by CCW | 21 March 2019 22:00
Commemoration of Benedict & Cranmer: King’s College, Halifax, March 21st, 2019
Little dogs. “Dogs bear the burden of revelation”, Colin Dayan notes (With Dogs on the Edge of Life). They are the bridge between man and nature, between man and God yet dogs are not much mentioned in the Scriptures and hardly ever in a positive light. We hear of sinners being like dogs returning to their vomit and that dogs licked the blood of Jezebel. Hardly attractive images. To call someone a dog in the Jewish Scriptures is to say they are worthless; in short, an insult. And in the New Testament, such as in Revelation and Philippians we are told to “beware of the dogs… the evil doers”. Dogs, it seems, are evil.
Isaiah speaks of “dumb dogs [that] cannot bark” (Is. 56.10) to criticize the watchmen of Israel, the leaders who do not protect and care for their people. A thousand years later, Gregory the Great would turn that phrase completely on its head to speak of dogs that bark against “the foxes and the wolves”, the heretics, in order to protect “the sheep”, the faithful. Preaching as barking! Now there’s a thought!
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 for 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 not “to establish any doctrine”, as Cranmer put it in the sixth of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles, 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. 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, of fidelity and fellowship, and as such something which belongs to the formative nature of Benedictine monasticism which shaped Europe and beyond. And then there is this gospel 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[1], is a little shaggy white dog. Identified as a curly-topped 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 portrayed in a wonderful late fifteenth century study, filled with books, papers, and clutter (not unlike my study) as well as reading devices such as a rotating lectern, which I must confess I envy. The scene is completely anachronistic though that would not have troubled Carpaccio and his contemporaries in the slightest. I don’t need to remind you about the formative role of Augustine for both Benedict and Cranmer.
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 francaof 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, third, the painting of St. Augustine in His Study. It 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 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 which for our culture means the unending accumulation of facts without understanding, data without meaning. Here is an image about prophetic or intellectual insight which connects powerfully to the history and significance of reading, deep reading, to the lectio divina which shapes Benedictine monasticism and the Common Prayer tradition. And it is very much a contemporary concern as Alberto Manguel shows in his brilliant essay St. Augustine’s Computer and as Maryanne Wolf argues 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 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. She shows 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 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. It 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.
This was something which Benedict and Cranmer each in their own way had a hold of too, the one shaping a spiritual community through the balance of work and prayer, of study and labour, of care and commitment; the other, a godly commonwealth shaped by Word and Sacrament, by service and sacrifice. As Cranmer puts it in his homily on reading Scripture: “He that keepeth the word of Christ is promised the love and favour of God, and that he shall be the dwelling place or temple of the blessed Trinity”. This captures the spiritual impulse of Benedictine monasticism, a community united in prayer and praise, in word and sacrament, that participates in nothing less than the divine life. For both what is necessary is humble attention and perseverance in the things of God; like the Canaanite woman, like the little dogs.
Since 1662, the King James Version has been used as the translation for the epistles and gospels in the classical books of Common Prayer. Curiously, that translation has Jesus say that “it is not right to take the children’s bread and to cast it to dogs”while she responds with “yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”I have often thought that this was a rhetorical masterpiece on her part. But as it turns out, the Greek (κυναρια) and the Latin (catelli) are very clear. They are the diminutive for dogs, hence ‘little dogs’ by bothJesus and the woman.
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, correctly uses “whelps” for both Christ and the woman. Inexplicably, the King James’ version simply says dogs. But in the Canadian Prayer Book of 1962, a change was made that captures the original at least for the words of the woman, “little dogs”.
Others have done something similar. Luther in German had Jesus speak of “hund” but the woman “hundlein”; French translations have both say “les petits chiens”. These small matters 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. But it requires our constant attention to Christ. Such is the striving of Lent shown in her witness. Such is our being like little dogs who eat of the crumbs which fall from our master’s table.
Fr. David Curry
King’s College Chapel
Benedict & Cranmer
March 21st, 2019
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