as the Western Roman Empire was long gone by this time -- to rededicate the Roman Pantheon to Mary and all martyrs. What's the Pantheon? A big temple built by Agrippa, Caesar Augustus' best general officer, to Jupiter, Venus and Mars in 27 BC. It was destroyed in a major fire in Rome in 80 AD. The emperor Domitian rebuilt it, but it burned again in 110 AD. The emperor Trajan began reconstruction and it was completed by the emperor Hadrian in 126 AD. That's the building that's there now.

Boniface rededicated the Pantheon to Mary and all martyrs on 13 May 609 (might have been 610) AD. Why 13 May? Because it was on that day that the old Roman Lemuralia concluded. What's a Lemuralia? The Roman poet Ovid says it originated when Romulus, one of the co-founders of Rome and from whom the city is named, tried to calm the spirit of his brother Remus, the other co-founder. Why would Remus' spirit need calming? Because Romulus killed him with a shovel to make sure he didn't name and rule the city, that's why.

At any rate, over time it became the day, or rather days, there were three of them, 9, 11, and 13 May, when the head of the household (the paterfamilias, father of the family) chased off the lemures (one lemur, two or more lemures) who were vengeful spirits of the dead ticked off at the living, for either not having been buried properly or treated well in life, or remembered well in death, and out to harm or at least scare the crap out of the living.

Because they appeared so scary, they were also called larvae (one larva, two or more larvae) meaning "masks", which is also how the "mask" of early stage life in some animals nothing like the adult stage, such as the caterpillar to the butterfly, came to be called larva. Anyway, paterfamilias went out at midnight looking to one side and tossing black beans behind him saying "haec ego mitto his redimo meque meosque fabis", or "I send these (beans), with these I redeem me and mine" nine times. Then, he banged bronze pots to-gether saying "manes exite paterni" or "Souls of my ancestors, exit" nine times.

Western All Saints' Day Gets Moved By The Pope. Samhain.

In putting the Feast of All Saints on 13 May, Boniface meant to both replace the old Lemuralia and transform it into a Christian observance for all the Christian dead. The replacement anyway worked, and over time the Lemuralia were largely forgotten. So why isn't All Saints' Day still 13 May? Because Pope Gregory III (731-741), btw a Syrian and to date the last pope not a European, built a place in St Peter's -- the old one begun by Constantine, not the one there now, remember that, it'll pop up later -- in Rome for veneration of relics of all saints, and moved the date to 1 November. It stuck, and in 835 Louis the Pious, son and successor to Charlemagne (aka Karl der Grosse), with a big nudge from Pope Gregory IV, made it officially stuck and there it is to this day.

Thing is, there already was another non Christian celebration about this time. The Celts had something called Samhain, which means "Summer's end" and is still the word for November in Irish, as two other of their big celebrations, Bealtaine and Lunasa, are the Irish words for May and August. It was a harvest festival, but also included the realisation that Winter is coming and thus grain and meat for the season for people and livestock alike is prepared, the bones of the slaughtered animals thrown into bone fires, which is now contracted to bonfires, from which the whole community lighted its individual home fires. Also it was thought the world of the living and the dead intersected on this date, and the dead could cause damage to the living, so the living wore costumes to look like the dead or appease them or confuse them and minimise the potential damage. Your original trick or treat.

So a feast that started out to replace or transform one pagan observance involving the dead ends up on another, first Roman then Celtic. So whadda we got? A supposedly Christian celebration that's just a non-Christian one with a Christian veneer over it? Well, to some extent, yes. The mistake would be to see this as the whole story. Judas Priest, we ain't even got to the Reformation yet, howzat figure into all this? And how come Luther's out there nailing stuff to the church door on Halloween? Was he trick or treating or something?

As to the general idea, guess what, people die, Christian or non Christian, and the people they leave behind feel the loss and want to remember them. Hardly surprising that Christians would want to do that, hell, everybody does, and that's why there's remembrances of various kinds in cultures all over the world. Given the Christian knowledge of salvation from sin and death by the merit of the death and resurrection of Jesus, a commemoration of those who have passed from this life to the joy of that salvation in God's presence would even more suggest itself, and show the fulfillment of a universal human inkling with all its folklore in the revelation of the Gospel. IOW, if anyone ought to commemorate their dead, it's Christians who know God's revealed truth as to what death, and life both here and beyond, is all about.

But, as we've seen, it's easy to get confused again, get drawn back into the folklore, begin to evolve a sort of hybrid of truth and the guesswork expressed in the folklore, and confuse that for Christianity itself. As an example, remember old Gregory III setting up a place to venerate relics in St Peter's? Why would one venerate something from the body of a dead Christian? Is there even the slightest suggestion of such a practice, or it having any merit, in the Bible? No. Luther mentioned there are many things which even if they began with a good intent originally become so clouded with the sort of thing we manufacture for ourselves in folklore that the intent is long since lost.

What Is An Indulgence?

What is an indulgence anyway? It has nothing to do with forgiveness of sin, and we'll see in a minute doesn't have bupkis to do with Purgatory either. In Roman Catholic thinking, a sin may indeed be forgiven, but, consequences remain for punishment. Some sins are so serious that, if one does them knowing they are serious yet freely deciding to, the rejection of God is so complete that it is mortal to the life of the soul, for which reason they are called mortal sins, and the punishment and consequence is eternal if there is no repentance.

But, even if one repents and is forgiven for a mortal sin, it's still like most sins which aren't so serious, called venial sins, where the punishment is not eternal loss of life but temporal, the sin reflects an attachment to some part of God's creation over God himself, and one must undertake the removal of that attachment to creatures rather than the Creator through works of mercy, charity, penance, prayer and the like; one must undertake the sanctification, the making holy, of himself, and the problem is, while this may be done over time, you may die before you have enough time here. Hence Purgatory, where the process begun here is completed if you die before completing it here and "walk right in" as they used to say.

But good news! Not good news as is the Gospel; if that were understood we wouldn't even be into this nonsense, but guess what, you don't actually have to do all this cleansing and sanctifying yourself. There's a whole treasury of merit from Jesus and the saints, and just as one's sins affect others, so since we're all members of the body of Christ the church, the merit of Christ and the saints can affect others too, and the church, given the power to bind and loose on Earth and it will be bound or loosed in Heaven, can apply that merit to other members, not to forgive the sin but reduce the temporal consequences needing sanctification, and that application is tied to various pious things you do, like say venerating a relic.

Holy crap that's a lot of thinking! I guess the message that by HIS stripes, meaning the marks of his suffering, we are healed, that he redeemed us like a coupon, paying the price, taking the punishment we are due for us, is just too good to really be true, so we tack all these human thinkings-through onto it to make it more palatable to our understanding.

St Peter's, Luther, and Tetzel.

Well back to this church that's been standing in Rome for over 1000 years through lots of stuff good and bad and is in pretty bad shape, but given as Constantine started it you kind of don't demolish stuff like that, so whaddya do? Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455) was the first guy to think yeah maybe you do either completely rebuild it or tear it down and build a new one. He had some plans drawn up but died before much was actually done. Finally Pope Julius II (1503-1513), the one just before Leo X to whom Luther addressed "The Freedom of the Christian", laid the cornerstone for the new St Peter's in 1506.

Costs a lot of money, and Julius liked building stuff. The project was begun 18 April 1506 and wouldn't be completed until 18 November 1626 when Pope Urban VIII dedicated the church. Funding was to be provided in part by selling indulgences. Facilitating this was Albrecht, or Albert. von Hohenzollern, who became archbishop of Magdeburg at age 23 in 1513 and bought himself election to the powerful post of archbishop of Mainz in 1514. To pay for it he got a HUGE loan from Jakob Fugger. Don't laugh at the name, he was a serious, serious dude, banker to everyone who mattered. He loaned Charles V, he to whom the Augsburg Confession was presented, most of the money to buy being elected Holy Roman Emperor, for example.

Albrecht then got permission from Pope Leo X to sell indulgences to pay the loan off as long as half was sent to Rome to pay for St Peter's. A Fugger agent tended the money, and Albrecht got his top salesman in a damn Domincan (friars are always suspect; if they were up to any good they'd have been proper monks like the Benedictines, everybody knows that) named Johann Tetzel.

When the gold in the coffer rings,
the soul from Purgatory springs.

Sobald das Geld im Kasten klingt,
Die Seele aus dem Fegefeuer springt!

Not even RCC theology, as Cardinal Cajetan later said. Now, it would be overly simplistic to the point of just plain false to ascribe Luther's posting of the 95 Theses to Tetzel and that famous jingle. The sources, the depth, the background of what led to the Reformation go much deeper than that -- which is why I spent all that time on all that ancient stuff. This had been coming for a long, long, time, centuries of it. Tetzel died a broken man, shunned by all sides, and while Luther fought him strenuously, as he lay dying Luther wrote him a personal letter saying the troubles were not of his making, that that child had a different father, as Luther put it.

For us Lutherans to-day to not understand what that different father was would be false to our Lutheran Reformation and to Luther himself. What do we really have here? A misunderstanding (Luther) in reaction to a misunderstanding (Tetzel and indulgences and the late mediaeval papacy) which once the misunderstandings are cleared up, maybe issue a joint declaration on the doctrine of justification or something, the whole thing is resolved and we're one big happy family again? No, and in the words of the great theologian Chris Rock, hell no.

Reformation.

Theologians like to call the problem one of justification versus sanctification. What does this mean? Sanctify, to make sanctus, which is the Latin word for holy, right back where we started. Justify, to make justus, which is the Latin word for just. How can a person be just before God if he is not holy? Well, he can't. It gets worse. Not only can he not be just before God if he is not holy, there is no amount of time and works that will make him holy enough to be just before God. It gets worse yet. That's even when God calls out a people and gives them his Law to show them exactly what he wants, and sends prophet after prophet to get them back on course.

But having shown us that with the Law, it gets better with the Gospel, which is just a contraction of old English words for good news. And the good news is this, that he has himself done for us what we could not do for ourselves, which is, fulfill the Law on our behalf, taking the punishment we deserve on himself and paying our debt, thus literally redeeming us. Turns out those human inklings were on to something but couldn't grasp what. Salvation is by works, but the works of Jesus, not us; our salvation is by faith in the merit of Jesus, that as he took our sin and it was credited to him though sinless, we take on his holiness and it is credited to us though we are unholy.

It's so utterly simple. What then, we are to do no works at all? Not in the least. We are to do good works; we are not to trust in them for our salvation in any part but to trust wholly in his. This too is utterly simple. It's our sinfulness that wants to make it complicated, figure our works have just got to have something to do with it, and mix that in with the good news of salvation through faith in the works of Jesus, his death and resurrection, and come up with a sort-of good news where it's all him, except that it's you in there too with some punishment to work off and holiness to attain.

Thus do indulgences become a corruption of the Gospel and obscure it, whether they are sold or not. Thus does so much else become a corruption of the Gospel and obscure it -- the office of holy ministry becomes a priesthood, celebration of those who have gone before us in faith become another spirit/ancestor thing, the church itself becomes a part of the state, doing good works because we are saved becomes doing good works in order to be saved, on and on.

And worst of all in that the mass, or Divine Service as we often call it, becomes no longer first his gift of his word to us through the transformed synagogue service of prayer, Scripture reading and preaching and then his gift of the same body and blood given for us now given to us as the pledge of our salvation and his testament to us his heirs, but a work to be done and effective not through the power of his word to do what it says by simply by having worked the work.

Reformation Day. Reformationstag.

And so on 31 October 1517 Father Martin Luther posted his document on the door of a church in Wittenberg. The title was Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiaru, If that sounds like Latin it's because it is. It was an invitation to a formal moderated academic event called a Disputation, in which a statement or statements are argued to be true or false by reference to an established written authority, such as, in religion, the Bible.

The church was All Saints Church in Wittenberg -- hey, the all saints thing again! -- which was and is commonly called the Schlosskirche, or castle church, as distinct from the Stadtkirche, or town church, of St Mary. It was built by Frederick III, called The Wise, who was the Elector of Saxony, one of the seven who elected Holy Roman Emperors. He also founded the University of Wittenberg in 1502, in which Luther was a professor of theology, and attached the castle church to it as the university's chapel.

Luther was awarded the Doctor of Theology degree by the university on 19 October 1512 and two days later became a member of the theological faculty there with the position Doctor In Bible. The "95 Theses" as they are commonly called were written therefore in the academic language, Latin, rather than the language of the land, German, because it was an academic document calling for the academic event called a disputatio, or Disputation.

So he wasn't out trick or treating, All Saints Church had a huge collection of relics of the saints, thousands of them, collected by Frederick, and veneration of them was one way to earn an indulgence, for which purpose they were put on display once a year. You get 100 days indulgence per relic. By 1520 Frederick had over 19,000 of them, and taking that as a round number, (19K x 100)/365 is 5,205 years and some change. Now, the "days" are not, as is often thought, time off from Purgatory; it is time off from what would otherwise have to be punishment here on Earth, therefore shortening one's stay in Purgatory, where there are no earthly days, to complete what was not completed here in earth.

Holy crap that's a lot of thinking! Oh yeah, we've been there before. Now we see how out of hand it was, and also see that the out of hand thing isn't the worst part, you can curb the out of hand stuff, and it is now largely curbed even in the RCC, but the worst part remains, the near total eclipse made of the good news of salvation in the Gospel, getting justification and sanctification all mixed up.

So, the power and efficacy of indulgences was the surface of a much deeper problem, the obscuring of the Gospel and the perversion of the church's mission to spread it and minister its sacraments, those gifts of grace, grace coming from the Latin for "free", gratis, from Christ himself, in Baptism and the Eucharist.

A Quick Look East.

BTW, the Eastern Church isn't off the hook here; while this indulgence thing was a Western thing and there is no equivalent to the remission of temporal punishment for sin in the Eastern Church, there was the practice of absolution certificates, which in some places did lift punishments but primarily were issued by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem to pilgrims there and were distributed abroad, which absolved the sins of whoever bought them -- as distinct from an indulgence which does not absolve sin but remits punishment due to forgiven sins, which if they're forgiven then why is there still punishment, holy crap brace yourself for a lot of thinking -- and the proceeds paid for the heavy costs, including taxes, of maintaining the shrines in the Holy Land. Even worse than indulgences, or at least just as bad, technical differences regardless.

Conclusion.

You know what? The Disputation the 95 Theses called for was never held. Something much better happened. It's called the Lutheran Reformation, in which no new church was started, but the one church, the church that has been there all along, the church that will be there all along, the only church there will ever be, was reformed where the Gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered after the institution of Christ rather than that plus a hell of a lot of thinking that added all sorts of emendations by Man.

This reformation was at the risk of life in the beginning from the powers that be. Thankfully those times are over, but as with the indulgences themselves, it is not that itself which is the main thing, but the Gospel for which it was done. We celebrate this great working of the Holy Spirit, in reforming the church against both pressures to maintain the old errors and pressures to take the Reformation into further errors, on 31 October, Reformation Day.

Reformation Day, whether it's Sunday or not, until recently. As if something for which our Lutheran fathers risked literally everything needs to be moved for the convenience of us who benefit from it to the nearest Sunday to make it easier and therefore get more numbers. Any of us need police protection to safely move about as Lutherans that moving it to Sunday will change?

Thanks be to God for the reformation of his church!

And Happy Halloween while you're at it. Happy All Saints Day (Allerheiligen) too!

Boethius, Terence, Wheel of Fortune. 23 October 2011.

2011-10-05T00:19:00.002-05:00

Festschrift for the feast of St Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius, 23 October.

Now whoda thunk that an apparently purely entertainment TV game show actually references one of the more important topics in philosophy with a history back to ancient Rome and an influence for centuries thereafter, including why there's Lutherans and what we think we're doing here.

It all comes from the Latin phrase "Fortes fortuna adiuvat" which is usually translated "fortune favours the brave" and generally taken to mean than those who take risks, or at least action, are going to be luckier, or at least get more results, in life than those who don't.

It was first written by a Roman playwright named Terence, which is also my first name.

There's just a bit more to it than that. Here it is.

About Terence, or, My Name Is Terence and I'm a Playwright.

The English name Terence comes from the Roman playwright Terentius. It wasn't my birth first name, Douglas is, but I got it when adopted at about six months old. Well hell, it wasn't Terentius' birth name either, how about that? Wasn't even his first name, ever! Hell, he wasn't even Roman, nor was I of the ethnic descent of the people who adopted me!

Here's the deal. My namesake was born around 185 or 195 BC, in or around Carthage, or else to a woman in Greek-speaking Italy (yeah, they spoke more Greek than Latin in Rome back then, it was the cultural language) who was sold into slavery and taken to in or around Carthage. He himself was sold as a slave to a Roman senator named Publius Terentius Lucanus, who brought him to Rome, gave him an education, and then, apparently impressed with the result, freed him.

OK Romans had three names. First comes the praenomen, which means your first name, or given name as it is called. Second comes the nomen, aka the nomen gentile or sometimes the gentilicium, which by whichever designated the clan, or gens, from which one came. Third and last comes the cognomen, which designates your family within the clan. This structure is even older than the Romans, who got it from the Etruscans before them.

But that's Romans, not slaves or kids of slaves who become slaves themselves. Nobody knows what Terentius' birth name was, but it wasn't Terence, sure as hell. His name reflects his status as a Roman citizen, upon being freed. So he took the praenomen Publius, meaning "public", which was one of the relatively few first names, and also his former master's first name, and took the clan name of his master, Terentius, and for a last name to distinguish his family within the clan, took Afer, since he was not a blood Terentius but from Afer.

Afer, what the hell is that, sounds like Africa. Yeah it does and for good reason. Africa now means the whole continent, but in Terence' lifetime it meant the land of the Libyan tribe the Afri, who hung in and around Carthage, which is in modern Tunisia but was founded as a Phoenician colony in 814 BC, or so the Romans said. But when the Romans trashed Carthage in 146 BC, by which time Terence had been dead several years, the Carthaginians themselves were called Punic, a reference to Carthage's Phoenician origin, and Afri came to mean the Libyan Berbers around them.

So hard telling. He may have been a Berber, although that use of Afri is just a little later than his lifetime, or he may have been Afri, who according to Flavius Josephus, the great Roman historian, were descendants of Abraham's grandson Epher, hence the name Afri, or he may have been none of the above and who knows what, since when you're a slave you don't get a hell of a lot of choice about where you end up.

Afer as a Roman cognomen meant people who whatever else were from in or around Carthage, but doesn't clarify whether he was from there originally, and if so was he Afri or something else, or was something else and got brought there.

So we got a guy whose birth name and people are not known, who was sold as a slave but treated well and educated, and when freed took his former master's praenomen or given name, his clan name, within which he was distinguished by his Carthaginian/Tunisian origins at least with regard to the Roman world.

About Terence, or, My Name Is Terence and I'm a Blogger.

Now, when I was adopted, my new mom wanted to name me Cornelius Steven, but my new dad wanted Terence James. Dad won. Which is unusual twice over. For one thing generally moms get naming rights, and for another the usual RC practice in those days was to name a kid after one of the saints. So here's my dad naming me after a pagan Roman playwright and the RCC allowed it, and so I was baptised at Holy Name By God Cathedral in Chicago.

My adoptive parents were of Irish-American stock, which completes both the irony and the fittingness of the name Terence for me. I learned later, from seeing the adoption papers among my parents' stuff after they died, my original name. Douglas John, and the last name, Clutterham, is English, from the Suffolk area specifically, making me an Angle by descent.

So I get a first name from a guy whose first name it wasn't! Which is OK, you don't hear Publius much these days. And neither that Terence nor this one started out with the name, or came from the people who gave him that name (he wasn't Roman and I ain't Irish), but got names that look like it by, as they say in insurance, major life event. He by being freed from slavery and made a Roman, me by being adopted. I doubt Dad was thinking of all that, but he did know the correct spelling to give me, which, the original being Terentius, is Terence. No double damn r.

It's all good. Later in life, when I fell in with the Puerto Rican student community at university and they, saying I thought like them (which is crap English btw, should be, thought as they), culturally adopted me, so to speak, well, there ain't no Terence in Spanish, so I was dubbed with an honorific neologism, El Teraco.

And totally in tune with what was to come, namely, the great gift of the Christian faith, as revealed in Scripture and accurately confessed in the Book of Concord. Luther admired the plays of Terence and quoted them a lot, and thought they were good for kids to learn in their educational formation.

Ain't that a kick? My first Lutheran pastor once said -- not sure if he was joking or not -- that my growing up in Minnesota and going to a Bavarian Benedictine founded school and picking up German and the whole German thing was God's way of getting me to be ready to be Lutheran, so I could lapse into German when ranting. But right there at the RC baptismal font, I was given the name of a Roman playwright Luther admired!

About the Saying, or, What the Translations Can't Translate.

First, the phrase itself. I think I learned it "Fortuna fortes adiuvat". OK, "adiuvat" is the verb and verbs go at the end of a sentence in Latin, so at least that part's right. It means "helps" or "assists" or "aids", and you can see it in the English word "adjutant", which means a helper, or assistant, or aide. So what's "fortes"? The direct object of the verb, the one helped or assisted or aided, and means "the brave" or "the strong", and you can see it in the English word "fortitude" for courage aka guts or grit.

So, the generally accepted Latin form is "fortes fortuna adiuvat" and the generally accepted English translation is "fortune favours the brave", and it was widely used as a proverb and first appears in a play by Terence, namely, line 203 of Phormio. End of story? Oh hell no.

For one thing, the first of many, some Latin scholars contend that it should be fortis fortuna adiuvat. Huh? Well, Latin is an inflected language, which means that the function of words is shown by differences in how the word ends rather than by prepositions and word order as in English. These differences are classified into typical uses of words, called cases, and direct objects, which are that to which the action of the verb is applied, go in what is called the accusative case.

Some say that while "fortes" is the overall ending of the word in the plural accusative in Latin generally, in Terence' time, which was the era of the Roman Republic, before the Roman Empire -- Terence lived from either 195 or 185, depending on which ancient source got it right, to 159 BC, which according to some ancient sources was when he was lost at sea, making him either 26 or 36 when he died -- the accusative plural was then fortis, not fortes, and so in his play it's actually fortis fortuna adiuvat. The Latin texts available online give it both ways.

The next thing is, fortes literally means the strong, as in physically powerful, not the brave, but just like "strength" itself, the word took on a figurative meaning of brave or courageous from the associated connotation of those characteristics with the physically strong -- like we may say "Be strong" meaning to man up and get through it rather than start working out. So that makes it literally "fortune favours the strong".

Next thing, about the verb. "Favours" is a little different than "aids' or "assists". "Favours" is more a general reference to your overall chances, but "aids" or "assists" or "helps" means that someone or something is actually actively helping or assisting you. That's a real big difference, and that's where "fortuna" comes in. The word is obviously the root of the English words "fortune", "fortunately" and the like, but while now it's like random chance or good luck or something like that, in Latin and to the ancient Romans it wasn't just that but the goddess Fortuna who was in charge of that.

So altogether, that makes it more like the goddess "Fortuna helps the strong".

That was a real big deal. Fortuna's sacred day was 11 June -- holy crap, that's the day before my damn birthday, and holy crap again the later state church of the Roman Empire, which still survives in an RC or EO parish near you, has holy days for its "saints" still! -- and the cult of Fors Fortuna (hey, there's that "strong" thing again) was found all over the Roman world and was a festival on 24 June.

Now Fortuna was known as Tyche to the Greeks, from whom the Romans took much of their original state religion, and as Tyche was all over the Greek world before the Roman world. The Roman name comes from Vortumna, which means "she who spins the year" and if you're paying attention, there you go with a "wheel of fortune". But, just like with the saying from Terence, wheel of fortune isn't all there is to it. It's rota Fortuna in Latin, the wheel of the goddess Fortune, as she spins the year and what happens to you shakes out. Thing is though, you don't get to buy any damn letters to move things in your, uh, favour, so instead, you'd better hit her temple and make her happy, or else just say she's a fickle whore who does what she damn well pleases. Both opinions and behaviours were common in the ancient world.

About Augustine's Answer, or, So What?

Now is this just some more musty old stuff from Past Elder? Hey, why do you think books with titles like "Purpose Driven Life", "Your Best Life Now" and "Man's Search For Meaning" are best sellers for years? Why do you think people say "shit happens"? Judas H Priest, the whole question of is life just a bunch a random stuff that happens without any meaning or any ability to change it much and then you die, or does it have a meaning, maybe even a reason or purpose, and you can get in there and affect it, has been bugging Mankind since there's been Mankind. It's the biggest question of all -- Why?

So we've got the wheel of the goddess Fortuna, and the original Wheel of Fortune, Rota Fortuna. As she spins the wheel, bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people, stuff just seems to happen, and here we are wondering if there's any rhyme or reason to it, to life. A lot people still wonder that about life.

Terence's phrase became a commonplace saying and had been used and/or quoted by heavyweights of Roman literature. Pliny uses it in his Epistles (don't freak, no lost works of the Bible here, just means "letters"). Cicero referred to it as a proverb. Virgil used it in the Aeneid (Book Ten, Line 284) as audentis fortuna iuvat. Audentis is where English gets audacious, iuvat is just plain helps, the "ad" intensifies the intention toward (that's what ad is, toward) someone, so you get the idea. And Ovid topped that in his Metamorphoses (10/86), saying not just Fortuna but God himself helps the bold. Well OK he actually wrote audentes deus ipse iuvat.

Another guy from Carthage, good old Augustine, took Fortune on in De civitaitis Dei contra Paganos (On the City of God Against the Pagans). Gus wrote The City of God right after the Visigoths trashed Rome in 410. The Romans were wondering if maybe that happened because the state had not only abandoned traditional Roman religion for the new state Catholic Church, established by the co-emperors Theodosius in the East and Gratian and Valentinian II in the West with the Edict of Thessalonica on 27 February 380, but also destroyed the sites and institutions of the old Imperial religion. As part of making the case that this is not so, he says Fortune, since she brings good things to good and bad people alike, is unworthy of worship -- his answer to why good things happen to bad people I guess, along with why abandoning stuff like that didn't bring down the whole damn Empire.

About What Sets Up Another Answer, or, Everything Falls Apart.

But Boethius, writing over a century later, about 524, as he was waiting to be executed, took a different slant on Fortuna. Holy crap, executed -- for what? Well, more Goths, this time of the Ostro kind. Visigoths were from what is now Spain, Ostro or East Goths were from the Balkans.

The Western Roman Empire was gone by then, the last Western Emperor, Romulus Augustus, having been deposed by Odoacer, a non-Roman Roman officer of uncertain origin though his name is Germanic, on 4 September 476. Odoacer's army proclaimed him the first "King of Italy" though he was a "barbarian". At first the Roman Senate thought it would be fine to just continue under the remaining of the two Roman Emperors, the Eastern one, Zeno at the time. Zeno made Odoacer a Patrician but also thought he should restore emperor Julius Nepos, whom Romulus Augustus had overthrown. Well actually his father Orestes, Julius Nepos' military chief of staff (magister militum) did, then named him emperor.

Odoacer declined to do so, and as his power increased, Zeno determined to get rid of him and promised Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, he and the Ostrogoths could have Odoacer's Italian kingdom if they would get rid of him. Theodoric and Odoacer's forces slugged it out all over Italy. Now both these guys were Arian Christians btw. Anyway, a treaty was signed and a celebration arranged, at which Theodoric proposed a toast then killed Odoacer personally. And that's the real story of the real "Dietrich von Bern". (OK you Lutherans oughta be laughing like hell right now, if not, go read the preface to the Large Catechism.)

Which far from being a useless story shows that the century between Augustine and Jerome, both of whom we saw in recent posts on each's feast days, and Boethius, was one hell of a century. Quick time line for review:

380, the Roman Empire both East and West constituted the Catholic Church and made it the state religion on 27 February with the Edict of Thessalonica; pope, after killing supporters of a rival, is Damasus, proclaimed to have the true faith from Peter, emperor Gratian refuses title of pontifex maximus, head of the state Roman religion, established by Numa Pompilius, second king of Rome, elected by the Senate after the death of the first king and co-founder of Rome (21 April 753 BC) Romulus; the Babylonian Captivity of the Church begins;
382; Jerome called to Rome to help Damasus, run out of town after Damasus dies;
390, the Roman Empire destroys the Temple of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi;
391, the Roman Empire destroys the Serapeum and Great Library of Alexandria;
392, the Roman Empire ends the Eleusinian Mysteries after 2,000 years;
393, the Roman Empire ends the Olympic Games for Zeus, begun 776 BC, after that year's;
394, the Eastern Empire crushes classic Roman resistance to the Catholic Church on 6 September at the Battle of The Frigidus;
394, the Roman Empire disbands the Temple of Vesta, established by Numa Pompilius, second king of Rome (715-673 BC) , and puts out its eternal flame;
395, Augustine becomes Bishop of Hippo;
410, the Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome on 24 August;
420, Jerome died on 30 September;
430, Augustine died on 28 August at 75;
455, Rome was sacked again this time by the Vandals;
476, Romulus Augustus was deposed becoming the last Western Roman Emperor on 4 September by Germanic foederati (non-Roman allies) of Rome under Odoacer;
475 to 480, somewhere in there, Boethius was born.

The entire world these guys knew changed completely during these decades. Jerome himself said of it, that the city which had conquered the world had now itself been conquered. Augustine and Jerome lived at the end of the Western Roman Empire, which is also to say at the end of the full Roman Empire either divided into East and West or undivided, whereas Boethius was born right about the time the last Western Roman Emperor was deposed.

As the Western Roman Empire approached its end, at the same time as its state Catholic Church was busy destroying the institutions of the classic Roman religion, its theologians were busy incorporating and synthesising the state church's faith with classic Roman philosophy -- which religion and philosophy were derived from ancient Greece before them -- and the bishop of Rome increasingly became a symbol of stability that the emperor of Rome no longer was.

Holy crap, there's have been even more sacks of Rome without that. "Pope" Leo himself met with no less than Attila the Hun in 452 and averted a sacking by the Huns, due to the grace of God, or just maybe the one helluva lot of gold he brought along to buy them off, and then on 2 June 455 met with Genseric, King of the Vandals, to try to repeat his performance with Attila, which this time did not prevent a sacking but did hold its severity down somewhat with less physical destruction than the Goths did in 410.

But the Vandals, like the Goths Germanic types who were Arian Christians and who by then were operating out of North Africa, made off with so much loot and people to be sold as slaves that centuries later the religious and social order destruction following the French Revolution was described as "vandalisme" by the bishop of Blois Henri Gregoire in 1794, the year the Reign of Terror ended, and that quickly became a name for any notable destruction -- vandalism.

It is right here that the doctrine of "Petrine" supremacy becomes established. Petrine, what the hell is that. Nothing to do with St Peter, but with the popes, the bishops of Rome, who had come from being proclaimed by the Roman Empire as conservators of the true Apostolic faith in 380 to just 70-some years later meeting with leaders of powers about to kick Rome's ass. And which eventually did, but in the face of the oncoming destruction Leo asserted a religious authority complementary to his civil influence, with the bishop of Rome assuming the significance of the long-gone undivided emperor of Rome, the last emperor of an undivided Roman Empire being Diocletian, who retired (about the only one to do so without being killed into retirement) 1 May 305.

So from an edict issued during the reign of the last Roman Emperor of both the Eastern and Western Empire, Theodosius in 380, Leo just decades later harks back to the last Roman Emperor of an undivided Roman Empire. Just as "Rome" became more a concept as new imperial seats of power (Trier, Milan, etc) emerged, with in the words of Herodian "Rome is where the Emperor is" (OK that's an English translation of his Latin words), so now Rome asserts itself as the seat of power, and not just a concept, and that is where Peter, meaning his supposed successor the bishop of Rome, is and heads the whole Christian church, with the heads of local churches valid insofar as they are "in communion" with him.

None of which has the faintest justification in Scripture, but when the entire world about you is swirling down the tubes politically and culturally it looks pretty good, and when this pontifex maximus, now the Roman pope rather then the Roman emperor, is about all that's left it looks damn good. Unfortunately it still looks damn good to many looking for the Kingdom of God to have the same external signs of visibility and continuity as a Kingdom or State of Man.

About Boethius' Answer, or, So What Revisited?

Theodoric was interested in keeping the culture and institutions of the Roman Empire going, and appointed Boethius his Master of Offices (magister officiorum), the head of the government bureaucracy. Theodoric was educated in Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Empire, and kind of worked out a deal where the defeated Romans could continue their thing under his rule while the Goths continued the Goth thing. As part of this, Theodoric, though an Arian, was pretty favourable toward the Pope, head of the Catholic Church, about the only major institution of the Roman Empire in the West to survive. Theodoric was effectively but unofficially the new Western Roman Emperor.

Boethius, a Roman, was a Trinitarian, or Nicene, Christian, which is to say Christian in the usual sense now, and eventually Theodoric, an Arian Christian, came to distrust him, thinking he might be more in sympathy with the effective AND official emperor of the surviving Eastern Roman Empire, then Justin, also a Nicene Christian. So he ordered him tried and executed for treason. Thing is, while he is awaiting execution, he writes this book, one of the most influential books ever, and for some time THE most influential book in philosophy, as a consolation, but it's not the Consolation of Christianity but the Consolation of Philosophy. Well, De consolatione philosophiae, actually. Christianity is never mentioned or treated by name, but it sounds a lot like Christianity, and that's because since Augustine Christianity sounded a lot like Plato.

The basic idea of the Consolation is pure Platonism -- even if everything looks like it's going right straight to hell it ain't. Now you might say well hell, don't Christians believe that too? Well yes they do but with a different idea about why that is. For Christians it's not just a matter of an ideal world that is truly real beyond the mess we see, old Fortuna spinning her wheel, here in what appears to be real.

But Boethius, and this is typical of everything about him, blended Christianity and Roman/Greek philosophy to-gether, so that while Fortuna may indeed spin her wheel, apparently at random and pretty much indifferent to the results, nonetheless, distinct from Gus' take that therefore she is unworthy of worship, she is herself subject to God and her effects and any other such effects all bend to the unseen plan of God, so it's all good even when it looks like pure crap. So the Consolation is kind of like the Book of Esther, in which as the rabbis pointed out God is not mentioned yet he is everywhere present in it.

OK full disclosure, some read Boethius yet, including me. I like the dude. He was on a mission, and the mission was, to pass on the learning and wisdom of the Greek/Roman world falling apart to the new world emerging from it. In which he translated in the new language of learning, Latin, the great works of classic learning in Greek.

Hell, I wrote my damn doctoral dissertation on him, specifically his attempt to pass on the system for organising and teaching knowledge outlined in De arithmetica, which you may have heard of as the Seven Liberal Arts, and more specifically on his four-fold division of one of those arts, called musica but it means a hell of a lot more than we do by "music", what we mean by music being the lowest level of it and best left to the uneducated. Well hell, you didn't think the future Past Elder was gonna write another music theory dissertation in which some obscure piece or musical relationship is analysed into further obscurity while putting everyone who isn't into such things, which is nearly everyone, to bloody sleep, now did you? Hell no.

You can read a rather good summary about Boethius by "Pope" Benedict XVI, given at a general audience on 12 March 2008, here.

Boethius succeeded in his mission. His works would form the backbone of the learning system for centuries in the new world that emerged from the ancient. The Consolation was one of the bedrocks of education and formation for hundreds and hundreds of years to come. King Alfred of old England, Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth (not the current one the first one, Judas) all translated it, it's all over Dante and Chaucer's original works, Shakespeare too, and students read and studied The Consolation for a thousand years after.

About Time, or, Conclusion.

The Wheel of Fortune was, and endures as, an allegory. You can get all hung up in why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people and whether there's anything to life but a bunch of stuff that happens and then you die, but what you gotta see is that the wheel keeps on turning. Big wheel keeps on turning, proud Mary keeps on burning, just like Tina Turner said. Things change, and you can't get all hung up on one point in the process. The mighty fall, the lowly rise. Riding high in April, shot down in May, like the Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon song written for Sinatra says. Hey, that song made it into the Tony Hawk video game Underground 2.

Stay in the process, not one point of it, and that applies equally to when things look good as to when things look bad. You can't put your trust in any one point, whether you like that point or not, in the process, because the process is gonna keep right on processing. There ain't no Fortuna, and the process itself ain't God either. And just like Boethius -- not to mention St Paul -- said, there is a God and while things aren't all good all things do work to-gether for the good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)

Fortune does favour the brave. And as Ovid tweaked it, God himself's gonna help ya. Except Ovid didn't know how. None of us (Mankind) do, did, or can, which is why the whole life thing bugs us so much and we come up with all sorts of answers to it. God himself helps you with finding out how too. He reveals it, first in the Law of Moses, then in the Gospel, or Good News, of Jesus Christ. The wheel stops there even if it keeps on turning in the world. Sooner or later the world is gonna stop too. But the good news is, you're free even when you remain here, Jesus paid your price on the cross, he gives you new life in him in Baptism, his Law and Gospel are proclaimed to you in preaching by the Office of Holy Ministry, and he gives you his body and blood in Holy Communion that he gave for you at Calvary as his sure pledge.

Besides, Vanna is way better looking than any representation I ever saw of Fortuna. It didn't occur to me while it was happening, but it's kind of a wild ride that a guy who doesn't start out with the name Terence says something that goes right into Boethius, the major force in the intellectual transition from the ancient world to the modern one, then as the postmodern one is emerging from that another guy who doesn't start out with the name Terence becomes a Philosophiae doctor writing about it for the postmodern world.

So take it from Terence, either one of us -- Fortuna fortes adjuvat. Yeah I know I wrote adiuvat above but since I'm saying it as I remember being taught it I'm writing it with the spelling more common to ecclesiastical Latin as I was taught to write and pronounce it. But more importantly, take it from God how that works out, as he revealed it to us in the Law and Gospel of Scripture.

St Jerome. 30 September 2011.

2011-09-30T00:28:00.001-05:00

Now here's a hell of a guy.

Let's start where I started, long ago in a galaxy far far away -- by which I mean, the preconciliar Roman Catholic Church, which, there having been lots of councils to be pre- to, means pre-Vatican II.

The Jerome Of My Younger Days.

Here's what I recall from those days. We used an official Bible in Latin, and our English versions were made from the Latin, and that Latin Bible was the Latin translation of St Jerome, often called the Vulgate. Protestants didn't do that. They had the King James Bible, translated from Hebrew and Greek, not translated from a translation into Latin, and, it was claimed by those who claimed it, therefore more accurate.

Not so, we were told, or at least I remember being told. St Jerome, for one thing, was a saint, a term not at least as yet applicable to modern Biblical scholars. And, he was much closer in time to the Biblical, particularly the New Testament, authors, which meant his understanding of the languages was more immediate and not from scholarly studies centuries later. And also, he worked from better sources than we have, including texts that no longer exist. Therefore, in using Jerome's Latin Bible, we are using a source altogether more trustworthy than the much later sources and scholarship of the Protestant Bibles translations.

The Historical Jerome versus The Jerome Of Faith.

What's ironic is, in his own day, Jerome was highly controversial for using the Hebrew text of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, as the Jewish translation into Greek called the Septuagint was considered the normative and inspired text for centuries going back to the Greek-speaking early church, and whose longer canon was the basis for the Old Testament canon.

Fact is, Jerome was controversial for a hell of a lot more than that and was run out of Rome! Holy crap, people jumped all over Jimmy Swaggart for getting caught with a prostitute, but that ain't nuttin compared to this story. Here it is.

Jerome was born a pagan in a town called Stridon, which was in the Roman territory called Dalmatia. The town no longer exists because the Goths trashed it in 379, and no-body knows exactly where it was, except that it was in Dalmatia, which was more or less modern Croatia and Bosnia and Slovenia. As a young man he went to Rome to pursue classical education, and by his own account pursue the various extra-curricular activities often found in student life then as now. Somewhere along the line he converted to Christianity and was baptised.

After some years in Rome he set out for France, well, Gaul, and ended up in Trier, which is among the most magnificent and enchanting places it has been my good fortune to visit, ever, anywhere. Here in this most wonderful place he seems to have taken up theology. Then about 373 or so he sets out for what is now called the Middle East, particularly Antioch, in what is now Turkey and one of the oldest centres of Christianity. It was there that he came to give up secular learning altogether and focus on the Bible, learning Hebrew from Jewish Christians, and, apparently seized with remorse for his past behaviour, got into all sorts of ascetic penitential practices. Always a danger -- the Good News just isn't news enough, gotta have works!

The Ladies' Ear Tickler Enter the Story.

But in 382 he goes back to Rome again, this time as assistant to Pope Damasus I. Now there's another hell of a guy. Man, papal elections just ain't what they used to be. Twice over actually. Once upon a time, they were a matter of the clergy and people of the area choosing a bishop, or overseer, with overseers from nearby areas confirming it. But by this time we have Constantine, and Christianity attaining respectable state-recognised status, and the Emperor confirmed newly elected bishops. That's helpful because sometimes more than one guy claimed to be elected, sometimes in more than one election!

So when Pope Liberius, whom the Emperor Constantine had thrown out of Rome, died on 24 September 366, one faction supported Ursinus, the previous pope's deacon, while another, which had previously supported a rival pope, Felix II, supported Damasus. The patrician class, the old noble families of Rome, supported Damasus, but the plebian class, the regular folks, and the deacons supported Ursinus. Each was elected, in separate elections. Some real apostolic succession there, oh yeah.

It gets worse. There was outright rioting between supporters of the two, each side killing the other, so bad that the prefects of the city had to be called on to restore order. Damasus got formally recognised, and then his supporters commenced a slaughter of 137 of Unsinus' supporters, right in a church. Damasus was accused of murder, and hauled up on charges before a later prefect, but, being the favourite of the wealthy class, they bought the support of the Emperor and got Damasus off. He was known as Auriscalpius Matronarum, the ladies' ear scratcher.

Damasus was "pope" from 366 until he died on 11 December 384. During which time, we have to remember to really get what was going on here, the Emperors East and West made the church as headed by Damasus, and Peter in Antioch, the official state church and the one recognised as "catholic", in the Edict of Thessalonica on 27 February 380, the birthday of the Catholic Church, as distinct from the catholic church. It was during Damasus' papacy that the Emperor Gratian. one of the signatories to the Edict of Thessalonica, refused the traditional title of pontifex maximus, which then became associated with the bishop of Rome as the chief priest of the Roman state religion. In sum, this is the era of the beginning of the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (Babylon of course being a figure for Rome).

Back to the Historical Jerome.

So in 382, when Damasus calls Jerome back to Rome to help him shape things up, what was being shaped up was the new Catholic Church, the new official state religion, which by Imperial edict was the only church entitled to the name and all others were heretics and deserving of such punishment as the Empire should choose to inflict. The Western Roman Empire at this time was starting to fall apart and was just decades away from falling apart, so a lot of this had to do with staving that off.

Jerome was no slouch at matronly ear tickling himself, and once back soon had a little group of wealthy patrician widows around him, whose money supported him, a Paula in particular. And he had this ascetic works-righteousness thing going, into which he got them all. Nothing like having lots of someone else's money to support you if you want a monastic ascetic life. Hell yes.

In fact, the daughter of Paula, a lively young woman named Blaesilla, after just four months of having to live this way, died! Yeah, died. On top of which Jerome tells Paula not to mourn her daughter. This got the Romans really pissed, there was an inquiry into just what was really going on between Jerome and Paula, and then Damasus dies, and with that support gone, Jerome is forced out of Rome.

So where's he go? Where else, the Eastern Empire, where they really get into all this monkery and fasting and stuff. Paula and her money follow. The whole sham of a works based sparse life funded by patrician wealthy-class money. There's some real apostolic stuff for you. Lemme tell ya, if somebody wants to convince you of their mistaking the physiological effects of self induced glucose denial for some sort of spiritual state of attainment, you'd be better off running right to the nearest McDonald's and ordering a double quarter pounder, which, if memory serves, is combo 4 on the menu. Personally I like Arby's or our Nebraska favourite Runza better, which also makes a helluva burger. Wolgadeutsch too!

This sort of stuff is not self-denial, it's life denial. Utterly pathological. It is no curb whatever to excess and greed, but is rather an equally odious extreme reaction to it, both extremes equally devoid of the Gospel altogether. It comes rather from an empire about to collapse under the tension of its classic past and Christian present and efforts to reconcile them within, with huge civil unrest in its wake, and threats from without in the West. Which was bad enough, but in the East, where it did not collapse for another thousand years or so, it continued unabated, which is equally bad. The opposite of greed and excess is not this pathological repression, but Judas H Priest, just eat a normal balanced diet and go about a life of use to God and your fellow Man, stay in your parish where you find everything that made the saints saints, the Word, the Word preached, the Sacrament, and your fellow Christians.

The Word of the Lord Endures Forever -- Despite the "Church".

Well, it would also be about a thousand years or so until THAT message got out, little thing called the Lutheran Reformation, by a fellow survivor of the remnants of all this nonsense, guy named Martin Luther. Sorry if this stuff isn't in the sanitised reductive biographical sketches that turn up in treasuries of prayer and stuff like that, but them's the facts. It's a disgusting pagan mess, massacres, murders, politics, scandals and all, and from the time of Jerome's life on, the official religion of the state held to be right from the Apostles, which remained in the East, and remained in the West after it reconstituted itself as the Holy Roman Empire, and remains to this day in the former state churches that survive these empires.

This is the world of Augustine, Jerome, Damasus, etc -- the Western Roman Empire, which contains Rome, once the centre of the whole thing, in utter turmoil between its classic philosophy, art, culture and religion and the new religion, in attendant civil turmoil, and under assault from Germanic forces outside it. The sack of Rome came in 410, 24 August to be exact, by Alaric, King of the Visigoths. The efforts to synthesise Rome's past and present failed utterly to preserve Rome. But it created a state religion which survived the death of the state that created it, became the one remaining link upon which the new state would be built, the Holy Roman Empire, and survives to this day in the West as the Roman Catholic Church as well as other state churches, some of them with the word Lutheran in them, and most having now severed the connexion to their modern state as mandatory, and in the East as the various Eastern Orthodox churches.

And all of it based entirely on the characteristics of this age, not in the least on the Gospel, as a dying empire tried to redefine itself for survival -- hence "true" churches, "apostolic succession", "bishops" who were as well state officials and political powers, and all the other nonsense by which the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches try to justify themselves and their pagan accretions which would hold the catholic church in captivity until the Lutheran Reformation, the need for which was so strong amid all this horse dung and bullroar that later "reforms" blew right past the Lutheran Reformation to an opposite but equally bad extreme, which to-day but not originally travels under the name Protestant or Evangelical.

A pope supported by the wealthy Roman class in their twilight who kills his opponents and becomes by edict of the Emperor the true recipient of the true faith; a holy man whose I'd better inflict all this on myself asceticism is funded by more wealthy Roman class money and kills the daughter of his main supporter and disgusts even the Romans.

So what do we do then, forget about all this as an unholy mess we can ignore and just get back to the Bible, the "New Testament" church? No. And hell no. Judas H Priest, the New Testament church did not have the New Testament, so how ya gonna do that? You ain't.

Because here's the thing, the Babylonian Captivity was just that, a captivity, not an extinction. The catholic church survived and continues to survive even the invention of the Catholic Church by the Roman Empire. And why is that? Because of the truth expressed in the motto of the Lutheran Reformation, which motto is simply Scripture itself, both New and Old Testament.

VDMA. Verbum Domini manet in aeternum. The Word of the Lord endures forever. It cannot be overcome, and on its central truth about Jesus Christ is built the church against which the gates of hell itself cannot prevail, let alone the Roman Empire. It can survive power mongers like Damasus and pathological lunatics like Augustine and Jerome.

The Word of the Lord Endures Forever -- Despite Translators.

Particularly Jerome. His new Latin translation really did, even if the work of a nut case whose nuttiness was fatal and supposed self-denial based on the wealth of others, establish a better text of the Bible in the most widely understood language of its time and remained key in the availability of the Bible for centuries to come, as that language became the language of learning, and really did introduce, to a thoroughly Gentilised Christianity with the barest of understandings of the Jewish faith it fulfilled that had replaced it with reworkings in Christian dress of its classic philosophy, a more Jewish understanding of the texts, admired to this day by Jews, not to mention the Hebrew itself.

Not only that, but Jerome set in motion a tradition of selections from Scripture for reading at the preaching part if the Divine Service which would continue for about 1,500 years, and still continues as what we now call the "historic" lectionary. And why is it historic, because it's, well, old, you know, historic. Hell no. Because there's another one now, a product in the 1960s of that part of the church still in Babylonian Captivity, a product of the last council there, Babylon II, er, Vatican II.

The Western Roman Empire, under its new Germanic leaders, managed after a few hundred years known as the Dark Ages to more or less reconstitute itself as the Holy Roman Empire, and the old state church of the old Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, was right there to take its place in the whole set up. Some consider the HRE to have begun with the coronation -- by the "pope" of course -- of Charlemagne, Karl der Grosse, in 800, as Emperor of the Romans, and some consider it to have begun with the coronation -- by the "pope" of course -- of Otto on 2 February 962. But in any case it lasted for about another 1,000 years, and formally ended on 6 August 1806 at the hands of Napoleon, with the newly deposed last HRE, Francis II, who however continued as Francis I, Emperor of Austria. Francis hell, it was Franz dammit, the only Doppelkaiser in history. Kaiser, that's a Germanisation of guess what, Caesar. Doppel is double.

But by about 100 years after that, the underpinnings of the Roman Catholic Church seemed even to many within it as wearing a bit thin, the Roman Empire being long gone and now the Holy Roman Empire being long gone too, and movements began in various circles, some Scriptural, some doctrinal, some liturgical, to re-express this whole deal in terms not so connected to things long gone. So they set about coming up with something more attuned to the existentialism and phenomenology then all the rage.

A couple of problems with that. Once again, just as in the time of Jerome, Augustine, Damasus, et al, we have an entity trying to preserve itself by merging its past with its present and future of different origin. But, that past was exactly the product of what was once the different origin the last time around. IOW, that church's Empire, both of them, were gone and now their church had to go it alone in another emerging new world and once again it sought to reinvent itself as a synthesis, hybrid, reconciliation, something like that, of the two. This culminated at Vatican II, when the old Imperial church reinvented itself for a new post-Imperial age.

Problem is, the old Imperial church was just that, the old Imperial church, not the catholic church or the church of Jesus Christ, and one of the two elements being synthesised into a new synthesis was itself a previous synthesis of Christianity and the old empire. Christianity, the catholic church, the church of Jesus Christ, thought by the proponents of this movement to be re-emerging after centuries of being obscured, was in fact being yet further obscured; the Babylonian Captivity deepened, only re-expressed in terms of the new Babylon that no longer had it as its church, or had a church at all.

In this way it only superficially resembled the real reformation of the church, which had happened nearly five centuries before already, with such things as vernacular languages, free standing altars. And so the Whore of Babylon thoroughly remodelled the brothel, with a new order of liturgy (yeah, literally, a novus ordo) complete with new calendar of observances and new lectionary of readings, replacing the one that had grown for centuries.

Now that's not surprising, that's what you do when you're the Whore of Babylon, and the Babylon that formed you and kept you as its whore is gone and there is a new Babylon.

But these came about on an entirely different basis than the reforms of the Reformation, which did not run from the march of history nor wish to discard or disparage it for all its warts and blemishes, but accept it and move on, not reinventing anything but continuing in continuity, discarding only that which contradicted Scripture.

So what is surprising is that the churches of the Reformation generally, and even those of the Lutheran Reformation, jumped on board with this insanity, took the novus ordo and revised and reworked their own versions of it! And now we have an "historic" lectionary right alongside a Vatican II For Lutherans Lutheranised version of this novus ordo, even leading the Whore herself in this regard because we didn't have to wait a generation or so for a Roman Imperial official with only a church of the former state left -- a "pope", in case you were wondering -- to say it's OK with a motu proprio! Utter madness.

Conclusion.

So on this feast of St Jerome, let us remember that, you know what, he really was closer to the authors and sources of the Bible than our vaunted modern scholars working removed by centuries, and really did, nut case and all, contribute to the church which even he and his contemporaries and times and subsequent times could put in captivity but not extinction, a thing of great value in the Vulgate Bible and the tradition of the historic lectionary.

And let us remember that the Reformation has already happened and not at all on the basis that fuelled Babylon II, er, Vatican II, and we continue as the catholic church where the Word is rightly proclaimed and the Sacraments rightly administered, no new faith, no new doctrine, no new anything, and sure as hell no new orders of worship, based on the scholarship emerging from the dissolution, not just politically but in every way, of the Holy Roman Empire, in which there is no "hermeneutic of continuity" whatever but a pathetic old whore trying to still work the streets, but rather the organic continuity of the catholic church normed by its very own book, the Bible, rejecting only what contradicts it.

St Michael's Day / Michaelmas / Michaelistag 29 September 2011.

2011-09-24T01:38:00.000-05:00

This was a pretty big day for centuries, and still is contained in our LCMS calendar. Phillip Melanchthon even wrote a poem for the day which became a hymn, "Lord God, To Thee We Give All Praise", or "Dicimus grates tibi summe rerum" in his Latin original, yes, Latin, which is hymn 254 in The Lutheran Hymnal, or, I suppose it won't hurt to say, 522 in LSB.

Here's why the big deal.

Michael in the Bible.

Michael is one of the angels, and is mentioned by name in three books of the Bible, Daniel, Jude and Revelation aka the Apocalypse. His name means in Hebrew "Who is like God?"

In Daniel, Gabriel, another leading angel, tells Daniel that Michael is his helper in defending the Jews, this wrt Daniel's prayer that the Jews be able to return to Jerusalem (Daniel 10), and later (Daniel 12) Michael is again identified as he who stands up for "the sons of thy people", the Jews, who will do so in the final battle at the end of time. This is the only time he is mentioned by name in the Hebrew Bible.

It is not the only time he appears, depending on who you listen to. Some say he is the "captain of the host of the Lord" in the Book of Josue, or Joshua, 5:13-15, but some say this cannot be since he accepted worship and only God can do that. So some then say the figure was actually a disguised appearance of God himself, and some say (like my historical-critical Scripture profs in college) that that is what "angels" are anyway, not separate beings but muted references due to piety for God himself so Man can stand the interaction.

Rabbinic tradition variously credits him with being the angel who rescued Abraham from Nimrod's furnace, who protected Sarah from being defiled as Abraham's sister as Abraham tried to protect her by calling his sister and not wife, who told Sarah she would have a son, who brought the ram provided by God for Abraham to substitute for that son Isaac in sacrifice, who was the angel who wrestled with Jacob, who was the angel who spoke to Moses in the burning bush and later taught Moses the Law, on and on, including things in writings not in the Hebrew Bible such as protecting Adam and Eve after the Fall and teaching him how to farm.

This role of protector and defender was passed on to the early Christian church, among so much else in Judaism, not just in these stories, but he is mentioned twice in the New Testament.

In the Letter of Jude, verse 9, he argues with Satan over Moses' body, also a Jewish theme, keeping Moses' body hidden so reverence would be directed to God and not misplaced hero worship aka saint veneration?. In the Book of Revelation, or The Apocalypse, chapter 12, Michael is given a similar role in the last battle at the end of time as he had in the revolt of the angels in heaven at the beginning, as military leader of the forces of good.

Michael in Later Stories.

There are many other legends of Michael's intervention on behalf of Christians in history, of which we will mention two as particularly noteworthy. He is said to have worked with the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, and a celebration on 8 November became the main feast of St Michael in the Eastern Church. Also he is said to have appeared over the mausoleum of Hadrian in Rome to answer the prayers of Pope St Gregory the Great in 950 that a plague in Rome stop, after which the mausoleum, destroyed by the Visigoths and Goths but rebuilt as a papal fort and residence, was called Castel Sant'Angelo, Church of the Holy Angel, the angel being Michael, and still is to this day.

It was connected by a fortified covered passage, the Passeto di Borgo, to St Peter's Basilica by Pope Nicholas II (pope from 25 November 1277 to 22 August 1280), to provide an escape route for the popes, which turned out handy for Pope Clement VII.

There's a story. Clement had allied with French forces to offset the power of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, he to whom the Augsburg Confession was presented, and Charles' army had defeated them in Italy. However, there was no money to pay the soldiers, and it is never ever a good idea to mess with military payroll then, now, or ever. In this case, the troops figured well hell, there's all these riches in Rome, let's go there and take them, which is exactly what they did, about wiping out the Swiss Guards on 5/6 May 1527, the "Sack of Rome". Clement made it out to Castel Sant'Angelo but became a prisoner there and eventually surrendered on 6 June.

Neither the HRE Charles nor Martin Luther approved of this, but it did have the practical effect of curbing papal power over the Holy Roman Empire, with a lot of money and land changing hands. Luther saw Christ's providence in this, saying that the Emperor who persecuted the Lutheran Reformation for the Pope ends up himself having to destroy the Pope. Might just be something to that. To commemorate the fight put up by the Swiss Guards, new ones have their swearing-in on 6 May to this day.

The Passeto and Castel sant'Angelo still exist, the latter now as an Italian national museum, and has a HUGE statue of St Michael on top of it. Not surprisingly, so much intrigue having played out in it historically, it is the headquarters of the "Illuminati" in the fictional "Angels and Demons", a recent movie by Dan Brown of da Vinci Code fame.

St Michael has thus become the patron of guardians of various kinds, from policemen to the sick. Western church writings speak of his feast from at least the 6th century, and other observances based on other appearances and legends arose elsewhere. But 29 September as the Feast of St Michael is among the oldest observances in the Western calendar.

The Feast of St Michael the Archangel, and All Angels.

Why is that? Not to mention, how is that? The custom in the church is to take the date of a saint's death, that being the day he was born to eternity as it were, as his feast day, or if that is unknown, the date of something else he did or is associated with him. Now Michael being an angel and all, ain't dead, so it can't be his date of death, so what is that something else?

Here's what. The feast isn't actually the Feast of St Michael, but the Feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St Michael. The Leonine Sacramentary, from the Sixth Century (the 500s) gives a feast Of the Birth of the Basilica of the Angel on the way to Salaria; the The Gelesian Sacramentary, from the Seventh Century, gives a Feast of St Michael the Archangel, but both of these were on 30 September. Then in the Eighth Century, the Gregorian Sacramentary gives a Feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St Michael the Archangel, but puts it on 29 September.

That's just as well -- gonna need 30 September for the Feast of St Jerome, who died on that day in 420. So we have a feast on 29 September of the dedication of a church to St Michael, howdya like that? Two things about that. For one thing, church, didn't it say basilica, what the hell is that? A basilica originally was not a church at all, but a meeting place for merchants and mercantile justice, but as they were pretty nice big buildings, they got taken over as churches, with the state church and all, and later such churches were called basilica from the get-go.

For another, the specific basilica whose dedication established the feast on 29 September hasn't existed for over a thousand years! One thing's for sure though. 29 September sure in the hell ain't what Vatican II made of it in the novus ordo, where it's now the Feast of Michael, Gabriel and Rafael. Utter revisionist bullroar. 29 September has been about Michael, and the whole company of angels by extension, since it started, and even if the basilica disappeared a thousand years ago, why in the hell a thousand years later does the Whore of Babylon mess with it?

Because that's what the Whore of Babylon does, mess with things. Gabe has his own feast day, which is 24 March, and in the Eastern church his day is 8 November in the Julian Calendar, which is 21 November in the Gregorian Calendar, and two other days as well (26 March and 13 July if you wanna know, the first for his role in the Annunciation and the other for all his other stuff). Rafe has his own feast day too, which is 24 October.

It's interesting the both these feast were only put in the General Roman Calendar in 1921, however, in the sanctoral calendars at lexorandi.org, the 1731 Lutheran Almanac, on the 200th Anniversary of the Presentation of the Augsburg Confession, has Gabe's but not Rafe's, and "The Calendar", which I believe is Loehe's, has Rafe's but not Gabe's, and my "Manual of Prayers", ordered prepared by the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore with Imprimatur 17 May 1889 by James Cardinal Gibbons no less (it was my dad's), has Rafe on 24 October and Gabe but on 18 March, so 1921 didn't start anything but standardised it for Rome.

To its credit, among the many things to its credit, The Lutheran Hymnal -- you know, THE Lutheran Hymnal -- doesn't jack around with any of that, but simply retains The Feast of St Michael and All Angels, and to its credit, Lutheran Service Book, while it does often follow the novus ordo model of jacking around with stuff, doesn't jack around with this one. And given that the dedication thing has kind of lost its significance, the basilica being dedicated being gone a millennium now, it's still worth mentioning since originally that is why 29 September.

And yes, it's kind of like an All Angels Day too. Which is just fine. St Michael being the commander of the angelic forces, like any good commander, he doesn't forget his men.

Various Michaelmas Observances.

We ain't done! Michaelmas has all sorts of stuff attached to it. For centuries, it was a holy day of obligation -- you gotta go to Mass. As the Germans were Christianised, St Michael took the place of Wotan, and you will find St Michael chapels in the mountains, previously sacred to Wotan, there to this day. Michaelmas is also one of the four Quarter Days in Mother England: Lady Day 25 March, Midsummer Day 24 June, Michaelmas 29 September, Christmas 25 December.

What the hell is a Quarter Day? These are four days roughly equivalent to the two equinoxes and two solstices, when business and legal dealings need to be settled -- rents and bills are due (the rent thing is still often followed in England), judges had to visit outlying areas to make sure no matters go on unresolved, servants and labourers are hired so employment isn't up in the air, stuff like that. This is big stuff, coming from the Magna Carta itself of 1215, when the barons secured against the king, John at the time, the principle that no-one's right to justice will be sold, denied, or delayed.

Ever gone to a job fair resume in hand to meet prospective employers? You're right in the tradition of Michaelmas! At harvest's end, on the day after Michaelmas labourers would assemble in the towns for just that purpose with a sign of the work they do in their hands to get employment for the next year. Such events came to be called Mop Fairs, from those seeking employment as maids showing up with a broom in hand, like a resume to show the prospective employer what work they could do.

Pay your taxes due in April? You're right in the tradition of the Quarter Days! Hell, Lady Day was the first day of the calendar year until the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, and when taxes were due. The English tax year still starts on "Old" Lady Day, 6 April.

Oh btw, the lady in Lady Day is Jesus' mother Mary, and the day is more widely known as the Feast of the Annunciation, commemorating the announcement by Gabriel to Mary that if she consented she would bear Jesus, nine months before his birth 25 December. And re calendars, Julian refers to Julius Caesar who set the old calendar, and Gregorian refers to Pope St Gregory who modified it into what we use to-day.

In England, the modified more accurate Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1752, and on 3 September in the old Julian Calendar it became 14 September in the new Gregorian calendar. Many were confused by this, thinking they had lost 11 days of their lives, leading to protests in the streets. Michaelmas was the first big deal to happen after the change, leading some to say that since we lost 11 days, Michaelmas is really 10 October in the new calendar, which is then "Old" Michaelmas Day.

A lot of the resistance to the Gregorian calendar came from it being done by a pope. It was actually the work of Aloysius Lilius, and Gregory made it official 24 February 1582 in the papal bull "inter gravissimas". It's named as is the custom in many places from its first couple of words, which here mean "among the most serious", and changing to the new calendar was taken in many Protestant countries as a deference to papal power.

Michaelmas was also the start of winter curfew, which lasts until Shrove Tuesday, with bells being rung at 2100 hours (that's 9pm) to signal the curfew, which is literally lights out, "curfew" meaning "cover the fire", put out the household fires and lamps.

Michaelmas is also called Goose Day, because goose is eaten for the meal, coming from the practice of those who couldn't pay their rent or bills on the Quarter Day offering a goose instead to the landlord. There's an old rhyme -- He who eats goose on Michaelmas Day, shan't money lack his debts to pay.

It also started the new term, Michaelmas term, at Oxford and Cambridge. Still does!

It is also the day when peasants on manors elected their new reeve. What the hell is a reeve? A serf elected by the other serfs to manage the land for the landowner nobleman, the lord. A reeve of an entire shire was a shire-reeve. What the hell is a shire? That's what counties were called in Mother England before the Norman Conquest, county being the name of the land controlled by a count in continental Europe where the damn Normans came from. Bunch of old stuff lost in history? Got a sheriff in your county? It's exactly why the chief law enforcement officer of your county is called a sheriff, a contraction over time of shire reeve, and why your county isn't called a shire.

Now.

So there's stuff from this all around our modern life. And now, maybe, one more. Back to the legends about St Michael, one of them is, when he kicked Satan out of heaven, which was on 29 September story goes, Satan fell to earth and landed in a bunch of blackberry thorns, which totally ticked him off so he cursed the fruit of the bush, stomped on them, breathed fire on them, spat on them and just generally went nuts. This curse renews every Michaelmas Day, so, what ever you do, DO NOT pick or eat blackberries after Michaelmas!

Which in our digital age opens a whole new question -- if you have a Blackberry phone, can you use it after Michaelmas Day?

Aren't saint's days just a riot? A little bit of something real -- there really is a St Michael the Archangel and he really is the military commander of God's forces, stands ready with all the faithful angels to help and protect you, and will function as such on the End Time -- and a whole lot of legend, leading to some pretty amazing history, both of which have left common elements large and small on life to-day.

Happy Michaelmas! And have some goose, but before 2100. And touch up that resume, if you're looking for a job. Been there and it's tough. Put your trust in God, in this and in all things; I mean who is like God, just like Michael's name means, and, you got people -- and angels.

22 Sep. Jonas, And I Don't Mean The Brothers' Band. (Jonah)

2011-09-18T16:44:00.001-05:00

A really excellent post on Pastor McCain's really excellent blog Cyberbrethren last year (2010) got me going, and I expanded my comment there into a post here. This is the 2011 version of my post. I don't know if PTM will re-post his, write a new one, or what, but Cyberbrethren is always worth a visit, so check it out. He generally posts calendar related things the day of, whereas I post them some days before since this is not a daily-posting blog.

Jonah is one of those Eastern observances that we have well added to our calendar. Although our current calendar unfortunately adds Vatican II novus ordo style revisionist nonsense along with preserving the Christian calendar which grew out of the Jewish one, it also adds, commendably, some observances of Old Testament figures the Eastern Christian calendar has that the Western historically hasn't. Jonah is one of them, which is on 22 September. Thing is, in the traditional Julian calendar followed by many EO churches, 22 September falls in 5 October in the Gregorian Calendar we use. Oh well.

Growing up, in that preconciliar RCC time, I was taught that Jonah -- or Jonas as we said then following the Septuagint, or Greek, form of the name -- prefigured Christ with the three day thing and all, the great fish prefigured the tomb of Christ, his coming out of the fish the resurrection of Christ, the water the water of Baptism, etc.

But how much more there is! Where Jonas was the "reluctant prophet", Jesus is not! Jonah wanted judgement, especially on Nineveh, which was not only not part of the Chosen People, it was one of its enemies! Jonas was called; he just didn't like what he was called to! His reluctance was to a message of repentance, and the forgiveness that it brings, to all people. Teshuva, the Hebrew for repentance, is extended to all Man, not just the people chosen to bear the message, and even to its enemies.

Jonas doesn't like that. But the book makes God's insistence on it clear. The pagan sailors' piety and desire to do what's right before God, as best they could understand it by their own incomplete lights, is contrasted with Jonas' reluctance and the problems it brings them. And after the message is delivered to Nineveh, God takes him to task for being more concerned about a gourd given for his help than the fate of the people -- and animals -- of Nineveh! But they do repent, and yes, fast.

Nineveh, btw, was the capital of Assyria, a threat to the Jews which would later conquer them, and a centre of the worship of Ishtar. Regardless, God offers them repentance, and with no insistence that they undertake observance of the Law of Moses. You may have heard of Nineveh's location in the news lately, in case you think this is more musty Past Elder stuff. Its ruins are across the river Tigris from Mosul, Iraq. Heard of that? And what for sure isn't musty is the message that God offers repentance and forgiveness unto all Man, even the wicked and those who oppose God, everyone.

That God offers repentance and forgiveness unto all Man is so important that the Book of Jonah is read in its entirety on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which is the precursor of Christ the Atonement, as the haftorah at mincha. What the hell is that? Or, if you like, what does this mean?

The haftorah is the precursor in the Jewish lectionary of the "Epistle" reading in the Christian letionary. Mincha is the afternoon synagogue service corresponding to the afternoon Temple sacrifice that is the precursor of Vespers.

Our lectionary grew out of the Jewish one. So, just as in the original there is a reading from The Law or Torah and a related reading usually from The Prophets, called the haftorah, which is sometimes actually from the third section of the Hebrew Bible, The Writings, in the Christian lectionary there is a reading from the Gospels and a related reading usually from the Epistles, called the Epistle reading which is sometimes actually from other books of the Bible either NT or OT.

Thousands of years ago, a third reading was added to the Law/Haftorah format, to make readings from the Writings more included, and, a reading cycle over three years was done besides the traditional cycle. They were also centuries ago abandoned and the traditional continued; maybe that will be the precursor to the abandonment of recent similar Christian, Roman Catholic actually with other wannabes following suit, efforts of adding a third (OT) and even fourth (Psalms) reading and distributing them over a three year cycle. The point of a lectionary is the calendar of observances it serves, not to be a Bible study; synagogue and church alike hold those separately.

Thus the Torah (Law) portion is the precursor of the Gospel portion and the Haftorah is the precursor of the "Epistle" portion, in the lectionary as in the order of the books of the Bible as in the unfolding of salvation -- Law and Gospel! And here in Jonas we see that while God's call to repentance is universal, so is the failure to do it, to both those under the Law or even just the Noahide part that applies to all Man, and so is the forgiveness offered by the Gospel!

14 September. Holy Crap Day 2011.

2011-09-12T00:05:00.014-05:00

In many places a commemoration we Lutherans usually call Holy Cross Day is observed on 14 September. Its actual name is Exaltatio Sanctae Crucis, which in Latin means "Exaltation of the Holy Cross", which is the name I grew up with, except exaltatio in Latin does not mean what exaltation has come to mean by extension in English, it means raising aloft, so the name actually translates as "Raising Aloft of the Holy Cross" which is pretty close to its Greek name "Raising Aloft of the Precious Cross". I ain't getting into the Greek. And I ain't getting into the other "Holy Cross Days" on 13 September, 12 October, 6 March, 3 May and 1 August either!

So What's a Holy Cross Day?

Glad you asked. But before getting down to that, let me be clear about two things. None of what follows should be construed as knocking the historic liturgy and things related to it, as I consider it one of the great treasures of "Lutheranism" that they are retained except where they contradict, as distinct from are commanded by, Scripture. And, none of what follows should be construed as knocking an ever growing awareness of and reverence for what was accomplished for us by Christ on the cross.

It should be construed as what it is, knocking the retention of this "feast" as in any way aiding either the work of zealously guarding and defending the liturgy or of deepening awareness of and reverence toward what was accomplished for us by Christ on the cross.

The Origin of Holy Cross Day.

So why a Holy Cross Day on 14 September? Because on 14 September 335 the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was concluded -- the dedication itself was the day before, and on 14 September the "cross" was brought outside for veneration by the people -- and the Roman Emperor, Constantine, made it a feast day, that's why. What in all church planting Judas does that mean? What cross? Why, the "true" cross, discovered by the Emperor's mom Helena on a dig funded by the Imperial treasury! Huh?

So why ain't it called the Church of the Holy Cross then? Well guess what, there was already something standing there, which was another church, well a temple actually, to the goddess Aphrodite, known to the Romans as Venus, she from whom the planet, and also Friday, is named. Some say the place was originally a Christian worship site, for reasons that will presently be clear, and that the temple was later built by Emperor Hadrian in his rebuilding of Jerusalem.

Why Jerusalem Had To Be Rebuilt. Again.

Now why rebuilding? Well, remember, Jerusalem was completely trashed by the Romans in 70 AD. Whyzat? Well it started in 66, when some Greeks started offering pagan sacrifices outside a synagogue in Jerusalem. At first, the Roman soldiers stationed in Jerusalem did not get involved in this local matter, but next thing you know, the Jewish priests quit offering token sacrifices to the Emperor -- the Roman Empire generally left you alone as long as you paid tribute to the top and didn't rock the boat, which is how its surviving state church still pretty much operates -- and next thing you know there's protests against Roman taxes, call it an ancient Tea Party, and muggings of Romans living there, and finally, when some of the boys from duty stations in the area go in to intervene they get their butts kicked by a bunch of Jews (that's the Battle of Beth Horon) which clean pisses off the Roman Emperor, guy named Nero.

Old Nero tells General Vespasian -- who had distinguished himself in the Roman invasion of Mother England (OK Britannia at the time) in 43 as commander of Legio secunda Augusta (Second Augustan Legion), one of the four legions deployed -- to go in and open up a major can of whoop-ass on Judea. Which he commences to do along with the forces of his son, also a general, Titus, in April 67, with total forces of about 60,000. By 68 they had pretty well cleaned house in the north, and in the south the Jews pretty well cleaned house on each other with infighting, so about all that was left was Jerusalem.

But then something else happened back in Rome. Nero was getting too bizarre for even the Romans, the Senate and the military went against him, he was declared an enemy of the people, so he bolts and commits suicide in 68. All hell breaks loose and in 69 Rome goes through four emperors! First, the new emperor, guy named Galba, gets assassinated by a guy named Otho who wants to be the new emperor so he bribes the Emperor's bodyguards, the Praetorian Guard, to kill him, and then a guy named Vitellius, with the best legions in the Roman army on his side, defeats Otho and inspires him to commit suicide, but then Vitellius pisses everybody clean off by having so many feasts and parades that he about bankrupts the Empire. So in July 69 Vespasian gets hailed as emperor by his army and other Roman armies -- Roman armies did that sometimes, it's also how Constantine would get his start as emperor -- and, thinking maybe that isn't such a bad idea, Vespasian heads to Rome and his allied armies kick the living crap out of Vitellius' forces and kill him, and the Senate proclaims Vespasian emperor 21 December 69. Helluva year.

Vespasian had left crushing the Jewish rebellion to his son Titus, which he bloody well does, so thoroughly destroying Jerusalem that Jospehus, the Roman name of the great Jewish contemporary historian Yosef, says you wouldn't have even thought the place was once inhabited. This includes the destruction of the Temple, which happened on 29/30 July 70. In the Hebrew calendar it was Tisha B'Av, or the 9th of Av (a month in the Hebrew calendar) and guess what, it was on exactly that date that first Temple had been destroyed by the Babylonians, leading to the Babylonian Captivity (the one of the Jews, not the church) some 656 years earlier.

Why the Destruction of the Second Temple Is a Big Deal.

The destruction of the Second Temple has enormous consequences for both Christianity and Judaism. To have the centre of one's worship and people's identity destroyed for the second time was catastrophic. And this time there wasn't even a captivity in which to be carried off. Worst of all, with the Temple gone, it would now be impossible to follow the Law. How does a religion and people based on the Law continue when observing the Law is no longer fully possible?

There's only two answers: one, the Law could now pass because it had been fulfilled, or two, something else would take the place of the sacrifices until such time as they could be restored. The second answer was forthcoming from Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai. During the siege, he was slipped out in a coffin, and knowing the destruction was coming, and sensing Vespasian would become Emperor, negotiated from him three things: 1) sparing the city Jamnia, 2) sparing its sages, who were students of Rabbi Gamaliel, grandson of the great Hillel, and whom St Peter mentions as having argued against killing the Apostles for their messianic beliefs about Jesus, and among whose students St Paul counts himself, 3) a physician to attend an old rabbi (OK, his name as Tzadok)who had fasted for forty years hoping to ward off any destruction such as has just happened. It was here that Judaism as we know it, in the absence of the Temple, began to take shape. Basing himself on Hosea 6:6, he concluded that our mitzvoth (good works) and prayer would now take the place of the sacrifices commanded in the Law.

The second answer is that the sacrifices had culminated in that to which they pointed, the sacrifice of Jesus at Calvary, who is now both priest and victim, and the destruction of the previous ones is what was meant when Jesus said some of those living would see the end, meaning the end of things as they knew it -- which some of them did.

Hadrian Rebuilds Jerusalem.

The story goes that, as Hadrian was rebuilding Jerusalem, there was a site that had been a Christian church reportedly on the site of Jesus' burial, so Hadrian, who hated Christians, ordered dirt brought in to cover the site, then had a temple to Venus (Aphrodite to the Greeks) built on top of the earth on top of the old church site. So Constantine ordered the temple destroyed and the earth underneath it moved back out!

Makes for a nice story, but the story is pure bull. Hadrian located the forum for the new Jerusalem where Roman fora were always located, which is, at the meeting of the main north-south road through town and the, or one of the, main east-west roads. In Jerusalem there were the latter case, and the forum was located in the space between the two east-west roads and along the north-south road, and the temple to Venus was part of that. So far from being a special action against Christians, it was just a following of standard Roman practice anywhere.

And, that the site is that of Jesus' tomb is so unlikely as to be nearly surely false. The Bible says Jesus' tomb was outside the city walls of Jerusalem, and this site is within the walls of Jerusalem. Oh well, some say, the walls of Jerusalem in Jesus' day were different. Two problems with that. If they were east enough of the current walls to make the site west of them, Jerusalem would have been quite a narrow city. Also, building a tomb west of the city is highly unlikely, as wind in Jerusalem generally blows from west to east, and thus would blow over the tombs bringing ritual impurity not to mention a possible stench to the city and in particular to the Temple Mount. So, graves go to the east of the city.

Helena.

And, to those unlikely to be true legends, add those about Helena and the finding of the "true" cross. Helena was the mother of Constantine and the father was Constantius, however, it is unclear of she was a legal wife or a concubine, which then meant an extra-legal wife since the marriage was between social classes (he was noble, she was not) and prohibited by Roman law. Constantius dumped her in a power deal to solidify his political position to marry another (Theodora), which he did in Trier, then called Augusta Treverorum and his new capitol. Son Constantine the "Great" would later do the same thing for the same reasons. Once her son became Emperor, Helena returned to public life and was made Augusta Imperatrix, and was given unlimited access to the imperial treasury to locate objects of Christian veneration.

The story is, after the Temple of Venus was torn down and the land removed, excavation found three crosses at what was supposed to be the site of Jesus' burial. So a woman near death was brought, and did not recover on touching the first two crosses but did on touching the third, which Helena proclaimed the cross of Christ. Problem is, contemporary accounts of the excavation (Eusebius) do not mention Helena being there at all, unlikely for the Augusta Imperatrix to not be mentioned if she were there, and the legend about authenticating the true cross appears not only later, but in at least three distinct versions, the one just related, one where a dead man was touched to each of the three and came back to life at the right one, and that the inscription put on the cross was still on it.

Take Your Pick. Or Not. Exaltatio Sanctae Crucis.

What a wretched mess, most of it legend of the most spurious kind and the rest of it fact of the most disgusting kind. A verifiable total confusion of the Two Kingdoms (left and right hand) surrounded by unverifiable legends that don't even agree with each other. This honours the cross of Christ? Such a miserable excuse for piety should be shovelled out and thrown away just like Constantine shovelled out what Hadrian shovelled in. The object of our veneration is not the cross per se, or toothpicks from it, or legends about finding it, or big fancy churches built at state expense on the supposed site of it, or a feast day established by a Roman Emperor, but Christ and his action on it for our salvation, whose body and blood he gives you right in your own parish in Communion Divine Service.

The true Raising Aloft of the Holy Cross is not like some empty fiction, for example the story about Dietrich von Bern, or these miserable True Cross legends, but as St John says in John 12:32 "And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." Et ego si exaltatus fuero a terra omnia traham ad me ipsum. The Alpha and the Omega, and his Omega Point through whose exaltatio we are drawn from the one and raised aloft to the other.

It's Fall --What Happened to the High Holydays and Sukkoth? 2011.

2011-09-01T08:45:00.003-05:00

OK what's up with this? If it's really so as Past Elder, the blog, has been saying since it started that Christian liturgy is essentially a transformed, Messianic Jewish one, then how is it that in Fall when Judaism is about to begin a whole bunch of major observances, the Christian calendar ain't got nuttin major until Christmas?

Some background. Past Elder, the blog, commenced operations 22 February 2007. In my first posts about Holy Week, Easter and Pentecost, I mentioned that the Christian pattern of yearly worship derives from the Jewish one. In my second year, I took to posting a few posts again, revised here and there, that relate to our cycle of observances of major parts of our faith in the church year, and also the civil calendar, calling it the "blogoral cycle" as a play on terms like "sanctoral cycle" for the saint's days in the church year.

The Blogoral Cycle takes particular note of how our church year comes from and fulfills the cycle of observances in the Jewish calendar. However in Fall, where the Jewish calendar is FULL of stuff, the Christian church calendar has -- NOTHING, precisely where, if it indeed comes from and fulfills the Jewish cycle, one would expect it to be full of stuff too!

So what's up with that? Here's the 2011 version of my post about it.

I. About Fall.

In the US, Labor Day is the unofficial start of Fall, or Autumn if you insist. The official start is 0905 hours GMT on 23 September 2011. GMT means Greenwich Mean Time, aka, which means also known as, UTC, which means Universal Time Co-ordinates. That will be 0405 hours, or 405 am CDT, 23 September 2011 here in Omaha. Well, that's one of the official starts. Holy crap, what's up with that -- two official starts? And to a season with two names! What's up with THAT, before we even get to this post's What's Up With That?

A. About the Two Starts.

The first thing is, there's two Falls, the astronomical one and the meteorological one. Astronomical Fall is determined by the relative amount of light and dark in a day. Just like the word Man, which can mean either all human beings or just the male ones, the word Day is used sometimes for the whole 24 hour period or just the light part of it.

Astronomical Fall is from the day, as in 24 hour period, with equal amounts of light and dark in it, called the autumnal equinox ("equal night" in Latin), to the day with the least amount of day light in it, called the winter solstice ("sun stand still", solstitium, sol or sun and sistere or to stand still in Latin). And some think Latin is not still with us! But we all note these daylight changes do not align exactly with the air temperature changes. That is because of the thermal latency of land and sea.

Judas H Priest, what is thermal latency? How many what's up with thats can we have? Don't freak. "Thermal latency" are simply more Latin derived words for the phenomenon that while as the earth rotates toward and then away from the sun, thereby giving more and then less heat, it takes both land and water a while to warm up or cool off.

Meteorological Fall is determined by the changes in air temperature. Huh, if it's meteorology why ain't it about meteors? Holy crap another What's Up With That! Now ain't you glad you read Past Elder so you can know all this stuff? Meteorology comes from the Greek meteoros or "up in the sky" and -ology or the study of something. Matter of fact, although weather forecasters take flak for having the only job where you get paid to be wrong, and TV has gone through phases where the weather segment was done by somebody just reading stuff, a comedian if male or a stacked babe if female, meteorology was started by Aristotle in a book by that name he wrote in 350 BC in which, with no modern instruments whatever but just being a keen observer and smarter than all hell, described what is now called the hydrologic cycle.

Don't freak, more Greek derived words, here meaning water cycle, in which water is not just distinct from land but interacts with land in changing cycles in various forms; liquid, otherwise known as rain, vapour, otherwise known as fog, and solid, otherwise known as ice. Think that's just some musty ancient stuff, who cares? Guess what? Our planet, though we call it Earth, is mostly actually water, and a planet with a lot of water over long periods of time loses hydrogen, which is part of water (H2O, remember?), which in turn leads to what is called the "greenhouse effect", which leads to more hydrogen loss, which leads to more greenhouse effect, which natural cycle can be accelerated by what Man's activities put in the air, and while we don't know exactly how the two affect each other everybody is worried as hell about that now or ought to be.

Sound musty now? Old Ari was sharp as a tack, wish we had more like him now with modern instruments. Which doesn't mean you can't be a comedian or a stacked babe while you're doing that. Which is also why besides Blogoral Calendars and stuff like that Past Elder goes on about musty ancient stuff -- because it helps us understand where in the hell we are right now and what where we are right now even is.

So meteorological seasons are determined by average air temperatures, which lag behind the astronomical events of solstices and equinoxes that determine astronomical seasons, due to thermal water latency. Fall in this definition is from 1 September to 30 November. Well, in the northern hemisphere that is. Our planet being a sphere, when one side rotates toward the sun the other rotates away, so Fall in the southern hemisphere happens when our Spring does, and vice versa.

Now topping that all off are school boards, who as any kid or parent knows, are God and determine when Summer ends by when school starts, which unlike when I grew up when it was after Labor Day, the unofficial start of Fall, and after 1 September, the official start of meteorological Fall, now start in August sometime when you oughta still be swimming in the damn city pool, probably because they don't want no lawsuits so they have "snow days" in the Winter, which unlike when I grew up simply meant you got up earlier, shovelled the crap outta the way and went about your business, leaving early because you drive slower, or should.

B. About the Two Names.

Oh yeah and on the two names for the same season thing, so we can clear up all the What's Up With Thats before we get on to the main What's Up With That. Guess what? More Latin. The original name was the Latin autumnus, and the modern languages derived from Latin all have similar words for it. But English isn't totally Latin derived, the Latin and Greek stuff is an overlay onto basically a form of German. Now in German itself autumn is Der Herbst, which means harvest, and that is what the season was called in English too, Harvest, and it wasn't until the 1500s, when people were tending to live more in towns than in the country, that "harvest" in English became more the activity of harvesting and the season began to be called Autumn and Fall.

OK we saw the derivation of "autumn" from autumnus but where did this fall thing come from? Because the leaves are falling, and the amount of daylight is falling, and the year is drawing to its close. In the 1600s English colonisation of the Americas was in full swing, and both terms came over, but back in Mother England by the 1700s "fall" fell to "autumn" in usage, and that is why now Autumn is used in both places but Fall in mostly heard here.

Sukkoth is the easy part of this Fall stuff. It begins at sunset, the start of the Biblical day, on 15 Tishrei in the Jewish calendar. In the secular calendar, which actually is religious in origin being commissioned by Pope Gregory, this is sunset on 12 October 2011. In 2010 it fell on sunset of 22 September, in 2012 it will fall on sunset of 30 September. God's pretty straight up about what he wants. Speaking of which, let's see what the real God, not the school board, wants regarding observances through the year.

II. Here's What God Wants For A Festival Calendar.

In the religion God delivered to the Jews in the Old Testament, he commands three major festivals: 1) Pesach or Passover; 2) Shavuot or Pentecost, also called Weeks; 3) Sukkot, called Tabernacles or Booths. These three are the Shalosh Regalim, the Three Pilgrim Festivals where all Jews go to Jerusalem.

And in the Fall, in addition to Sukkot, before it there is the High Holidays, more properly the Yamim Noraim or Days of Awe, which are the Ten Days of Repentance from Rosh Hashanah, the so-called Jewish New Year, through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year, commanded in the Law of Moses, then Sukkoth itself, which runs seven days, then the Eighth Day, Shemini Atzeret, when normal living indoors (huh, what's up with that, hang on, we'll get to it below, or as we say, vide infra, Latin for "see below", a term once common in the scholarly apparatus -- you know, footnotes and stuff -- of scholarly works and which I damn straight would use if I ever resume writing like a PhD) resumes and Simchat Torah, Rejoicing in Torah, is held with the conclusion of the annual reading through of Torah and starting it right over again and dancing that often goes on for hours.

In some of the other posts, we saw Passover transformed by Christ at the Last Supper, or Last Seder, into what we call Holy Communion, the new and eternal testament of his body and blood, and ratified by his Death and Resurrection which we celebrate as an event in time on Good Friday and Easter. Then we saw God himself count the commanded Omer and transform the celebration of the giving of the Law at Sinai at Pentecost by the giving of the promised Holy Spirit to the Apostles, which we celebrate as an event in time on the day also called Pentecost.

Then, what -- the whole thing seems to, uh, fall apart!! Where's the transformed Rosh Ha-Shanah, where's the transformed Days of Awe, where's the transformed Yom Kippur, where's the transformed Sukkoth, where's the transformed Eighth Day and Rejoicing in Torah? And where's the dancing?

Nowhere, it seems. The Christian calendar is entirely absent of such things. Fall, full of observances in Judaism, comes and goes with nothing until the secular Thanksgiving and then Advent which is a time of preparation for Christmas. So does the parallel fall apart here, or perhaps show itself to be irrelevant anyway if it exists at all? Just give me Jesus, man.

No. Consider how Jesus gives himself. Christ has himself become our atonement, that to which the Day of Atonement led. The "Day of Atonement" is the historical Good Friday, once for all. Rosh Ha-Shanah too, the day on which creation was completed and God judges each person for the coming year, has been fulfilled in God's having re-created lost Man by making justification possible because of the merit of Christ's sacrifice. That is how we are now inscribed, not just for the coming year but for eternity. So these two are absent because they have served their purpose and been fulfilled.

But what of Sukkot? At Sukkot, one lives, or at least takes one's meals, in a temporary structure called a sukkah in Hebrew -- a booth, a tabernacle, not in one's actual home. This is to remember the passage of the people after the Passover and Pentecost to the Promised Land. Zechariah (14:16-19) predicts that in the time of the Messiah the feast will be observed not just by Jews but by all humanity coming to Jerusalem for its observance. That would be a pretty big event. It ain't happening. And a transformed Sukkoth in the Christian calendar ain't even happening either. So what is the deal here?

III. Here's The Christian Sukkoth.

Consider. Christ is our Passover, in whose blood we are washed and made clean, and the Holy Spirit has empowered the spread of this Good News beginning on that Pentecost recorded in Acts. But the end of the story, unlike the arrival in the Promised Land, has not happened. The real Promised Land is not a piece of geography but heaven itself, the ultimate Jerusalem. So, there cannot be a Christian Sukkoth because we are still in our booths, as it were, not in our permanent homes, still on our pilgimage to the Promised Land, and what Zechariah saw is happening as "the nations", all people, join in this journey given first to the Jews and then to all Man, the Gentiles.

Our Sukkot is our life right now, in our "booths" or temporary homes on our way to heaven! So this feast awaits its transformation, and that is why it is absent. The first two of the "pilgrimage festivals", the Shalosh Regalim, have been transformed, into the basis of not just our calendar but our life and faith itself, but the third will be heaven itself, toward which we journey as we live in our booths here on the way.

While we do not, therefore, have a certain observance of a transformed Sukkot in our calendar, being in our booths presently, we do have something of it as we go. Our nation, and others too, have a secular, national day of Thanksgivng at the end of harvest time, preserving that aspect of thankfulness for our earthly ingathering of the fruits of our labour. And in the final weeks of the Sundays after Trinity, we focus on the End Times in our readings, the great ingathering that will be for all nations when our Sukkoth here is ended, not just at death personally but finally at the Last Day.

As a comment to an earlier version of this post, "orrologion", an Orthodox blogger, observed that "In the Orthodox Christian tradition the Transfiguration fills the place of Sukkot. Fruits are blessed and it commemorates Peter's offer to build three booths for Christ, Moses and Elijah". In the Eastern observance the "Blessing of the First Fruits" does give it a harvest connexion, but, Sukkoth is not about first but last fruits. And, in the Transfiguration we see Jesus' fulfillment of the Law (Moses) and the prophets (Elijah), and the appearance of all three persons in God, as he is about to go to Jerusalem for the Crucifixion, Death, and Resurrection.

Related to that, the Feast of the Transfiguration is celebrated in both the Eastern and the Western church on 6 August. The West had the feast, but only settled on this date in 1456, when the Kingdom of Hungary broke the Siege of Belgrade and forced the Islamic Ottomans back. News of the victory made it to Rome on 6 August, and in view of its importance Pope Callixtus III put the Transfiguration in the general Roman church calendar on this date.

We Lutherans do not follow this, but follow a tradition which places the Transfiguration on the last Sunday after Epiphany, placing the event where it is in the course of Jesus' life followed by the Gospel readings of the traditional church cycle. The military connexion of 6 August would be odd for a harvest feast. In our times however it has found a significance which is altogether spooky, which I have never heard anyone East or West mention.

6 August is also the anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons, Hiroshima. It puts in stark contrast the world and God: one can approach a transfiguration by God shown in this event, or one can approach a transfiguration by Man shown in Hiroshima -- salvation is of the Lord.

IV. Conclusion.

At my wife's funeral, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the secular Sukkoth, in 1997, the pastor concluded the sermon by saying: A few days ago most of us celebrated a thanksgiving that lasted one day, but Nancy began one that lasts an eternity.

So is the promise to us all. And that's what happened to Sukkot. And also to the rejoicing and dancing, not for hours, but eternity!

Augustine and Happy Birthday, Western Catholic Church. 6 September 2011.

2011-08-28T00:11:00.004-05:00

Nah, 6 September is not the birthday of the Catholic Church. 27 February 380 is. It just took 14 years for resistance in the Western Empire to be crushed militarily, which happened 6 September 394, so it's kind of like a birthday for the Western Roman Imperial Church. And fits right in with the Feast of St Augustine, 28 August, who was a pagan professor in 380 and about to be named Bishop of Hippo in the new state church in 394.

Huh?

On 6 September 394 the Eastern Emperor Theodosius I defeated the Western Emperor Eugenius at the conclusion of the two-day Battle of The Frigidus.

Judas H Priest, never heard of it and why should I have heard of it, and where and what in the hell is the Frigidus?

About the River and Why the Battle.

OK about the river. The Frigidus is a river, the Latin name means "cold" as its English descendant "frigid" suggests. It is in northeastern Italy and Slovenia and is now called the Vipacco in Italian and the Vipava in Slovene, and of course I gotta tell ya it is called the Wipbach in modern German, or, as b and p get sort of interchangeable in German sometimes, the Wippach.

So why was there a battle there and why should I care to know? Goes like this. On 27 February 380, the Eastern Emperor Theodosius, in concert with his Western co-Emperor counterparts Gratian and Valentinian II, issued the Edict of Thessalonica, which made Nicene Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire overall, required that all subjects of the Empire must hold this faith as delivered to Rome and preserved by then current Pope Damasus I and then current Bishop of Alexandria Peter, and declared that these alone shall be called "Catholic Christians", the universal faith of the Empire, and all others are heretics and not even churches, subject to such punishment as the Empire should choose to visit upon them.

So, 27 February 380 is the birthday of the "Catholic Church", as distinct from the catholic church. The then-new Imperial state church is still around, and still reflects the divisions between the Eastern and Western Roman Empire as Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. The Eastern version took hold earlier but it was a little more unsettled in the Western Empire. That's why, though both have the same birthday, 6 September 394 is a sort of Western birthday, since that is when resistance to it in the Western Empire was crushed by military power from the Eastern Empire, no co-incidence at all that this was at the hands of Theodosius, who would be the last Emperor both East and West.

A Renowned Professor Get Caught Up In This.

A Roman citizen, from what are now called Berbers, named Augustine is teaching in Carthage in 380, seven years away from being baptised by the state bishop, Ambrose, of the state church in the state's Western capital by then, Milan. Diocletian, the last emperor of an undivided Roman Empire, had made Milan, then called Mediolanum, the Western capitol in 293 and Nicomedia, now Izmit Turkey, the Eastern capitol in 286, and called his new provincial units diocese, after himself. Constantine moved the Eastern capitol to Byzantium, renamed it Constantinople, which is now Istanbul Turkey.

The Roman Senate, still in Rome, was not shall we say comfortable with this new state religion in the two new capitols of the Empire, and lots of academic disputes and apologetics on both sides went back and forth, but no violence. During this unsettled time Augustine gets appointed to the most prestigious professorship in his world, at the Western capitol Milan in 384, and is all caught up in the swirling controversy between the old religion and classic philosophy and the new state church.

He also gets caught up in his mother Monica's designs for his career. Now with a prestigious academic position, his longstanding relationship with a woman he never names but called "the one", of some 14 years complete with son, called Adeodatus, meaning "given by God", hasta go according to mom. So he caves and sends her away, she saying she will never be with another man, he finding a new concubine to tide him over until the proper social marriage his mom, "Saint" Monica, arranges with a then-11 year old girl can happen.

And about concubines. Ain't what you think. A concubine in ancient Rome was simply a wife that Roman law forbade you to marry due to your or her social class. These marriages denied legality by Imperial law were rather common, and the church didn't come down on them since it wasn't the couple's fault they weren't legally married. Something to keep in mind when "the one" gets called concubine in the modern sense, their relationship gets passed off as merely lustful and the son as "illegitimate".

Take, Read -- This Christian Bestseller!

No wonder the dude was confused! His whole world is swirling in unsettled controversy and mom is running his life like a beauty pageant mom. And then, as he's all upset about his life, he has this really weird experience where he hears a kid's voice saying "Take, read" (the famous tolle, lege). Now what he was told to take and read you won't likely find in your local Christian bookstore, but was among the most widely read books, first in the Imperial Christian state church and then through the Middle Ages. It's a Life of St Anthony of the Desert, written by St Athanasius about 360 in Greek, but best known in a Latin translation made about ten or so years later.

Hoo-boy, old Tony. He was a wealthy Egyptian who became Christian at about age 34, so far so good, sold everything and took up with a local hermit. Tony in NO way was the "Founder of Monasticism", as religious hermits of various religions were common on the outskirts of cities; Philo the Jewish-Egyptian writer mentions them all, sharing the Platonic idea of having to get out of the world to get into an ideal. Pure Platonist Idealism. Sure glad Jesus didn't do that or let his Apostles do it either when they wanted to, but went back to Jerusalem where real life had things for them to do.

But old Tony went the other direction, and left even the outskirts for the desert itself to get away from it all to get into it all. But the crowds followed -- everybody loves an exotic "holy man" -- and Tony took on the more advanced cases of this mania and left the rest to his associates, a Christian Oracle of Delphi, which "guidance" was later variously collected as the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, or Apophthegmata, if you want a word to impress somebody in a combox or something.

The Famous Professor Converts.

Anyhoo, Gus reads this in 386, and on the Easter Vigil of 387, Ambrose baptises Gus and his son. The next year, 388, he determines to return home to North Africa. Which he did, but along the way both his mother and his son died, so he arrives alone in the world, and understandably unsure of himself once again. Next he sells the family stuff and gives the money away, except the house which he turns into a sort of lay monastery. I guess that's what you do when you read about dudes in the desert, rather than go through the grief and live on in the world of people. Then he gets ordained presbyter or priest in 391 in Hippo, now Annaba, Algeria.

This mostly academic and political controversy, in which Gus' unsettled life had its context, and of which it is typical, changed when Western Emperor Valentinian II was found hanged in his home on 16 May 392. His half brother and co-Emperor Gratian was already dead, killed 25 August 383 in Lyon France by forces of Roman generals who thought he was losing his grip. The official word was Valentinian was a suicide, but his wife and others though he was done in by his military power behind the throne, a Frank named Arbogastes, and the Imperial Milan court church's bishop, Ambrose, left the question open, suicide being a no-no for a Christian Emperor held up as a hero.

A Digression, but a Damned Important One.

What's a Frank? Not a hot dog, that comes from Frankfurter, and originally meant Frankfurter Würstchen, which means "little sausages from Frankfurt" served on a bun. They originated in the 13th Century and became the peoples' food for coronations of the Holy Roman Emperor starting with Maximilian II, a Habsburg and nephew of Emperor Karl V, he to whom the Augsburg Confession was presented, on 25 July 1564. About 1800 or so, a butcher named Johann Georg Lahner from Coburg, Bavaria, introduced the Frankfurter Würstchen to Vienna. Now Vienna had its own sausages, which were a mixture of pork and beef called Wiener, from Wien, which is "Vienna" in German. Lahner modified his product by mixing the original pork with beef like the Viennese and calling the result simply a Frankfurter. German immigrants brought the product to the US at Coney Island, and at St Louis where the German American owner, Chris von der Ahe, of the St Louis Brown Stockings, now the Cardinals, started selling them at baseball games and also at a stand in what is now Paul T McCain's back yard. OK just jacking around on that last bit --the inter-relation of hot dogs, Lutheranism, St Louis and the Cards is clear enough without it. There, toldya it was important! The name got shortened to "Frank", they're hot, and the "dog" thing came from rumours that the makers actually used dog meat. Myself, I like kosher beef hot dogs, not at all the original!

Oh yeah, the Franks -- comes from the Roman name gens Francorum for these Germanic barbarians who threw their axes (the franks), whose own ethnic history says they were Trojans under Priam who ended up on the Rhein, oh sorry, Rhine, after the fall of Troy in Homeric times.

Back To the Story.

On 22 August 392, Arbogastes, who being a Frank and not Roman could not be Emperor, names a Roman Christian named Eugenius the Western Emperor. Eugenius though Christian was sympathetic to traditional Roman religion and started replacing Western officials sympathetic to the Eastern Empire. The Eastern Empire put off recognition of the new Western regime, and finally in January of 392 Theodosius declared his two-year-old son Honorius as Western Emperor and begins preparing an invasion of the Western Empire, which began in May 394 and concluded in the victory at The Frigidus 6 September 394. Arbogastes commits suicide and Eugenius is beheaded by the Catholic forces of Theodosius.

Later in the same year, 394, the Imperial state Catholic Church, on a real roll -- having destroyed the Temple of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi in 390, the Serapeum and Great Library in Alexandria in 391, the year Augustine was ordained a priest in the official church, having ended the two great rituals of ancient Greece, the Eleusinian Mysteries in 392 and the Olympic Games after the ones in 393 -- puts out the fire considered essential to Rome's survival at the Temple of Vesta, and disbands the women who were personally selected by the pontifex maximus, when that meant the head of the traditional Roman religion rather than the head of the new state Catholic religion.

The next year, 395, Augustine becomes religious head, which is called bishop, of the Roman Imperial administrative unit called a diocese, in Hippo. Guess Gus knew on which side his bread is buttered.

It All Comes To-gether, It All Falls Apart.

The Battle of The Frigidus effectively ended any Western resistance to the new state church. But those old Roman families knew a thing or two about survival and before long they were papal families, eventually supplying Pope Gregory, made Pope 3 September 590, who ruled the state church like a real Roman indeed. This enormous civil war though left the Western Empire greatly weakened, and it collapsed a thousand years before the Eastern Empire did, with the Visigoths sacking Rome in 410. So Augustine, by then 56 and still Bishop of Hippo, writes more Platonism to assure the shocked Romans that though the joint was a mess, the real and ideal City of God was the real winner.

Yeah right. Back here in reality the "City of God", Rome, first sacked by the Gauls in 387 BC, after the 410 sack by the Visigoths, got sacked again by the Vandals in 455, but Gus died at 75 on 28 August 430 so he missed it. And Rome would be sacked again by the Ostrogoths in 546, and again by the Arabs in 846, and again by the Normans in 1084, and last by soldiers of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, but not on his orders, in 1527.

Still, warts and all, Augustine at least did not hold a six 24 hour day creation to be the "literal" understanding of Genesis without which the rest of revelation falls apart.

Anyway, that's the famous book The City of God, which is actually only the first part of its title, which is On The City Of God Against The Pagans (OK it's De civitate Dei contra Paganos, I translated). Pagan is another term reinvented by the new church. It once meant someone from the country, or a civilian, but with the Imperial Catholic Church firmly in the cities, and their faithful thinking they were a church militant, soldiers of Christ, which, the state military having kicked the crap out of the former religion for the state church, I guess kind of fits, pagan came to mean someone adhering to the old religion which hung on more in the countryside.

The Aftermath.

That Platonic idealism guided and fuelled the West as it struggled through centuries of chaos and tried to reinvent its former glory with the Holy Roman Empire, which, as has been famously remarked, was not holy, not Roman, and not much of an empire. Hell, it was Frankish, the new Romans! Old Arbogastes would have liked that! And it by God had the Roman state Catholic Church with popes and bishops and diocese and all the Platonism reinvented as Christianity you can shake a stick at, complete with justification as the City of God.

Which wholesale hijacking of the catholic church as the Catholic Church, one might say its Babylonian Captivity, lasted for a thousand years. Then a poor guy in a screwed up world with a screwed up life, and a barbarian to boot, a German named Martin Luther from outside the old Roman boundaries, seeks solace in a religious order modelling itself after Augustine's Platonic idealism turned into Christian monastic asceticism, and discovers none of this crap is gonna save you but simply faith in the Son sent by God to be the sacrifice which takes away our sins, just like Scripture, which is supposed to be the church's book, says.

And so begins the disentanglement of the catholic church from the Catholic Church of the Roman and Holy Roman Empires. They tried like hell to make the catholic church, the pillar and ground of truth, the bride of Christ, into the Whore of Babylon. The vestiges of Theodosius' state Imperial Catholic Church continue in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Which is bad enough, but equally false but opposite reactions to the Babylonian Captivity arose and continue in later Reformation churches. The guideline of the Lutheran reformation was, if it contradicts Scripture must go but what doesn't is retained, since the power of the Gospel and Word and Sacrament is such that not even the Roman Empire could entirely keep it out. But with these guys the guideline became, if it ain't in Scripture it goes -- depending on whose version of what is in Scripture one buys -- thus losing his Divine Service of his body and blood for our salvation, and in some cases even Baptism as well.

And lately all of these anachronisms, state churches that survived their original state, seem intoxicated with a Rousseau-like Romantic fiction, which is some sort of resurrection of an imagined pure church of the Apostles and Church Fathers, rediscovered by their scholarship of course, a sort of ecclesiastical version, a noble church, of Rousseau's "noble savage". And it must be said some of these anachronisms have the word "Lutheran" in their names. Thus the equal but opposite errors of the old state church and the later Reformers, equally condemned in the Lutheran Confessions, continue as well.

Conclusion.

But while all of this rages about us, and even infects the Lutheran Reformation, thanks be to God for the Lutheran Reformation and its confession of the true teaching of Scripture, the book that is the church's own measure and norm, while yet retaining what does not contradict it.

St Monica and Vatican II For Lutherans. 27 August 2011.

2011-08-24T00:30:00.013-05:00

We Lutherans -- "we" being the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, insofar as the name has not been removed or hidden so people don't think we're some kind of frozen chosen, maintenance rather than missional mentality, or wannabe Catholics stuck in a Eurocentric liturgical straight-jacket for worship rather than ablaze to bring you to a critical event and get you all on fire with our praise band -- are about to celebrate the Feast of St Monica on 27 August.

Thing is, the Feast of St Monica is 4 May.

Huh? Who cares? What difference does that make? And who is and why bother about this Monica anyway? The last Monica anyone heard about was Lewinsky! Besides, it's all adiaphora, right, why trample on my Christian Freedom with all this dead weight from the past?

Monica was the mother of St Augustine. Geez, whozzat? Well, arguably the most influential Christian theologian ever. We'll leave whether that was for better or worse, as well as biographies of Augustine or Monica, aside here, or you can check Section VIII of Eastern Church/Empire, Western Church/Empire, 2011, in this blog here. Except for this: Augustine was quite non-Christian, anti-Christian really, held the most prestigious professorship in his time, and his conversion was brought about in part by the example and prayers of his Christian mother, Monica, which is why the church honours her.

When the church sets up a day in honour of someone, the traditional practice is to choose the day on which the person died, if known, since that is the day they were born into eternity. St Augustine's date of death, his heavenly birthday, is 28 August 430, so 28 August is his feast.

St Monica's feast day was not a part of the overall observance of the Western Church for about three-fourths of its elapsed history to date, until about the time of the Council of Trent in the Sixteenth Century. However, it was long observed by the Augustinian Order. Geez, whazzat?

The "Augustinian Order" is a rather motley assortment of religious associations rather than a clear cut single entity, all of them tracing their origin to St Augustine and his rule of life, or regula in Latin. That's what it literally is to be regular -- you live under a regula, or rule. Readers here may have heard of one such Augustinian. Guy named Martin Luther. Anyway, in the Augustinian Order but not the church as a whole there was, besides the observance of the feast of St Augustine on 28 August, another one whose focus was his conversion to Christianity, which conversion in turn influenced the entire church.

This Augustinian feast, the Feast of the Conversion of St Augustine, was/is celebrated on 5 May. So they celebrated the single biggest human factor in bringing about that conversion, the example and prayers of his mother, St Monica, the day before, 4 May. The Conversion feast never did make it into the overall Roman Calendar, and when St Monica's did, since her date of death is not known, the traditional Augustinian date was retained, 4 May. Simple.

And retained in the Lutheran Reformation for centuries. Until the Revolution. Er, Vatican II.

One of the stated aims of the "liturgical reform" at Vatican II was to pare down the historical hodgepodge of stuff into something more straightforward and accessible. So they effectively banned the old stuff and came up with an entirely new order (novus ordo), sporting four "Eucharistic Prayers", several new options for other key parts of the Mass, a new lectionary of readings spread out over three years, and a new calendar -- a new hodgepodge crafted from an even wider spread of historical sources! Oh well, it was the 1960s after all. I guess you gotta make allowances for that.

One small item in this was relocating the Feast of St Monica to 27 August, the day before the feast of her son. There's a logic to that. And as far as the institution of Christ and fidelity to Scripture goes, you can celebrate the Feast of St Monica on 4 May, 27 August, any other day, or not at all.

However, it's not the 1960s any more. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to learn or be taught that we honour St Monica not because of her physical motherhood of St Augustine but because of her example in the conversion of her pagan son, who went on to be one of the church's greatest saints, and that we do so on 4 May because in the religious order that looks to her son as their patron saint they had long celebrated Monica on 4 May, the day before they celebrated the conversion of their patron on 5 May. And then to stay connected to and become a part of that ongoing history by leaving it there rather than turning one's back on all that and relocating it.

Sorry, Roman dudes. There already was a liturgical reform. It was to pare down all right, but in view of what contradicts Scripture, not our ideas of what makes something more "accessible", and to zealously guard and defend the worship of the church's existing order, not invent a new one. It's called the Lutheran Reformation. You're a few centuries late to the party. If the Roman hierarchy and associated academics are going to busy themselves with something other than preaching Christ and him crucified, and along the way explain the history of this movement, let them put off the period clothes, get married and raise a family and learn something of real benefit to their fellow man, like heating and air conditioning repair.

Yet, we and other Christian bodies now fall in line with them as if there had been no Reformation! The 1960s Roman novus ordo, with emendations and adaptations, is now the common property of pretty much all other heterodox Christian denominations with liturgical aspirations, rather than the traditional order of the Western Church.

And "our beloved synod" falls into line too, even those parts of it trying to remain true to our Confessions in the Book of Concord. We moan and groan why other parts of our beloved synod seem to be heading off on all sorts of tangents, or rather, variations on the tangent of chasing after the success in attracting numbers of the American suburban "evangelical" megachurches.

We wonder how our people could be taken in by these false hopes and promises, yet, why should our people not wonder why these are not also valid options that we can Lutheranise when we set before them as confessional Lutheranised "options" modelled after 1960s Rome side by side with our common catholic history -- this historical mass and that Vatican II For Lutherans mass, this historical lectionary and that Vatican II For Lutherans lectionary, this historical calendar and that Vatican II For Lutherans calendar. Why not listen to Willow Creek and Saddleback and Lakewood too with their false hopes and promises when we adopt and adapt the stinking filth of the Whore of Babylon as it toys with our catholic heritage? Why should they not think it's all about options, personal preference, all OK? We let something in through the back door then wonder why it comes knocking at the front!

Even in a small matter like when a saint's day is observed the whole rotten Roman mess in the church is revealed, and its adoption/adaptation by other church bodies!

St Monica gave St Augustine physical birth, but her greatness for which we honour her is not that but in her role in his spiritual birth, his conversion, in this life. Therefore she is better honoured by leaving her day where it is for the reason it is there, or better yet finally inserting the Conversion into the Calendar, rather than moving her feast day from a day which does have inherent reference to her to the day before her son's feast, which does not.

Jacking around with the feast of St Monica is a small example but typical of a big issue. Once again, the calendar, lectionary and ordo of Vatican II all miss the mark, even of its own intended reform. They are the products not of the Christian church, but one denomination, and that headed by an office bearing the marks of Anti-Christ -- regardless of its current occupancy by a nice and learned German guy -- and now are the common property of all heterodox liturgical churches in the West, utterly irrelevant to Christ's Church and therefore should be utterly irrelevant to Lutherans.

Right along with Saddleback, Willow Creek and Lakewood, Rome no less than they offers "contemporary worship" whose forms derive from and express a content that is not ours and rejects ours, derived from an agenda that is not ours and rejects ours, and therefore into which our content does not fit nor should we try to make it fit, and when we do, we abandon that part of our mission which is to zealously guard and defend the mass, for the most part retaining the ceremonies previously in use.

On St Bernard, Sacred Heads, and a Bunch Of Stuff.

2011-08-17T00:16:00.001-05:00

Well here it is 19 August and our Commemorations list says it's the Feast of St Bernard of Clairvaux.

Thing is, the feast of St Bernard of Clairvaux is actually 20 August. Whyzat? That's the day he died, and traditionally, the date of a person's death, faith seeing it as the date they were born to eternity, is used as their feast day, if known and unless it's already taken by a saint who already died that day or by something of more importance. You die on 20 August, your feast day is 20 August. Pretty simple. It's a Christian version and continuation of Yahrtzeit, meaning "time of year" in Yiddish, when relatives remember a family member on the date of their death.

So what possessed the compilers of our Commemorations list to move it up one day? Hell if I know. I also do not know what possessed them to import from the Eastern Orthodox calendar several commemorations for Old Testament figures, but one of those is for Samuel on 20 August, so I guess they needed the day and had to boof Bernard. But to the day before, when he was still alive and not born unto eternity? Scholars. Oy.

Anyway, Bernard has a pretty good rep among notable non-Catholics, including Martin Luther and John Calvin. In spite of being a rip roaring kick-ass let's get serious about this Rule of St Benedict for monasteries type. Or, say, choosing the "right" pope when two were elected (hey, what if he got the Innocent/Anacletus thing wrong?). Or, say, seeing one of his students (Bernardo da Pisa) elected Pope (Eugene III) largely on the basis of his connexion to Bernard who thought him too naive for the job, then using that naivete to function as a shadow pope. Or, say, Eugene reacting to Edessa, a state established by the First Crusade, getting its butt kicked by the Muslims by proclaiming a Second Crusade, gets Bernard to promote it, whereupon the two main takers, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, got their butts thoroughly kicked, which completely tarnished the rest of his life though he insisted the failure was due to the Crusaders being a bunch of sinners. Or, say, at the Council of Troyes in 1129 championing the Knights Templar which secured their endorsement by the Roman Catholic Church and their transformation into a multimillion dollar multinational banking and holding company, the world's first.

He does, despite all that and more, show some signs of knowing it all comes down to faith in Christ and what he did for us. That can happen, even in the RCC, and in all fairness I gotta say old Bernard was one of those. And me being a Benedictine never-was, the only thing worse than a has-been, lemme tell ya a little reform wouldn't hurt those guys at all.

He is best known among non-Catholics because the hymn "O Sacred Head" is attributed to him. Now, let me be clear, O Sacred Head -- which everybody knows God sings as O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden -- is among the greatest hymns ever written by anybody, any time, any where.

But, Bernard didn't have a damn thing to do with it.

The text to the hymn comes from the last part of a long mediaeval poem called Salve mundi salutare (I ain't translating, ask Father Hollywood) which meditates on a number of Christ's body parts as he suffered on the Cross. The last part meditates on his head and is called Salve caput cruentatum. It dates from the 14th Century; Bernard lived in the first half of the 12th Century (1091-1153 to be exact).

The tune is even later. It was written originally as a love song by Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612). When Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676), one of the great contributors to our magnificent Lutheran hymn heritage (no clowning around here, he was great and it is magnificent) translated Salve caput cruentatum into German as O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden (the aforementioned version God now uses, OK that's clowning around) Hassler's love song got used as the tune (there is no textual reason for this parenthetical comment except to make three in one sentence and thus reflect the perfection of the Trinity, it's a monkish thing and completely clowning around).

But hey what the hey, our national anthem's tune was originally a drinking song.

So what's the point? Bernard had nothing to do with O Sacred Head, neither as tune or text, and for that matter, being thoroughly Roman Catholic as we saw above, makes a hell of a lot better Roman Catholic saint than Lutheran commemoration.

The point is, the power of the Gospel, well meditated on in O Sacred Head, is such that the hymn does not depend on or even need pious legends and myths about its earthly authorship. And that the power of the Gospel, of which Bernard shows signs of being aware, is such that it can penetrate even the largely pagan accretions laid over it by the RCC, in which Bernard was deeply involved. Thank God for the Lutheran Reformation, that we no longer live in times like Bernard, where church and state alike were choked by these accretions, and the Gospel can be rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered in our churches openly.

And hey, next time you write a cheque or use a debit card to draw somewhere else on your bank deposits back home, rather than carry your stash with you and make yourself more attractive to thieves and robbers, thank the Knights Templar, whose system of letters of credit based on deposits was the low tech forerunner of banking as we know it.

The Dormitory of Mary, 15 August 2011.

2011-08-09T00:08:00.001-05:00

Yeah I know, it's the Dormition of Mary, aka the Assumption.

Dormition, dormitory -- all from the Latin for "to sleep". One of the dormitories where I went to university was called St Mary Hall, formally. It was just "Mary Hall" otherwise. Everyone went there whether they had a room there (I didn't) or friends there (I did) or not. Reason being, St Mary Cafeteria, or "Mary Caf" as we called it -- the culture may include tendencies which may strike those unfamiliar with it as unduly familiar, even slightly irreverent. Thing is it wasn't a cafeteria at all but an on-campus restaurant and gathering place.

What's up with that? Mary Caf was not the regular cafeteria, where those with a meal plan, which being a rural campus not in any town was just about everyone, ate. Rather, it was where one ordered burgers and fries and stuff like that on one's own time, and dime. So why is a restaurant called a cafeteria when it really isn't? Well, the regular cafeteria wasn't called a cafeteria either, but a refectory, so the word was available. And it did have trays.

Holy crap, what's a refectory? Comes from the Latin reficere, to restore, which gave rise to the word refectorium, a room where you get restored, ie eat. It's a monk thing, and being a Benedictine institution we were all about that. Now, in a real refectory, according to the Rule -- what's "the Rule", without modifiers that's the Rule of St Benedict for monasteries, geez do I have to explain everything? -- meals are eaten in silence, one guy reads from Scripture or the saints (that's called lectio divina, or divine reading) and no meat from mammals except if you're sick.

However, true to the very heart of the most venerable tradition, Benedictine in particular and Catholic in general, it ain't really like that. As more and more "feasts" came in to the church calendar, the meals got better, and, by the time it took four digits to write the year, the obvious solution was to eat the other, better, food in another room, and keep up appearances in the refectory. Not have your cake in one room, then eat it in another. Perfect.

And in a student refectory, where the teaching monks ate too, as distinct from the monking refectory of the monkatorium itself, there ain't no lectio divina and ain't much of anything done in silence either.

So it don't get no more Benedictine than to have the refectory and Mary Caf, the official restoring room and the other one on the side. Hey, don't laugh, the Eastern Orthodox, as usual, amp it up even more. In their monkeries the refectory is called the Trapeza, always with at least one icon and sometimes a ruddy church unto itself, altar, iconostasis and all.

And they got this Lifting of the Panagia to end the meal too. What in all monking monkery is a Panagia? It's the prosphoron from which you take a chunk in honour of the Theotokos. What the hell izzat? The former is the loaf used in the Eucharist, the latter is Mary. After the service, the refectorian (don't freak, it's the monk who runs the refectory) cuts a triangle out of it, cuts the rest in half, puts it on a tray, the boys go over to the refectory with the tray in the lead, and after the meal there is a ceremony in which the refectorian says "Bless me, holy fathers, and pardon me a sinner", the assembled holy fathers say "May God pardon and have mercy on you" (as if he had not already done so at Calvary, but I digress), then he says echoing the liturgy "Great is the name" and the boys chime in with "of the Holy Trinity", then comes "O all-holy Mother of God help us" and the reply "At her prayers, O God, have mercy and save us" (as if he had not already ..., oh well), then accompanied by a dude with censer offers it, each holy father taking a piece between thumb and forefinger, running it through the incense, and eating it.

Now that's some serious monking. Judas H Priest, we're a bunch of Bavarians, or at least the joint was founded by them: hell, the closest we came to anything like that was to make sure you went back for more of the good dark bread before they ran out. Closest I'm gonna come to any Lifting of the Panagia now is the lifting of the Panera. Besides, Panera's got wi-fi too I think -- for some digital lectio divina of course. I still don't like white bread, though, and will take a wheat or dark bread every time. Every time. And still call a dining room a refectory once in a while too. It's a spiritual thing of course.

So we had our refectory and our "cafeteria" named for Mary. Later, the food service would open a more night oriented spot, Der Keller, which means the cellar or basement in German, in the cellar of the old main building, though it took a new food service director who was a Baptist from Alabama to come up with the idea. Now that's my kind of Baptist! Also my kind of refectorian. Hell, with the secular and ecclesiastical sides of the 1960s both raging, he was more German and Benedictine at heart than the German Benedictines.

And Mary? Just as Gabriel said, full of grace, the Lord was with her; blessed is she among women and blessed is the fruit of her womb, Jesus. And if you're looking for an example, if your cost of discipleship is seeming a little high, there is no better example than her submission in faith to God, which she for all she knew at the time ran her the risk of execution as an adulteress, only to survive that only to see her son executed as a criminal. And no better direction, rather than quasi-pious speculation about dormitions and assumptions, than she herself gave to those wanting her to sort things out one time at the wedding in Cana -- "Do whatever he tells you".

Robert Barnes, DD, Martyr. 30 July 2011.

2011-07-21T09:14:00.003-05:00

I like this guy. There aren't a whole lot of English Lutherans. I'm not one either. However, my ancestors are from Suffolk, and I professed the Lutheran faith, taught in Scripture and correctly stated in the Book of Concord, when I was 46. Close enough. At least to really admire Robert Barnes.

I. Who Is Robert Barnes And Who Are The English?

Robert Barnes was born about 1495 in Lynn, formally Kings Lynn, Norfolk, England. Norfolk, Suffolk; the North folk and the South folk of East Anglia, once its own kingdom, named after ourselves, the Angles, named in turn from where we came, Angeln, or Anglia in the international language of the day, Latin, in the modern state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, way up North damn near, er, just South of Denmark.

Before us, a Brythonic tribe called the Iceni lived in the area. Who are the Brythons? A Celtic tribe whose land it was before we, the Saxons, the Danes, the Vikings and yet more starting piling in. It's from them that we get the word Britain, British, etc. The Romans invaded Britain in 43 BC, called the place Brittania, and as they did in many places left the local stuff pretty much alone so long as they obeyed the Roman governors. Despite revolts here and there, including the great one by the Iceni queen Boudica, they held out until about 400 AD. That's when the Saxons from Germany moved in, uninvited, the bleeders.

We were invited. The Iceni ended up pretty much wiped out, but in 433 the Brythons asked us if we'd like to come over and settle since things were getting a bit sparse, and help against the Picts too. How about that -- in a world history of pretty much conquer and re-conquer everywhere, we were invited to come! We're all like that -- look at the irenic tone that steps back from controversy, the staid measured writing style, for which I am known throughout the Lutheran blogosphere. About 520, the North folk and the South folk united to form the Kingdom of East Anglia, one of seven kingdoms that emerged in what would become the United Kingdom.

East Anglia is called such to this day as a region of England, generally also including Cambridgeshire to the West and often Essex to the South too. Anglia is the root of the words England and English for the whole thing and its language, East Anglian or not.

Lynn, in Norfolk, shows its Celtic origins in that the name simply means "lake" in Celtic. Robert Barnes was born there, and went to Cambridge for the university there, where he was associated with the Augustinian friars, same as Luther. Ah Cambridge; seems that in 1209, some Oxford scholars upset at the hanging of two Oxford scholars for murder went to the school there and turned it into a university, the second oldest in the English speaking world. Ah, the pure pursuit of learning, when academic freedom also included no prosecution for murdering and raping locals. Call it academic immunity. Well, at least there actually is a bridge over a river Cam.

II. So How Does An English Guy End Up Reading A German Reformer?

Anyway, Barnes also hung out at the White Horse Tavern, aka White Horse Inn, in Cambridge where starting about 1521 groups met to discuss Luther and his thought, including Thomas Cranmer, Miles Coverdale, William Tyndale, and others. Because of their interest in the ideas coming from Germany, the group got the nickname "the Germans". Damn, wish I was there.

In 1523 he graduated Doctor of Divinity, or Divinitatis doctor, from Cambridge. At Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve 1525, Barnes preached an openly Lutheran sermon, at St Edward's church in Cambridge. He was brought up on charges, examined by Thomas Cardinal Wolsey -- a Suffolk boy, from Ipswich -- Lord Chancellor to the King, Henry VIII, and ended up being sent to jail in 1526.

He escaped two years later, made his way to Antwerp and then Wittenberg, where he met Luther and was his house guest. I'm guessing they spoke Latin to each other. Maybe he learned German, like me, hanging around with the fellas. Damn, wish I was there too. While there, as Luther noted in his work to be mentioned below, he used neither his title nor his name, enrolling simply as Antonius Anglus (there's the Angle thing again).

In 1536 he was able to return to England, working as a liaison between the English government and Lutheran rulers and churchmen in Germany. In 1535 they sent him back to Germany, to get Lutheran support for Henry's efforts to get a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and Henry's vision of reformation in England. He didn't get it, and Henry never forgot it. Catherine of Aragon was really Catalina de Aragon. What does this mean? (If you're Lutheran and ain't laughing, oh well.)

III. So Why Was An English Guy Reading A German Reformer A Big Deal?

Oh boy here we go. Now Catalina was married to Henry's older brother Arthur, who was supposed to become king, being the first son of Henry VII, but he died before his dad (predeceased him, if you like it put that way) so Henry became the heir. This was a big deal. Henry VII claimed descent from the legendary King Arthur and said his son to be would restore the glory days of the equally legendary Camelot, and thus named him Arthur. And to bolster his kingdom against the French by an alliance with Spain, just recently united under Isabela I de Castilla and Fernando II de Aragon, a marriage was arranged when Arthur was 2 between him and their daughter Catalina.

Henry VII had another problem too. None of the other European monarchs recognised him as a real king -- you know, by birth. He became king by his victory over Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Hill in the "War of the Roses", between the House of Lancaster, which he as Henry Tudor led, and the House of York, of which Richard III was the last English king, since he not only lost the battle but was killed in it. Well hell, Richard had become king by taking power from his nephew King Edward V, who was just twelve and, um, disappeared after Richard took power, but they were born to this stuff so it's OK. Henry Tudor wasn't.

Not only that, his great grandfather on his mother's side, guy named John Beaufort, was a bastard. No, not that kind, born out of wedlock. Now John's dad, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, was indeed the third son of Edward III, but he did not lock in wed with John's mother, Katherine Swinford his mistress of some 25 years, until after John and three other kids were born, and even at that she was his third wife. Which made the kids legitimate, but not eligible for the throne because they were not legitimate by birth.

So here's Henry Tudor with his claim to the throne, all other claimants from the House of Lancaster dead in battle, murdered, or executed, resting on military victory, with an illegitimate ancestor by birth, and not on the male side of his ancestry. That's why all the stuff about jumping over all that to the legendary King Arthur. And also why Catalina as queen would make the House of Tudor accepted as for real by all the other kings and queens. Catalina was actually of descent from the House of Lancaster, named after Catherine of Lancaster, her great grandmother and a legitimate daughter of John of Gaunt and his wife Constance of Castile, who was his second wife but that's OK as his first, Blanche, died of the Bubonic Plague two years before they were married, so there's a wrap on that.

Catalina had all the cards to make everything OK. Not only that, she was enormously well though of in all respects: highly educated, devoutly Catholic, privately critical of many of the moral abuses and superstitions the Lutherans condemned but had no time for Luther or the Lutherans, was a lay member of the Franciscan Order -- a secular tertiary, meaning a lay member of the third order, the first being friars (OFM, Order of Friars Minor, there ain't no friars major, the phrase is from "little brothers" or fraticelli translated into Latin) and the second nuns (OSC, Ordo Sanctae Clarae or Poor Clares, from St Clare, a female follower of St Francis) -- and praised by such notables as Erasmus, who called her a defender of the faith, and Thomas More, who said she was also a complete and total babe, or words to that effect.

After a long-distance relationship by mail, Arthur and Catalina finally met on 4 November 1501 and were married 14 November 1501 at St Paul's Cathedral in London. He didn't know Spanish and she didn't know English, and even when they tried the international language of the day, Latin, that didn't work due to differences in pronunciation! Then they both get sicker than hell, most likely from the deadly "sweating sickness" that swept England from 1485 to 1551 and hasn't come back since. She recovers, but he dies on 2 April 1502 and that blows the whole thing all to hell.

IV. I'm Henery The Eighth I Am.

It gets worse. Now Henry VII has two more problems! One is, with Arthur dead after not even five months of marriage, he would have to pay back Catalina's dowry, but he needed the cash! What's a dowry? Serious stuff in those days. No it was not part of a woman being bought and sold like a commodity. Quite the opposite, a dowry was meant to insure her well being and provide an incentive against mistreatment of her. It provided money toward the establishment and maintenance of the new household, and, there being no "life insurance" at the time, provided for their support should he die, since the dowry remained hers, not his. A woman without a dowry might have a problem getting a husband, and you know what, that is what the original Santa Claus, St Nicholas, was all about tossing money into stockings -- to provide poor girls a dowry that their fathers could not, so they would find husbands and not end up prostitutes or in the slave trade; it wasn't just something for fun to open on 25 December!

Plus there's the legitimacy that Catalina's descent brought, but, when her mother died, Castilla (Castile) passed to her older sister, Juana la Loca (Johanna the Mad) so that diminished somewhat Catalina's desired cred since she was now just a king's daughter. Nonetheless it was decided that she would marry the new heir Arthur's younger brother Henry, five years younger than she, though Henry VII had second thoughts. The marriage was put off, officially to allow young Henry to grow up a bit, hell he was only 10 at the time, but really because it solved the giving back the dowry problem. Henry VII died on 21 April 1509, and Henry VIII and Catalina were married 11 June 1509.

But more problems. In Roman Catholic canon law (church law) a man cannot marry his brother's widow. For you canon law freaks, and others uncomfortable with my sometimes offhand style of discourse, this is called the impediment of affinity. But given sufficient power and money, and church laws being church laws but not divine laws, one can get what one wants; like Sister Sarah said in Two Mules For Sister Sarah, by Clint Eastwood, the pre-eminent theologian of our time, "The church has dispensations". The Pope at the time was Julius II, who gave himself some unofficial dispensations, shall we say, having illegitimate children, one who survived being Felice, after whose birth he married her mother (Lucrezia) off to the majordomo of his cousin's (a Cardinal) household. All quite openly, hell, she's in a painting by Raphael. Well, like Sister Sarah said...

Henry VII got the dispensation from Julius II, mostly because Catalina's mom La Reina Isabela was leaning on Pope Julius to give it too, and in support of the case for it Catalina said she and Arthur never bopped (oh sorry, said that the marriage was never consummated). Actually Henry, being at this point a widower, could have married her himself, and did give some thought to marrying somebody and having more male heirs.

Now whyzat, what's wrong with the younger Henry? The thing is, Henry soon to be VIII was not brought up to be king, Arthur was, and Henry was educated for a church career, to probably end up Archbishop of Canterbury -- you didn't think being a bishop in state churches from the old Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church in the West and the Eastern Orthodox in the East, had a damn thing to do with with being an overseer (translated bishop) in the Christian church, or was anything more than a state office, I hope.

So Catalina and Henry, now 17 and she 23, were married 11 June 1509, and on 24 June 1509 (Midsummer's Day, btw) were crowned king and queen (queen consort actually, meaning a queen who is married to the king but the king is the ruler) of England in Westminster Abbey. King Henry VIII.

V. How the Catalina Thing Played Out.

Catalina proved an exceptional queen. Even before her marriage, she had been the Spanish ambassador to England, the first woman in Europe ever to hold an ambassadorship. In 1513 Henry made her regent (ruling in his absence) when he went to France on a military campaign, and Catalina went downrange herself , leading the army though pregnant against the invading Scots (holy crap, over a millennium before, the Brythons asked us to move in and help them with the Picts, and they're still invading, persistent bleeders!) and won. She also commissioned a book, The Education of Christian Women, it being a novel idea at the time that women, Christian or otherwise, be educated. And she was conversant with the great scholars Erasmus and Sir Thomas More. Even Cromwell, who hated her, said if she weren't a woman she could have gone up against any of the great heroes of history.

But that wasn't enough. Catalina was pregnant six times: a stillborn daughter in 1510; a son, even named Henry, who died in 1511 after 52 days; another son who died at birth in 1513; yet another stillborn son in 1514; then in 1516 a healthy baby but who was a girl (this would be Queen Mary, oh hell ya); and in 1518 another girl who died though. Looked like she couldn't even give birth to the wrong sex right.

Henry began to think his marriage was cursed because it had been wrong in the first place. Leaning on Leviticus 20:21 he began to think the prohibition in the Law against a man marrying his brother's wife, with the consequence that they be childless, was the basis of what was happening, and therefore old Julius II even though pope could not legitimately grant a dispensation. So he took the case to the then current pope, Clement VII.

Well, there's some problems with that. For one thing, Catalina always maintained her marriage to Arthur was not consummated. She rejected appeals to quietly become a nun. To top it all off, the pope, Clement VII, following the Sack of Rome, the one in 1527, was the prisoner of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, yes, the same one to whom the Augsburg Confession was presented in 1530, but who also doubled, as Carlos I, as king of Spain, and was Catalina's nephew. So there was some doubt he would side with Henry against Aunt Cathy, shall we say, or allow the pope to do so.

Not to mention, though I am about to, that about 1521 Henry started bopping Mary Boleyn, one of Catalina's maids of honour and otherwise Mrs William Carey. No, not Anne, Mary. Right along with all the Biblical high principles and stuff. Hey, used to be only kings and royalty and bishops got to do this kind of stuff and get away with it, now we all do, so no finger-pointing!

In 1535 Barnes (remember him, this post is actually about him!) was sent back to Germany in hopes he could get his Lutheran friends to side with Henry about the annulment. Didn't work. Emperor Charles sided with Aunt Cathy, and so for that matter did Luther himself. So did such otherwise different men as More and Tyndale. Hell, even Henry's sister Mary Tudor sided with the queen! So Henry turned to he whom he had earlier avoided, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, for the appeal.

Old Tom, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor to the king and created cardinal by Pope Leo X in 1515, worked like hell to get the annulment. He argued that the pope could not overrule the Bible, assuming of course Henry's case fit the Bible's scenario, back to the whole consummated thing. He argued the wording of the dispensation was faulty, but, guess what, a properly worded version turned up in, guess where, Spain! Finally he argued that the decision, he being papal legate in England and all, should be made in England, and of course he knew which side he would take. The pope took that one, in 1528, but said he would send a second legate too from Rome, who took his sweet time getting there and getting things going.

Wait, there's more! Remember Mary Boleyn? She was at the royal court and began an affair with Henry about 1521 and it lasted about 5 years. She was already good at affairs, having had several in France including one with the King of France, Francis. Somewhere along the line her sister, less attractive but more ambitious and intelligent, Anne, caught the king's eye, but Anne was not about to be any old mistress like her sister had been, she held out for the whole pie, queen. Which made getting the annulment all the more imperative. Man, would to-day's diocesan RC marriage tribunals been handy then!

Well after all the delays the pope decides Henry may not marry until the Great Matter, as it was called, was settled in Rome, not England. Wolsey took the fall for that decision, Anne getting him ousted from government office in 1529. But old Tom fought back, and tried secret arrangements with Catalina and the pope to have Anne forced into exile from England. But he was found out and, though he remained Archbishop of York, was arrested for treason and would have been executed except he got sick and died in 1530 on his way to London to face trial.

Wolsey was replaced as Lord Chancellor by Sir Thomas More, Catalina gets banned from the court and her rooms given to Anne, and when the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, William Warham, died, in the finest tradition of apostolic succession, Anne had the Boleyn family priest Thomas Cranmer, made the new Archbishop of Canterbury. The pope wasn't too keen on this, but after the King of France leaned on him a bit -- more apostolic succession -- he relented and gave the pallium, a sign of a bishop's special affinity with the pope, to Cranmer.

VI. Next?

It all went downhill pretty fast after that. Cromwell gets the Law of Supremacy, which recognised the final authority of the king over the church in England, passed in Parliament, More resigns over it, Henry and Anne wed secretly, Henry meets with the King of France to get his support for the marriage, Anne gets pregnant, the couple is publicly married 25 January 1533, on 23 May 1533 Cranmer in church court rules the marriage between Henry and Catalina was no marriage at all because it was invalid (that's what annulment is, not divorce, a recognition that no marriage in the sacramental sense ever took place because the marriage rite was done under invalid conditions, hence null, hence the term annulment) and on 28 May rules Henry and Anne are validly therefore truly married, on 1 June Anne is crowned Queen of England and on 7 September Queen Anne gives birth! To a daughter, oh MAJOR oops!

Nonetheless Parliament enacts the Act of Succession of 1533 (hell of a year, that) recognising Anne's, not Catalina's, children as legitimate and heirs, and in a sign of things to come, repudiates any appeal to any foreign authority of any kind (guess who that means) and high treason punishable by death to publish any such things. Yeah, my kingdom is not of this world indeed!

Judas, Parliament even made it a matter of praemunire facias -- holy crap what's that, well, it's bogus mediaeval Latin for a bogus mediaeval English idea that it is treason to appeal to any authority beyond the king re the church in England, from which acts the sheriff does (that's facias) a warning (that's praemunire). Praemunire actually means to fortify, but the word was mistaken for the correct Latin for warning which is praemonere, the ancestor of the word premonition. Bad Latin for a bad idea.

Henry warn't no Lutheran. In 1521 Henry VIII published Assertio septem sacramentorum, A Defence of the Seven Sacraments, which he had shown to Wolsey and then expanded as an attack on Luther's De captivitate babylonica of 1520, a key influence on me, and dedicated it to Pope Leo X, who in turn named Henry Fidei defensor, Defender of the Faith, on 17 October 1521. But after Henry decided he was head of the church in England in 1530, Pope Paul III revoked the title and Henry was excommunicated, but the English Parliament restored it, and the English monarch to this day remains Supreme Governor of the Church of England, formally above the "Archbishop" of Canterbury.

Prince Charles said in 1994 he wants the title changed to Defender of Faith, not the Faith. Well, rock on Church of England/Anglican Communion.

Hell, Pope Clement blew a gasket at that, excommunicated Henry and Cranmer, said Cranmer's annulment decision was itself null and broke off relations with England. Anne miscarries in 1534 and by year's end Henry is trying with Cranmer and Cromwell to figure a way to dump Anne without having to go back to Catalina. Then what the hell but Catalina dies, Henry and Anne rejoice, death breaking the bond of marriage, Anne's pregnant, and -- MAJOR MAJOR oops, miscarries with a baby boy on, guess what, 29 January 1536 the very day of Catalina's funeral. I ain't making this up and didn't read it in a Dan Brown novel either. Who needs that when the truth is way weirder!

VII. And Next?

Well hell Henry is bopping a lady in waiting at court named Jane Seymour (no, not the actress) anyway, and hell yes, death ends any claim of marriage, so whadya know but charges of infidelity and treason are brought against Anne, she's arrested along with five guys, including her brother, accused of schtupping her, they are executed and five days later, 19 May 1536, so is Queen Anne. The next day, Henry and Jane are engaged, and ten days after that, are married. Wow. An Act of Succession says now Jane's kids are first in line for the throne. Jane gets pregnant and gives birth to, guess what, a baby boy (who will be Edward VI)!

Problem solved? Nope, she also gets an infection in childbirth and dies on 24 October 1537. Henry gets his long desired son but loses his queen, whom he always afterward thought of as his true wife and next to whom he is now buried in Windsor Castle.

Now it would be easy to put this all down to attitudes towards women, but that would be to read it as if it were happening now. Yes, that was part of it, but only part. We saw above, at least I hope we did, I went on about it enough, that civil war and legitimate occupancy of the throne had kept England in a state of civil war at home and in problems abroad for years and years, and Henry had that much on his mind, also that he not leave such a situation behind when he died. Having an unquestioned heir and ruler, at home and abroad, was a really big deal. Henry had exactly the same problems his dad did, just with different details.

Of course they were centuries from knowing it is the father who determines the sex of the child!

VIII. Number Four and The End For Barnes.

Well a guy's gotta move on, right? So Cromwell starts thinking this Anne of Cleves would be a hell of a good idea as his next wife, even gets a guy to go paint a portrait of her to convince Henry. Why her? Well, Anne of Cleves is really Anna von Juelich-Kleve-Berg. That's near Düsseldorf; wherezat, it's the dorf -- village -- near the delta of the Düssel for crying out loud, a tributary of the Rhein, oh sorry, Rhine. Anna was the daughter of the Duke there, John II, and was promised at age 12 to be the wife of Francis I, Duke of Lorraine, but Cromwell thought she'd make this hell of a wife for Henry since Protestant German allies would help if the Catholics invaded England, so Barnes, with his German connexion, was involved in helping with that, and it happened.

Henry was not all that into the idea, hoped Cromwell could find a way out, but there was too much at stake in alliances with the Germans for that, so they were married 6 January 1540 by bleeding Cranmer himself, but there was no consummation of the marriage and by Summer Henry wanted out. The Duke had ticked off the Holy Roman Emperor and Henry did not want to get into that either. So Barnes was asked to help in the annulment of Henry's marriage to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, and an annulment was granted on the basis of the contract with Francis and there having been no consummation, which, in more contemporary language, means no sex. Anna went along with it all and fared pretty well in contrast to Henry's other wives, and for going along with annulment she lived out her life relatively well, not to mention in the former home of the Boleyns, Hever Castle, which was given to her.

But those involved with setting the marriage up didn't fare so well. Henry already had refused to accept Lutheran theology, the Six Articles of 1539 effectively renounced Lutheranism and affirmed Roman practices considered abuses by Lutherans. The Six Articles affirmed 1) transubstantiation, 2) communion in host only, 3) clerical celibacy, 4) vows of chastity, 5) private masses, 6) auricular confession, private confession of sins to a priest.

Then the annulment in 1540 also worked against Barnes. He preached against Bishop Stephen Gardiner (another Suffolk boy), active in the enforcement of Catholic doctrine, in the Spring, was forced to recant, then recanted his recant and professed the Lutheran faith, for which he and two others were burnt alive for heresy under the Six Articles, along with three others for treason for denying royal supremacy over the church, on 30 July, 1540.

In Germany, Lutherans and Catholics alike were shocked and outraged. Luther took Barnes' final confession of faith, translated or had it translated into German, wrote a preface to it himself, and published it later that year (1540) as Bekenntnis des Glaubens.

IX. What Happened To The Other Guys and Everyone Else.

Cromwell was executed 28 July 1540, two days before, by beheading in the Tower of London. Thomas Cranmer, who would become the first non-Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, who believed in the right of the king to determine the faith of the nation and all its people, which makes it hard when you go back and forth between Catholic and "Anglican" monarchs, recanted his recantation of his recantation, whatever, and was burnt at the stake 21 March 1556 under the Catholic Queen Mary.

Remember Mary, that's Catalina's daughter! Wanna know the kicker? After all this long story coming from an enormously complicated matter of the legitimacy of and succession to the Tudor line of kings of England, Henry ruled for just short of 38 years and left only three heirs of either sex and within about ten years of his death on 28 January 1547 all three of them came to the throne -- Anne Boleyn's daughter becoming Elizabeth I and as we saw Jane Seymour's son becoming Edward VI -- and not a one of them left an heir! Not a one! Elizabeth I was the last Tudor on the throne. And she never even married! All that for nothing.

Through secret negotiations Elizabeth arranged for the House of Stuart (or Stewart) to take over a combined England and their original Scotland. Man, the Scots again. And we (Angles) were asked to come there and keep them out way back when. Now they're the royal line of the whole damn place! Well, not really, the Stuarts aren't real Scots, they're Normans from Brittany in France who arrived in Scotland after the Norman Conquest of England. The last Stuart was Queen Anne, who died 1 May 1707, and the English again turned to the Germans to solve things, with the House of Hanover taking over and lasting until the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.

Victoria's son, by patrilineal (from the father) descent, which rules in such things, Edward VII, is of the house of his father, Prince Albert, the house of Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, Englished to Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, but which adopted the much more English sounding name Windsor during World War I, German descended monarchs on a throne in a war against Germany being too weird. His cousin, who was on the German throne, Kaiser Wilhelm II, thought that was a riot and said he looked forward to seeing Shakespeare's new play The Merry Wives of Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha.

The current English royal family is the House of Windsor. There's still Hanovers though, the current head of that bunch being Ernst August V Prinz von Hannover (I ain't translating, it's not hard to work out) who is also the current husband of Princess Caroline of Monaco so maybe he'll end up with a throne or something. I mean, his titles are not recognised in modern England or Germany, but they are in Monaco! And the heir to the English throne, Charles, is through his father of the House of Gluecksburg, short for the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gluecksburg (Schleswig-Holstein, current name of where we Angles came from!) in turn a branch of the biggest baddest ones of the all the House of Oldenburg, who have been or are on the thrones of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Russia (yeah the Romanovs), Greece and looks like the British Commonwealth one of these days.

After Charles will come the absolutely delightful William and Catherine, currently the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, dear old Cambridge.

X. What We Can Learn From This Now.

Notice something? Ain't no reformation going on here, just getting the church to baptise, as it were, matters of state, church and state being all part of one thing. From the Assertio of 1521 to the Six Articles of 1539, it's Catholic as all hell, just with a little jurisdictional modification so the king can get an annulment when he needs one.

One of the most enduring enticements of the descendants from the state church of the Roman Empire, in the West the RCC and those non-Catholic national churches, generally Anglican or Lutheran, which consider themselves to have taken over Rome's function within their jurisdictions, and in the East the Orthodox churches, is the apparent solidity of their continuous existence, presumably then with a connexion to the catholic church of the creeds, the Apostles, and Christ himself.

For a person of a faith not solidly grounded in Christ and the Gospel, this enticement is so strong as to solve or resolve all doubt. For example, the ridiculous John Henry Newman, to the point that his deus-ex-ecclesia shall we say solution to his indecision led him to declare that really there are only two real possibilities, atheism or Catholicism, with those not in either camp either on their way "home to Rome" or not having thought through the implications of not going to Rome.

While faith in Christ can exist in such an environment, what an unnecessary, distracting and complicating encumbrance to it.

Our foray about into the situation in which Robert Barnes lived and by which was ultimately killed is but one of any number of such situations which show this apparent solidity and continuity is but the most appalling and grotesque of shams, rooted in NOTHING WHATEVER of Christ, his Word or his Sacrament, all of that being a self-justifying veneer over which affairs of state played out. Miserable blasphemous parodies of the catholic church which have survived the passing of the states as then constituted which created them.

We needed Barnes then, and we need him now. Happily we no longer live under the idea that rulers are agents of God with the right to choose the religion of their people. Barnes himself struggled to find his way between the political reality of this idea in his time and spreading the Gospel in reforming Christ's church. In England, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of England, with which the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod is in fellowship in the International Lutheran Council, is the heir of Barnes' work in England.

Yet, in this freedom now, Christianity, the church in general, and our beloved synod in particular veer between the same two poles of those times, namely, on the one hand the attractive exterior in which the errors of Rome and the Orthodox are couched, and on the other, the different but no less attractive exterior in which the errors of Calvinism and the Reformed are couched, most recently in American "evangelicalism".

Our beloved synod is greatly beset by this. May the works and example of Robert Barnes help and strengthen us as they did Luther in our Bekenntnis des Glaubens, our confession of faith, holding to the Word rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered, and steering our course so as not to crash on the rocks under the influence of either of these siren songs, which unlike those of Greek mythology, are quite real.

From the last words of Robert Barnes, DD, martyr, on 30 July 1540:

Lord if Thou straightly mark our iniquity, who is able to abide Thy judgement? Wherefore I trust in no work that I ever did, but only in the death of Jesus Christ. I do not doubt, but through Him to inherit the kingdom of heaven.

(Quoted from "The Reformation Essays of Dr Robert Barnes", Neelak S Tjernagel editor. Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1963. Republished 19 October 2007.)

A Different (Russian) St Nicholas, 17 July 2011.

2011-07-09T00:02:00.002-05:00

17 July 2011 is the 93rd anniversary of the murder of Nicholas II, Emperor of all the Russias, with his wife, who began life as Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, a Lutheran, and children in 1918 in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

The Chilling Legacy of These Murders.

The brutality of these murders would in time to come be visited upon millions of Russians, as the regime which ordered and carried them out blossomed into a world power. While we hear much about the six million victims of one group specifically targeted by Nazi Germany, that was only roughly half of the total number of the victims of Nazi Germany. And if relatively little is said about the other half, even less is said about the great number murdered under our ally against Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia under Stalin.

By the most conservative estimates, that number would be 4 million from direct repression and 6 million from the results of enforced economic theory, namely, collectivisation, for a total of 10 million. That is roughly equal to total estimates of Nazi victims, and nearly twice the number of the specifically targeted group. However more recently available material generally indicates a total of around 20 million, nearly twice by our ally of what Nazi Germany managed to attain in toto, and over three times the 6 million of their specifically targeted group.

The Soviet Union itself passed into history on 26 December 1991. On 17 July 1998, the 80th anniversary of their murders, the bodies of Tsar Nicholas and Tsaritsa Alexandra and the three of their children then found were buried with state honours in the Cathedral of Sts Peter and Paul in St Petersburg. The city was founded 27 May 1703 by Tsar Peter the Great and named by him after his patron saint St Peter. It was the capitol of Russia until the Communist revolution, known as Leningrad under the Soviet regime, and its name was restored in 1991. All Russian Emperors since Peter the Great are now buried there.

The President of post Communist Russia, Boris Yeltsin at the time, attended along with members of the House of Romanov, the Russian royal family. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia had declared them saints and martyrs in 1981, and on 14 August 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church itself declared them saints, of a type called Passion Bearers. These are people who were killed but not specifically for their faith, and who met their deaths with Christian humility and dignity. This is not a judgement on his rule, rather universally regarded as weak and incompetent at best, but rather on the why and manner of his death. On 16 June 2003 Russian bishops consecrated the "Church on the Blood", built on the site of the house where the royal family was murdered.

The regime which killed them has passed into history, but, there is still a Russian Orthodox Church, there is still a House of Romanov, and there is still a Russia -- The Russian Federation.

About 70% of Russians count themselves Orthodox Christians, though few regularly participate in church. Of Orthodox churches, 95% are Russian Orthodox, the traditional Russian religion overall. There are Lutherans in Russia, in large part due to the open immigration policies of Catherine the Great.

How a German Lutheran Princess Ends Up Empress of Russia. Twice.

How there's a story. Tsarina Alexandra wasn't the first German Lutheran noblewoman to end up Tsarina. Catherine was originally the noble-born raised-Lutheran Sophie Friederike Auguste, nicknamed Figchen, or Little Frederica. Her father was the devout Lutheran Prince Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, who as a Prussian general was governor of Stettin, Pomerania, then part of Prussia, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, but her birth city (Stettin) is in a part of Pomerania that in now part of Poland (and called Szczecin).

Huh? How does Figchen end up Empress of Russia? Because her mother, Johanna, loved court intrigue and wanted it for her daughter, but she really ticked off Tsarina Elisabeth who threw her out of the country for spying for Prussia. The Big E liked Figchen though, and apparently liked the family, hell, she was going to marry Johanna's brother Karl but he died from smallpox before it could happen. Figchen ended up married to E's nephew and heir, Peter III, who was also Figchen's second cousin. But first she learned Russian, and on 28 June 1744 she converted to the Russian Orthodox Church -- against her father's orders, who went ballistic over it -- and was given the name Catherine. Then she marries Peter on 21 August 1745, and after Elisabeth died on 5 January 1762, Peter takes the throne.

He didn't last long. He pulled Russia out of the Seven Years War -- remember that, left Mother England in huge debt to pay for which they taxed the hell out of the American colonies who ended up revolting and becoming the United States -- got friendly with Prussia, admired the Western Europeans, tried to make the Russian Orthodox Church more Lutheran, and had a mistress for whom Catherine was afraid he would divorce her. So he pissed off everybody, and when he went to his paternal ancestral Schleswig-Holstein (the area from which my ancestors the Angles left for Mother England, but hey) Catherine with her lover (fair is fair I guess) staged a military coup and Peter was arrested 14 July 1762. He wasn't too upset really, just asked for an estate and his mistress, also named Elisabeth.

But three days later he was killed by one of the conspirators while in custody, though Figchen/Catherine does not seem to have been behind that part of things. So after Peter being Tsar for six months, his wife succeeds him. Some say she should have been Regent until her son, Paul, was old enough to become Tsar, but what the hell, the first Tsarina Catherine (Catherine the Great is technically Catherine II) succeeded her husband Peter I (aka the Great) in 1725, and anyway Catherine no longer Figchen ruled until she died, which was 17 November 1796, at which time George Washington was in his second term as President of the United States. Got all that? No wonder George didn't want anything resembling royalty here.

Why Eating Runzas Is a Spiritual and World-Historical Experience.

And a damn good eating experience too.

In 1762, the year she came to power, Catherine issued a manifesto inviting non-Jewish Europeans to settle in Russia and farm using more modern European methods. It got few results, French and English preferred to emigrate to America, and another manifesto with more benefits was issued in 1763, attracting Germans since they were allowed to maintain their language, religions and culture, and were exempt from military service. This last was particularly attractive to Mennonites, but many German Lutherans, Catholics and Reformed also came, settling along the Volga River, hence the name Volga Germans, or Wolgadeutsche.

However these benefits, particularly the exemption from military service, were eroded and many Wolgadeutsche, especially the pacifist Mennonites, left for the midwestern United States, Canada, and South American places of German emigration. The midwestern US immigrants have given us people as different as US Senator Tom Daschle and and big-band leader Lawrence Welk. But most importantly, it has given us the Runza, a magnificent pocket sandwich of beef, onion and cabbage -- thank you Catherine!!

In 1949 Alex Brening and his sister Sally Everett opened a drive-in in Lincoln NE offering food of Wolgadeutsche derivation, which has since expanded to a regional chain, including one close to Concordia-Seward (NE) as every grad of there knows, and besides the fantastic runza (get the cheese runza, Combo #1) has the best burgers, fries and OR in the whole "fast food" industry. Hell yes. You can have a great meal, be a part of history back to Catherine the Great, proclaim your solidarity with ethnic self-determination and praise God for religious freedom as a Lutheran (or anything else) all at the same time! Makes me wanna go to the one a few blocks from me right now!

Lutherans In Russia Now.

Anyway, in this heavily Russian Orthodox land with notable German-born raised-Lutheran Tsarinas, there are Lutherans. Not a lot, but even so, not all in the same group (just like here). There is the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria in Russia (a member of the International Lutheran Council, founded 1993, as are we, "we" being LCMS), the Evangelical Lutheran Church - "Concord" (a member of the Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Conference, founded 1996, whose American members are WELS and ELS), and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Russia and Other States (a member of the thoroughly heterodox Lutheran-in-name-only Lutheran World Federation, founded 1947,whose American member is the similarly characterised ELCA, and to which the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria in Russia also belongs).

I am pleased to say that the pastor of St Gertrude's Lutheran Parish in Yekaterinburg -- the city in which the Tsar and family were murdered in the Ipatiev House, on whose site the "Church on the Blood", whose full name is Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land, now stands as mentioned above -- is a "friend" of Past Elder on Facebook. Seeing another "Catherine" in the city's name? It's there, named at its founding 18 November 1723 after St Catherine, name saint of Catherine I (Yekaterina), Tsarina and wife of then ruling Tsar Peter I the Great, who died 8 February 1725, after which she became ruler like the next Peter and Catherine duo (III and II/the Great). St Gertrude's has been there since Day One too. Check out their site here and please consider giving them a hand in their wonderful work.

Kind of all comes full circle, huh? That's what's cool about history, makes the circle clearer, sometimes even gives one a clue there is a circle, an interrelation, at all amid all this stuff of life that otherwise seems like so much dust from the past, and makes our present point clearer, which is why I get into all this stuff.

Nicholas' feast day, following ancient custom, is 17 July.

Otto von Habsburg, RIP.

2011-07-05T01:20:00.001-05:00

Please read this article from The Telegraph on the last, and greatest, direct gift of the old order to the new still defining itself nearly a century on. Erbprinz Otto died 4 July 2011.

The Fourth Of July. 2011.

2011-07-01T00:03:00.001-05:00

We did not actually declare independence from Mother England on the Fourth of July. What happened was, the Second Continental Congress approved a formal declaration on the Fourth of July, explaining the Lee Resolution adopted two days earlier, the Second of July, which actually declared the independence. Here's the story.

I. Hostilities Break Out.

When the Revolutionary War began in April 1775 in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, independence was a minority opinion, and not the goal of the fighting. Most here hoped to remain under the English Crown, and objected rather to the acts of Parliament re the colonies, who were not represented in Parliament. The Seven Years War had concluded twelve years earlier in Europe, with England and Prussia and other German states (there was no Germany in the modern sense) against France, Russia, Sweden, Austria, Saxony and later Spain.

Our French and Indian War was actually a part of the Seven Years War, and broke out in 1754, though the Seven Years War is dated from its European outbreak in 1756. It lasted another seven years, hence the name, until 1763, and Winston Churchill called it really the first world war, with hostilities happening not just in Europe or over just seven years, but in North America, India and West Africa in the combatants' colonies. England won, more or less; things didn't change much in Europe per se, but England emerged the world's dominant colonial power.

But it left Mother England in huge debt. To pay for the war debt, all kinds of taxes were enacted by Parliament, particularly to bring in revenue from the colonies. England saw it as the colonies' fair share of being fought for; the colonies thought that since they were not represented in Parliament that body had no right to tax them. England was stingy with currency in the colonies anyway, and many took to using the Spanish currency the dolar from La Florida, now a state but then a Spanish colony South of us, which is why we have "dollars" to this day.

The beef was with Parliament, not the Crown. Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and others, proposed something like what is now the British Commonwealth, preserving unity with the English Crown but leaving Parliament the legislative body for England only, elsewhere being under legislative bodies where they were represented. It was even hoped that the Crown would intervene with Parliament for the colonies.

II. Tom Paine and Common Sense.

But unfolding events did not go that way, and brought more and more over to the cause of independence even if remaining under the Crown would have been their preference. A major boost came on 10 January 1776, when Thomas Paine published a 48 page pamphlet called Common Sense. It was published anonymously, for obvious reasons, and royalties went to support General Washington's Continental Army. It was signed, By An Englishman, which he was, from Thetford, Norfolk. He emigrated on the suggestion of Benjamin Franklin, and arrived in Philadelphia on 30 November 1774, too sick from the typhoid fever that plagued the ship to get off the boat without the assistance of Franklin's physician.

In making the case for independence, Paine intentionally avoided the Enlightenment style, which used much philosophy from ancient Greece and Rome, and wrote more like a sermon, using Biblical references to make his case, so as to be understood by everyone, not just the educated. Now don't go thinking he was some sort of Christian founding father. Paine had no use for Christianity, be it Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox, or for any other religion either. In later works he specifically rejected claims about Jesus as Son of God and Saviour as fabulous, literally, fables, nothing more than reworked sun worship, and advocated Deism, "by which I then meant, and mean now, the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral character, or the practice of what are called moral virtues".

"Then" and "now" refer to the first and second of the three separately written parts of his The Age of Reason; the quotation is from the second part. Paine and Common Sense though were not much on the minds of the Continental Congress, which was more concerned about how a declaration of independence would affect the war for it, and for that matter John Adams thought Common Sense "a crapulous mass", which we might express as a piece of, well you get the idea. Paine spent much time abroad, back in England, and eventually in France where he became part of the French Revolution too, but ran afoul of Robespierre, and was imprisoned 28 December 1793. He was scheduled to be guillotined, but the door to his cell was open to let a breeze in, and when his cell mates closed it the marking on the door faced inside. After the fall of Robespierre, 27 July 1794, he was released in November. He later became friendly with Napoleon, advising him on how to conquer England, but noting Napoleon's increasing dictatorship, although Napoleon though a gold statue of Paine should be in every city everywhere, Paine called Napoleon "the completest charlatan that ever existed".

He did not return to the US until 1802, at the invitation of President Jefferson. His support of the French Revolution then Napoleon, his disdain for religion of any kind, his antagonism to George Washington, and his distinctly un-Federalist views made him deeply unpopular. When he died, 8 June 1809 at 72 in Greenwich Village New York, his obituary, originally in The New York Citizen and reprinted throughout the country, said he "lived long, did some good and much harm" and only six people came to his funeral.

III. Independence.

It went a little differently for our revolution. The Virginia Convention on 15 May 1776 instructed the Virginia delegates to the Continental Congress to propose to that body a declaration of independence. Richard Henry Lee, General Lee's great uncle, so proposed on 7 June 1776, hence the name Lee Resolution. It was seconded by John Adams of Massachusetts. Here is the text:

Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.

That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.

Not all of the colonial conventions had so instructed their delegates to vote for independence, so support was rallied and debate put off. Meanwhile, a Committee of Five was formed to draft a formal declaration. The five were, John Adams (Massachusetts), Roger Sherman (Connecticut), Robert Livingston (New York), Benjamin Franklin (Pennsylvania), Thomas Jefferson (Virginia). Jefferson was given the job of writing the draft by the other four, who reviewed it. The declaration was proposed to the Congress 28 June 1776.

Congress approved the Lee Resolution on 2 July 1776. It was not unanimous. New York abstained from the vote, as their colonial convention had given them no instructions, which assent came on 9 July. Then on 4 July the Declaration of Lee's Resolution was approved, adding Lee's Resolution at the end. However, the delegates did not all sign it right then, most of them signing 2 August 1776! But the image of everybody signing endured and even the elderly Jefferson and Adams remembered it so, though it wasn't. Although John Adams thought 2 July would be Independence Day, from the outset 4 July has been celebrated as Independence Day.

IV. The Declaration of Independence.

In my humble opinion, The Declaration of Independence, explaining passage of the Lee Resolution, is one of the towering accomplishments of the mind of Man. Consider its famous words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

We now sometimes cynically say how could it be that someone who could write words like "all men are created equal" could also own slaves. We have it backwards. When the concept of democracy arose, in ancient Greece, there was nothing about all men are created equal to it. Democracy was a function of the free class, those with the leisure to devote to becoming informed enough to participate in democracy; those who work do not have this leisure and cannot participate. Even by that great ancestor of our Constitution, the Magna Carta, in 1215, the first time ever that subjects forced concessions from a ruler and placed subject and ruler alike under law rather than the ruler's divine right to rule, there was nothing about all men are created equal to it. The subjects were themselves rulers, lower ranking nobility.

The wonder is not then that someone who wrote "all men are created equal" could also own slaves; the wonder is that someone who owned slaves as part of the warp and woof of his time and economy could also envision "all men are created equal". And no-one was more aware of the untenable tension between the two, and the untenable nature of slavery, than the man who wrote those words. It is no discredit to him that it would fall to later leaders to work out the implications he knew full well; it is to his credit that these words were even there for later leaders to work out.

And while we're noting things, we may also note that equality of all men is not just the way it is, or the way Man is. It says all men are created equal, which means there is a Creator, and that all men have rights not because it's just that way but because all men have been so endowed by their Creator with rights that therefore may not be taken away, and that it is the function of government to secure, not grant, these rights. The Creator is essential to this, and is the source of this, which role is not diminished by our freedom to understand the Creator as we, not a government, or a government's state church, will. No Creator, no equality.

V. The Celebration of Independence.

The next year, 4 July 1777 -- the war was still on, btw, that didn't end until 1783 -- Bristol, Rhode Island, which had refused to supply the English army and got bombarded for it, fired off 13 cannon, one for each colony, at dawn and sunset to commemorate the first anniversary of the Declaration. The next year the British had taken Bristol, but in 1785, independence secured, Bristol established the Bristol Fourth of July Parade, the longest running Independence Day commemoration in the US.

The country's largest Independence Day thing is Macy's Fireworks Spectacular, which began with the bicentennial year 1976. And cities throughout the country do much the same on a smaller scale, not to mention in streets and backyards all over.

Maybe old John Adams wasn't so far off. The Fourth of July is indeed itself Independence Day, and has survived the lunacy of Day and Day (Observed) of the Uniform Holidays Bill of 1968, changing four Federal holidays from what they are to Mondays to create a three day week-end, a spirit which has infected the church calendar in modern revisions too. But I guess a Fourth of July and a Fourth of July (Observed) is too absurd for even the modern mind.

But it is not at all uncommon in those years when the Fourth falls on a work-week day as we now know it, which was along time coming in 1776, for fireworks etc to be done on the nearest week-end.

And get this though -- on the third Fourth of July ever, in 1779, the Fourth fell on a Sunday, for which reason it was celebrated the next day, Monday. How about that -- the original Monday week-end was because of the Lord's Day, Sunday! Guess old Paine wasn't the main force here. At least then.

Judas H Priest, now if the Fourth falls on a Sunday we want Monday off, not because Sunday is a Lord's Day, a little Easter each week, but because we didn't get a three day week-end! Not to mention our churches making Saturday Sunday now too, so we can get church "out of the way", er, increase participation, as if most people don't get it out of the way by just not going, either day!

Sunday is still Sunday, and the Fourth of July is still the Fourth of July. After independence was declared on 2 July, the next day John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail the following, though he thought it would be for the Second of July, the day independence was actually declared, but regardless, it stands as an enduring statement of what our commemoration of independence is all about, and that ain't three-day week-ends:

"I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more."

Roger that. Happy Fourth Of July!