Psychedelic sticker .redbubble.net

I try to imagine – fifty-eight years after the event – the impact on the Vietnamese, whether armed Viet Cong in jungle trenches or villagers cowering under a hail of ammo – of massed, youthful choruses, halfway across the planet, screaming in unison Make Love Not War! And how exactly would the men of, say, the 101st Airborne, who had shipped out from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, do that when under the simple command to kill before being killed? There was another shout coming from militants who had better couplets: Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh Viet Nam Is Gonna Win!

There is a war raging around you in Vietnam. How to stop it, if you’re Vietnamese? Make love, or shoot first?

That conundrum of strategy of warfare from another century comes back to me as a kind of haunting. In my twenties I thought I had done my part – after all, Uncle Ho had won – and wore a pin to prove it. I’m looking at it now, small and faded green, from the Young New Democrats. END THE WAR IN VIETNAM! Done.

There is no true peace without fairness, truth, justice and solidarity. Pope John Paul II

End the war in Ukraine. But how? Stepping right up, as though straight from the 1970s, is the Executive Director of Project Ploughshares [Isaiah 2:4: And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares], the peace research project of the Canadian Council of Churches.The ED is writing on February 25, 2023, a day after the first anniversary of Russia’s terror war on Ukraine: “Compromise and a negotiated settlement is the only path to peace in Ukraine.” Top of mind are the “threats” to Russia’s “vital interests, Russian President Putin’s “humiliating defeat” should Ukraine defeat the Russian army “crushingly,” NATO and Russia’s “security relationship” and the “security assurances” delivered through negotiation. Where are the Ukrainians? Presumably among the nameless “tens of thousands” tossed in a mythic cycle “of violence and destruction.”

(Rally in Germany) Peace with Russia Instead of a Third World War

As Vladimir Ilyich Lenin put the question, кто кого? Who whom? Who is doing what to whom? Who is the subject, who is the object, of the “cycle” of violence? It is not as though Russians and Ukrainians are equally haplessly tossed between the millstones of the gods by an agent who shall remain unnamed.On Day 186 of the war in Ukraine a friend who has been a peace activist since the 1960s circulated an opinion that he hoped for “peace movements to break out around the planet.” When I questioned him about the value of such “movements for peace” when Ukraine had to defend herself violently or be overcome by the occupiers’ force of arms (Who whom?), he indeed rejected what he called the “one-dimensional ideological anti-war position” and called instead for support for “antiwar resisters in Russia.” This conjured for me an image of a long tramp of resisters to the Gulag. But I know what he was getting at for on February 15 2023 on World Peace Day European peace activists massing on the streets demanded a ceasefire on the front (occupied Ukrainian territory) while at a rally elsewhere it is NATO that “must be held to account” for its “war crimes,” unelaborated. “We were delighted,” one protester is quoted, “to see Russian flags.” 

Perhaps Russian feminists carried them. Ukrainian feminist, Yulia Lutyi-Moroz, of FemSolution, a queer feminist organisation, averred that before the invasion, feminists like her believed in the solidarity of “sisterhood” with Russian feminists, but not anymore. At a conference in 2022, “We didn’t receive any support from them – neither financial support, nor any interest in ways they could help. ” Her Russian former comrades couldn’t see how their own behaviour was an extension of Russia’s imperial attitude towards Ukrainians.

Where are the Ukrainians? Viewed through the Russian lens, where is Ukraine? It must be said that there are (nonviolent) human rights activists who are actively gathering evidence on the Ukrainian ground (earth, soil, land) of Russian war crimes (rapes, kidnappings, torture cells). At round tables – I try to watch them all – a Ukrainian victory emerges in the vocabulary of a “just peace,” not any old peace but a “sustainable peace” that would deliver “justice, reparations, accountability” once the last Himar has been volleyed and Russia has been defeated on the battlefield. Even Team Navalny, exiled supporters of the imprisoned Russian opposition leader, Alexey Navalny, in a Manifesto published February 2023 (better late than never) called for the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine, offered reparations, insisted on the investigation into war crimes in cooperation with international institutions, and ultimately “letting Ukraine live and develop as Ukrainians want.”

official Eurovision 2023 magnets

There is no Golden Mean between Good and Evil (argued the legendary Myroslav Marynovych, Ukrainian gulag survivor), no “other side” to be aired in debate, no “dialogue” in the middle of an unprovoked and murderous assault on a sovereign state. Russian Orthodox clerics would disagree: the way to stop to the war, they insisted, was for the “opposing sides” to engage in “dialogue,”  as though there were no moral let alone military imbalance between the “sides.” Meanwhile, ahead of the Eurovision song contest for 2023 members of a Czech rock band including a Russian musician urge their fans to “choose love over war” and wear a Ukrainian bracelet to that effect. This is to “misjudge the moment,” as Svitlana Morenets wrote in The Spectator (UK): “When this war is over and our borders are restored, Ukraine will join the world in wishing for love and peace.”

Favourably citing Pope Francis, who has said about “reality,” that it is “discerned not discussed,” Georgian Orthodox theologian Tamara Grdzelidze nevertheless argues that “at this point in the war” – July 2022 – it is not obvious that reality is being “discerned” when peaceful resolutions stubbornly dominate “Vatican channels.”  The discernible reality is the need to support Ukraine “in its fight to restore the territorial integrity and retain its sovereignty intact.” 

Enter the churches.

Back in October 2022 Pope Francis, speaking to the thousands thronged in St Peter’s Square, used the occasion for the first time to make a direct appeal to Russian President Vladimir Putin “imploring him to stop this spiral of violence and death, also for the sake of his own people.” For its part, the Russian Orthodox Church “has been praying for peace in Ukraine since 2014 with the blessing of His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus.”  Is it peace when monks of the Russian Orthodox Church do not condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, instead intensifying their prayers that the “conflict” stop? Is it peace when to “stop” the violence Ukraine is urged to surrender occupied territory? Or when the Russian president and his spiritual counselor do not utter the word “war” but are nevertheless doing everything possible “for peace to prevail”?

ReligionNews.com: What do you need from the United States to win the war?

Metropolitan Epiphanius I Orthodox Church of Ukraine www.breitbart.com

Epiphanius Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine: First of all, as Christians we need spiritual support and prayer….But we also need, of course, material support because in Ukraine almost all our infrastructure is ruined. That’s why we need financial support to stand and to resist the aggressor country.

Q: And arms?

A: And arms.

“…a terrible dilemma [felt by all Christians] between the moral dubiousness of participating in the sin of war on one hand, and the need for effective resistance against an aggressor who brutally disregards minimum standards of international law and humanitarian rules on the other”. Dr Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, former President of the German Evangelical Church,

I have been reading commentary on the Beatitudes (Matthew 5: 3-12). “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.” How do we make peace? In his The Ladder of the Beatitudes, the late Jim Forrest writes of this beatitude that “Christ did not say…’Blessed are those who prefer peace, wish for peace, await peace, love peace, or praise peace.'” (Nor did he say, ” Blessed are those that wish to be left in peace.“) “His blessing is on the makers of peace.He requires an active rather than a passive role.” [p. 112] What might that act be, in the middle of a war? Might peace’s actors be makers of justice?

“When we speak of war, we first must clarify that there are two kinds of wars: offensive and defensive. In principle, the Orthodox Church always condemns the former, while only condemning the latter most of the time….Orthodoxy makes clear that offensive war and violence are never the means by which God achieves justice….Saint John Chrysostom teaches that changing the minds of our enemies and bringing about a change of soul is far more wonderful than killing them.”

Key to this teaching is the distinction between a war of aggression (invasion, occupation, genocide) and the armed resistance of the victims of this bad or unholy war. When a nation or a people is assaulted, then, the war of defense, although unjustifiable,  has become necessary. When, in its Liturgical Petitions, we Orthodox congregants pray for the armed forces (not once but three times: “For our God-loving and God-protected country of Canada, its government, armed forces, and for all our pious people…”), the priest makes his own silent prayer that a peaceful and pious life be rendered the people by the actions of an army coming to their defense in a time of civil war or foreign invasion. In fact, Fr Roman Bozyk, Dean of Theology of St. Andrew’s College in Winnipeg, told me in a phone call, “a functioning army is necessary for an Orthodox country.” Necessary, but justifiable? He continued:  “Armies are not to be offensive. Why would you want to disturb your neighbour? An army of the Orthodox must never attack.” Our life and death is with our neighbor. If we gain our brother, we have gained God, but if we scandalize our brother, we have sinned against Christ.“— St. Anthony 

War is never good, of course, but we live in a fallen world after all. Fr Roman continues: “Ukrainians don’t have to justify that they have taken up arms to defend themselves, their families, their communities.It is not considered ‘pious’ to just give up when an aggressor attacks your home. People who fight in self-defense don’t have to repent or explain themselves.What they do may be evil but it’s not a sin. ” The aforementioned Ukrainian feminists began as critics of patriarchy (the Church!) and of nationalism and they still “love unicorns more than blood,”  but as feminists they “strongly support the right to self-defense…the right to resistance.”

the Baptism of Kyivan Rus 988 CE

At the beginning of the war in February 2022, much was made rhetorically of the fratricide at the core of its meaning: “Russians and Ukrainians are ‘one people’...brothers who need to be reconciled.”  As with Cain and Abel, fruits of the same womb, in deadly struggle in the field, site of our first murder, where God calls out to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” The fratricide evoked in 2022 arose from the event in 988 CE when, according to the Russian imperial interpretation, the people of Kyivan Rus were baptized into Christianity, who later diverged as Orthodox Ukrainians, Orthodox Russians and Orthodox Belarusians. They had emerged from the same “baptismal font” but now on the bloodied fields of Ukraine clash in a repetition of Cain’s sin: fratricide. Ukrainians would say it was the people of Kyiv who were baptised – later known as… the Ukrainians. 

Metropolitan Epiphanius of the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine makes a distinction between a people and its political leadership who in the case of Russia have led them to war – “The spirit of the Antichrist operates in the leader of Russia” – while Fr Roman disputes the “brotherliness” of a conflict when the spiritual head of Russian Orthodoxy “sides with the aggressor” and his clergy have blessed weapons on their way with Russian troops to the Ukrainian border. What to make of Patriarch Kirill’s prayer – “that the Lord will strengthen the fraternal feelings of the peoples of Holy Russia” and, ominously, for the “establishment of peace in the expanses of historical [read: Imperial] Russia.” – except as a species of magical thinking?

Alongside, I would also argue against the false equivalence implied by Pope Francis’s statement that those “who pay the price of war” are both “the Russian soldiers” and “the people who are bombed and killed” – who are Ukrainians, though Francis did not name them. In some transcendent space far above the darkling plains where “ignorant armies clash by night” this may be true but in the materiality of the clash between a Russian soldier in the turret of his tank and the Ukrainian villager shot at the gate of her shattered fence, there are unequal prices that have been paid.

There is another kind of price to be paid by Orthodox soldiers, Russian and Ukrainian: the price for having spilled blood that has been lost from a body. When they return to their communities or what is left of them they must do penance for the great pollution that they bring with them: “For the life of every creature — its blood is its life…the life of every creature is its blood.”[Leviticus 17:14] And the life blood belongs to the Creator.

Ukrainian Cossack in Kyiv protest www.pinterest.ca

And so the soldier re-enters the church and community by first fasting, making confession and receiving communion.”Even for the best motives in the world,” writes Fr. John McGuckin citing the fourth century Canon of St Basil on war and repentance, “the shedding of blood remains a defilement, such that the true Christian, afterwards, would wish to undergo the cathartic experience of temporary return to the lifestyle of penance, that is be penitent.” (In fact Basil prescribes excommunication for fully three years for those who cannot come “clean-handed” to the communion cup.) Fifteenth-century Ukrainian Cossacks who returned from war were forbidden to set foot in church for a year, because “they were covered in shame.”  The priest, for his part, will never have served in the army and, after ordination, must not kill animals; but if he does hunt, he cannot serve Divine Liturgy (Mass) for the succeeding forty days.

A Theology of War and Peace?

The Primate of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church said in a message-as far back as October 2022:  “Step by step, day after day, our soldiers are tirelessly liberating our homeland’s towns and villages. Through the eyes of its wounded defenders, we already see Ukraine’s victory. . . ” The Russian Orthodox Church through its Patriarch Kirill has the same vision (double-gendered in his case), that with God’s help, “together with all those who love the Motherland, we could stand up for the Fatherland today and do everything to gain victory.”

When the Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine likens proposals for negotiating “peace” with Russia as sitting down at the table with “the mafia;” when he dispenses with appeals to transcendent values in this struggle for peace and argues “Only military deterrence is realistic,” where is the Church headed?

On the first anniversary of the Russian war on Ukraine, Metropolitan Epiphanius had a message: “On this marked day in the history of our nation and all humanity, we beseech the Lord to arrest the spreading evil, to end Russian aggression. We pray for the fulfillment of Ukraine’s approaching victory and, through victory, the establishment of a just peace.”

Through war to battlefield victory; through battlefield victory to peace.

July 12 2021 First of all, I would like to emphasize that the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space, to my mind is our great common misfortune and tragedy…. But these are also the result of deliberate efforts by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity….Hence the attempts to play on the ”national question“ and sow discord among people, the overarching goal being to divide and then to pit the parts of a single people against one another. Vladimir Putin, “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”

Feb 12, 2012 MOSCOW (Reuters) – The head of the Russian Orthodox church on Wednesday called the 12 years of Vladimir Putin’s rule a “miracle of God.”

I began writing this post near the end of February 2022, on tenterhooks along with much of the world about the likelihood of a war being unleashed by Russian military forces on the sovereign territory of Ukraine. At the same time, preparations were underway in Rome to facilitate a meeting between Pope Francis, supreme pontiff of the world-wide Catholic Church, and  the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia, perhaps as soon as June or July of 2022, although the venue had not yet been chosen. So I learned from one of the Google alerts that were popping up daily in my Inbox. Not only was I nonplussed and distressed by this development, I was taking it very personally.

Jan 24 2022 Peace is an aspiration Patriarch Kirill shares with the pope, a goal they should strive for together. During the Christmas service, on Jan. 7 in the Russian calendar, the patriarch thanked Pope Francis for a fraternal message and added, “Hopefully, these relations will translate into many and many kind joint actions, including those aimed at achieving peace where there is no peace today,” according to Tass, a Russian news agency.

As a practising Christian, I am a bundle of contradictions spiritual, historical, geopolitical and personal. As this blog – “What am I doing here?” –  announces itself, I am a baptised and active member of a parish within the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada. From this fact all other affinities have developed – with Ukrainian Catholics, with the Patriarchate of Constantinople, with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, with oblates and brothers of the Order of Saint Benedict and, God help me, with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Then Russian military forces invaded sovereign Ukrainian territory on February 24, 2022.

February 27 2022 “Religious exceptionalism, self-identification as ‘Holy Russia,’ ‘The Third Rome, and the Fourth cannot be,’ resided in the Russian religious consciousness as radical conservatism. And Russian religious nationalism is not the nationalism of a small nation that wants to survive. It is mainly imperial nationalism.”

Prince Volodomyr baptises the people of Kyivan Rus 988 AD

I will try to be succinct.The Church into which I was baptised in 1944 was still called the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church of Canada. The “Greek” is there not because its members and clergy were Greeks (although I did try to pass myself off as a Greek for awhile in elementary school) but because we were Greek Orthodox (as opposed to Roman or Latin Catholics). We were descended from that initial baptism of Kyivan Rus in 988 by its prince Volodomyr (Vladimir) who had accepted Christianity from Greek-speaking Byzantium. (The Moscow church would not get its first Primate until 1322.) Not only was Byzantium’s capital, Constantinople (now Istanbul) situated west of Rus on the Black Sea , it was the Second Rome, still draped in Imperial splendour compared to the ruined First Rome, now fallen to various barbarians and usurpers, and sacked, plundered, vandalized with many of its citizens enslaved.  Who would not want to be a Byzantine? But then, catastrophe.

Russian clergy (archival)

With the utter destruction of Kyiv by Mongols in 1240  and the massacre of its population (after its citizens had refused to surrender), the Mongols advanced unstoppably into Hungary and Poland. And the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and its spiritual leader the Metropolitan were not to return to Kyiv until late in the fifteenth century. For all the vicissitudes of history, however, Ukrainian Orthodoxy remained within the jurisdiction of Constantinople until – another catastrophe! –  the Kyivan Metropolia was annexed by the Patriarchate of Moscow in 1685. It must be said, however, that Ukrainian bishops were powerful churchmen throughout the 18th century in the Russian empire, their superior education setting them apart from their Russian counterparts. And a century later, all the ancient Ukrainian dioceses had been incorporated into dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church, itself the product of missionary work from Kyiv, and all its spiritual leadership was occupied by ethnic Russians.

Early one evening in May 2018, days before the annual parade celebrating the Soviet victory in World War II, a convoy of military trucks carrying long-range nuclear weapons trundled to a halt on the Russian capital’s ring road.As police officers stood guard, two Russian Orthodox priests wearing cassocks and holding Bibles climbed out of a vehicle and began sprinkling holy water on the stationary Topol and Yars intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Meanwhile,  another shock to Ukrainian Orthodoxy in central Ukraine had been administered by the Union of Brest in 1596 (an event of “tragic” proportions to some Orthodox even today). That region had been incorporated into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a large and populous federation ruled by a single King of Poland. Ethnically diverse and relatively tolerant of diverse Christian and Jewish religious communities, its Constitution nevertheless acknowledged Catholicism as the “dominant religion.” At the time of the Union, the main concern of the bishops was the consequences to their episcopates of internal Polish affairs. The Moscow threat was not very strong in 1595/6 as it became later. Nevertheless, it is useful to be reminded in the swirl of disinformation that emanates from Moscow that not all Ukrainians have lived in the “spiritual realm” of the Moscow Patriarchate.

St Josephat Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral in Edmonton

Thus was created the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Byzantine/Orthodox in its rites but in full communion with the worldwide Catholic Church.(As recently as 1995, the spiritual head of much of world Orthodoxy, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople -never of Istanbul, please – insisted that the “Eastern Catholic churches” should be regarded as “irregular communities.” For their part, the Roman Church post-Vatican Two no longer labels the Orthodox as “schismatic” although the accusation still finds purchase – online where I found it – “It would be very difficult to find the right name for this so-called Church. Heretic and schismatic ‘Church’ is highly fitting, however.”)

On Feb. 5, 2015, Crux noted: “During the Soviet era, no church produced more martyrs in percentage terms or suffered more vicious crackdowns. In light of that history, Greek Catholics become understandably nervous anytime they see Russian forces crossing their borders, or insurgents armed and supported by Moscow trying to slice off pieces of Ukrainian territory.” Therefore, it would be in the interest of the Vatican to take millions of Ukrainian Catholics under its wings.

(I become sensitive to a kind of tone-deafness on the pontiff’s part when, for example, on March 25 2022 Pope Francis  “consecrated Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary with a prayer asking for peace in the world.” Right Rev. Fr Roman Bozyk, Dean of Theology at St Andrew’s College, University of Manitoba, would remind the Holy Father that Russians and Ukrainians are not one people – this is Putin’s line -and that “Kyiv has been dedicated to the Theotokos (Mother of God) since the 11th century” and his consecration is redundant.)

Embedded in Orthodox Christianity in Canada, I remained pretty much unconcerned with the vicissitudes of Christianity in the Old Country. As an undergraduate  at the University of Alberta in the 1960s, I took a smattering of courses in Soviet Studies, understood that the Ukr/USSR was an atheist state, watched jerky and grainy newsreel footage of the toppling of church domes, and knew from relatives’ letters from Ukraine that the women in the village that Baba had left behind furtively fasted, taught their young children basic prayers, wrote pysanky and even went once a year to the village’s (Russian Orthodox) church although none of their grown children did such a thing. On my first visit to the village in 1984, that church was pointed out to me as the one “your Baba went to,” as a girl, although in Canada, ironically, she was an adherent of the pro-Soviet Ukrainian Farm and Labour Temple Association and I never saw her in church until my wedding in 1972.

St John the Baptist Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral, Edmonton

On my father’s side of the family, however, “church” was a very different story. The Kostashes had emigrated in 1900 from a Galicia that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – that had earlier absorbed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth – and therefore Ukrainians in Galicia were historically, and remained, Ukrainian Catholic. This aspect of their identity – that in fact my Galician grandparents had been baptised in Dzhuriv and in Tulova as Greek Catholics – went unnoticed by me for a long time.

I had been raised in the city in a made-in-Canada Orthodox Church (the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada incorporated by an Act of Parliament in 1929) to which a great-uncle and some great-aunts  and various others of the Ukrainian-Albertan intelligentsia had attached themselves, eventually carrying into it my parents. The founders of the UOCC not only seized the opportunity in Canada to return to the ancient faith of  Rus: they decided also to bring it up-to-Canadian-date, so to speak, having been deeply influenced by the model of Protestantism (Presbyterians) in the immigrant settlements of western Canada. Uniquely in Orthodoxy, congregations of the UOCC act as trustees of their own church property, consent to the appointment and dismissal of priests, govern as a General Council of clerical and lay members, and manage their lay organizations independently of episcopal authority..(This is important for the women’s organizations: although the parish priest attends their meetings, he is ex officio and has no voting authority. He can however, request to be on the agenda.)

Greek prayer rope/bracelet

Yet, I was aware that there were Ukrainian Canadians of my generation in Edmonton who went to Roman Catholic not public schools, and I thought them anomalous. What were they doing at St Joseph’s Composite High School (only two blocks away from our Orthodox Cathedral) among Polish and Italian and Irish classmates under the scholastic supervision of nuns in medieval dress and, as I imagined, frequently on their knees, hands bound in ropes of rosary beads and chanting in Latin? (Even in the privacy of our parents’ homes or anywhere else, we Orthodox didn’t “do” rosaries, although many did adopt the Greek prayer rope as a substitute.) It’s true that the Ukrainian Catholic kids went to churches mounted with bulbous domes just as ours were and whose interiors were as gorgeously adorned with icons and embroidered altar cloths. Their parish priests were also married, and wore similar vestments ; and their liturgies and hymnals are practically identical. But not wholly. For here’s the thing: over them all loomed the figure of their supreme spiritual authority, the Pope.

May 9 2022 When Pope Francis visited the Russian ambassador to the Holy See Feb. 25, the day after the war started, this was widely perceived in the West as a diplomatic peace initiative…The repeated calls for peace in Ukraine by Pope Francis have hitherto been interpreted by the Russian Orthodox Church as support for the central Russian justification of the war that peace in the Donbas was threatened by Ukrainian extremists and has to be restored by the Russian special military operation.

When I once took part in a series of classes (in the company of Ukrainian Catholic friends) on the Catechism [summary of doctrine] of the Ukrainian Catholic Church and had been assured by my priest that this would not imperil my Orthodox soul, I was struck by the virtual interchangeability of our Catechisms, except for this inclusion (there are others) in their liturgical prayer: “Among the first, remember, O Lord, our most holy universal Pontiff [name] Pope of Rome.” In the Orthodox world, said Pontiff is the Bishop of Rome but never included in our corporate prayer. (News flash from 2007: “A joint commission of Orthodox and Catholic theologians has agreed that the Pope has primacy over all bishops, though disagreements about the extent of his authority still continue.”)

After a prolonged, by decades, absence from participation as a parish member of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada, I returned; and learned that while I had been busy as a professional writer who “dipped into” Orthodox worship only as a visitor when abroad in need of spiritual refreshment (I had never resisted the elemental allure of Byzantine interiors), the UOCC had

Hagia Sophia interior

ended Ukrainian Orthodoxy’s long separation from the patriarchate of Constantinople through whom we had been baptised back in 988 AD. In 1990, Eucharistic Union was re-established (common sharing in the sacrament of Holy Communion), bringing us Canadians into communion with much of world Orthodoxy. On each of my visits to Hagia Sophia in Istanbul – that 6th century masterpiece of Byzantine architecture now a mosque – I stood in profound awe that in this very space I had a source and origin of identity. (An aside here for an observation I made of a listing on the Departures flight board in Athens airport in 2019: in English I was looking for the flight to Istanbul; in Greek, for Kωνσταντινούπολη/Constantinople. True story.)

It did eventually dawn on me as well that being in communion with “world Orthodoxy” also put me in communion with the Russian Orthodox Church, the most populous Orthodox jurisdiction in the world. This did not sit well with me.

May 4, 2022: “We do not want to fight against anyone. Russia has never attacked anyone,” said Patriarch Kirill of Moscow in his sermon yesterday, continuing his steadfast support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has caused the deaths of innocent Ukrainian Orthodox civilians.

With Ukraine’s independence as a sovereign state after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was inevitable that at least a portion of its Orthodox population under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate would seek an equally independent Church. And so it came to pass. In 2019 Patriarch Bartholomew in Constantinople granted autocephaly (self-governance) to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) under its primate, Epiphanius, the Metropolitan of Kyiv and all Ukraine. Patriarch Kirill was so displeased with this “interference” by Constantinople that he dissolved the Russian Orthodox Church’s Eucharistic Communion with Constantinople and made a pivot to the Vatican.

May 4 2022 The week before his Zoom call with Francis, Kirill, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, described the war in Ukraine as a “metaphysical” struggle against a godless international order based on “excess consumption” and “gay parades.”  Pope Francis said in an interview published Tuesday that he told Patriarch Kirill — the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church — not to “transform himself into Putin’s altar boy,” CNN reported Wednesday.

Patriarch Kirill and President Putin

Also in 2018, I had become an oblate of the Order of Saint Benedict, about which I have written in an earlier blog post. I was accepted as a baptised Christian (an ObOSB is not necessarily a Roman Catholic) Over the years, because of retreats at the Benedictine Abbey of St Peter in Muenster, Saskatchewan, in the company of the brothers I became immersed in their daily cycle of prayers and psalmody, attended Sunday Masses, ate meals in the refectory and enjoyed convivial conversation with them all, especially the  Abbot and Guest Master, and, very important, spent hours reading in the Oblates’ reading room choosing from a library of quite extraordinary Benedictine-inspired literature. I shared their enthusiasm (mostly) for the reinvigorated papacy led by Supreme Pontiff Francis. Looking back on my more recent visits (resumed post-Covid in 2021), I am struck by the equanimity, even serenity, of the community’s response to the very issues that agitated me – why can’t women be priests? how should we settlers establish relationships with Indigenous neighbours? do you think the Great Schism of 1054 that split the universal Church into East and West can be healed?

April 27 2022 By the wanton slaughter of innocents in Bucha, in Mariupol’, and throughout Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has stigmatized himself with the mark of Cain. Kirill has tried to mask that stigma. For the Bishop of Rome to have met with Kirill as if the Russian were a true religious leader would have bitterly disappointed Catholic and Orthodox Ukrainians, who would not unreasonably have regarded it as a betrayal; it would have depleted the Holy See’s moral capital in world affairs; and it would have contributed nothing to peace.

Abbey grounds in Feb 2022

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. But the monks of St Peter’s live according to the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict, in whose Prologue Benedict exhorts: “Never departing from [God’s] guidance, remaining in the monastery until death…so we may eventually enter into the Kingdom of God.” Not even the war in Ukraine seemed to disturb their composure as a community, to judge from their website. Do you suppose there is a lesson in this?

May 11 2022 Francis names this truth, and defends the other logic—God’s logic, the path of mercy—even after most of us have given up on it. God’s logic recognizes the depth of human relationship. It demands our mutual recognition as fellow creatures. The pope’s stance needs no clarification. It could not be clearer. Amidst the roar of weapons and cries of grief, he stands among the victims, their blood on his cassock, begging for peace, and ready to talk to anyone and to do anything to bring it about.

Part Two: Peace in a Time of War

It will be remembered from my earlier post on Mary Magdalene that, when Pope Gregory I delivered an Easter Homily in 591CE, he collapsed into the figure of the Magdalene other Marys mentioned in the Gospels. His message? “She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary [the Magdalene] from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. What did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices? It is clear, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts.” 

Time for the Eastern Church to weigh in.

Who was Mary Magdalene historically, or, as I prefer to put it, in her own life? Outside fragmented and disputed Gnostic texts,  she never spoke for herself on the record although the canonical Gospel narratives, which place her and other women disciples at the Empty Tomb where Jesus had been buried, give her a few lines. Hours before that transfigurative moment, moreover, she had been among other women who, “observing from a distance,” kept vigil at the scene of the Crucifixion, at Golgotha, Place of a Skull. (All the male disciples had fled into hiding, fearing their arrest. Matthew 26:56) For months, women such as these had been among the followers of Jesus  during his brief earthly ministry “and attended on him when he was in Galilee” [Mark 15:41] We don’t know when or how Mary Magdalene, drawn into Jesus’s magnetic orbit, had left her home and situation in Magdala to join with others in sharing their material goods and even money for the sustenance of the disciples [Luke 8:3], clearly women of some means and independence.(That is, acting as deaconesses.)

Reports of Jesus’s healing ministry among the humble – the halt, the lame, the leprous, the epileptic and the mentally distraught – had reached them or perhaps they had even witnessed the miracles. “And certain women [were with Him] who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities – Mary called Magdalene, out of whom had come seven demons.” [Luke 8:2]

So, from the succinct not to say scant Gospel record, certain biographical details may be deduced. Because Jewish women could inherit if no male siblings survived, because Magdala on the Sea of Galilee was an important urban centre trading in dyed fabrics and salted fish, because archaeological excavations in Magdala have revealed immersion pools, likely attached to the synagogue but possibly baptismal connected with followers of John the Baptist , we might construe a back story for Mary Magdalene such as offered by James McGrath in What Jesus Learned from Women. She was a successful businesswoman in the fabric dyeing trade with neither spouse nor parents and male siblings still living but with the means to be a benefactor [McGrath 229]. She was literate and numerate, a quick study in the news from Galilee concerning prophecies, miracles and instruction through parables, but, for all her self-sufficiency, she was afflicted by infirmities unspecified. Perhaps the hope of healing drew her out of her circumstances to follow the man who would call her, respectfully, Mary of Magdala, her own woman, neither mother nor wife of anyone. This back story, McGrath summarizes as having “set the stage for her role as supporter, disciple, and a proclaimer  of the good news about Jesus….” [McGrath 242]

The Prophet Jonah: “A great sea-monster appeared straightway by divine providence, and swallowed him up. For three days and nights he was found in its belly and he prayed, saying the words, “I cried aloud in my affliction unto the Lord my God…” The sea-monster then vomited him up on dry land.” https://www.goarch.org/chapel/saints?contentid=213

Satisfied by this portrait of the woman before she became a Saint, I was nevertheless nonplussed by the absence of any standard Orthodox affirmation of any of it. Wasn’t Orthodoxy interested in who Mary Magdalene might have/could have been as a historical, nonhagiographic, figure? I put the question to my go-to source for all things Orthodox, Right Reverend Fr Roman Bozyk, Dean at the Faculty of Theology, St Andrew’s College at the University of Manitoba.

“How does the Orthodox Church view the value of archaeology, archival research, anthropology, linguistics, what have you, in establishing the material history of our faith?” His response (from my notes of a telephone chat): “We don’t get excited about archaeology and so on. Science is secondary to faith. We don’t need this type of ‘proof.’ But we are very supportive of genuine knowledge of the sciences. We don’t require of our faith that a human being really can live inside a fish for three days.The important detail is that Jonah was vomited up ‘on the third day.'”

Me: “What about the demons that tormented Mary Magdalene – what does the Orthodox Church teach about the nature of demonic possession?”

Fr Roman took me by surprise (clearly I did not grasp the the theology of this) with his blunt answer: “We believe angels and demons exist. Some people overdo the ‘angels,’ forgetting that only three or four show up in Scripture. Some are real demons, or vices, or mental illnesses. For the afflicted: first rest, then pray, and if still unwell, see a doctor.”

Finally concerning Mary Magdalene’s role as one of the Myrrh-bearers, I wondered what exactly the women were so intent on doing as they approached the tomb with herbs, spices and aromatic oil. Jesus had been buried, but hastily, before Sabbath, and the women had come to do the anointing properly. Fr Roman: “It’s the family that does the anointing of the dead and women who complete the prayers and raise their voices in ritual lamentation. The myrrh-bearers saw themselves as having the status to do this as intimate sisters of the new family. Remember also the woman who anointed Christ’s feet before his journey toward Jerusalem and his crucifixion.”

White Angel icon in monastery in Mileševa, Serbia

Women have tended the bodies of their dead since time immemorial. So here they are, very early on the Sunday morning after the Friday of the crucifixion and the Saturday/Sabbath, prepared to anoint Jesus where he had been laid. Among them were his mother, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, Mary, the wife of Clopas, and Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus. At the tomb,  they are confronted by an angel who is seated on the massive stone that was now rolled away from the tomb’s mouth. “Right there,” continued Fr Roman, “was the Good News: no Angel would have sat in the presence of the King, but sitting he was, for ‘He is not here.”

But, but, I had still not come across a source from Orthodox scholarship deeply interested in who Mary Magdalene was in her own life. “Science is secondary to faith.” Had Orthodox thinkers, in foregrounding her life in the Church as a Saint, a Myrrh-bearer, a Witness to the Resurrection, ceded the study of a putative historical Magdalene to the scientists and cultists? Ceded her story to students of Biblical archaeology, scholars of Palestinian sociology and archivists of Galilean commerce, who have brought into focus a Magdalene present in the new community of the followers of Jesus, active in that ministry before she is present at the Cross?

“Despite the fact that legally a woman’s testimony at that time was considered invalid, the authors of the four gospels all make women the primary witnesses to the most important event of Christianity.” (Heidi Schlumpf, “Who framed Mary Magdalene?”]

Me: “Fr Roman, do you think the Eastern Church truly ‘gets’ Mary Magdalene in these terms?”

Fr Roman: “Truly Orthodox theology ‘gets’ Mary Magdalene but maybe not the actual Orthodox in the pews.”

For us in the pews, Mary Magdalene makes three appearance in the Gospels: she is delivered from seven demons, she joins and supports Jesus’s ministry [Luke8:2,3]; she is present at the Crucifixion and Entombment [Matt 27:55-61]; she is first to see the Risen Lord [Mark 16:9 and John 20:1-18]. So, if we are paying attention, we will have learned of a remarkable woman disciple who has entered into the history of the Church, East and West. Introduced as well as “she who was not believed” by her fellow disciples – “and their [the myrrh-bearers’] words seemed to them like idle tales” – who rush tripping over themselves to see if the Tomb really is empty. (Reader, it is.) Neither Luke nor Mark nor Matthew mention that any of the male disciples had witnessed the Crucifixion let alone the Resurrection. It is to women that the Angel speaks, it is to a woman that the Risen Christ reveals himself. Eva Catafygiotu Topping pretty much sums it up: “From a woman’s lips first came the good news of love’s triumph over evil and death, the good news of life and liberation for all of God’s children. Christianity’s first apostle, a leader in the primitive Christian Church, a pioneer in the struggle to build a new earth, St. Mary Magdalene wears the brightest of halos.”

Honoring the Ancient Myrrhbearers  modernmyrrhbearers.com

Mary Magdalene also has her moments in Liturgies celebrated by the Orthodox Church. And here too we in the pews will learn of her as Myrrh-bearer and Apostle to the Apostles, but not necessarily on Sundays (which is after all “the centre of all prayer,” Fr Roman reminds us) when the pews are most full. Mark 16:9 – “Now, rising early on the first day of the Sabbath-week, [Jesus] appeared first to Mary Magdalene…” –  is officially read at Matins on the Feast of the Ascension “but this is seldom done in today’s parishes.” If we’re lucky we will hear of Mary Magdalene early in the evening of Holy Saturday (before Easter Sunday) but Jesus’s  joyous proclamation to Mary, “Rejoice!” [Matthew 28:9] is squeezed in just before the midnight proclamation from the pulpit: “Christ is Risen!” I’ve been there, standing with a small crowd at the cathedral doors in deepest, darkest midnight, as the priest knocks with a heavy crucifix on the closed doors until they are opened – all lights and candles blazing within – and we walk in, representing the Myrrh-bearing women. Who knew?

I was grateful for a footnote in the Orthodox Study Bible, that tells me “‘Rejoice is the first word of the risen Christ, a common greeting here filled with great blessing.” He repeats the proclamation “Rejoice!” to the Myrrh-bearing women on the evening of Easter Sunday. (However, other, newer, translations have Jesus hailing Mary and her companions plainly: “Suddenly Jesus met them and said, ‘Greetings!’”)

www.pinterest.ca/pin/541417186435193564/

On the sixth Sunday after Pentecost, the Magdalene, Jesus’s faithful and inseparable disciple, has a commemoration all to herself, not only as a Myrrh-bearer but also as Equal to the Apostles, a term once used only in the Orthodox Church to denote Saints who contributed as much as the Apostles to the enlightenment of the whole world. But on June 3, 2016, the Vatican announced that the liturgical celebration of “the memorial of St Mary Magdalene” was now raised to the dignity of  Feast, the same rank given to the liturgical celebration of the Apostles.

So now East and West are on the same page again.

Mary Magdalene has had an afterlife in the Church, East and West, mainly in traditions that continue her life story well beyond the Gospels and hymns and iconography. According to one Holy Tradition, she accompanied the apostles, who had left Jerusalem, “to preach to all the ends of the earth,” herself making her way to Rome and then, from Rome, “already bent with age, moved to Ephesus where the holy Apostle John unceasingly labored. There the saint finished her earthly life and was buried.” (I’ve been in Ephesus, I’ve viewed St John’s burial place but there was nothing to indicate – admittedly from a Turkish tourist board – she has likewise been interred in the vicinity.) The Holy Monastery of Simonopetra on Mt Athos in Greece preserved the still-warm hand believed to be that of Mary Magdalene, a relic unfortunately carried off by pirates in 1747.

holytrinitystore.com

But a beloved Tradition that tells of Mary in Rome is represented in another very popular icon of the Saint. In place of the jar of  fragrant oil, she delicately holds a red egg. “Tradition teaches that when Mary first met the Roman emperor, Tiberius Caesar, she held a plain egg in her hand and greeted him with the words, ‘Christ is risen!’ Tiberius exclaimed: ‘How can someone rise from the dead? This is hard to believe. It is just as likely that Christ rose from the dead as it is that the egg you are holding will turn red.’ Even as he spoke, the egg turned a brilliant red! She then preached the good news of Jesus Christ to the emperor and the imperial household.” A blogger adds: “To this day, the Byzantine church commemorates this legend with the exchange of red eggs. If you look closely at one of the many dinner scenes in ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding,’ you will see characters tapping each other’s red eggs as if they are toasting with wine-glasses.” I’ve been at an Easter Sunday feast in the Greek countryside, the guest of a group of Communists; true to form the kids went around smashing red eggs. If one is dealing with metaphors, perhaps this was a game of “Smash the  bourgeoisie.”

This is all charming, But I have to ask myself how these traditions or Traditions add to the honour and prestige in which the Church holds her? But that is not the right question. People tell these stories, for they are full of wonder: how Mary Magdalene returns to Palestine to live with the Theotokos (Mother of God) who in other versions had moved to a modest house near Ephesus which one can visit still; how the Magdalene suffered persecution in Ephesus and was exiled to Marseilles, of all places.

But there is another iconographic subject, East and West, that I find more deeply satisfying, one more poignant and infused with the profound humanity of Mary Magdalene’s mission, namely – back to the Gospels for a moment –  the scene at at the Resurrection often represented in the West as Noli Me Tangere [John 20:1617]

I’m looking at an art postcard of Giotto’s La resurrezione of 1304-1306 (a fresco in the Chapel of the Scorovegni, Padua, Italy). Giotto has focussed on the moment when the resurrected Christ has spoken her name, “Mary,” and, in full, devastating recognition of his voice, and then of his risen body standing before her, she cries out “‘Rabbouni,” which means  Teacher.” [John 20:16]

https://www.frammentiarte.it/2016/33-la-resurrezione/

There are several figures in this fresco, two Angels in white garments, winged and haloed, seated comfortably on a marble slab; four sleeping men in drab clothing (not in John but perhaps guardians or wardens modelled after men Giotto dragged in off the street); Christ in white robes and holding aloft a fluttering standard (I can’t make out the lettering). And, not quite at dead centre but the focus of our gaze, Mary, in luminous red from haloed head to foot. This cloak covers her kneeling posture in profile to us, her two arms reaching out – “Rabbouni!” – as Christ, already turning, his right foot making the pivot away from her as his right arm and hand keep her distant even as his lovely head is still turned toward her, inclined toward her: “Do not hold on to me.” [John 20:17] Noli Me Tangere.

          Russian icon /www.holyart.com

The fourteenth century in Italian painting was still close enough to Byzantine influence that one can see the same moment represented in Orthodox iconography – the same positioning of the figures of Mary and Christ, the same small pivot of His left foot, the same bright red of Mary’s cloak. But peeking out from under her robe are her arms clothed in blue. For his part, in Orthodox icons Christ is draped in red and blue. But notice which colour is closer to the figure’s body. Fr Roman again: “Some Orthodox understand that Red is the colour of Divinity and Blue is the colour of Humanity. So, the icons of Christ have red closer to His body, seen as Christ as Eternal God;  and blue on top as God who took on a human body.” Conversely the Magdalene has blue as the first layer (her humanity shared with us ) and red her outer garment, signalling her transformation as Apostle and Saint.

Giotto paints Christ entirely in white garments, like an Angel. (“WHITE: Typically represents purity and divinity. It is seen on angels, babies, and the shroud of the dead. Christ after his death is shown in white as well.”) Byzantine iconography  never fundamentally changed this suite of colours, figures and stylized landscape. (At the time of Giotto’s work, Byzantium had 150 years more as a shrinking empire in the eastern Mediterranean before it flared out in the brilliance of the so-called Palaiologan Renaissance, the final period in the development of Byzantine art. Constantinople finally fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.) But East or West, this is the moment of the Magdalene’s transformation from disciple to Apostle to the Apostles, for Christ’s next words to her are: “But go to my brothers and say to them…”

As discussed in Part One of this blog post about the “framing” of Mary Magdalene, the Western Church would develop another sequence of imagery of the Magdalene as the repentant prostitute who, purified, joins Jesus on his Path. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Brunig finds in her story “that great medieval hope – uniting spiritual virtue with deep sensuality.” She writes of the gradual development of “a less corporeal, more ethereal spirituality” in both Protestant and Roman Catholic veneration, so much so that Reformation theology sees Mary Magdalene as “an example of the universality of the sinful condition.”

The Orthodox tradition, cleaving much closer to the Scriptural sources, presents us a much different and in many ways simpler Magdalene. Healed of what ailed her, she becomes a follower of Jesus, one of many women who, of independent means, help finance the needs of the mission. She displays enough moral fortitude to keep vigil at the Cross and enough spiritual vulnerability to apprehend the Risen Christ. No fallen state of whorishness is necessary nor abject penitence nor an elevation to the ethereal to establish her dignity among the Apostles and as a saint of the (Orthodox) Church.

Granted, I sometimes feel that the very sacredness ascribed by Eastern Christian theology to iconographic images renders the Magdalene precisely as a creature of elevated ethereality beyond her lived life – her hieratic pose, her generic Christian piety that betrays no particular personality, the repetition, age after age, so that we recognize her instantly, modestly cloaked in red, her head covered, and her hands holding a cross and an ornate jar of ointment.

Mary Magdalene © Shanelle Callaghan

But that’s the power of icons, writes Dr Wilma Tommaso, they have the gift of  “converting the profane into the sacred,” the hinge that swings between the person at prayer and the Divine. And thus an icon, even of Mary Magdalene, full of humanity, “cannot be the object of free interpretation by the artists.” But now and then she breaks into our own time still bearing the old, old message, as the late Orthodox theologian Fr Alexander Schmemann reminded us in a sermon about the significance of the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing women, that it “calls us to ensure that in this world love and faithfulness do not disappear or die out.”

WHO FRAMED MARY MAGDALENE?

Twenty-one years ago, even without the question mark, a former editor of U.S. Catholic (vol 65 #4), Heidi Schlumpf, put it bluntly. Mary Magdalene has been framed.

Mary Magdalene, a 1616-1618 painting by Artemisia Gentileschi

That’s quite a charge, given the ubiquity and even much-loved image of a penitent sinner. Her luxuriant tresses are in disarray, her full breasts illuminated by a celestial glow to which she has tilted her head and rolled back her eyes. She seems transfixed on a vision that she (not we) beholds. In similar iterations from medieval western European art and sculpture to 20th century rock operas, she has been offered for our consideration and contemplation: the example par excellence of the woman fallen into sin (almost always insinuated as sexual), likely a prostitute, who repented and was healed of her (sex) demons. She becomes part of the company of women who follow Jesus in his ministry, from town to village to Temple in Jerusalem, and on to Golgotha. Across Christianity she is considered a Saint, and extravagant legends tell of her travels across the Mediterranean after the Crucifixion to Rome or to Provence, of her retreat to a cave, of her relics housed in magnificent Abbeys. Even after the Reformation she was extolled in sacred Motets, Cantatas, Oratorios.

So what is the problem here? To quote Prof. Heidi Schlumpf, the question arises nevertheless: “How the first witness to Christ’s Resurrection was made into a prostitute, and how women today are restoring her reputation.”

Wait, wait! First witness to Christ’s Resurrection, a prostitute?

It’s a long story.

For a harlot is a deep pit; an adventuress is a narrow well. She lies in wait like a robber and increases the faithless among men. .Proverbs 23:27-28

Pope Gregory I by Jose de Ribera on Wiki

We can usefully begin in 591 CE when Pope Gregory I delivered an Easter Homily the jist of which for the next 1400 years in the Christian west provided the substance of the biography of Mary Magdalene.

It is Easter, and Gregory is recalling scenes from the Gospels in which we see Jesus in the Easter story. He begins with the Gospel of Luke [7:37] and the appearance of the nameless woman “of the city, who was a sinner,” who brings a jar of expensive ointment with which to bathe Jesus’s feet and dry them with her hair. Gregory then moves on to John [12:1-3], who names the woman with “the pound of precious perfume” as “Mary.” Gregory next evokes Mark [16:9] at the Resurrection when “[Jesus] appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he [had] cast seven demons.”

I pause to let this sink in: a woman, now cured of an affliction, is the first to see the resurrected Christ and she has a name, Mary Magdalene. But this is not the Good News of Easter that Gregory wants to tell us. No: “The woman, whom Luke calls a sinner, and John calls Mary, I think is the Mary from whom Mark reports that seven demons were driven out.” Nowhere in fact in the New Testament is possession by “demons” synonymous with sinfulness, let alone prostitution. [McGrath 230] But Pope Gregory presses on: “She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. What did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices? It is clear, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts.”

And we’re off.

In What Jesus Learned From Women, New Testament scholar James F. McGrath cites Margaret Hebblethwaite from her Six New Gospels: “The tradition that Mary was a prostitute is among the most extraordinary and implausible inventions ever woven out of Gospel texts.” [McGrath 229]

Mary Magdalene at the Cross Eugene Delacroix

But it has had a long and vivid life, including among those sinning but penitent Christians who heard in this version of Mary’s story that they still had a place in the community. Gregory had ended his Homily reassuringly: “She turned the mass of her crimes to virtues, in order to serve God entirely in penance.” By the eleventh century she was also often painted as a figure at the foot of the Cross, dishevelled and in tears; her veneration had spread across western Europe, churches claimed her relics, Basilicas her patronage. Legends told of how the Magdalene along with several other persecuted followers of Jesus took to the sea and tossed up on the southern coast of France. Her cave, overlooking the Massif de la Sainte-Baume, became a pilgrimage site, never mind that the entire legend was a medieval invention.

Mary Magdalene is mentioned twelve times in the New Testament (second only to mentions of the Mary Mother of God). It comes as a shock to cradle Catholics – and to the nonreligious steeped in the “sexy saint” of The Da Vinci Code or Jesus Christ Superstar – that most of those NT references place her in the Crucifixion and/or at the Empty Tomb narratives, a loyal and fearless disciple and witness. Johann Sebastian Bach gives her an aria in his Easter Oratorio, an “agitated solo for the oboe d’amore” and alto voice, a lamentation of loss and spiritual longing.Saget, saget mir geschwinde “Tell me, tell me quickly, Tell me where I can find Jesus, Whom my soul loves?” And for an Easter Mass in St Mark’s Basilica in Venice Andrea Gabrieli (1533-1585) gives her a Motet set to words from John 20:11-13, Maria Stabet ad monumentum: “But Mary stood outside the tomb weeping….”

Christ and Mary Magdalene Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

This is the “real” Biblical image of Mary Magdalene, a woman in a group of women who never left the appalling scene of the Crucifixion (the male disciples had fled in terror), who hasten to his tomb after burial (the men still in hiding) with oil and  aromatic herbs such as olive, laurel, palm and cypress with which to anoint Jesus’s body in its shroud, who find the Tomb empty. They walk away, disconcerted and fearful. The Gospel of Mark ends there but John’s Gospel continues. Mary, alone this time, weeps in consternation and bewilderment. Where have “they” taken the body of her Lord? She looks around and sees a gardener. “Whom do you seek?” he asks her. Perhaps, she thinks, he knows where the body is. “If you have borne Him away, tell me where you have laid Him and I will take him away.” Then come the two short lines of Scripture that never fail to take my breath away as I picture the little scene. The gardener is Jesus, Risen. He is the Good Shepherd who calls His own sheep by name. “Mary.” Mary Magdalene knows that voice and falls to her knees. “Rabboni! Teacher.” And then, as she is bid, she returns to the rest of the disciples. “I have seen the Lord.”

You could say that the story of Christianity begins there, with Mary Magdalene’s apostleship [Gk. apostolos sent forth] but that is not how it turned out in the western Church. As far back as the third century in Dura Europos, Syria, a normal domestic house that had been converted for Christian worship bore frescoes, prominently installed near the sanctuary, that showed women approaching the sepulchre, carrying their jars of ointment. Had the narrative already slipped from the telling by the time of Pope Gregory?

Dura Europos fresco https://at.bc.edu//secretsrevealed3.jpg

Mary T. Malone writes in Women and Christianity Vol. II, “One cannot cease to be amazed at the power of [the] fictional composite of [Magdalen’s] supposed biblical and Christian virtue, when the real biblical image of Magdalen as the leader of the women disciples and the ‘apostle to the apostles’ had never stirred any similar enthusiasm, even among most women.” [Malone 265] Malone suggests why the “fictional composite” held such sway: “She was a favourite of Jesus, a model of conversion and repentance and, above all, a redeemed whore.” [Malone 269] Above all? Yes, if you agree with Thomas Arentzen’s notion of a Mary Magdalene complex, “the pull to stretch Christian women’s lives out on a rack between promiscuity and chastity, between sexual decency and debauchery.” Between those eternal verities of Woman: The Madonna and the Whore.

However, scholars and theologians mainly women have pushed back. The sexualization of Mary Magdalene has effectively “silenced her” as a spiritual Mother, “cut her off at the knees,” “suppressed” her and the potential of women’s leadership in the church. Until her demons were identified as “the forbidden acts of the flesh,” victims of such demonic affliction were not generally held to be blameworthy [McGrath 231]. All the women listed in Luke 8:1 as Jesus’s followers had been cured of their demons and, moreover, helped sustain the group from their own private means. (Might they have been independent of male authority as unmarried women of means, or as widows, or merchants?)

Some writers in search of the authentic Magdalene cite uncanonical (read: heretical by the end of the fourth century) Gnostic texts. The Gospel of Philip says that Jesus loved Mary more than he did the other apostles, but at the crucial development where it was written that “he used to kiss her often on -” the manuscript is damaged and the curious or prurient among us will never know where and when Jesus kissed Mary.  The Gospel of Mary [Magdalene] was discovered in an antiquities market in Cairo in 1896 and dated to perhaps the first half of the second century. (“The ‘Christian Gnostic’ movement and its writings date from the middle of the 2nd century AD or later. By then, most, if not all, of the writings that became our New Testament were 80 to 100 years old.”) Nevertheless it carries powerful messages from a Mary Magdalene, authorized by Jesus himself, who is a teacher.

The Gospel According to Mary VenerabilisOpus.org

“Then Mary stood up, spoke, and turned their [the apostles’] hearts to the good. ‘Do not weep and do not grieve nor be afraid, for his grace will be with you completely, and will protect.” [Pagels 103] Clearly, according to such a “heretical” text, Jesus himself has found Mary capable of learning, perhaps then gifted for teaching – for discipleship is a form of apprenticeship – which is an excellent argument right there for her authority among the male apostles. I thus join James McGrath in asking why so many (women) readers of the Gnostic Gospels “prefer” to discern in their mystical and enigmatic disclosures a “romantic connection” between Mary and Jesus rather than her noteworthiness in the New Testament as a teacher and apostle to the apostles ? [McGrath 241-2]

Why exactly do we need to go there in order to reclaim Magdalene from the patriarchy? But some feminist theology, notably Cynthia Bourgeault’s presentation through Gnostic texts of the Woman at the Heart of Christianity, the subtitle of her classic The Meaning of Mary Magdalene (2010) – does go there. Not to a “romantic connection” but to a “love relationship.” Bourgeault acknowledges that it is an “emotionally-charged” question but sees that a love relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene “most likely did exist and is in fact at the heart of the Christian transformational path.”  It is a love that creates a “healing and generative energy,” a “refined and luminous” spiritual love, one might even say Christianity’s “long-missing key.” [Bourgeault x]

A kind of return-to-the-sources for the truth of Mary Magdalene’s life of apostleship, the reclamation for current generations, has been ongoing among some Christians of the western Churches for awhile. In her ground-breaking work of 1985, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, the New Testament scholar Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza revisits, for example, the event of the seven demons cast out of Magdalene: this does not characterize her Biblically as a “sinner” but as “someone who has experienced the unlimited power of the Kingdom of God in her own life.” [p 124] The Kingdom is already here, not as a sign of the special holiness of the elect but as a “wholeness of all,” the central vision of Jesus according to Schüssler Fiorenza. [p 121] After all, he preached that in the Kingdom many who are first will be last and those last will be first. [Mark 10:31] And what woman in first century Palestine, on hearing that promise would not have, in the quiet of her own heart, heard herself included?

Mary Magdalen announcing the resurrection to the apostles magdalenepublishing.org/

For these Catholic women and men it had clearly not been satisfactory to leave things as they were in 1969 when Pope Paul VI removed the descriptive “penitent” from all references to Mary Magdalene in the Catholic liturgical calendar, and, more drastically, stopped Liturgical readings from the Gospels that referred to her as the “penitent sinner.” But when the Vatican issued a decree in 2016 that elevated the commemoration of St Mary Magdalene to the lofty level of a Feast (July 22), celebrations blossomed in Catholic parishes, schools, retreat houses, hospital chapels – the Future Church, perhaps? – as though finally a 2.000-year-old wrong had be righted.

St Gregory of Nyssa icon Wikipedia

As an Orthodox Christian, I can only cheer on these brothers and sisters. Not a millennium too soon, Pope John Paul II issued an Apostolic Letter in 1988, On the Dignity of Women (Mulieris Dignitatem) tin which he wrote that, as the first eyewitness of the Risen Christ, and for this very reason, “[Mary Magdalene] was also the first to bear witness to him before the Apostles” and came to be called “the apostle of the Apostles.” [italics in original] He footnotes several Latin textual sources going back to St Thomas Aquinas, a 13th century Doctor of the Church, who wrote precisely a thousand years after St Gregory of Nyssa, c.335 – c.395. who wrote of Mary Magdalene’s witness of the Risen Lord: ” And these glad tidings He proclaims through the woman, not to those disciples only, but also to all who up to the present day become disciples of the Word.”

 Mary Magdalene as penitent sinner “has taken such a hold on the Christian imagination,” asserts Mary T. Malone in an all-too-casual collapse of western Christianity into Christianity as a whole, “that all the exegesis in the world seems unable to dislodge it.” [Malone 264] A footnote to this lamentation takes the reader not to exegetical sources in Eastern Christianity  but to current c. 2001 scholarship by women scholars in the Western tradition. The “centuries-old case of mistaken identity is being rectified,” writes Heidi Schlumpf.

Moustafa the night clerk, in an aureole of black curls, had bent his head over a medical textbook under a small shaded lamp at the miniscule Reception. He smiled dozily at my arrival, and left his duties at the textbook to lead me up to the roof to show me where breakfast would be served. I was staring out to the starry Sea of Marmara, enveloped by the plushness of the night, when Moustafa gently directed me to turn around. There, swelling up at us from the night sky, from a blackness as if from another world, heaved the vaulted floodlit bulk of Hagia Sophia, queen of churches in the Byzantine cosmos. It seemed to hang in the air right above us under the roof of heaven.

The Greeks called the church Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, the Ottomans, Aya Sofya. They made a mosque of it in 1453, eventually plastered over the mosaics and erected four superb minarets at its four corners. Sultan Murat IV, the Conqueror of Baghdad, delighted in this incomparable mosque, and when he came there to pray, attendants hung cages of singing birds near the southern door, particularly nightingales, “so that their sweet notes, mingled with those of the muezzins’ voices, filled the mosque with a harmony approaching that of paradise.”

My mouth will speak words of wisdom, the utterance of my heart will give understanding. Ps 49 3:1-2

For almost a thousand years (537 CE – 1453) the great Mother Church of Byzantium, Hagia Sophia, had stood triumphant in Constantinople as the place in all of Christendom where those who entered “knew not whether they had entered Paradise” (as recorded of an awestruck tenth-century emissary  from pagan Rus to the Imperial capital on the Bosphorus.) But 1453 – catastrophe! Holy Wisdom may have seemed eternal but the Byzantine Empire was decidedly rickety and Constantine’s city dangerously vulnerable to assault. It fell (or was conquered, depending on where you stood) to the Ottoman Turks on Tuesday May 29 when sultan Mehmed II cantered through shattered gates in triumph and claimed Hagia Sophia for Muslim worship.

As Ayasofya it was a mosque until the Ottoman Empire in its turn fell in the aftermath of the Great War, a secular republic was proclaimed and in 1934 the Ayasofya mosque was decommissioned, so to speak, and declared a museum, affiliated with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Fifty years later, it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. So far, so secular.

In the early 1990s, however, in what professor of Islamic Studies at Stanford University Anna Bigelow called “rituals of majoritarian grievance” (in a webinar October 9 2020), crowds of Muslim worshippers began to congregate to pray outside Ayasofya Müzesi on the anniversary of the Conquest.  Then massive petitions circulated online to have it reconverted to a mosque. In June 2018 a survey among 6000 Turks older than 18 asked: “Should Hagia Sophia be converted into a mosque and open to worship?” YES: 78.6%; NO 21.4%

Muslim crowds outside Hagia Sophia

Good as done.

A council of State decision, followed by a presidential decree on July 10 2020, “within hours” annulled the 1934 regulation. In the Globe and Mail Michael Coren wrote: “…the Islamic call to prayer was recited, and the museum’s social media pages were shuttered.”  It was reported that, after signing the decree,Turkey’s excitable president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was so moved that he had been unable to sleep all night. Four days later “thousands” of Muslim faithful were on their way to Ayasofya for the first Friday prayers in 86 years.

I clipped and printed out many accounts of that day, from nonpartisan reportage to partisan – achingly, exuberantly, triumphantly, mournfully partisan – testimonials and homilies, press releases and op eds.

President Erdogan arrives in Hagia Sophia

Accompanied by 500 dignitaries, cheered on by those thousands who had arrived and were now packed in the newly-segregated (men and women) squares around the mosque. President Erdoğan arrived at noon, entered the church/museum/mosque and took his place as Prof.Ali Erbaş, head of the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs, climbed up on the minbar, gripping the hilt of the “sword of conquest” and gave his sermon. According to a post on Public Orthodoxy, “Erbaş’s sermon presents a sacred narrative of Turkish national history, where the Turkish state is appointed by God to be the patron of all who live within its dominion.”  The drawn sword, it turns out, dates back to the fifteenth-century “signifying that Hagia Sophia was a mosque acquired through holy warfare.”

A hotel manager: “Ayasofya is reconquered.” His wife: “Turkey’s Muslims have taken back what was theirs.”

A retired businessman: “This is a festival for us today. We are so happy.”

President Erdoğan: “This is Hagia Sophia breaking away from its captivity chains. It was the greatest dream of our youth.”

Adem Yilmaz, worshipper: “This turned into a place where all hearts beat at once.”

UNESCO World Heritage Site: “The Grand Hagia Sophia Mosque.”

“As for Agia Sophia, well, it depends on degrees. Is there some Muslim prayer, and then the museum resumes? I heard they cover the mosaics for some time everyday. It is hard to judge if one is not there to see. As a woman, I know I would be a lot happier to be in a museum free of the headscarf police in a mosque. Many feel it was a purely political gimmick, fear-mongering and garnering Islamic prestige and power politics.’ [an email from a friend in Athens]

Curtains cover the apse mosaic

Here and there were people who wondered what was going to happen to the “human images” – a stupendous achievement of Byzantine mosaic art and spirituality – that are offensive to Muslims at prayer. Straight off, in fact, to cover as needed the image of the Mother of God and Christ Child, workers clambered up and into the sky-high apse and installed curtains, but so far there seems no intention to replaster the images. Scholars and conservationists raised concerns about the status of the on-going conservation work now that the museum’s stewardship has been transferred to a religious authority: tesserae on mosaics are becoming detached, red paint from the 1980s has to be removed, research on the mortar in the ancient brick walls is still underway.

But normally, I think it fair to say, the western reading public would not overly-concern itself with the political and religious agenda at play in the fate of an old church just barely inside Europe. Take Mark Twain, who visited Hagia Sophia in 1869:

How Hagia Sophia became a museum

I had been reading his The Innocents Abroad on the sun-struck roof of the hotel, the paperback propped up against a salt shaker, while I scooped up breakfast – a boiled egg, packets of cream cheese and cherry jam and honey, black and green olives, tomato and cucumber slices, bread, cookies, tea, with wasps crawling over my honey-sticky fingers. ”I do not think much of the Mosque of St. Sophia,” Twain wrote. “I suppose I lack appreciation. We will let it go at that. It is the rustiest old barn in heathendom.”

Perhaps it was a shambolic sight, a Byzantine masterpiece stripped of bells and crosses, icons and relics, its ponderous architecture propped up by massive buttresses, its marble flooring randomly covered by strips of carpet, the incomparable mosaics – those that had not been excised – plastered over in the 18th century and not uncovered until 1931.

But when its patron, Roman Emperor Justinian I first entered its completed space in 537, having “disregarded all considerations of expense and raised craftsmen from the whole world,” he is said to have declaimed “Glory be to God, who hath thought me worthy to accomplish so great a work. I have vanquished thee O Solomon!”

Justinian I

Vast in scale, immense in cost, marbles and spolia taken from five pagan monuments – its green marble pillars once fortified Artemis’s own sanctuary in Ephesus – it took only five years to build. In his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon described the emperor himself, “clad in a linen tunic” who “surveyed each day the rapid progress” of ten thousand labourers and made sure each was paid promptly at the end of the day. The bedazzled visitor for centuries to come would behold a sanctuary that contained “forty thousand pound weight of silver, and the holy vases and vestments of the altar were of the purest gold, enriched with inestimable gems.” As for the dome:

… And so the visitor’s mind is lifted up to God and floats aloft, thinking that He cannot be far away, but must love to dwell in this place which He himself has chosen. Procopius, De Aedificiis

Dome of Hagia Sophia

May 27, 1453: Hagia Sophia was thronged with worshippers when the besieging forces of the Ottomans had scaled the “impenetrable” land walls and had already arrived at the church’s mighty bronze doors which eventually gave way. “The pillage continued all day long.” 

Even so, when Sultan Mehmet approached Hagia Sophia as its conqueror, his horse wading through streams of blood, he dismounted and bent over to the ground to scoop up a handful of earth. This he sprinkled over his turban as a sign of humility, or perhaps of penance, for inside the cathedral was unfolding a scene of such bestial ferocity   – rape and murder of priests and nuns and cowering citizens, and the systematic looting and destruction of religious objects, of marble and silver and gold – that the last Patriarch to celebrate Divine Liturgy in Hagia Sophia is said to have taken the Chalice and Host into his hands and disappeared into a crack in the walls, there to be sealed up until the day the Cross triumphs over the Crescent on the church’s stupendous domes and he re-emerges to finish the Mass.

As for the Byzantines, they had vanished into thin air after the conquest, or so I had been led to believe. Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul

What happened next is illuminating – something entirely new in my education – that strips at least some of the cynicism from the text of the brochure distributed by Erdoğan’s AKP [Justice and Development Party [whose symbol is an illuminated light bulb] : “Turkey has been delicately cherishing the historical, cultural and spiritual value of Hagia Sophia since the conquest of Istanbul.”

Mehmet the Conqueror was by no means oblivious to the prestige that the monumental glory of Hagia Sophia lent his ambitions. Without changing the city’s name, he had declared Constantinople the new imperial capital and Holy Wisdom as “the church most suited to the sultan’s dignity.”  As though an awe-struck emissary himself from an abode of the profane, he is said to have wandered through his new possession and climbing into the dome “as the spirit of God had mounted to the fourth story of the heavens.” And at once ordered it repaired and made fitting as the royal mosque. Unsurprisingly, then, Mehmet II was to see himself, as conqueror of Constantinople, Byzantium’s legitimate heir.

Paradise, paradise, heaven, angels, Cosmos: we all want a piece of it. Moustafa at the hotel told me that the postures performed at prayer – the bending at the waist, the crouching on the haunches – were performed in imitation of the postures of the angels who once greeted the Prophet from all the levels of heaven when he was taken up to meet God. I loved that idea, that one could be like the angels with a swoop and a bend of our human body. Though Mustafa’s place of prayer would never countenance music or icon, nor altar or sacrament or priest, it has admitted the dance of the angels.

Myths were fashioned for this enterprise. A mythical ruler, Yanko bin Madyan, had been guided by a dream to found Constantinople; it was constructed of materials from Solomon’s ruined Temple; its doors from the wood of Noah’s Ark; among its treasures, the stone cradle of baby Jesus. “Sixteenth-century authors…refer to Hagia Sophia as the second Ka’ba for the poor who could not afford the pilgrimage to Mecca.” Of course, at the same time the devout and the visitor would be impressed over and over by the rich visual affirmation of Islam’s subjugation of the Byzanto-Christian past, even as they spread their prayer rugs on its consecrated marble.

Patr. Bartholomew delivers Homily

Orthodox Christians, however, are inconsolable. While Muslims gathered from across Turkey to join the inaugural prayers at the church/museum/mosque, Orthodox Christian church leaders in Greece and the USA announced a Day of Mourning for “the confiscation of our Αγία Σοφία.” “We do not mourn only for ourselves,” His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros preached from Holy Trinity Archdiocesan Cathedral in New York. “We mourn for the whole world whose loss this is,” he asserted, echoing other clergy including the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, Orthodoxy’s spiritual leader who in his Homily of June 30, 2020, reminded listeners that, as a museum, Hagia Sophia was “the symbolic place of encounter, dialogue, solidarity and mutual understanding between Christianity and Islam.” His words were carefully chosen, given the delicacy of his position in an increasingly nationalist and Islamist Turkish state.

In a sign of solidarity with the Patriarch, Yuri Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada sent out a call to all his clergy and Brothers and Sisters in Christ to “unite in prayer” with his for the intercession of the Blessed Mother of God on July 24, 2020.

To You the Champion, we your City dedicate
a feast of victory and then thanksgiving,
as ones rescued out of sufferings, O Theotokos.
But as you are one with might that is invincible,
from all dangers that can be, deliver us.

Meanwhile, over at the New York Times and Comments posted July 24, 2020 a reader raised the spectre of “colonialism and genocide” in the “taking over” of a people’s [Greek Orthodox] Holy Church, referencing perhaps what Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk had called “conquest fever.” In 1955, in the wake of the 500th anniversary of the “great miracle” of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, rampaging mobs for two days sacked and burned and raped in the Greek districts of Istanbul. “It later emerged that the organizers of this riot – whose terror…made the city more hellish than the worst orientalist nightmares – had the state’s support and had pillaged the city with its blessing.” Istanbul p.158

Indeed, behind the heated populism of Erdoğan’s rhetoric recorded in AKP’s brochure – that “there was a great demand from the people of Turkey, that this historic building regain its identity as a mosque” – observers see also a neo-Ottomanist second conquest of Constantinople. And a rectification of the “sinful act, a gesture to the West, offensive to the pious,” of having made Hagia Sophia a museum in the first place.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

The status of museum had been conferred by a regulation of the secular Turkish state under its long-revered founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938). When I travelled in Turkey in 2011 and 2015, his image was ubiquitous, from state institutions to neighbourhood bakeries, from schools to gas stations. In 2015 the tour guide disclosed to us, somewhat furtively, that already Erdoğan’s portrait was being included cultishly alongside Atatürk’s in sacrosanct places such as the frontispieces of school textbooks. His critics have accused him of inciting “culture war” and the “clash of civilizations” when he appeals to his political base that, in the symbolism of Ayasofya/Hagia Sophia, he is defending national sovereignty. Meanwhile, they go on, Turkey’s economy is weakening, prices are rising, and his political opponents are censored and worse: arrested and made to disappear in prisons without trial. 

But Kemal, so much admired in the West for his fashioning of a democratic, secular republic from the ashes of “the sick man of Europe,” the Ottoman caliphate, is evaluated by the writer-historian Karen Armstrong as “a dictator who hated Islam…Western approval of Atatürk led many to believe that the West sought to destroy Islam itself.” The Kemalist transformation – abolishing Shariah law, outlawing the Sufi orders and seizure of their properties, and the shutting down of the madrasses [religious schools] – was a “spiritual and cultural trauma” for the devout.

Soviet propaganda poster. Religion is the narcotic of the people

I admit to a certain fellow feeling when I review images of Soviet Bolshevism’s violent take-down of ordinary people’s faith and piety – burning liturgical books, smashing icons, pulling down church cupolas, humiliating village priests, outlawing Christian Feasts and festivities, the whole demonic Carnival of Reason.

Visit to Kadilli Girls’ School, Istanbul

In 2011, thanks to an invitation from my schoolteacher friend Taner, I spent a day at Kandilli Girls’ Anatolian High School in Istanbul, where he taught English. A bevy of girls, unscarved but in uniforms, whisked me around the bucolic grounds and building that overlooked the Bosphorus, chattering in bursts of creditable English, and led me to the office of the Headmaster, Dr.Abdurrahman Memiş, who, Taner informed me, is a scholar of Islamic theology, and I assumed that the green book open on his desk under his folded hands was a copy of the Qur’an. Dr. Memiş does not speak English but through Taner’s translation we managed a conversation of sorts.“In your view,” I enquired conversationally, “do you think there is a possibility of mutual understanding among the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam?” “Yes,” Taner translated his response with enthusiastic approbation, “it is a fact that correct Islam teaches that any Muslim who does not honour the Hebrew and Christian prophets, Mary and Jesus included, cannot call himself a Muslim.”

I was still mulling over the likelihood of some Christians on the wilder shores of the faith honouring the prophets of other people’s faith when I was whisked onward to the school’s Assembly Hall and onto the stage festooned with balloons and large cut-out letters spelling my name. I was presented an enormous bouquet of flowers, then for an hour I responded to the questions about my books volleyed at me from two students onstage with me, who had carefully studied my website. The students and faculty had been attentive enough that I ventured a new topic: the rather emotionally-charged subject of how an Orthodox Christian from the West might feel about the monuments of Byzantium, not to mention the very memory of it, disappearing under Ottoman/Turkish triumphalism. Take the very name, Istanbul. From the fourth century of its founding by Roman Emperor, Constantine, it was called Constantinople, a name not officially changed to Istanbul until 1930; even the Ottomans had kept the Byzantine name. The name Istanbul itself lightly conceals its origins in the Greek phrase, “eis ten polin,” in the city, there being only one city worth mentioning.

The other day, I said, I had taken a photograph of a bright, new monument erected just off a main thoroughfare, a statue of Fatih Sultan Mehmet in a simple cloak and turban and posed with his left hand held peaceably across his chest. Fatih means Conqueror, the Conqueror. “You conquered Constantinople,” I said, “but for us it fell, and great were our lamentations.”

A few days later at my hotel, I picked up a booklet advertising the “Panorama 1453 History Museum.” In his Foreword, the mayor of Istanbul writes that the museum has been opened “in order to bring to life the images of those bewitching moments [of the Conquest]”. The booklet reproduces some of those images, which I saw for myself in 2015. Mehmet front and centre on a noble steed gesturing toward the walls of Constantinople, feats of engineering that blasted open the walls that had stood impenetrable for a thousand years, a scene of Janissaries raising the Ottoman flag on the devastated ramparts. “You shall hear the shouting of Taqbir (‘God is great!’) by Fatih Sultan Mehmet’s thousands of soldiers and the victory marches played by his janissary band,” the brochure came to a rousing climax.

In 2015, as far as I could tell, I was the sole non-Turkish woman visitor in the crowd, gazing in amazement at the murals, with full sound and light effects of battle. “My” empire had fallen; “theirs” had just begun its 450-year-long imperium on the self-same banks of the Bosphorus and Golden Horn.

On the apse of Hagia Sophia where surges the magnificent mosaic of the Theotokos and Child, a Koranic text had soon been inscribed after 1453, Sura 3 verse 37. In its Christian context, the verse refers to the presentation of the girl-child Mary at the Temple in Jerusalem as a dedication by her parents, Joachim and Anna, who deliver her into the care of the High Priest, Zachariah. The Qur’an continues: And thereupon her Sustainer accepted the girl-child with goodly acceptance, and caused her to grow up in goodly growth, and placed her in the care of Zachariah Whenever Zachariah visited her in the sanctuary, he found her provided with food. He would ask: “O Mary, whence came this unto thee?” She would answer: “It is from God; behold, God grants sustenance unto whom He wills, beyond all reckoning.” 

Why that text, in that place? It is not in Christian Scripture; the Feast, Entrance of the Theotokos, commemorates only a Tradition. Because (as I learned from a webinar hosted by the Cantor Center at Stanford University) it is about protection and care, as represented by Mary within Holy Wisdom. The Sura goes on, in Mohammad’s speech to Mary, that the child she will bear “will speak unto mankind in his cradle and in his manhood, and he is of the righteous…And He will teach him the Scripture and wisdom, and the Torah and the Gospel.”  Was it only as a Museum that Hagia Sophia could hold all claims together in one space?

Theotokos in the apse of the Hagia Sophia

They served lentil soup, in the serene little courtyard of the Bazaar of Ottoman Arts and Crafts across from Hagia Sophia, and apple tea, and played Classical Turkish music through speakers under the roof while I kept on reading my travel guidebook.By now I had visited much in the way of museums, mosques, excavations and restorations: overtop the almost invisible Byzantine lie Ottoman marvels. Courtyards and fountains of mosques, men at their ablutions, the gorgeous blues and greens, aquamarines and emeralds, of Iznik tiles that line their interiors, the intertwined polyphony of the muezzin calling out from each mosque, the swirling sweeps of Arabic calligraphy, water, rose gardens, pomegranates, carpets, tea in delicate glasses. An early Ottoman miniature depicts the story of Abraham and Isaac who do not look here like sand-scoured patriarchs roaming the desert but like figures from The Arabian Nights, swathed in silk. From a map in the Museum of Islamic and Ottoman Arts, I saw that Turkey lies at the western margin of most of the Islamic world. The centre of the world lies east.

Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars: 2She hath killed her beasts; she hath mingled her wine; she hath also furnished her table.3She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon the highest places of the city,10The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.11For by me thy days shall be multiplied, and the years of thy life shall be increased.

A comely  woman’s face, her eyebrows arched and eyes heavy-lidded and red mouth succulent, glances sideways from within a mosaic fragment on the cover of the CD. The disc is titled “Kassia”, and records Byzantine hymns from “the first female composer of the Occident.” I have not listened to it very often (to be honest, a little bit of Byzantine religious chant goes a long way) but I’ve opened the cover now to scan the disc’s contents for a particular hymn, and I find it. Number 10 of 18 hymns, “The Fallen Woman.”

The daughter of a wealthy family close to the Imperial court in Constantinople (now Istanbul), Kassia (c.810-843/867 CE)

Icon of Kassia public domain

had the privilege of education in Classical Greek studies (I’m reading this in the CD’s booklet) “such as writing and philosophy as well as early Christian studies.” As a respectable woman, society offered her two destinies: marriage or the nunnery. Fortunately for the history of devotional music, Kassia scooped up her dowry and got herself to a nunnery. (Hildegard of Bingen, Sybil of the Rhine, would not appear for another three centuries.) She flourished in the convent as a philosopher, poet, composer, hymnographer and eventually abbess. Fifty of her hymns are extant and 23 are even today  included in Orthodox Liturgical books. The Orthodox Church has recognized her as a saint and in icons she is portrayed, nun-like, cowled, haloed, and grasping a scroll.

(I love this woman, “feminist pioneer of her time,” according to the CD’s liner notes, also celebrated for her secular gnomic verses and epigrams, 789 of which survive. “I hate the rich man, moaning, as if he were poor.” And, under the lash for her defense of icons, “I hate silence, when it is time to speak.” )

The Hymn

Unknowingly, I have in fact heard her “speak,” that is, have read her words many times, each time during Great Lent, when I have opened for daily reflection the slender compilation, Orthodox Lent, Holy Week and Easter: Liturgical Texts with Commentary by the vicar of St. Mary Magdalen’s Church in Oxford, England, Rev. Canon Hugh Wybrew. Every year during Holy week, for Compline of Great and Holy Tuesday, I have been reading fragments of Kassia’s Great Hymn, sung  during the last service of the day (as Matins for Wednesday) and included in Rev. Wybrew’s compilation, and sometimes called The Fallen Woman.

Kassia’s Hymn for Holy Wednesday, from a collection of Hymns and Canons blogs.bl.uk

While you sat at supper, O Word of God, a woman came to you. At your feet she wept, and took the alabaster jar and anointed your head with sweet oil.[…] “Set me free and forgive me,.” cried the prostitute to Christ.

These lines set a well-known scene, or at least its elements, from the Gospels: a weeping woman, a jar, perfumed oil poured over Jesus’s head, the weeping woman beseeching forgiveness. There is much more to it as I read the liner notes: the woman, who has now merely “fallen into many sins,” is evoked as one who will be among the mourning myrrh-bearers on the way to the Tomb on Easter Sunday prepared to bathe Christ’s bloodied corpse with aromatic oils and herbs. Kassia writes   for her, the one with the alabaster jar, and sets to music an exquisite, lilting, melancholic threnody for women’s voices.

Woe to me, she says, for night holds for me the ecstasy of intemperance gloomy and moonless, a desire for sin. Accept the spring of my tears, you who with clouds spread out the water of the sea. Bend down to me to the lamentation of my heart. […] I will tenderly kiss your sacred feet, I will wipe them again with the hair of my head.

There are many more verses (included in Wybrew), as Kassia gives voice to the repentant harlot (“drowning in sin”) but Judas also makes an appearance enslaved to “the enemy,” as does Eve, who hides in the garden at the sound of God’s footfalls, and even the merchant to whom the Woman cries aloud: “Give me oil of myrrh, with which to anoint the Benefactor.”

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But I am becoming confused. The weeping woman who opened her alabaster jar to pour its fragrant contents on Jesus’s head as he sat at table with his disciples is also a prostitute who pours the oil, and her tears, on his feet, wiping them dry with the unloosed torrent of her hair. When I do an image-search for The Woman With the Alabaster Jar, I see both gestures. In one such, she stands behind an unsuspecting Jesus who is reclining at table, her jar, bauble-sized, poised in her outstretched hands as though to drop it. In another, she is prostrate at his feet, her long tresses caressing his foot while he rests his hand lightly on her head.

The Source

To sort out my confusion – about how the same event is described variously in the course of Kassia’s Hymn and from there into Orthodox Liturgy – I reason that her source for the story of The Woman With the Alabaster Jar is in one or another of the Gospels that narrate the incidents of Jesus’s ministry. (The term “Gospel” comes from the Anglo-Saxon “god-spell,” which translates from the Greek word euangelion, meaning “good news.”) In fact she is in all four, Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.

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In Matthew and Mark, in the town of Bethany, she has arrived at the home of Simon, a leper, bearing an alabaster jar of “very costly” fragrant oil. She is unnamed. Jesus is reclining at the dinner table when – one does wonder how she managed to crash this party – she “broke the jar and poured it over his head,” speechless all the while. Mark and Matthew are almost identical in their account of what happened next. Jesus’s disciples, who are among the dinner guests, exclaim indignation at this display of extravagance. “Why this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for a large sum” – 300 denarii or a year’s wages – “and given to the poor.”

Jesus is having none of it. And here I imagine the woman standing speechless as ever, empty alabaster phial dangling from her fingers, perhaps drawing her stole over her head as the men loudly harrumph and imprecate. Jesus, forehead and cheeks slicked with oily myrrh that he doesn’t bother to wipe away, bids them to shut up. “Why do you subject the woman to abuse?”  Then, in a phrase – a remonstration – that comes down to us through millennia, he explains why he accepts her precious gift. “She has done me a beautiful deed; for you always have the destitute with you, and you can do good to them whenever you wish [my ital], but you do not always have me.”

Anticipating his own Passion on the cross, he accepts the anointing as the woman’s foreshadowing of his laying-out for burial. “Truly I say to you, wherever these good tidings are proclaimed, in the whole world, what this woman did will also be told, as a memorial to her.”

 And immediately the scene ends.

Note that she-of-no-name is not once spoken of as a “sinner,” much less a “prostitute,” not even by the male disciples, who have now been silenced for eternity while we remember her still.

But in a clue to what will become of her, a footnote to Matthew in the Geneva Bible published 1599, calls her a “sinful woman.” And so she had proven to be, in Luke. In the New King James Version (as in the Orthodox Study Bible), “behold a woman in the city who was a sinner,” entered the house of Simon, a Pharisee (not a leper) who had invited Jesus to dinner. The woman-who-was-a-sinner stood behind the reclining Jesus and wept, and “she kissed His feet and anointed them with the fragrant oil” she had brought in an alabaster flask.

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This gesture infuriates the male host. Simon murmurs sotto voce that if this Man were truly a prophet, He would know “what manner of woman this is,” a prostitute, her hair flagrantly unloosened, her kisses and tears in possession of His feet. Now comes one of the most noble rejoinders in Christian Scripture to misogynist shaming: “Simon, I have something to say to you.” “Teacher, say it.” “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has washed My feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head. ⁴⁵ You gave Me no kiss, but this woman has not ceased to kiss My feet since the time I came in. ⁴⁶ You did not anoint My head with oil, but this woman has anointed My feet with fragrant oil. ⁴⁷ Therefore I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.”

Perhaps Jesus then holds out his hands and helps the woman up from her knees. What even does a multitude of sins measure compared to love? “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”

And here we leave her, shriven of sin, until she shows up again in John.

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Once again we are in Bethany, this time in the home of Mary, Martha and their brother Lazarus, he “whom Jesus had raised from the dead.” And we are at dinner as usual, with Martha serving, and once again a woman, this time identified as Mary of Bethany, that is, Martha’s and Lazarus’s sister, provides “very costly perfume of pure nard: (aromatic balsam) with which she anoints Jesus’s feet and wipes them dry with her hair “and the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” So: no tears, no multitudinous sins or repentance nor even any salvation proffered.

But there is the male spoil-sport, named as Judas Iscariot, he who would betray Jesus with a treacherous kiss. Judas in charge of the disciples’ money-box from which he pilfers denarii for himself. Judas, who loudly signals his virtue. “Why was that perfume not sold for 300 denarii and given to poor people?” Unimpressed by this line of argument – “for you always have the poor with you” – Jesus takes Mary’s part. “Let her alone; she has kept this for the day of My burial.”

And so all the way down to the ninth century we are back where I left Kassia:: “O misery of Judas! He saw the harlot kiss Thy feet, and deceitfully he plotted to betray Thee with a kiss. She loosed her hair and he was bound a prisoner by fury, bearing in place of myrrh the stink of evil: for envy knows not how to choose its own advantage. O misery of Judas! From this deliver our souls, O God!”

In only one of the four Gospel appearances of The Woman With the Alabaster Jar is she described as “sinful” (the implication is that the sin is of a sexual nature) and in that version she is also described by Jesus himself as one who has loved (Him) much and so she departs in peace. Whence, then, the wretched “harlot” who may as well be dead?

allamericanspeakers.com st clement of alexandria

By the ninth century, of course, the Church’s lurid preaching of this story had been long-encoded, including in its Liturgical treasures such as the Hymn of Kassia: “How can I look upon Thee, O Master? Yet Thou hast come to save the harlot.” The Woman in her scandalous fleshiness, her stink and wanton kisses and lewd exhibition of her hair – why, her very gender has condemned her. “[For women] the very consciousness of their own nature must evoke feelings of shame.” Saint Clement of Alexandria, Christian theologian (c150-215).

We are told (in Wikipedia) that Kassia’s Hymn, chanted only once a year, is so popular with sex workers in Greece that, while they are otherwise not often seen in church, do attend the services of Holy and Great Tuesday. I picture them huddled in the vestibule in exalted shame as the Church thunders at them: “And do you not know that you are Eve? God’s sentence hangs still over all your sex and His punishment weighs down upon you. You are the devil’s gateway! […] Because of the death you merited, even the Son of God had to die… Woman, you are the gate to hell!” Tertullian, “the father of Latin Christianity” (c160-225)

What Finally to Make of The Woman With the Alabaster Jar?

In the liner notes to the CD, Kassia, Diane Touliatos writes: “…unlike any of her contemporary male hymnographers, Kassia defended the virtues of fallen and Christian women in a society where women were expected to be obedient and meek. Kassia stands as a pioneer for her writings, musical compositions, and advocacy for women.” I’m not sure that a deeply-inspired compassion for fallen womankind (who will be saved by male agency, Father and Son) amounts to “advocacy” for women’s personhood under patriarchy. But the blogger, Elizabeth Livingston, sees her as very much her own woman in spite of social constrictions. You can see her thus, striding unaccompanied, purposefully, “in her commitment to Jesus,” to wash his feet in a perfumed oil she could ill afford (it “maybe represented her life’s savings”). Love, devotion, sacrifice – the apogee of feminine service as compared to Judas Iscariot’s (masculine?) arrogance, self-righteousness and sheer bone-headedness.

Although the Evangelists put no words in her mouth (unlike Kassia, who gives her hundreds), Livingston voices her as unbothered by what people are saying about her action, oblivious to all but Him: “It’s about diving fully into the sweetness of His presence.” Then Livingston deploys a metaphor: What is that but the “alabaster box of our lives” that we must break open in order that “the praises of our hearts to Him” pour out?

Or perhaps we can bend the story back to a complex “tradition-history,” as feminist theologian Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza hypothesizes, one that precedes the Gospel narratives or was redacted by their writers: it includes the alabaster flask of ointment, the anointing itself, and the Pharisee, Simon.

Or, as my friend and email correspondent, David Holm, suggests: “We have two different women doing the anointing. One is unidentified but is in the same village, Bethany, as Mary, Martha and Lazarus; and the other woman is probably a prostitute who lived somewhere around the southwestern corner of the Sea of Galilee.”

Let’s hold that thought for now – “probably a prostitute” – for in the Western – but not Eastern – Christian tradition the Woman With the Alabaster Jar will become Mary Magdalene, “the original repentant whore.” And the subject of a future blog post.

Finally, I turned to The Very Rev. Archpriest Fr Roman Bozyk, Dean of the Faculty of (Orthodox) Theology of St. Andrew’s College, University of Manitoba, who always, with admirable patience, hears me out on whatever is troubling me as an Orthodox Christian and responds with compassionate clarity. I asked him: “What do you say to us – me – about contradictions in what the Church teaches as Gospel truth, such as the identity of The Woman With the Alabaster Jar?” He answered: “Each Gospel was written at a particular time for a particular audience, and so details will differ accordingly. But Christ’s message is the same throughout.”

And what is that message? I choose this one: “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”

Ancient Corinth in Roman times

Paul had his work cut out for him in Corinth – his Letters to the Corinthians follow Galatians chronologically – a community whose members French writer Emmanuel Carrère characterizes as a bunch unruly or at least overly enthusiastic about the license of “freedom” to dissolve hierarchies and boundaries that their newness in Christ granted them.”They drank, fornicated, transformed the agapes [communal feasts] into orgies….” Moreover, Corinth, long a commercial centre and Roman colony, he describes as “an enormous, densely populated, dissolute port city….Half a million inhabitants, of whom two-thirds slaves.”

“Do you not know,” Paul thundered, that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? “Do not be led astray.” [1Cor 6:9] In David Bentley Hart’s translation, Paul is stabbing his finger at those who will not inherit, “neither the whoring nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor feckless sensualists, nor men who couple with catamites.” (Catamites? Other translators offer “sexual perverts” or “the effeminate.” But a catamite, Hart explains, is a boy prostitute. Paul is not denouncing a “sexual identity” but a “sexual activity,” a master’s or patron’s rape of young male slaves.)

And  not only them: “…nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom.” [1 Cor: 6:10]

As Pheme Perkins writes, this “vice list” may have seemed to his audience in Corinth – especially the men, unused to restrictions on their sexual behaviour – as the rant of a scold. But really it is “an invitation to a different kind of Christian maturity.” Paul is inviting these khristianos, followers of Khristos, “to engage in a process of ethical discernment.”

The Vexatious Veil

⁵ but any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled disgraces her head—it is one and the same thing as having her head shaved. ⁶ For if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to have her hair cut off or to be shaved, she should wear a veil. [1 Cor 11:6]

What is exercising Paul so much about the unveiled (Christian) women of Corinth? He has no issue with the fact they pray and prophesy in the assemblies – a few chapters later he will exhort Corinthians, that “you can all prophesy one by one,” teaching and encouraging those who hear them – but the uncovered female head? What was the problem?

I grew up in a Ukrainian Orthodox church in the 1950s when it was customary for the married women to wear a brand new hat for the Easter services. My sister and I enjoyed very much the privilege of attending our mother on her shopping spree on the creaky wooden second floor of Johnston Walker’s department store where hats were set out on the heads of mannequins and mum tried out one after another. (Earlier models had become part of our dress-up wardrobe and I especially liked putting on, at a rakish angle, a white straw boater with a black velvet ribbon around the crown.) When I stopped going to church in the mid-1960s, away from home, I missed the transition to women’s hatlessness. Now the “Easter bonnet” seems show-offy, certainly a fashion statement, and I wonder if the female covered head had actually been pronounced some sort of ecclesiastical, even canonical, edict by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada’s male hierarchs? Or had the Church ceased paying attention to Paul’s moralizing about a woman’s head?

Prostitute in Byzantine Holy Land

Now, in these days of my struggling with the Orthodox Church’s entrenchment of patriarchal privilege (don’t get me started on its stubborn refusal to use ungendered language in English-language liturgical texts) it dismays me that the Paul who had declared that in baptism (and I was baptized as an infant) “there is neither male nor female” should also fulminate about “disgracing” my (hatless) head as though I were as good as going about with a shaven head. Apparently, women with shaven heads in Biblical times were “a recognized class of woman, probably the accused adulteress.”  While those who went about with a glory of hair, such as the prostitutes in the brothels, were often the inspiration of erotic poetry. So the unveiled head of a woman apparently signalled her intention to be sexually available, or at least, to let her hair down, “a practice probably associated with spiritual freedom in Dionysus worship.” The Corinthians, remember, were very recently pagans.

But here’s another angle: it was customary that “elite” women in Greek society wore a veil to signal precisely their respectability and high status. If we take Paul at his word – that, in the Christian worship assemblies that he addressed, the “new creatures” now baptized in Christ were to behave in an ethical manner toward each other – their conduct would set them apart from a society of brutish and selfish custom. The enslaved were brutalized with impunity, the prostitute was humiliated and scorned and forbidden to veil. Then perhaps it was a sign of the new community’s one-in-Christ-Jesus that all women should be given the honour of the veil, not just “respectable” matrons.

Portion of Ars Pacis monument

And, anyway, Pheme Perkins points to the “tendency” of some Commentaries and translations to give the “wrong impression to modern readers” when they refer to the women prophets as veiled or unveiled  Perhaps she is thinking that with that word we have in mind  the “hijab” and “niqab” when in fact it was a loose covering. And she invites us to look at the Ara Pacis sculpture, an altar in Rome dedicated to Pax, the Roman goddess of Peace.

Perhaps that is bit of feminist overstretching and I do not wish to impugn Ms Perkins, who may not in fact identify as a feminist, although it must be said “she is a nationally recognized expert on the Greco-Roman cultural setting of early Christianity, as well as the Pauline Epistles.” [Wiki] Perhaps Paul was merely ambivalent or even down right anxious about transgression of rigid social and cultural norms in the highly-demarcated society in which the Corinthian church was embedded. Against these he preached the spiritual norms of autonomy and dignity but, still, he pleaded that “All things should be done decently and in order.” [1 Cor 14:40]

Daniel Boyarin, author of A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, reminds us that Paul has been preaching or writing to two very different communities, Galatians (pagans in the Turkish highlands, Paul’s first converts) and Corinthians (in an urban metropolis), in response to their particular concerns. (He is not establishing dogma or doctrine for a Universal Church that did not yet exist.) For us, he cautions, it is important which of these Letters we choose as the “interpretive key” to Paul. First Corinthians has been used as a “powerful defense of a cultural conservatism.” But if Galatians 3:28-9 is our interpretive key, then we start with a “profound vision of humanity undivided by ethnos, class and sex.”

As I outlined in Part One, after “authentic” Paul  of Galatians and First Corinthians come the Letters of Post-Paul (conservative) and Pseudo-Paul (reactionary). And so we read the notorious interpolation in 1Cor 14 – between the real Paul’s invitation, “for you can all prophesy one by one,” and “so, my brethren [“Paul was obviously writing to the entire church (which included sisters in Christ)”] earnestly desire to prophesy” – the astonishing rebuke that “the women should keep silence in the churches.” Women should be subordinate “for it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” Tell that to Phoebe or Lydia or Junia or Thecla. Or even to Paul.

It is generally conceded that the rebuke comes from the generation after Paul. Karen Jo Torjesen calls it a “scandal” that women were subordinated as the Christan Church grew in influence in Roman society. Rt. Rev. John S. Spong names the “church’s prejudice against women” outright, as Paul was “tamed and domesticated.”

Woman preaching in early Church

And so it is that we have: “Wives, be subject to your husbands” [Col 3:18]. “Women are not to teach or have authority over a man.” “We call this ‘reactionary,'” write Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, “because it is clearly reacting to what has been happening in the early assemblies: women who prophesy, who speak in tongues, who teach.” The radical mutuality between men and women that Paul preached to the Corinthians has been deradicalized. He had written: “Then again, in the Lord there is neither woman apart from man, nor man apart from woman. For just as the woman is out of the man, so too is the man through the woman, and all things are out of God.” [1Cor 11:11-12] Compare this to First Timothy: “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission for Adam was formed first, then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” [1Tim 2:11-15] Wikipedia gives the date of composition of First Timothy  “some time in the late 1st century or first half of the 2nd century AD, with a wide margin of uncertainty.” Paul had died in c. 64; the church of First Timothy was now being persecuted in earnest.

Feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, in Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (1985), points out that the “household codes” that governed patriarchal relationships in Greco-Roman society (husband and wife, father and son, master and slave) “belong to the later New Testament…and are not found in the genuine Pauline writings.” These, such as Timothy, she calls “a deformation of the Pauline gospel,” yet theologians, resounding down the ages, have mostly chosen to interpret Paul anachronistically through the lens of Timothy.

The Acts of Paul and Thecla was fated to be sidelined as New Testament Apocrypha. Remember Thecla?: the Acts “celebrates the story of a woman converted by Paul who rejects her fiancé, adopts men’s clothing, and travels as an evangelist. Persecuted by the agents of family and state, she is vindicated by God through miraculous protection from harm. Paul reappears at the end of the story to affirm her role and commission her to preach in her hometown.”

St John Chrysostom

But my favourite example of misogynist revisionism of Paul is what happened to Junia, “foremost among the apostles,” as Paul hailed her in his last Letter. [Rom 16:6]  (An apostle, in its most literal sense, is an emissary, from Greek ἀπόστολος, literally “one who is sent off.” wiki) Even 300 years later in Constantinople Archbishop John Chrysostom eulogized Junia as the apostle for Christian woman to emulate: “To be apostles is a great thing, but to be distinguished among them—consider what an extraordinary accolade that is! They were distinguished because of their works and because of their upright deeds. Indeed, how great was the wisdom of this woman that she was thought worthy of being called an apostle!”

But along the way Junia became Junias and, according to the 1952 Revised Standard Version translation of the New Testament, Paul greets “Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen and fellow prisoners, men of note among the apostles.” The “foremost apostle” has become insupportable in her gender.

So: is Paul a friend or enemy of women? I have decided to be guided by Daniel Boyarin for whom Paul was the “radical Jew” whose entire gospel is a “stirring call to human freedom and universal autonomy” from which women are not excluded. This is Paul’s “theology of the spirit” but even “in the flesh” the genders have mutual and reciprocal rights: “…let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband.”  [1Cor: 7:2-3] Returning to Galatians, Boyarin asserts that” if Paul took ‘no Jew nor Greek’ seriously as all of Galatians attests that he clearly did, how could he possibly – unless he is incoherent or a hypocrite – not have taken ‘no male or female’ with equal seriousness?”

Finally, I return to the effect on me of reading passages of Paul as by a religious poet and visionary (see A.N. Wilson on Paul ) who calls me to the internal transformation – how I envy the joy of it – when “everything old had passed away; see, everything has become new!” [2Cor 5:17]

And how are we transformed? By agape, love. C. S. Lewis’s “the highest level of love known to humanity: a selfless love that is passionately committed to the well-being of others.”

1Cor 13:4-7 has become a celebrated verse for Western (Christian or not) wedding ceremonies. “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal….Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. 5 It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” And marriages do, after all, offer premonitions of transformation. But for me, I read on, to the transcendent love that will bear us away from what, on earth, we know “only partially,”  and what we prophesy only “partially.”

 “But when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away….For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love”

A preserved ancient scroll, written in Greek

Since my last post, My Man Paul: Part One, I’ve gone on reading, and have added to my Pauline Studies bibliography a couple of websites (beliefnet.com and cbmw.org) and three books.. In 2012 the (wonderfully-named) Pheme Perkins wrote commentary on “First Corinthians” for a (also wonderfully-named) series Paidiea on the New Testament. While prowling around the basement stacks of the library at St Peter’s Benedictine Abbey in Muenster, Saskatchewan, I found Karen Jo Torjesen’s When Women Were Priests:Women’s Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity. (1995). Finally, a friend’s Comment on my post led me to French author Emmanuel Carrère‘s The Kingdom, a truly genre-defying  recapitulation of Paul through his Letters and Luke’s Acts of the Apostles.

Thus fortified, I began reading Paul, focussing on two of the authentic Letters – Galatians and First Corinthians – whose chapters and verses were most often cited by the authors I was consulting. But across so many of the Letters it is already obvious that, in spite of strict, not to say harsh, demarcation of men’s and women’s social roles in Greco-Roman society, in the budding, proto-Christian communities that Paul co-founded, visited and corresponded with, a remarkable number of women were prominent.

Roman matron

Really, this is not to be wondered at, given the status of the materfamilias who exercised authority in the very households, “house churches,” where Paul addressed their members. Except for the cloistered girls and women of the upper classes, women – free persons as well as slaves – were also trades- and sales people who laboured alongside men. Pheme Perkins cites contemporary texts in which women are mentioned in trades having to do with textiles and food or as lessees of pottery shops and vineyards (often inherited). For instance, this delightful tombstone inscription: “I worked with my hands. I was a thrifty woman, I, Nicarete, who lie here.”

Paul, Aquila and Priscilla at work

And here is Paul (Acts 16) who, in Philippi, northeastern Greece, on his way to Thessalonica, sits down outside the city gates on a Sabbath day (there is no synagogue in Philippi) and speaks to the women who have gathered there for that very purpose. He names Lydia, “a seller of purple goods, who was a worshiper of God,” whom he baptized along with her household and whose hospitality he accepts. In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère imagines Lydia “as the kind of hostess who’s both generous and tyrannical, who always wants to do everything herself” and always cooks too much for the agape (communal) feast. And who can forget, once having met her in Acts 18:3, Priscilla, who along with her husband Aquila and apostle Paul, set up shop as tent-maker and leather-worker in Corinth?

St Phoebe the Deaconess

Across the Letters (those authentic as well as disputed),  the women step out in front of the crowd. I had gone in search for “women named in Paul’s Epistles” on the internet and found what I was looking for in the post, “Women in the Pauline Mission.” Chloe, Mary, Junia, “outstanding among the apostles,” Tryphena and Tryphosa, “women who work hard in the Lord,” Persis, Lucilla, Euodia, Syntyche, “co-workers,” Nympha and her “church house,” Apphia, Claudia, Livia, Priscilla, and Phoebe: “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon [or minister] of the church at Cenchreae, so that you may welcome her in the Lord as is fitting for the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a benefactor of many and of myself as well.” (Rom 16:1-2)

Before I get too carried away, in the same article I read that of all the persons mentioned in the Letters in relation to the Pauline mission, 82% are men and 18% women. The article (author unnamed) is posted by the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, so I feel I know where this is going:

“As in Old and New Testament times, what is to determine women’s roles is not the dictates of contemporary culture but the designs of God. God’s plan is consistent from the time of creation to the age of the church, and from his pattern for the family to that of God’s ‘household.'”

But my “mission” is simpler: is there something in Paul to give me spiritual, ethical and creative sustenance as a woman in the 21st century?

The women in Paul’s letters – inside their communities – had already crossed boundaries when, sometimes independently of their husbands or fathers, they had been baptized “into Christ” and then assumed leadership roles, some more modest than others (from co-workers to outstanding among the apostles). These roles may have required of them to bear the same apostolic burden as Paul himself, “in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food,”  [2Cor 11:27] in cold and nakedness, wrapped in a meagre cloak. These hardships brought their own reward however: such women manifested “male virtues of courage, justice and self-mastery,” according to Karen Jo Torjesen. From his Letters, we know that Paul simply assumed that such bold women could speak authoritatively in worship services, lead local churches and travel as evangelists. [beliefnet.com] 

In its earliest formations, Torjesen understands the church as a social movement – she means its informality, “often counter-cultural in tone” and its flexibility in bringing women, slaves and artisans into its leadership. This strikes me as too idealized and categorical an assertion. But something had happened to these women, Phoebe and Priscilla, Junia and Lydia and the rest of them –  to embolden them, to bring them out from under the feminine virtues of the patriarchy,  chastity, silence and obedience, and into gender-bending adventure in the new communities of the followers of Paul’s Risen Lord.

I find this something in the second earliest of the Letters, to the Galatians (1Thessalonians is the earliest), written sometime between the late 40s and early 50s. (By comparison, most scholars date Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, at AD 65-75.) I find it in the baptismal formula, which has never stopped humbling me with its profound implications for human freedom. Yes, I know, I have been cautioned against reading Paul through the lens of “contemporary culture” (read: feminism) but, instructed as I may be in the realities of Paul’s historical context, I am the heir of twentieth-century Ukrainian Orthodoxy in western Canada in whose churches no female is allowed to contaminate the Sanctuary.

²⁷ For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. ²⁸ There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. [KJV]

Vats of ink have been used up in commentary about these two verses from Galatians chapter three. David Boyarin, author of A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, reads all of the (authenticated) Letters as the “spiritual autobiography of a first-century Jew” and as a “cultural critic” whose writings are “an extremely precious document for Jewish Studies.” As Christians, the biblical scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan and authors of The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon, read him as evoking a radical equality among the baptized whose transfigured life commits them to “the life principle that when you come into the Christian community you are equal to one another in that community.” (My italics. As we shall see, that limitation on the writ of radical equality had profound implications for later generations.)

Early Christian martyrdom

An aside: When I was writing Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium, in which I follow the fortunes of St Demetrius Great Martyr of Thessalonica, I had come up against a conundrum: how to write about a martyr as the Church teaches his life (hagiography) or as scholars have documented him, an obscure Deacon in the Roman outpost of Sirmium (now in Serbia)? When I read that Paul had preached to Thessalonians, I took a creative decision that made Demetrius a slave in a pagan household in Thessalonica who had been secretly baptized “in Christ” and who then resolved to live according to Paul’s teachings to the Thessalonians 300 years earlier: “Live in peace with one another….encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with everyone. See that no one repays another with evil for evil, but always seek after that which is good for one another and for all people. Rejoice always.” [1 Thessalonians 5:12-25] My Demetrius is martyred, but namelessly, and thrown outside the city gates, his body unclaimed.

I see the “Jewish cultural critic” in this vision of transformative identity (“neither Jew nor Greek”) and social status (“neither slave nor free”). But what is promised for me, what “justice of equality” (Borg and Crossan) accrues to me in a new identity – the new creature that I am “in Christ” – neither male nor female?

The gyneceum

I am being promised a new human nature beyond or outside the hierarchy of gender, beyond difference in fact (ethnic, social, gendered), a dissolved femaleness (wife, mother) and an emerged, well, celibacy. There is a logic here: Daniel Boyarin argues that it is heterosexuality (penetration, conception, parturition) that produces the gendered female body and the only real equality between men and women is in the realm of “spiritual experience” beyond the body. (For me this poses the question: is a celibate woman female?) This is the realm of women’s freedom, unsubordinated to reproductive (hetero)sexuality and the gynaeceum, and free to be co-workers with Paul.    

Paul and Thecla

Take Thecla in the noncanonical, possibly Gnostic, Acts of Paul and Thecla “which celebrates the story of a woman converted by Paul who rejects her fiancé, adopts men’s clothing, and travels as an evangelist. Persecuted by the agents of family and state, she is vindicated by God through miraculous protection from harm. Paul reappears at the end of the story to affirm her role and commission her to preach in her hometown.” [beliefnet.com]

Saint Catherine of Siena

(Or, from the western Christian tradition, Catherine of Siena, (1347 – 1380), saint, mystic, Doctor of the Church, whose biography I followed briefly when on retreat at St. Peter’s Abbey. At lunch we remained silent (except for the slurping of soup) while Br. Kurt, in dramatic, stentorian tones, read from a biography. “Caterina Benincasa was born in Siena, the last of 25 children of the wealthy wool-dyer Jacopo Benincasa and Lapa di Puccio dé Piacenti. At the age of six, Catherine received her first vision, near the Church of San Domenico. From this moment onwards the child began to follow a path of devotion, taking the oath of chastity only a year later. After initial resistance from her family, eventually her father gave in and left Catherine to follow her inclinations. In 1363, at just 15 years of age, Catherine donned the black cloak of the Dominican Tertiary sisters.”

Dear Reader, she never married. 

Coming next: Part Three (final installment of My Man Paul posts): The Vexatious Veil

Tossed into this anti-Pauline polemic (although not necessarily a feminist issue) was the charge that Paul had deformed the message of the plain-spoken egalitarian Jew from Galilee by institutionalizing the early Christian communities as hierarchical, doctrinaire and, did I mention, misogynist centres of power.

I remember reading selected texts that “proved” the veracity of these charges and my spirit writhed under their abusive assault.

But I moved on, read feminist literature on other topics – wages for housework, Marx and feminism, rape and pornography, race and “difference,” the male gaze, the real meaning of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. And by not attending any longer any church of any denomination, I spared myself the particular torments of instruction in the Epistles of St Paul.

The decades passed. Then in 2001, as a result of my adventure with the Byzantine saint Demetrius (it would eventually produce my book, Prodigal Daughter) I was considering the value of my heritage in the Orthodox Church. I read, for example, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by the Classical historian Charles Freeman. Fellow Classicist Mary Beard summarized his argument in a review in the British paper, The Independent, as that “the authority of the church and its political supporters destroyed ‘the tradition of rational thought’ that was among the major achievements of the classical world.”

Normally, I would have nodded in full agreement with Freeman’s grievance about the anti-intellectualism of “irrational” religious faith, but this time, much to my surprise, I found myself upturned by it. Knowing something now of the Eastern Mind of Byzantium and Orthodoxy and being of some sympathy with it, I needed to be reassured that “faith” and “reason” were not necessarily mutually exclusive. As a writer of nonfiction in particular, I had a simple question to put to a priest/reverend/pastor: Why should I, a writer, whose stock in trade is my brain and a certain degree of  impertinence, succumb to a religious faith that arguably despises my intelligence?

I took that, rather artless, question to a friend of a friend, an Anglican priest in Edmonton, who leaped from his chair to seize a Bible and read to me from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” (Or even better, as I would later read in David Bentley Hart’s translation, “And do not be configured to this age, but be transformed by renewal of the intellect.”) Paul wrote that? I was at once disbelieving and heartened. Later I would come ’round to consider the meaning of the rest of his sentence but at that moment in the chancery of an Anglican church I sat straight upright in the knowledge that the deplorable apostle Paul, in the first decades after the death of Jesus, had reassured me of the value of my “intellect” in the exercise of whatever modicum of Christian faith I might eventually acquire. (Mark 9:24 “I have faith; help my faithlessness.” Hart trans.)

And so began my tutorship in the meaning of the Epistles of St Paul, in the course of which I have nevertheless remained an unshakeable feminist.

I could be accused of having read very selectively about Paul but I plead the necessity of having to make choices among the myriad texts that have been written on the subject. I have bought books as I have come upon them, and some titles and subtitles have jumped out at me as revising my earlier feminist antipathy. Here are some titles in my library: A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity by Daniel Boyarin; First and Second Corinthians: An Orthodox Bible Study by Fr. Lawrence Farley; What Paul Meant by (Catholic and Classicist) Garry Wills; Meeting God in Paul by former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams; Paul: The Mind of the Apostle by English writer and ex-believer A.N. Wilson; The First Paul: Reclaiming the radical visionary behind the Church’s conservative icon by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan; and Paul: A Very Short Introduction by E.P. Sanders. It was of course important to me that I read women writers and scholars on the subject. A “leading historian of antiquity,” Paula Fredriksen, wrote Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle; St. Paul, the Misunderstood Apostle by English writer and historian of comparative religion Karen Armstrong; and Paul: A Short Introduction by professor of Divinity, Morna D. Hooker. I have a couple of whimsical texts that I keep: written in 1957 by a British writer, H.K. Luce, “St Paul,” as part of a series, Lives to Remember I retrieved from a box of discards ; and, found in a religious goods shop in Thessalonica, St Paul’s Journeys to Greece and Cyprus by a Greek academic, A.J. Delicostopoulos.

And, because she has a lot to say about the Epistles (and was influenced by the  redoubtable feminist theologian, Mary Daly, who was dismissed for refusing to allow men to enroll in her classes at Boston College. ), Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins.

Whew.

Was it Caravaggio’s monumental painting, Conversion of St. Paul, that was the first narrative that I “read” of the journey of Saul, persecutor of Christians, on the road to Damascus to become Paul? If so, it was a disappointment to learn, in Acts 9:3-4, that there was no horse on the road to Damascus but only a mighty flash of light that threw Saul off his feet to lie prostrate on the ground, and a voice from within the light: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He was not so much blinded by the light as simply unable to see anything within its dazzling blaze. Thus, in about the year 33CE, Saul became Paul whom God had”set apart from birth,”  had chosen to reveal his Son to him and “through me in order that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles.” (Gal 1: 16) And so began his extraordinary travels around the Roman world of the eastern Mediterranean – Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, Galatea – to establish or assist communities of fledgling Christians, to encourage, exhort, mediate, and above all to preach to them – and write letters – “the obedience of faith in Christ Jesus.” In his letter to the Galatians,  he rang the changes on the gifts of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness and self-control.” (Gal 5:22) It would prove to be a winning formula in a world of Imperial brutishness and profligacy.

I soon recognized Paul in icons as the balding, brow-furrowed one among the Apostles, said to have been bow-legged and unprepossessing in looks. He was a Greek-speaking urbanite from Tarsus, in the Roman province of Cilicia with the rights of a Roman citizen, and it is in Rome that he disappears from the record, perhaps executed, that is martyred, in a Roman prison.

And so I began to read. Fortuitously, even before I had read the Epistles in the Orthodox Study Bible  (King James Revised), I had picked up Borg’s and Crossan’s The First Paul and learned there are in fact three Pauls: the historical and radical Paul of letters by him; those by the conservative “Paul”, written by faithful followers after his death; and the reactionary, pseudo-Paul, the author(s) of letters  issued a generation or two after Paul in a very different world where Christians were martyred in successive persecutions in the dying days of the pagan Empire. (They would finally cease when Emperor Constantine issued an edict of toleration in 313 CE.) And then there are the obvious-to-scholars interpolated fragments of text, including those notorious teachings that we feminists cited as “evidence” of Paul’s misogyny. According to David Bentley Hart in a note about his translation of the New Testament, “the best critical scholarship regards [these] as a later and rather maladroit interpolation…almost certainly spurious.”

Well, then: fortified by this rather sensational information (I already felt like a cat that had been set among the pigeons) I was ready to read the Letters/Epistles themselves. I knew that, although the authorized Bible made no distinction among the letters as to authorship (they are all “by Paul”), I was now informed that there was only one authentic Paul and this is the one I would spend most time with.

Дзвони дзвонять бам-бам-бам, Чи до школи, чи до церкви, час-час-час…The bells are ringing, ding-dang-dong, To school or to church, it’s time-time-time.

I knew how to make the sounds of each letter (Ukrainian vowels,unlike the Russian, are pronounced without variation) and I knew there were “false friends” that lurked among them: В was not “b” but “v” and Н was not “h” but “n.” But what I revelled in were the letters that arrived from another calligraphic imagination altogether. Д or “d,” Я, not a backwards R but “Ya,” Б or “b.” Further on into the Cyrillic ABCs (in Ukrainian there are 32 letters), I relished the shaping of Ш or “sh,” Щ or “shch as in fresh cheese,” Ч or “ch,” Ц or “ts,” and, most fun of all, Ж, or “zh.”

See, you can read Cyrillic too.

The fact that in Ukrainian you needed only one letter where in English – or, God help us, Polish – you needed at least two in Latin letters to make the same sound (Щ = szcz in Polish) eventually confirmed for me the wisdom of the ancestors in choosing such an efficient representation of the sounds of most Slavic speech. As a result I can read – but not necessarily understand – Russian, Belarusian, Serbian, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Bulgarian. This is handy for figuring out newspaper headlines or street names or where a bus is going. Or, in a museum cafe in Sofia, I read that the “vegetarian menu” is offered in Bulgarian as “Lenten.”

I loved drawing the letters, curlicues and whorls and slanted strokes in the cursive, long before the letters arranged themselves into discrete sound clusters and then words. So for me the written Ukrainian language was first a design, such as one could trace on an embroidered cushion. Pleasing, like the swirl of my own name written on the flyleaf of the Reader on mum’s lap: Мирося Косташ. I don’t think I thought of these letters as exotic. Private, yes, belonging to this homely place in the pool of light under the lampshade or, later, belonging to the church, including its basement (Saturday and Sunday schools) where none but hyphenated-Canadians would gather to study on weekends. Even before I could read them, I had seen the letters all my life, again in that private space of my father’s newspaper from Winnipeg, Український Голос or “Ukrainian Voice” and on the fragile airmail letters that came all the way from relatives in Джурів, Dzhuriv, in the УРСР, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. And in a crabbed kind of cuneiform (to my childish eye) on the icons in the church.

And when I went to Greece the first time, I discovered I could read that too, or make a stab at it: shop signs, bus stations, icons. Once I had sounded out the letters (and thanks also to all those “Greeks” i.e. fraternities at the university with their  ΦΔΚ and ΣΑΜ emblazoned above their porches), I was already a foot in the door of Greek script. Γ = Г, Δ = Д, Φ = Ф, Λ = Л, Π = П….easy-peasy.

(In this respect, at least, I was not as naive as the American writer, Mary Norris, who wrote recently in the New Yorker “on the pleasures of a different alphabet,” the Greek in her case. “It had never occurred to me,” she writes, “that a person could become literate in a language that was written in a different alphabet.” I do admit that I am transfixed by the obvious literacy of a person reading right to left in the pages of an Arabic book or in vertical columns of Mandarin.)

And when I went to church in Greece, I had a field day: Ecclesia! Theotokos! Episkop! Liturgia! Khristos! And then learned the exact same vocabulary in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Just so, we Ukrainian-Canadian Orthodox are instructed to refer, in English, to an eparchy (Greek) and not to a diocese (Latin), to Divine Liturgy (Liturgia), not Mass, to the Mother of God (Theotokos) rather than to the Virgin Mary. This is no mere whimsy: our Orthodox Christianity is the fruit of missions among the Slavs of emissaries from Greek-speaking Constantinople, not Latin Rome. So when the need arose for a vocabulary of Christian terms and concepts that had no Slavonic equivalent, Greek was adopted holus-bolus. For example, the names of the priest’s vestments in English: Phelonion (robe),  Epitrahilion (stole), and Epimanikia (cuffs). Or translated into tormented (to me, trying to memorize the Creed, for instance) neologisms for ” Who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified” come up with five- and seven-syllabic words. 

I could read these words, i.e. sound them out, in my Children’s Prayer Book but, until the Church decided to publish bilingual editions of the Liturgical books we used, I hadn’t the foggiest idea what a lot of the words meant. Rivnopokloniaiemyi, anyone? I memorized The Nicene Creed as a child, one ghastly sound group after another, but I had no idea what I was professing “to believe” until I read the English text. (Whether I then “believed,” is another issue.)

According to Mary Norris, “the English alphabet is descended, via the Latin, from the Greek alphabet, which, according to Herodotus, was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet. Well, that’s interesting:  that all those languages written in Latin letters (Czech, English, Turkish) should have the same root as Cyrillic letters? It seems I have been labouring under the illusion of the utter strangeness of the one to the other. And for this I account the story of how the Cyrillic alphabet came to be.

If you, dear Reader, have ever paused to wonder why this particular European alphabet is called “Cyrillic,” you could logically assume that it is attributed to the divine work of St Cyril (“Apostle to the Slavs” together with his brother, St Methodius) of whom you will have heard in order even to pose the question. They were 8th century monks and theologians from Thessalonica in northern Greece who were sent by the Byzantine emperor, Michael III in Constantinople, on a mission to Slavic Great Moravia, at the request of Prince Rastislav. The Prince requested translations of Scripture and Psalters into Slavonic and an alphabet in which to do so. The first attempt at the alphabet was not in fact Cyrillic but Glagolitic (it looks like this: Ⰳⰾⰰⰳⱁⰾⰹⱌⰰ) and nothing came of it. Rastislav’s successor did not support their work and the Slavonic Liturgy was briefly deemed heretical.

But all was not lost. Although the disciples of Cyril and Methodius were expelled from Moravia, they were welcomed by Boris, ruler of the First Bulgarian Empire, who gave them a scriptorium in Ohrid (Macedonia in former Yugoslavia) in which to work out a new, improved alphabet that would be called the Cyrillic in honour of their masters. And this one stuck. According to Wikipedia, Cyrillic is derived from the Greek capital letters script, augmented by letters from the older Glagolitic alphabet, including additional letters  for Old Slavonic sounds not found in Greek. There you have it. From Ohrid to Kyiv to…Edmonton.

Imagine,then, my aggrieved astonishment, on a visit to Venice, to hear a British travel guide address his group waiting to enter St Mark’s Basilica: “Strange as it may seem, you will see Greek in this Christian church.” Note to tour guides: San Marco is known architecturally as an example of eleventh-century Italo-Byzantine style and the mosaics in the main porch are in “a fairly pure Byzantine style.” In fact, to quote the official website of the Basilica, “essentially Byzantine in its architecture, the Basilica finds in the mosaics its natural integrating element.” And that’s where you will read that troublesome Greek.