No Other Foundation

I have just finished re-reading the late J. N. D. Kelly’s wonderfully readable biography of Jerome and it made me a bit sad. St. Jerome was, of course, the greatest Christian scholar of his day and he deserves immense credit for soldiering ahead with his translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew when he knew that he would get all kinds of grief for it. But for all his scholarship and brilliance he was hard to like—at least as he survives in history books. He was famously abusive in his literary opposition to those he considered his foes and quick to take offense, which combines to make a pretty toxic cocktail. But what made me the most sad was his ferocious opposition to sex.

In chapter 14 of the Didache, a work dating to about 100 A.D., we read the following: “On the Lord’s own day gather together and break bread and give thanks, having first confessed your sins so that your sacrifice [i.e. the Eucharist] may be pure. But let no one who has a quarrel with a companion join you until they have been reconciled so that your sacrifice may not be defiled. For this is the sacrifice concerning which the Lord said, ‘In every place and time offer me a pure sacrifice, for I am a great king, says the Lord, and my name is marvelous among the nations.’” (The citation is from Malachi 1:11.)

Readers of this blog may not be familiar with the Homoeans which would be quite understandable for they all died out centuries ago. Now they can only be discovered within the pages of church history books, but they were all the rage in the fourth century. Let’s review.

There have been a number of times throughout my ministry that I have been asked by inquirers or parishioners if I would be their spiritual father. My answer is always the same: “No, but I am happy to be your pastor and your friend”. Sometimes I explain more fully: “People in parishes don’t need a spiritual father; they need a pastor.” My guess is that my attitude is a common one among parish clergy. And yet despite this our 1998 OCA clergy guidelines (repeated in the 2023 update) affirms that “the priest is the spiritual father of his parish and every parishioner ought to respect him as such”. What is going on?

In 1918 G. K. Chesterton wrote a series of five articles for the New Witness condemning the (then current) move in England to enact more liberal divorce laws. The articles were collected and published in 1920 under the title The Superstition of Divorce (image inset), a first-edition of which was given to me as a kind gift by a very dear friend. In the book Chesterton argues at length against the legalization of divorce. In his “Conclusion” added in 1920 he says that the book was really a mere pamphlet and that pamphlets of necessity wrote about passing things and that he hoped the fad of legalized divorce would be one of them. Of course, it wasn’t.