Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table.
Little dogs. Dogs are not much mentioned in the Scriptures and rarely in a positive light. We hear of sinners being like dogs returning to their vomit and of dogs licking the blood of Jezebel, hardly attractive images. To call someone a dog in the Old Testament was to suggest that they were worthless; in short, an insult. In the New Testament such as in Revelation or as in Philippians we are told: “Look out for the dogs … for the evil-workers.” Dogs, it seems, are evil. Don’t ask about cats, let alone ‘snakes, shamrocks and shillelaghs’, not to mention green beer. St. Patrick? Well that is another matter, yet one which has to do with perseverance, attention, and insight as in this Gospel. And so with dogs, too, perhaps.
Isaiah speaks of “dumb dogs [that] cannot bark” (Is. 56.10), criticizing the watchmen, the leaders of Israel. Yet more than a thousand years later that phrase was turned about to become an image for dogs as preachers, meaning dogs that dobark and, indeed, bark incessantly against “foxes and wolves”, the heretics that threaten “the sheep”, the faithful, as Gregory the Great imagines. Preaching as barking! Just saying.
Several centuries later after him, it became an image for the Ordo Praedicatorum, St. Dominic’s Order of Preachers, later known as Dominicans. And no, the term Dominicans cannot be punned or played with as the Domini Canes, the dogs of the Lord; that is just bad Latin and not historical, just another one of those latter day myths. There is, however, nothing mythical about the dog with the flaming torch as the symbol of the Order of St. Dominic. And scripturally, at least in terms of one of “the other Books (as Hierome saith) [which] the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine”, as the sixth of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles puts it, there is the Old Testament Apocryphal or Deuterocanonical Book of Tobias or Tobit, which mentions in a kindly fashion, Tobias’ dog. This provides the sole biblical instance of the long-standing view of dogs as faithful and loyal companions much like Odysseus’s dog, Argos, in the Odyssey. He alone recognises his master, though disguised as a beggar in his return to reclaim Ithaca, and then dies but without betraying him. Seeing Argos brings tears to Odysseus’ eyes. It is a touching scene. As Homer beautifully puts it, “Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years”.
In the New Testament, there are the dogs that are the companions of Lazarus who lies at the gate of Dives, the rich man, “full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table”. It is the dogs who “came and licked his sores”. That, too, is a touching image of compassion and care. No doubt, they, too, desired to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table. And then there is this story, a most powerful and yet disturbing story in which rejection, and silence, and even insult give place, finally and heartbreakingly, to mercy and grace. The breakthrough moment is this remarkable women’s last statement to Jesus: “Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table”. Little dogs.
In the foreground and to the left but occupying the centre of the empty space in Vittore Carpaccio’s magnificent 1502 painting known as St. Augustine in His Study, is a little shaggy white dog. Don’t worry this is not going to be a shaggy dog story, or at least I hope not! Identified as a curly-topped Maltese, what we would now call a Maltese terrier, the dog plays an important symbolic role in the understanding of the painting, a prophetic role. The fifth century theologian and preacher, St. Augustine, is here portrayed in a wonderful late fifteenth century study, filled with books, codices, and clutter (not unlike my study and Fr. Rix’s!) as well as reading devices such as a rotating lectern, which I must confess I envy. The scene is completely anachronistic – out of time, unhistorical – though that would not have troubled Carpaccio and his contemporaries in the slightest.
Carpaccio was commissioned by the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, a school founded by Slavs from Dalmatia for their immigrant community in Venice, to paint three scenes from the life of Jerome, one of their patron saints, and one of the greatest translators of all time. Jerome’s Vulgate version of the Scriptures, translated from the Hebrew and the Greek into Latin, was the lingua franca of Europe for more than a thousand years.
The three scenes depict, first, Jerome with his legendary lion as companion; second, Jerome’s death and funeral; and then, overshadowing all else, the painting of St. Augustine in His Study which captures a later legend in the life of Jerome. Augustine is depicted stylus in hand looking up at the window through which are shining rays of light. The light is not natural. It is St. Augustine’s vision of the death of Jerome even as he was writing to him. They were fifth century contemporaries. He is looking into things transcendent.
The little dog, too, is looking exactly along the same plane as Augustine, seeing and looking attentively at what Augustine is seeing. He, too, is looking at things transcendent. Such is prophetic insight or intellectus, we might say, perceiving what is invisible. This stands in complete contrast to our unfortunate fixation with a kind of ratio, what is simply rational, which for our culture means the unending accumulation of facts without understanding, without meaning. Here is an image about prophetic or intellectual insight which connects wonderfully to the history and significance of reading, deep reading, as Alberto Manguel argues in his brilliant essay, St. Augustine’s Computer and as Maryanne Wolf shows in her book, Reader, Come Home. In Carpaccio’s painting the room is filled with books, ninety-four of them, the exact number of Augustine’s literary works.
“He who is now called a prophet was formerly called a seer”, we are told parenthetically in 1st Samuel (1 Sam. 9.9). A seer is one who sees into the meaning of things, one who perceives the invisible in and through the visible. The little dog belongs to that idea as the symbol of prognostication, of prophetic insight. “Dogs”, Colin Dayan observes, “bear the burden of revelation” (Dogs on the Edge of Life). They are the bridge between man and nature, between man and God. Even though Carpaccio’s dog was not originally a dog, as we now know by way of another kind of light, x-ray, as it were, but an ermine or a weasel, it still symbolically, in terms of late medieval and renaissance iconography about animals, represents prophetic insight.
So, too, with the woman of Canaan. She has a hold of a deep truth about God in Christ. She sees the transcendent in the visible. And what she knows, she holds onto with great tenacity and perseverance. She will not let go. She is the perfect figure of what it means to strive with God, with what it means to be a true Israelite, namely, one who strives with God. Yet she is not a Jew, not an Hebrew, not an Israelite. The whole amazing dialogue, if one may even call it that, is an explicit critique of all and every form of exclusiveness, a critique of Israel’s holding God to be their God exclusively. Such is a betrayal of vocation and mission. God is the God of all. She brings out something universal in the soul of our humanity, the desire for God, for the good and not only for ourselves selfishly but for one another. She comes to Jesus seeking the healing of her daughter “grievously vexed with a devil”,a kind of possession not altogether unlike the obsessions of our own culture that contribute to so much depression and despair.
“Because I do not hope to turn again / Because I do not hope / Because I do not hope to turn / Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope / I no longer strive to strive towards such things”. T.S. Eliot’s poem, Ash Wednesday, describes the uncertainties of modernity yet ultimately ends in prayer, ultimately seeking the unity of our knowing and our willing which is found in God. “Suffer me not to be separated/ And let my cry come unto Thee”, the poem concludes. The line “desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope” derives from Shakespeare’s sonnet # 29 which begins “when in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,/ I all alone beweep my outcast state” and goes on to describe himself as one who wishes himself “like to one more rich in hope,/ featured like him, like him with friends possessed,/ desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope.” “Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,” the soul recalls “thy sweet love remembered” and that changes everything from despair and sorrow to “sing[ing] hymns at heaven’s gate” and even “scorn[ing] to change my state with kings”. It is all about what is inwardly perceived and known. Eliot has changed just one word, substituting ‘gift’ for ‘art’. In a word, the turning is by grace and with grace in our striving in grace.
The striving is not by any strength or power or art or techne of ours alone. What this woman has a hold of is grace. She has an insight into the truth of God in Christ and its meaning for human life. But that does not render her or us passive. Quite the opposite. It means, if I may turn Eliot’s phrase, that she “strives to strive towards such things”, the things that belong to our good in God. In other words, faith is totally God and totally us, a kind of Chalcedonian logic, as it were, namely, the distinction of the human and divine natures united in the person of Christ, which has to do with our sacramental life. Word and Sacrament, Intellect and Sense, God and Man, each in their integrity and unity, their harmony and truth; the balance and interrelation is crucial.
Little dogs. Some of you are wondering why little dogs? That is not what we heard in the Gospel. We heard Jesus say “it is not right to take the children’s food and to cast it to dogs”! We heard the woman say “yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” Why, then, little dogs? It is an interesting question about translation.
Most translations in a number of languages speak of dogs as does the King James’ Version which since 1662 is the translation used in the classical Books of Common Prayer throughout the Anglican Communion. Yet somehow in Canada, in the 1962 Book of Common Prayer, we have “little dogs”, at least for the last words of the woman. The Greek (κυναρια) and the Latin (catelli) are very clear. Both use the diminutive of dogs, hence “little dogs” for what Christ and the woman say here. The earliest English translation by Wycliffe has Christ say “hounds” while the woman speaks of “whelps”. Tyndale, the linguistic genius upon which so much of the King James’ version depends, uses “whelps” for both Christ and the woman. Inexplicably, the King James’ version simply says dogs.
Until I looked into this matter, I had thought that the woman’s response to what appears to be a complete insult by Jesus was a kind of rhetorical masterstroke. He calls her a dog and she does him one better, a little dog. Others in other languages have done something similar. Luther in German has Jesus speak of “hund” but the woman “hundlein”; some French translations have both say “les petits chiens”. These are small matters but ones which help to highlight something greater. The attentive gaze of Carpaccio’s little dog complements Augustine’s vision just as the woman’s attention to Christ brings out the deeper truth of our humanity in our striving with God. We are all like little dogs. Her attention to Christ gets his attention and provides the critical lesson about the grace of God which seeks our good and our perfection. “O woman, great is thy faith.”
The little dogs are the dogs of the Lord, too. They participate in the goodness of the Creator’s will for his creation. As symbols of faithfulness and loyalty, of prophetic insight and attentiveness, they speak to the desire of our souls so wonderfully illustrated in this strong, strong woman of faith and perseverance. Like her, we need to “strive to strive” towards the things of God in which we find grace and joy, healing and delight. Like the little dogs, the crumbs which fall from our master’s table are more than enough to sustain and nourish us. Such is the sacrament of the altar. As we shall see on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, the gathering up the fragments, the crumbs from the picnic in the wilderness with Jesus, is more than enough for the apostolic church in its apostolic faith. But it requires our constant attention to Christ. Such is the striving of Lent shown to us here in the witness of the woman of Canaan. Such is our being like little dogs, too, who eat of the crumbs which fall from our master’s table.
Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table.
Fr. David Curry
All Saints, Wynnewood, Philadelphia
Lent II, 2019