Church

Constantinople’s Last Night

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Yesterday, I wrote that I’ve been spending some of my commute time listening to the Modern Scholar series from Recorded Books – specifically the volumes from Thomas F Madden, a Medievalist and chair of the History department at Saint Louis University. The lecture set I probably learned the most from was Empire of Gold: A History of the Byzantine Empire. I knew very little about this culture, and the lectures helped me to piece quite a few things together – in both the political and religious spheres.

As the lectures wound down, I must confess I was growing a bit weary of the Michaels, Constantines, Alexioses, and others. In part, that may have been because the lectures could sometimes move through several reigns in the space of a minute or two – creating a sense of having a revolving door leading to the throne room. But I also felt frustration at the way imperial politics and palace intrigues seemed to lead almost invariably toward the eventual demise of this culture, which was so drenched in Christianity. I get a similar – but much more profound – discomfort reading the book of the prophet Jeremiah. What was especially frustrating to hear was the ways unity between the Greek and Latin churches was repeatedly torpedoed by various circumstances – even when unity had been formally agreed upon.

So it was with a palpable sadness that I listened to Madden describe the Fall of Constantinople. The worst of it being his description of the preceding evening. As Madden tells it, it was clear to all involved on the night of Monday, May 28th, 1543, that the city would fall the following day, and that the Roman Empire was about to come to an end. So the defenders of the city gathered in the great cathedral, Hagia Sophia, and celebrated the Divine Liturgy. This included not only the Emperor Constantine XI and his men (Greeks), but also the Venetians and Genoese (Latins) who had come or stayed to defend this bulwark of Christendom.

I was flabbergasted when I heard that. When all was finally lost, when the Muslims were poised to take permanent possession of Constantinople, adding it to their earlier war bounty of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria – of all the major patriarchates of ancient Christianity except Rome – the Greeks and the Latins in the great city decided it was time to put aside their doctrinal differences, and share the Eucharist together. There had been struggles over union going on for some time, and maybe the sharing of Communion was not as unusual as I’ve been led to think. But still, I can only wonder how differently history would have played out had the Greek and Latin churches not been at such cross-purposes over the preceding 800 years or so. What a shame. What a shame.

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Learning

Modern Scholar series (part I)

Posted on by John W Gillis / 2 Comments

In the spirit of always trying to look on the bright side of things… One of the advantages to spending two hours or so each weekday commuting to and from work is the opportunity it affords me to listen to audio books. I was in the local public library over the weekend, and noticed that they had a new title from Thomas F. Madden in Recorded Books’ Modern Scholar series. Unsurprisingly, the series overall is a bit of a mixed bag, but, having listened to all of Madden’s volumes so far, I can vouch for the quality of all those ones.

These offerings from Recorded Books are not actually recorded books, but sets of about seven hours’ worth of lectures on various subjects – in Madden’s case on the history of Christianity, broadly speaking. Madden’s work is by no means overwhelming – these are survey-level mini-courses, and an overlap in subject matter among his volumes leads to some redundancy, but he does an impressive job of walking through the material briskly while still demonstrating the complexities of the historical situations. I was particularly impressed with his agility in avoiding fashionable, oversimple cliches in his surveys of the Crusades and the Inquisitions – each of which he managed to cover fairly comprehensively in what would amount to about three weeks’ worth of classroom lectures in a traditional undergraduate environment.

I’ve been able to fill some gaps in my knowledge of European history while listening to these CDs, and it struck me a while back just how fundamental this knowledge is for understanding the world we’ve inherited from the ancients, the medievals, and the early moderns. And yet, where is this knowledge to be found in our culture? I know so many people who have absolutely no clue about any of this – including many with college educations. What little previous knowledge I had of this history was almost entirely gained through personal reading over the years. As a product of the public schools, I had almost no exposure to this history – beyond, perhaps, temporarily memorizing the details of major military skirmishes, or of changing political fault lines. I certainly was offered no clue as to how the set of ideas we call the modern world (if we can still call it that) was forged in the interplay of the ideas of our cultural ancestors.

Maybe teenagers are too young to grasp human history as the story of ideas, but if that is true, then our system of education teaches history to the wrong people. Indeed, I think that verdict is true, and it suggests the need to ask how we might rectify a rampant ignorance of the sources, histories, and meanings of ideas. Given that the Daily News Product feeds us political ‘debate’ which aims to find the right marketing mix of ‘change’ branded slogans and ‘experience’ branded slogans – all in an attempt to manipulate the election of the leader of the free world, no less – we’d be hard pressed to show that the status of ideas is not in crisis in our culture. Ideas are packaged for consumption – as trivia.

“For $10,000 and a weekend in Barbados with an upscale hooker: Who was the father of Charlemagne?”

The Modern Scholar series is a good place to at least start rectifying the problem – Madden’s volumes are, at any rate.

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Blogging

MaybeToday.org Site Launch

Posted on by John W Gillis / 1 Comment

MaybeToday.org was spawned in a crucible that was formed by the convergence of a number of difficulties in my life, all of which were pressing on my available time in some way or another. In a typically Christian manner, I was trying to understand what God was asking of me – what His will was for my life in those circumstances. In short, I was looking for God to help me straighten things out.

Maybe it was my professional background at play, but, in retrospect, I can see that I saw this essentially as a prioritization and scheduling exercise – which consisted in large part of trying to ascertain if the time was right to begin my studies toward a Master of Theology from Franciscan University at Steubenville, via their distance learning program. The program itself has seemed like the right direction for me for a while, but the timing has been problematic – perhaps primarily because of health concerns over the past year, but also because of concerns about its potential to impact my family time and work commitment, as well as my availability for involvement in my parish community. The insight that came to me seemed a bit out of left field.

I was beginning another long commute home in a miserable winter rain storm, when the thought came to me that I really needed to do something right away about making a long-needed change in email hosting. For years, I’d been running my own Internet mail server as part of a fairly elaborate network of systems in my basement. Back when I was working as an IT Infrastructure consultant, it was sensible enough for me to be running my own pilot lab at home, but I’d lost that need – and the motivation to maintain it- a couple years ago, and it was becoming something of an albatross to me, wasting time and money while steadily becoming riskier for me to run.

For various reasons, my resolution was to procure a new professionally hosted domain, migrate, then shut down my old domain. I’d come up with a list of potential new domain names, but hadn’t done any serious planning. And as I sat slumped in my car at a red light in that rainstorm, thinking I really needed to do something about it right away, my initial reaction was: “that’s going to be a lot of work, and when I’m done, I’m going to want to build a web site for it, which will be even more work… yeah, maybe tomorrow…” Immediately, however, I replied to myself: “No, maybe today”.

Right then, I knew I had found, not only my new domain name, but a key to understanding what God was looking for from me (or offering me, if you prefer): not a web site, per se, but the impetus to stop wasting my time waiting for tomorrow, and to start living for today; to stop trying to become me, but to simply be me; to stop trying to understand God’s plan, but to just do whatever honestly seems to be the needful thing to do.

It’s not very obvious how starting a blog would have been the needful thing to do in that situation, but it has to do with the need to stop waiting for the stars to align, so to speak. A while back, I targeted today as the launch day for this site. So, in the spirit of taking each day for what it’s worth – despite feeling still quite unready – I’m considering maybetoday.org formally launched with this post. I still have a lot of work to do to achieve the baseline I set out to meet for launch, but I’ll just have to be satisfied with what I’ve done design-wise, and get to the content as I can.

If anyone comes around and reads this, welcome: feel free to look around, and to chat if you’re so inclined.

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