Monastery of the Holy Cross

Archives for July 2024

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 4:11

“ ‘The ground…has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.’ ”

The language here is intentionally sacrificial.  In murdering his brother, Cain has not merely offended against an abstract moral precept, even if one ordained by God.  He has, perhaps unwittingly, offered a sacrifice to the ‘chthonic’ gods of death, paid them homage, obeyed their arrogated prerogatives.  Behind the failure of Cain’s initial offering of ‘fruit of the ground’ [4: 3] there may lie some kind of pact with the ‘gods of the ground’ which made the offering unacceptable to God.  Notice that the text at 4: 3 does not specify that these are first-fruits, whereas Abel’s sacrifice is of a firstling.  Had Cain already offered fruits of the ground to fertility gods?

And who would these pseudo-gods be?  Have we even heard of such beings, at this early stage of Genesis?  Or am I reading a supplementary mythology into this account?  Certainly, the mythologies of the creation and fall are not told in full in the first chapters of Genesis:  we do supplement these chapters with other notices regarding Leviathan and the fall of Lucifer.  However, we should return for a moment to the curses of Genesis 3.  There are two:  the serpent is cursed and made to go about upon his belly (on the ground); and the ground itself is cursed.  Instead of the ground naturally obeying God’s plan to be fertile, it now brings forth ‘thorns and thistles’, and the man will have to do battle with the ground to get his food.  Finally, at death, the man and woman will return to the (cursed) ground, indicating that death itself is a type of covenant with the cursed ground, the realm of the serpent.

The man will be forced to ‘eat the plants of the field’ [3: 18].  This means that the ease of and beauty of the garden give way to the uncultivated wilderness as a place of back-breaking work.  The wilderness, in many ancient urban-centered cultures such as Israel, is the place of un-creation, where demonic activity runs unchecked by God’s creative shalom or order.  It seems to be the place where Cain is doing his work.  And it seems to be the place where he has premeditated the immolation of his brother.  He reveals this (in the Greek and Syriac version) by luring Abel out:  “Let us go out to the field.” [4: 8]

Reflections on Genesis 2 for the Feast of SS Joachim and Anne

“In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant (siah) of the field was yet in the earth and no herb (ēsev) of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground—then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”

Genesis 2: 4b-8

“Thou hast one daughter/Who redeems nature from the general curse.”

King Lear IV.vi.205

Here, we have, in the Hebrew mindset, the true ‘state of nature’, one rather different from the Hobbesian ‘red in tooth and claw’ version.  Scholars of the Pentateuch, who typically regard the book of Genesis as a compilation from different sources, point out that in the previous chapter, ‘vegetation (deshe’)’ and ‘plants (ēsev)’ were already created by God.  Since in chapter 2, there is said to be no plants or herbs in the fields, this is taken as evidence that the original story given in chapter 2 was written without any knowledge of chapter 1.

However, Rabbi Umberto Cassuto, in his work criticizing the ‘documentary hypothesis’, argued persuasively that the reference is to two different classes of plants.  In chapter 1, we have plants in the ‘state of nature’, which God pronounces ‘good’.  In chapter 2, the denial that there were plants and herbs ‘in the field’ does not deny the existence of all plants.  Rather, ‘the field’, which connotes the wildness that was introduced into nature as part of the curse of Genesis 3: 17-19, does not contain any of this wild growth, including the specific genera of plants referred to as siah in Hebrew.

This rare word appears here and in three other instances in the Old Testament.  In Genesis 21: 15, when Sarah convinces Abraham to drive out Hagar from the household, Hagar in desperation places her son Ishmael under ‘the bushes’.  This is again in the wild, in the inhospitable ‘field’ (which, incidentally, is also where Cain lures Abel to murder him).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the other two instances of siah occur in the book of Job.  These ‘bushes’ (or ‘shrubs’) appear in 30: 4 and then again in verse 7, and appear once more in ‘dry and desolate ground’, in a place where people are ‘driven out from among men’.

To return now to Genesis 2, we read that the Lord had not yet sent rain upon the earth.  Indeed, the first time that we can say without contradiction that it does rain, is in chapter 7:  ‘The windows of the heavens were opened.  And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights.’  During this time, every creature of flesh not in Noah’s ark perished.  Thus it is implied that rain is part of the ‘fallen’ dispensation, producing these wild shrubs and other plants ‘of the field’.  Human beings were meant, in the original purity of creation, to dwell in a garden, in which water was supplied by this mysterious mist that went up from the earth.  Why would this detail be mentioned about the earth being watered (literally ‘given to drink’) if there were no plants?

It is also worth noting that there is no man to till the ground, and yet God makes it fruitful.  The Fathers of the Church, particularly in the Middle Ages, saw this detail as presaging the Incarnation of the divine Word of God.  The fruitfulness of the earth immediately after its creation, despite there being ‘no man to till’ it, finds its mystical fulfillment in the conception of Christ of the Virgin Mary, who knew no man.  For this fruitfulness, which depends entirely on God (and not on the ‘will of man’—John 1: 13), the ground must be pure, untouched in any way by the future ‘general curse’ that will mark the beginning of the rains, the thorns, thistles and shrubs of the field.

Today is the feast of SS Joachim and Anne, parents of Our Lady.  Their ‘one daughter’ was a ‘new creation’, a ground that needed no purification to become fecund at the overshadowing, the brooding of the Holy Spirit of God.  Akin to the temple, from which mystically flowed the waters which recall the mist and streams of Genesis 2, she is the true ‘ark of the covenant’, fit to be the dwelling place of the Dominus vivificans, the Lord, the Giver of Life, and to give God’s Son a body and a Mother.  She too, required no purification for this to take place, other than the anticipated grace of our Lord’s passion, death and resurrection, ‘which [God] foresaw’, as the collect for Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception phrases it.  Which is to say that God, in preparation for His definitive act of salvation, quietly prepared His triumph in the humble marriage bed of SS Joachim and Anne.  Happy feast day to all!

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 4:9

hashomer achi anochi?

“Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The Hebrew word order places a square emphasis on the word ‘I’.  The sense then is, “Is my brother’s keeper supposed to be me?”—with the possible additional implication that God should have prevented the murder of Abel, since He knows everything.  It can’t be stressed enough that the use of questions by God in the early chapters of Genesis should not be understood in a ‘folk’ sense of an anthropomorphized ‘god’ who doesn’t know what is happening and so needs to inquire.  Rather, these question need to be seen as a pedagogical tool that God is using to educate the first human beings.

Cain’s counter-accusation suggests a kind of bitterness.  It is as if Cain were saying, “Abel is Your favorite, after all.  You accepted his sacrifice and not mine.  If You cared about him so much, why didn’t You find a way to protect him from me?”

Indeed, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai makes just this observation: “When God asked Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ Cain answered “Am I my brother’s keeper?  You are God.  You have created man.  It is Your task to watch him, not mine.  If I ought not to have done what I did, You could have prevented me from doing it.”  This reads like the victim mentality so prevalent in our world today.

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Agony in the Garden

The Sorrowful Mysteries are, in many ways, the easiest to pray ‘incarnationally’.  The humanity of Jesus is on full display, and our own experience of suffering typically provokes us to prayer more readily than does joy.  What we find in the pairing of the Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries parallels the traditional stages of the interior life, the active or ascetical followed by the contemplative.  We put to death the desires of the flesh in order to rise in a spiritual manner and follow Christ to the Father.

How do we recapitulate the Agony in the Garden?  Clearly, we do this when we are faced with a situation that brings with it fear, an indication that we may anticipate pain of some kind in our future.  So when duty requires us to say difficult things to someone, or to begin a new job outside of our present competence, we are confronted with our human nature wishing that there were some way around these unpleasant experiences.

These situations can be somewhat abnormal, however.  Our Lord’s agony can also be a spur for the small, quotidian sacrifices that discipleship requires.  Not looking with lust or not harboring anger in my heart might not immediately cause me great suffering, in the sense that we think of suffering.  But it does require me to expend effort in a negative way that doesn’t seem to produce much fruit.  It is an inconvenience to be borne, and this bearing of irritations and uncongenial actions is at the heart of the quintessential monastic virtue of patience.  The Latin patior means both ‘to suffer’ and ‘to allow’.  When I take Christ’s instruction to heart literally, I must suffer or allow all kinds of minor discomforts.  Each morning, we should join Christ in the garden seeking that the Father’s will be done in us.  In our small, hidden sufferings, by which we uproot any affection for even venial sin, we will give glory to the Father, and Christ will be more clearly present in us.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 4:5

“So Cain was very angry (vayyichar l’qayin m’od), and his countenance fell.”

More literally, this reads, “Great wrath was to Cain”; or “Cain had great wrath.”  Anger here undergoes a kind of substantiation; it appears as something real and substantial.  The serpent has gone underground and no longer appears directly to human beings, but instead influences at the periphery of consciousness.  God warns Cain about this:  “Sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” [4: 7]  That is to say, we must learn to guard the door of our thoughts and not allow in sinful suggestions.  If we are not vigilant, these thoughts become a part of us and seem insurmountable.  But this is an illusion based on past negligences.

Homily for the Solemnity of Saint Benedict

Put on the armor of God. 

This is the language of battle, even of war.  Saint Paul writes about spiritual armor and spiritual warfare in several of his letters.  But here, in today’s second reading from Ephesians, he is referring to the “panoply,” the full armor of a professional soldier.  He explains why this is necessary:  we must be ready to ward off attacks by principalities, powers, world rulers of this present darkness, evil spirits in the heavens.

If you were to read the accounts of the early monks, you would see that this language was common among the fathers of Christian monasticism.  The biography of Saint Antony the Great, who, together with Saint Benedict, is depicted in the deesis above our altar, is filled with all kinds of spiritual battles between Antony and a host of demons.  Saint Benedict, writing almost two hundred years later, alludes to the great hermits like Antony in the first chapter of his Rule, where he says that hermits fight hand-to-hand with the Devil.  Saint Benedict’s own biography, written by Saint Gregory the Great, also has several stories of Benedict going toe-to-toe with the Devil and his underlings.  He shows that the power of Jesus Christ in his saints is far greater than the power of evil.

But the Lord still wants us to fight, to enter the lists of this spiritual warfare.  Over the course of the centuries, the common teaching drifted away from a realistic depiction of demons as having visible bodies and doing physical harm to monks.  Writers came to the realization—or perhaps just preferred to believe—that spiritual warfare happens primarily in the realm of the mind.  Demons test us by means of thoughts.  The principal thoughts include lust, gluttony, avarice, anger, sadness, vainglory and pride.

You might recognize this list as being very similar to the more contemporary list of the seven capital sins.  That represents the latest development in the tradition, bringing us up to the present day.  Perhaps on the feast of Saint Benedict we can take stock of what has been lost amidst these changes.  Perhaps we can ask whether monks and nuns might not have a significant contribution to make to today’s Church in recalling the dynamic of spiritual warfare.

When we talk about battling against vices, I suspect that we tend to think that we are battling ourselves.  But all human action begins with thought.  Often, we simply are not aware of the thought that precedes the action, because we aren’t attentive to our thoughts.  They can seem to have a persuasive force from habit, from social custom, and so on.

In fact, once we start paying attention to thoughts, we might start wondering where they come from.  Do they come from us or from somewhere else, or both?  So it is that monks and nuns, especially of the contemplative orders, have a special role to play in this spiritual battle.

In the best-case scenario, such monks and nuns are on the front lines.  We withdraw from the world and practice self-silencing to clarify what is going on in our minds:  to notice the fact that actions follow thoughts, and to catch thoughts before they become actions.  Then we can ask the question:  does this thought come from God? Or does it come from the Devil, from Principalities, from powers, or from other lower-ranking demons?

Saint Benedict is the patron of Western Europe, which is probably the last distinction he would have anticipated.  Like ourselves, he lived at a time of complete political upheaval.  Ten years before his birth, the last of the Western Roman Emperors abdicated.  This was followed by the terrible Gothic Wars, as the Eastern Byzantine Emperor Justinian tried to take back the Italian peninsula and reunite it with what was left of the old Roman world.  The end result was widespread destruction all around Benedict’s monastery of Monte Cassino and the beginning of a period of cultural hibernation.

Saint Benedict did not seek a political solution to the grave disorders of his day.  Rather he sought, in all simplicity, a life of solitude where he could focus on his own fidelity to the witness of Jesus Christ.  Where he could meditate day and night on God’s word and put it into practice in the most radical way possible.  Where he could watch his thoughts, purify his actions, and enter into real spiritual struggle by saying “no” to all kinds of temptation.

The first result was that others noticed his holiness and wanted to imitate him.  This led him to write his Rule for monks, but also to take up the work of caring for others, of bringing Christ to the world.  Eventually his way of life became so popular, and his Rule so widely recognized for its practical wisdom and fidelity to the gospel, that by the year 1100, all of Europe was dotted with Benedictine monasteries.

Under their influence, the European Middle Ages as we now know them came to be.  There arose new gospel institutions like the Truce of God, chivalry—which is the knightly warrior code civilized into service of the poor and weak—devotion to our Lady, and prayers for the dead.  All these practices, pervaded by the spirit and rhythms of the liturgy, flourished under the influence of Saint Benedict and his decision to arm himself and do battle for the one True King.

By withdrawing from the world, Saint Benedict and his disciples were able to replace the founding assumption of the previous world, the old Roman world founded in paganism and a drive for power, with a new vision of life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

May God help us to be worthy disciples of this great man.  And may his example light a fire in the hearts of many young men and women, who might choose to fight the ills of this age not by becoming internet influencers or political operatives, but by humbly submitting all thoughts to Jesus Christ.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 3:14

“The Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this…”

God does not ask the serpent why he did what he did, as God asked Adam and Eve in turn.  This is an indication that the serpent cannot be taught.  God does not adopt a pedagogical tone toward the serpent as He does toward Adam and Eve.  This is another hint of the ‘proto-evangelion’: God is against the serpent but for humankind.

 

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Institution of the Eucharist

In what sense can we recapitulate the institution of the Holy Eucharist, unless it is by accepting daily the death of Christ in our bodies?  There is only one Eucharistic sacrifice:  we do not sacrifice Christ again and again, but our approach to the altar is always to the same Christ, the same Supper.  We experience it differently because we change through time.  For this reason, we must institute the sacrifice each day in our own lives, taking up the cross daily and following Christ to Calvary to offer ourselves in union with Him for the salvation of the world.  When we do this, we receive our resurrected lives back again, at least in promise, in preparation for the full effects of resurrection in the world to come.  But for now, when we re-institute the Eucharistic sacrifice in our lives, we offer to the world a promise greater than any other gift that we might offer.  Indeed, all of our good works in some way must point back to this reality:  we embrace dying in Christ in order to embrace True Life in Christ.  We do not offer simple human camaraderie in our works of mercy.  We must offer our very selves, and in such a way as to offer Christ.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 3:12

“The woman that You gave me.”

It is remarkable how passive Adam turns out to be.  The one who boldly named all of the animals now finds himself, or at least portrays himself, as a hapless victim:  “You gave me…she gave me…and…I ate.”  Already toil, thorns, and thistles have entered!  “The sluggard says, ‘There is a lion in the road!  There is a lion in the streets!’ (Proverbs 26: 13)  Poor me!

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