by CCW | 1 August 2021 08:00
The Calendar in the Canadian Prayer Book designates August 1st as Lammas Day and as the commemoration of The Maccabean Martyrs.[1] In doing so, it looks back to the calendars of festivals and commemorations of the European medieval developments particularly in their Anglo-Saxon form and the way they have been recalled at different times. St. Peter in the Chains was a third commemoration on August 1st as well, looking back to the story of Peter in Acts being freed from his chains by an angel while in prison and to the subsequent building of a Cathedral in Rome dedicated to the breaking of his chains in the fifth century. The concept contributes to the centrality of Peter, the Petrine primacy, as it came to be asserted in Rome. It is, perhaps, no surprise that such a commemoration did not continue on in England post-reformation. But what about Lammas Day and The Maccabean Martyrs?
Lammas Day is associated with the harvest. It is one of the four ‘cross-quarter’ days which have to do with a profound sensibility about our connection to creation understood in terms of the celestial and the terrestrial, the heavenly and the earthly, captured artistically and arrestingly, for instance, in the many windows and sculpted stone work of the medieval churches and cathedrals of Europe that depict the labours of the months along with the signs of the zodiac. Such images place human labour in the world as ordered to God and as a form of participation in the life of God; something which we have largely lost in our technocratic world which presumes the mastery of human and non-human nature at the expense of both. August 1st is more or less halfway between the summer solstice and the fall equinox; likewise, November 1st stands half-way between the fall equinox and the winter solstice; February 2nd or Candlemas roughly half-way between that and the spring equinox; May 1st, May Day, between that and the summer solstice. Such things are reminders of the patterns of nature’s year and what that means for human life seen in terms of the created order.
In one of the wonderful stained glass windows at Chartres Cathedral in north central France, August is associated with the labour of the threshing of the grain or wheat. July’s labour was the harvesting of the wheat; August marks the threshing of the wheat leading to its being transformed into bread; September marks the harvesting of grapes. Lammas derives from Old English, hlaf, loaf, and, maesse, mass, hence loaf-mass; it marks the first harvest and its fruit, as it were. The term, mass, in loaf-mass ties it to the Christian theme of our sacramental participation in the fruits of Christ’s redemptive work as suggested in today’s Epistle.
What about The Maccabean Martyrs? This is, I think, most intriguing and suggestive. Apart from some calendars associated with the Carmelites who commemorate Elijah the Prophet as one their patrons and founding figures, this is the only pre-New Testament and thus pre-Christian commemoration in the Christian calendars of the western Church. It refers to the Maccabean revolt which was about the Hellenistic world post Alexander the Great which in the 2nd century BC undertook to subjugate Judaism. The Maccabean martyrs, spoken about in 2nd and 4th Maccabees, were Eleazar and his seven sons who refused to repudiate the Jewish religion at the orders of Antiochus IV Epiphanes who styled himself as Zeus, erecting a statue in his own honour in the temple of Jerusalem. The Book of Daniel and 1st Maccabees calls this the “desolating sacrilege,” a term which Jesus also uses in Matthew (24.15) and Mark (13.14) in the lead up to his Passion but as an indictment of the misuse of the Temple by Israel herself.
Eleazar and his seven sons were all martyred. A remarkable part of the story is the witness of Eleazar’s wife and the mother of the seven sons who exhorts them to remain faithful by way of two principles: the idea of creation as ex nihilo, “Look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and know that God did not make them out of things that existed” (2 Macc. 7.28), and the doctrine of the Resurrection, “God will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for the sake of his laws” (2 Macc. 7.23). 4 Maccabees is a philosophical and ethical treatise about the primacy of reason, of phronesis or wisdom, over all other attachments and passions. It explicitly cites the mother of the martyrs as an example of wisdom. It is about holding to a divine truth in the midst of the follies and evils of the world. Wisdom abides.
But as interesting as all this may be (or not), is this just a way of avoiding what some think is a very difficult if not impossible Gospel reading on this Sunday? No. It is all very much about wisdom and our practical labours as a form of wisdom in the world as ordered to God. Paul looks back to the Exodus struggles of Israel in the wilderness, the place of their learning the Law. He connects the images of the shekinah cloud of God’s protective grace and guiding presence, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the provisions of manna and water by Moses in the wilderness to the story of Christ. Christ is the rock upon which our lives in their totality are grounded. But he says that many “were overthrown in the wilderness.” Why? Through an ignorance of spiritual things, he suggests, such as lust, idolatry, pride, temptations. Yet, he says, “these things were our examples.” We learn through the negative as well in the awareness of our unwisdom.
The problem is about our misuse of the things of the world in relation to God, about our relation to God as the Creator, the author of all good things. The problem has to do with what the Collect bids us seek, namely “the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful” which cannot be accomplished in us apart from the acknowledgment of God as the principle of all good things for “we cannot do anything that is good without thee.” What is needed is the counter to ignorance, namely, wisdom, the very thing which the Gospel parable highlights.
The unrighteous steward is praised by his master not for his unrighteousness but for his prudence. “He had acted with prudence.” The word is phronesis – wisdom, particularly, practical wisdom. It is about using the things of the world properly with a regard to their origin and end (and ours) in God. The Epistle suggests what that means in terms of Holy Communion: how the things of the world, bread and wine, themselves the products of human labour by working with the natural world become the instruments of our communion with God; “the cup of blessing [is] the communion of the blood of Christ,” “the bread which we break [is] the communion of the body of Christ.”
This is to be prudent, wise about our lives in the world, using the things of the world with respect to our being with Christ. We are not meant to be passive but active in terms of our thinking and our doing. Hans Georg Gaddamer, one of the great German philosophers of the 20th century, drawing on Aristotle argues that phronesis, wisdom, is the key concept in ethics and rhetoric; in short, in deeds and in words. It is, he suggests, the thing most needful for us to recover in the contemporary world, a world defined, as George Grant put it more than fifty years ago, by “the technocratic dominance of human and non-human nature” (Technology and Empire, 1969).
There is no wisdom in technology. “It is not possible to live humanly in technopolis,” as Prof. James Doull puts it, but that doesn’t mean to reject it; the challenge is to discover how it “can be overcome and contained within human freedom” (The Theology of the Great Society, 1967).
We will need to discover in ourselves the wisdom which connects our thoughts and our labours to nature and thus to ourselves and to God. It is to know who we truly are in our freedom and so to be freed from the idolatry of the practical whether through the technological or the forms of natural individualism. “Thinking is [our] freedom,” Hegel says, in the overcoming of all forms of externality by drawing them into self-consciousness in the actualization of our ends. “Mak[ing] friends,” as Jesus says, not of “the mammon of unrighteousness” but by means of it, knowing its limitations but knowing our end in God through them. Ultimately, wisdom will mean a proper and just relation to things, “[being] faithful in that which is least” through “[being] faithful,” itself a kind of wisdom, in that which is much.
We learn, it seems, even by means of the unrighteous steward but what we learn is wisdom. Such things are our examples, our way of learning wisdom through the contradictions and uncertainties of our times. This would mean reclaiming something of the wisdom of Athens and Jerusalem which belongs to the Christian understanding and the challenge of our times.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 9, 2021
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