Undusted Texts

 Introduction Though St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690) is often considered the founder of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, she was not the first to praise the Heart (though she fought to gain the Heart a feast).  Hints of this devotion can be found in earlier writers, such as St. Gertrude (1256-1302), but the best formulator of the devotion was St. John Eudes (1601-1680).  (St. John also wrote the texts of the Offices of the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts, which were celebrated in a few areas; it was St. Margaret Mary's demand that the Feast of the Sacred Heart be a universal feast, set on the first Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi, as was eventually done.)  Hints of devotion to the Sacred Heart were already arising in France, such as in the writings of Jean de Bernières-Louvigny , but it was St. John who theologically fleshed out the devotion and its rationale.  Among earlier writers he points to is Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle (1575-1629), wit...

I recently ran across a video on a topic that I've been somewhat interested in for a while: the influence of the Desert Fathers on Celtic Christianity.  Below is a talk from Orthodox scholar Fr. Gregory Telepneff on this topic:     Fr. Telepneff also wrote a book on the same theme:  The Egyptian Desert in the Irish Bogs: The Byzantine Character of Early Celtic Monasticism . Other resources on this topic include Connie Marshner's  Monastery and High Cross: The Forgotten Eastern Roots of Irish Christianity  and Robert K. Ritner, Jr.'s "Egyptians in Ireland: A Question of Coptic Peregrinations."

   Introduction The Sacred Heart was not a new concept when it was revealed to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690), though the official consecration and liturgical feast requested through those revelations was new.  A number of St. Margaret Mary's near-contemporaries wrote about the devotion, such as St. John Eudes (1601-1680) and Jean de Bernières-Louvigny (1602-1659).  Bernières was a lay Third Order Franciscan who founded a hermitage in Caen; he also served as a treasurer for the same region, and he provided financial support to the still-young Church in Canada, particularly through his relationship with St. Marie of the Incarnation (1599-1672).  Among his writers, the greatest is the  Interior Christian , published posthumously in 1661.  It was a great favorite of St. Claude La Colombière and others; however, its influence among Catholics fell drastically when Bernières was posthumously condemned as a Quietist in 1689, and his writings placed on...

Introduction One of the requests found in the revelations to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690) was that of a consecration to the Sacred Heart.  Though devotion to the Sacred Heart existed before St. Margaret Mary—perhaps most prominently in her older contemporary, St. John Eudes (1601-1680)—this request for consecration was new.  Even her confessor and spiritual director, St. Claude La Colombière (1641-1682), who was inclined to this devotion, and who came to accept her revelations, seemed to be wary of this consecration at first; yet he did, in time, come to fulfill Our Lord's request.  He probably did not do so in June 1675, when he was with St. Margaret Mary in Paray-le-Monial—at that time, he may have only made the act of reparations, or "honorable amends" ( amende honorable ), also requested by the Lord—but he most likely made his consecration sometime before a spiritual retreat in London in 1677, though it is at the end of his notes from this retreat that his f...

 For ease of reading, I have consolidated three prior posts from Jean Gerson ( Letters on the Espousals of Mary and Joseph , Office of the Espousals , and Matins Readings for the Espousals ) into a single PDF.       Direct Download  

 Francis Jammes (1868-1938) was a French poet and author; I previously published a translation of one of his novels,  The Rosary in the Sun .  Now I have translation an essay of his on poetic theory:  The Poet and Inspiration  (1922).  As an appendix, I have also translated a short manifesto from his early days, "Jammism" (1897).     Direct Download

 Introduction Even a cursed poet can write a holy poem.  Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) was such a poet.  Though much of his life was spent in violence, debauchery, alcoholism, and addiction, he had a brief time when he experienced a return to the faith, while in prison for shooting his lover in the wrist (deemed by the courts "attempted murder").  Most of the poems from this time were published in his 1880 collection  Sagesse (Wisdom) .  The following poem is one such poem, from the time when Verlaine had "prostrated before the long-unknown Altar...adores the All-Good and invokes the Almighty, sworn son of the Church, the last in merits, but full of good will" (Preface to  Sagesse ).  The poem is made of tercets in which lines 1 and 3 are identical, and line 2 unique.  Other than the identical rhymes of lines 1 and 3 of each tercet, no rhyme scheme is involved.  My translation aims at accuracy of meaning rather than any attempt to replicate ...

 Questions to Antiochos and Other Theological Questions  Pseudo-Athanasius Buy the Kindle Edition Here Buy the Kobo Edition Here    It was Luther who made the question-and-answer format popular for catechisms, but it had been used for teaching for centuries before him.  Often, the curious would prepare lists of questions and send them to authorities to answer: so we have a set of  Solution to Thirty-Eight Questions  from St. Hildegard of Bingen, or the set of detailed questions that the Khan of Bulgaria sent to the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople to decide whether he would become Catholic or Orthodox.  (One question queried the sinfulness of wearing trousers.)   This volume consists of a variety of sets of questions, all falsely ascribed to St. Athanasius, but instead probably written in the 7th century.  The sets included are the  Questions to Antiochos , the  Sequential Questions on the Gospels , the  Scrip...

 Introduction I am finishing up a translation of a series of Greek questions-and-answers falsely ascribed to St. Athanasius; at the least the main group of questions (the  Questions to Antiochos ) seem to date from the 7th century.  One group of questions, simply named "Other Questions," goes into detail about the metaphysics of the Trinity and the Incarnation.  Below is an excerpt from Q. 4 of the  Other Questions , discussing how man can understand the Trinity.  I hope to release the full translation of these works soon.      The Sun As An Image of the Trinity Pseudo-Athanasius (c. 7th c.)  Listen with understanding, and you will know the Holy Trinity’s mystery, as far as the mind of men is able to know.  Or, rather, it seems to me, insofar as our words are able to tell.  For God is unexplainable, and, therefore, we cannot comprehend His nature, nor is He, like us, one-personed.  For if He were one-personed, we would kno...

The Byzantine tradition has some beautiful prayers for absolution at the end of the Mystery of Confession or Penance, but I have had trouble finding them online, so I have copied them out here. The simplest, and probably most common, prayer is the following: May our Lord and God, Jesus Christ, through the grace and mercies of His love for us all, forgive you all your transgressions.  And I, an unworthy priest, by His power given to me, forgive and absolve you from all your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  However, the original Byzantine prayer of absolution is the following: God, who forgave David the evil deeds he confessed through Nathan the prophet, who forgave Peter his denial when he wept bitterly, who forgave the sinful woman who shed tears on his feet, and who forgave the publican and the prodigal, may this same God, through me, a sinner, forgive you (Name) both in this age and in the age to come, and make you stand u...

I am nearing completion of a translation of some 7th-century Greek questions-and-answers, falsely ascribed to St. Athanasius.  Most of these answers are short, dedicated to tightly-focused questions: "Some say that infants often die for their parents' sins.  Is it so?"  "Why was God seen by Moses in a bush, and not in another plant?"  "Why, since Christ was circumcised, do we not circumcise ourselves too, like Him?"  There is one set of questions included in my translation, though, that covers Trinitarian theology writ large, with careful metaphysical and theological precision. In translating this last set of questions, I noticed how a grammatical distinction in Latin and Greek changes the understanding of the Holy Spirit's procession.  In the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (as the "Nicene Creed" is more precisely known, since it incorporates additions made at the First Council of Constantinople), the Holy Spirit is described via a chain...

Back in 2011, I prepared a set of reflections for the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary for the use of a prayer group that had a particular focus on Pope St. John Paul II's  Theology of the Body .  They are included below, and an easier-to-read PDF version is available for download at my website .     Reflections on the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary Inspired by the Theology of the Body Prepared by Brandon P. Otto The First Luminous Mystery: The Baptism in the Jordan "Christ sanctified Baptism by being Himself baptized." 1 As we reflect on Christ's Baptism, let us also reflect on our own Baptism and the effect it had in us. Through original sin, we, as men, are "deprived of participation in the Gift, … alienated from the Love that was the source of the original gift, the source of the fullness of good intended for [us]." 2 By the power of Christ's Cross, present in Baptism, we can be free from this deprivation and ali...

 Introduction The little essay below is one I wrote back in 2015, an account of St. Ephraim the Syrian's interpretation of Genesis 3, drawing on his Hymns on Paradise and his Commentary on Genesis .  It is not much more than a synopsis of St. Ephraim's views, but it at least makes those interesting views a little more accessible.   The Battle for Paradise According to St. Ephraim the Syrian “ Joyfully did I embark on the tale of Paradise—a tale that is short to read but rich to explore”: thus did St. Ephraim declare ( Hymns on Paradise 1.3 in Sebastian Brock’s translation), and so it is. In the text of Scripture, men spend little time in the true Paradise (though in Greek a garden like Susannah’s is called “paradise”), yet those few verses are flowing with spiritual milk and honey. Many have explored these passages (as did St. John Paul II in his monumental Theology of the Body ), but here we explain the reading of Ephraim, the Harp of the Holy Spirit. Paradise was ...

I have added a number of old papers to my website.  One of them, "The Marriage Liturgy and the Married Life," is an interesting reflection based on the Byzantine Rite of Crowning; it certainly wasn't for a class, and I don't think I ever attempted publication of it.  (In connection with this essay, one might want to peruse my undergraduate thesis, "The Symbolism of the Mystery of Crowning." )  Most of the rest are old school papers, mostly from my graduate courses: "Θεία νύξ: The Mystical Union as Unknowing in St. Gregory of Nyssa and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite" (2012)  "The History and Legacy of Photios I, Patriarch of Constantinople" (2014) "The Exegetical Principles of Joseph Ratzinger" (2014) "The Spirituality of St. Hildegard of Bingen" (2015) "The Effects of Liturgy on Culture" (2016)  Finally, I have rescued from the abyss of the Internet my very first published writing, "The Best Meani...

  The Clovisiade of Jean-Marie Gabriel Darrodes de Lillebonne  Background By the 1800s, zeal for Christian epics had burned up all its fuel: though long narrative poems were still quite popular (as seen, in English, in Southey, Scott, Tennyson, Longfellow, etc.), the epic style was now outré .  Even by the 1700s, few were hits, besides Klopstock's Der Messias (1748-1773).  The quest to craft a Christian epic was quixotic in the 1800s: even more delusional was the hope that readers would pay for it. Yet such material considerations did not stop Jean-Marie-Gabriel d'Arodes de Lillebonne (1781-1838).  He wrote a few shorter poetic works—some Diverse Little Works (1805), and a book of Odes to the Emperor Napoleon (1806)—but his chief-work was the The Clovisiade, or, The Triumph of Christianity in France .  It was intended as a monumental work of 24 cantos, matching the Iliad or the Odyssey (though still short of Nonnos of Panopolis' 48-canto Dionysiaca );...