Fuga Mundi

"The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan. He was among wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him. After John had been arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God: 'This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.'" [Mark 1:12-15]

This Gospel for the 1st Sunday of Lent (Year B) is terribly succinct by comparison with the parallel passage from Matthew (proclaimed in Year A) and that of Luke's Gospel (assigned for Year C). Its first sentence, however, jumped out at me in an extraordinary way this year:  "The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan."

Lots of images and thoughts came to mind, but an episode from the life of St. Benedict prevailed. In Pope St. Gregory the Great's Life of St. Benedict (2nd Dialogue) in Chapter 8 he recounts the story of the jealousy of a wicked priest named Fortunatus, who sought to destroy Benedict and his work. Benedict pitied the man and ultimately withdrew himself to another location for the sake of his monks, entrusting them to other governors who would not provoke the priest.

St. Gregory explains very well that Benedict did not flee from evil, did not seek to escape the real world, but carried on the struggle after the manner of our Lord and Savior:

"The old enemy of mankind, not taking this in good part, did not privily or in a dream, but in open sight present himself to the eyes of that holy father, and with great outcries complained that he had offered him violence. The noise which he made, the monks did hear, but himself they could not see: but, as the venerable father told them, he appeared visibly unto him most fell and cruel, and as though, with his fiery mouth and flaming eyes, he would have torn him in pieces: what the devil said unto him, all the monks did hear; for first he would call him by his name, and because the man of God vouchsafed him not any answer, then would he fall a-reviling and railing at him: for when he cried out, calling him "Blessed Bennet," and yet found that he gave him no answer, straightways he would turn his tune, and say: "Cursed Bennet, and not blessed: what hast thou to do with me? and why dost thou thus persecute me?" Wherefore new battles of the old enemy against the servant of God are to be looked for, against whom willingly did he make war, but, against his will, did he give him occasion of many notable victories."


Our struggle is indeed against Principalities and Powers, the minions of Satan. Our Lenten exercise is indeed more than a retreat. Days of recollection, spiritual exercises, are, yes, strength training; they have their sense in the words of Jesus inviting His disciples to come away and rest/divert for a while. Our annual Lenten penance is in a sense other, just as Jesus' 40 days in the desert were other; they were neither rest nor diversion. Lent and Lenten practices (classically: prayer, fasting and almsgiving) can help us contextualize the struggle, that determined effort which must be ours in seeking the Lord and His kingship over our lives. St. Gregory tells us that St. Benedict never simply locked horns with evil or butted heads with the devil. He defeated the Prince of Darkness by his life of intense communion with the Lord, by his relentless prayer, his humble estimation of self and absolute confidence in Christ Who has won the victory for us.

You might say that I don't have the foggiest idea what the words "fuga mundi" mean, simply because they don't even hint at what for or to what end Benedict, the whole monastic tradition and the Church's great ascetics turned their backs on this world's passing splendors.

Again this week I posed my question to a man working hard here in Ukraine as a Catholic missionary: "The moment of grace at independence, with the fall of Communist repression of all things spiritual, has passed. A generation has passed and there really aren't people remaining who can be called back to the practice of their faith. How do you announce the Good News to a world that has never known Christ?" I'll leave his answer aside and hint at my own response by insisting that like with Jesus Himself, like with Benedict, father of Western Monasticism and one of Europe's Patrons, it cannot be done without engaging in spiritual combat with the one who holds so many in chains, in darkness, in the shadow of death. It cannot be done without a fight, without engaging the enemy in the desert.

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI

The Church is Where You are to be Found

The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy

Alexander Schmemann

(St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, New York, 2003)

A colleague loaned me his copy of this book which must be labelled either "a standard work" or a "classic". Reading it you get an impression, not so much of timelessness but of freshness, such that you would hardly guess that the 2003 edition is the third reprint in English of a work first translated from the Russian and published in 1963. I have some very strong objections to Schmemann's approach to history, but I learned a lot from the book especially in terms of contextualizing the experience I had of Orthodoxy while stationed in Jerusalem in the years 1993-96.

Despite my strong temptation to go after the way Schmemann yokes the Byzantine Church to temporal power, I prefer to take his observations on monasticism, not so much in the Greek form but as he describes it in Russian Orthodoxy and especially in the 15th century as point of departure for a reflection on how even ordinary Christians manifest contrition and set their hearts on the heavenly Kingdom:

"Yet amid all this darkness and decay there was the pure air of the monastery, evidence of the possibility of repentance, renewal, and purification. The monastery is not the crown of the Christian world, but on the contrary, its inner judgment seat and accuser, the light shining in the darkness. This must be understood for a comprehension of the origins of the "Russian soul." In the midst of its degradation it stretches toward this limitless brightness; it contains the tragic discord between the vision of spiritual beauty and purity expressed in monasticism and the sense of the hopeless sinfulness of life. Those who see a wholeness in the Russian religious mind of these ages are deeply mistaken, for just then, in the centuries after the Tatar invasion, the dualism which would mark its future course began to enter into it." (p. 308)

Elsewhere and repeatedly in his book Schmemann maintains that Christianity was imposed on the people of the Rus and only ever absorbed or integrated by an elite. He seems convinced that for the masses, the ordinary folk, Byzantine ritual was a veneer covering the "soft paganism" of the Slavic lands. He points to the rudeness in the people resulting from centuries of slavery under the brutal Tatars. So far Schmemann, the expert on Orthodoxy writing his original in Russian, and as he is dead at the moment, as they say, it hardly pays to get too worked up about what he says about post-Muscovite Slavic Orthodoxy. It is sort of like a French Dominican of over a century ago who insisted that American Catholicism had nothing to offer to the Church at large because of the hypocrisy generally of American Catholics. You have three choices in the face of such a condemnation: 1) Object with vehemence; 2) Beat your breast: 3) Get on with life as the Dominican too in question is long dead.

Getting on with the question for me in terms of Schmemann means posing another question or taking another perspective in terms of the why and wherefore of the Church in time and then ultimately. Ultimately, the Church should be our window on how things ought to be, how they will be in the fullness of time when Christ comes again in glory:

"And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it, and its gates shall never be shut by day - and there shall be no night there; they shall bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations." (Revelations 21:22-26)

 Here on earth we perforce see as through a glass darkly. The Church even at its most sublime while celebrating the Sacred Liturgy can be no more than foretaste and promise of the Kingdom which is to come. Hans Urs von Balthasar writing about the liturgy ("Liturgy and Awe", vol. II of his Explorations in Theology, Ignatius Press) attributes greater clarity to the worship of the Western Church in its classic liturgy than is preserved in the East. In another article published in the same volume ("Seeing, Hearing and Reading Within the Church), von Balthasar seems to take exception to Schmemann for blaming the Russian dualism on the Tatar yoke and points to a specific deficiency of the Byzantine liturgical tradition:

"Thus while it is true that the Eastern liturgy, where it genuinely unfolds itself, is a liturgy of seeing, in which the believer is permitted to see, through mirror and likeness, the supraheavenly mysteries of the new age in a great symbolic-representative sequence of scenes as it were solidifies into the "wall of images", the iconostasis - solidified like the ceremonial of the Byzantine court - and that this now divides the church interior into two, one space for the profane, uninitiated people who must be content with the "colorful reflection of the splendor" and one space for the mystic-initiated priest who always has the iconostasis at his back and already stands on the far side of all likenesses." (p. 485)

Von Balthasar is no less sparing in his criticism of Western liturgy, but my point would be that the basic question is another. How do we get to the Kingdom? How do we live the Christian life? The Byzantine world is filled with stories of saints and would-be saintly people who at the end of their lives took the monastic habit. The great example for me is St. Methodius' brother St. Cyrill, who took the habit at Rome when he realized he was dying. I think Schmemann has a great and beautiful description of Russian monasticism when he says of it: "The monastery is not the crown of the Christian world, but on the contrary, its inner judgment seat and accuser, the light shining in the darkness."

Taking the habit is not so much going over to a religious elite, not so much choosing the better path, as it is symbol of commitment with firm purpose to amend our lives. It is that step really which the Church asks of us all, regardless of our state in life, beyond the tears of our penance. It is our "yes" to the exhortation of Jesus to the woman caught in adultery "Go and sin no more."

As taboo as it is to speak about such things in the Church today, I cannot but think of the number of people in the West who in days gone by, on the advice of their confessors, took the hair-shirt or the discipline. Ultimately, the sense of the brown scapular of our Lady of Mount Carmel in which we were enrolled at First Communion is the same, namely as token, sign, sacramental witness of our resolve never to be separated from Christ and His Blessed Mother again.

It is not the judgment but the love, the light, the luminous witness, which draws us, and is so eloquently illustrated in the tender dialogue between the Virgin of Tepeyac and St. Juan Diego.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Americas, Pray for Us!