These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Desiderius Erasmus, reformer of the Church

The illegitimate son of a priest, Erasmus was possibly born in Rotterdam. He attended school in Gouda and Deventer and was strongly influence by the Brethren of the Common Life.
He gave Jesus a central place in his devotions. In 1486 he became an Augustinian canon. Ordained in 1492, he left the Augustinians to study at the College De Montaigu, Paris, in 1495. Travel to England from 1499 – 1500 led to a close friendship with the notable scholar John Colet and careful study of the New Testament in Greek. His publications grew in number and variety, as did his fascination with the challenge of translating the Bible. Between 1506-1521, his spent time in Paris, Louvain and Italy, as well as making a return to England, and developing a fruitful friendship with Thomas More, celebrated in his book Enconium Moriae. As well as becoming the first teacher of Greek at Cambridge. His prestige was not only academic and pastoral. He was made a royal councillor in Brussels during 1516.

Between 1515 – 1525 Erasmus produced the second earliest Greek New Testament and this went through at least 4 editions. One of these editions was used by Luther in his translation of the New Testament. Erasmus’s NT also played a part in the King James translation of the NT. His work on the Greek was not without critics. Since Erasmus’s work older Greek versions of the whole or parts of the NT have been found and these finds have corrected the many mistakes in Erasmus’s texts.

From 1521, he lived in Basel with J. Froben, the noted printer. There he could write with fewer interruptions. When the city became Protestant, he moved to Freiburg from 1529 – 1535 before returning to Basel, where he died while editing the works of Origen. Advocacy of social, political, educational and religious reform made him an influential leader in the Europe of his day. He corresponded widely with people in a wide range of positions and status. An English edition of his letters is currently being prepared. He was strongly opposed to the corruption of traditional Catholicism and the Papacy, which he saw as indispensable of the European heritage. He sought to clarify their central emphases. Seeking to correct abuses in the church, he wrote a variety of popular and scholarly books, ranging from devotional works, such as his Enchiridion (1504) to editions of the Fathers. Initially, he welcomed Luther’s teaching and writing as complementary to his own. He, however, grew disturbed at its increasingly polemical nature and potential to undermine Catholic unity. That was made plain in De Libero Abitrio, to which Luther replied in De Servo Abitrio. Erasmus replied with Hyperaspistes. It was clear that they were far apart on many theological issues and reflected wider divisions in popular and scholarly Catholicism. Erasmus was convinced of the importance of education and that return to the sources was vital for authentic reform. He could be a cutting critic, as well as an inspirer of devotion. He provided reliable editions of some of the leading Fathers, as well as writing popular books on basic Christian belief and behaviour. Though he cherished the Catholic heritage, some more traditional Catholics regarded him as a corrupter of the faith.  His work was censured by the University of Paris and his books were totally banned by Sixtus V in 1590. The Roman Index banned some books, but permitted others, when they were carefully edited.  His importance has been widely recognized in the 20th century.

Ian Breward

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Irenaeus, Christian thinker

Irenaeus of Lyons (Lugdunum) in Roman Gaul, one of the foremost apologists of the early church, came from Smyrna on the coast of Asia Minor where, as a boy, he heard his lifelong hero, the great Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna. Given that Polycarp died a martyr in 155 CE it is assumed that Irenaeus was born c. 140. As a relatively young man he went to Lugdunum, apparently as a missionary to the Celts. Lugdunum, founded in 43 BCE near the confluence of the Rhone and Saone rivers, was the capital city of the Roman province of Gallia Lugdunensis and one of the most important cities, after Rome, in the Western part of the Empire. It included a thriving community of traders from Asia Minor and, indeed, the martyr lists from the 177 persecution reflect many Greek and some Latin names but no Celtic. Following the martyr’s death of Pothinus, bishop or at least senior presbyter of Lyon and the nearby town of Vienne, Irenaeus became himself bishop or at least senior presbyter. He certainly styled himself as bishop and that is how he is now recognised. He first came to prominence beyond Gaul when he went to Rome early in his episcopate and developed a reputation as a mediator in a number of disputes, the best known perhaps that between the Roman church and the churches of the east over the dating of Easter. His very name reflected his reputation in the early church.
His extant apologetic writings, for which he is most widely known and appreciated, are the five books of the On the Detection and Refutation of Knowledge Falsely So-Called (better known as Against Heresies) – which survives only in a Latin translation from the 3^rd or 4^th century – and Epideixis or Proof of the Apostolic Preaching – which exists only in an Armenian translation of unknown date. The former is directed against the so-called Gnostics of his time, particularly those belonging to the school of Valentinus. The Valentinians are regarded now – and were possibly so regarded by Irenaeus himself and this is perhaps why he regarded them as particularly dangerous – as the closest to ‘orthodoxy’ on the orthodox-heterodox scale. The first book outlines the beliefs of the Valentinians and their predecessors while the second offers rational proofs against these. The third offers proofs from the Apostles (the canonical Gospels) and the fourth those from the sayings of Jesus, particularly the parables. The fifth offers proofs to be used against the claims of the Gnostics drawn from others sayings of Jesus and the writings of the Apostle and includes some eschatological reflections. Irenaeus was himself a convinced millenarian. It is in the fourth book that Irenaeus offers some of his most important theological writing on the unity of the Old and New Covenants (Testaments) and of the necessary and critical relationship between Creation and Redemption, between God as Creator and as Redeemer. The Epideixis, a much shorter book and only discovered in 1903, was written for converts and offers a simple summary of the Rule of Faith with supporting biblical texts. Irenaeus also wrote on the biblical canon, on the succession of bishops as a guarantee of orthodoxy – he was a doctrinal conservative and literalist biblical commentator whose motto was semper eadem – and on apostolic authority. While not always given his due perhaps as an important apologist and theologian in his day, the preservation of his major work in Latin indicates that he was appreciated not only in the East but also in the West.  His feast day is celebrated in the East on 26 August and in the West on 28 June.

David Mackay-Rankin

 

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

 

Ephrem the Syrian, person of prayer

Ephrem has justly been described as the greatest poet of the Early Church.  He wrote in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic (the language spoken by Jesus), and for most of his life served as a deacon in Nisibis on the eastern border of the Roman Empire.  Ten years before his death in 373 he became a refugee when his town was transferred to the Persian Empire. He ended up in Edessa (modern Sanliurfa in SE Turkey), where he is recorded as having organised food for the poor during a famine shortly before he died.  A considerable number of his poems survive, along with a few prose works, which include Commentaries on Genesis and on a Harmony of the four Gospels.  Most of the poems are stanzaic and were intended to be sung; a later poet, Jacob of Serugh, has a delightful poem describing how Ephrem introduced the practice of having choirs of women (some of his poems are in fact written in the voice of women).  These poems survive in a number collections of varying sizes, ranging from 4 to 87 poems; the collections have general titles, but only rarely (as in the case of the collection ‘On Paradise’) do these correspond to all the poems in them. Thus the large collection ‘On Faith’ ends with a small group of five poems ‘on the Pearl’ and its symbolism.   Two of his narrative poems were translated into Greek (and thence into other languages):  one is on Jonah and the Repentance of Nineveh, while the other is on the Sinful Woman who anointed Jesus (based on Luke 7), where Ephrem introduces into the narrative the Seller of Unguents; a motif picked up in many subsequent literary treatments of the episode.

Besides being a highly accomplished and original poet who uses some fifty different metres with great skill, Ephrem was also a profound theologian, who found poetry a much more satisfactory vehicle than prose for conveying his theological vision of the relationship between the material and spiritual world, and the elaborate spider’s web of multi-dimensional interconnections that a person the interior eye of whose heart is pure and luminous has the possibility of discovering in both Nature and Scripture.

Although Ephrem’s fame as a poet soon spread to the Greek- and Latin-speaking world (in a work of 392 Jerome mentions him), it was only in the sixth century that a biographical account of his life was written.  Since the author wished to present Ephrem to a sixth-century audience he presents him as it were in modern dress:  thus instead of a deacon he has become a monk, and he is credited with visiting both St Basil (in Cappadocia) and St Bishoi (in Egypt).  Though without any historically basis, these episodes can be said to be symbolically true, in that Ephrem’s spirituality has much in common with that of the Cappadocian and Egyptian Fathers.

Sebastian Brock

 

For further reading:

The Harp of the Spirit:  Poems of St Ephrem the Syrian, Introduction and translation by S.P. Brock (3^rd edition, Cambridge [UK]: Aquila, 2013).

St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise, Introduction and translation by S.P. Brock (Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990).

Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns, Introduced and translated by K.E. McVey (Classic of Western Spirituality;  New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1989).

S.P. Brock, The Luminous Eye. The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1992).

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

 

Pope John XXIII, reformer of the Church

Pope St John XXIII (born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, 1881-1963) came from humble beginnings, through a diplomatic ministry in the Roman Catholic Church, to become Pope at the age of 77, from 1958-1963. He was canonized in 2014. Far from being the caretaker in that role which others imagined, less than three months from his election, he called the Second Vatican Council together and presided over its first sessions (1962), Pope Paul VI bringing it to a conclusion after three more sessions, in 1965. Unusually, his saint’s day is not the date of his death, but the day the Council began (September 11). The Uniting Church remembers on his ‘heavenly birthday, June 3, and we grant him the title ‘Reformer of the Church’. His own favourite papal title was ‘Servant of the servants of God’. Many called him ‘Good Pope John’. He charmed people with his gentle sense of humour.

The Vatican Council was indeed a reforming council, well beyond expectation. It benefitted from a century of serious scholarship and pastoral thought across Europe and the Catholic world. He invited representatives of other churches as non-voting observers. There was lively debate on the floor of St Peter’s, and in the coffee shops around Rome. His stated intention was to ‘open the windows [of the Church] and let in some fresh air.’ The unimagined result was change in the whole of the western church. Key documents were composed and promulgated, the first being on ecumenism (Unitatis redintegratio), which propelled the Roman church into relationship with others, defining non-Catholics as ‘separated brethren’.  From dialogue, we have all learned to state more clearly what we believe, what unites and what still divides us as Christians. The Church’s primary purposes and its structures were redefined in Lumen Gentium, including its evangelical mission in the world. The liturgy was radically challenged, vernacular forms of language replacing Latin, word and sacrament given a new balance, and new rites composed. The centrality of Scripture was emphasized and a new three-year lectionary created. On all of this scholarship and wisdom, other churches have drawn on in their own ongoing reforms.

Pope John was a Christian visionary. His passionate sense of humanity was summed up in his remark, ‘We were all made in God’s image, and thus, we are all Godly alike.’ Many of the gains of the Council must be attributed to the gifts of Pope Paul VI, but it was Good Pope John who summoned his Church, and all of us, to reform and renewal in the humble spirit of Christ.

Robert Gribben