Books for Bulgaria and a Panikhida

Today, the third anniversary of my father's death, the community of St. Bede and St. Cuthbert Orthodox Church in Durham held a panikhida in his memory. Here are gathered Father Andrew Louth (formerly of the Department of Theology and Religion), Dr. Krastu Banev and his family, Deyan Petrov and my wife Jennifer and myself.

With the kind assistance of Deyan and Krastu, my father's entire patristic collection was catalogued over the past few months and this week shipped to Bulgaria where it will enhance the collections of the University of Sofia. My father was ever committed to the principle that his books should endow an institution that was in genuine need of books and would make good use of them. Given his long association with Eastern Orthodoxy through the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, I believe he would have approved that his collection, built up over more than fifty years, should find its home in the vicinity of Constantinople. Below the collection stands ready for dispatch on May 16.

Update: May 25, 2016

The books have now arrived at the Patristic Library of the Library of Theology Faculty at Sofia University.

Gerald Bonner: A Life Well Lived

Gerald wrote in his will: I desire that I be buried according to the rites of the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 . . . with a celebration of the Holy Communion and without any eulogy or encomium though I ask for the prayers of my friends. His family wanted to do as he wished, but funerals are also for the living, and we want to celebrate all Gerald was and did, so we have put together this necessarily incomplete tribute.

********************************* 

He made you feel honored when he spoke to you, even when you felt you weren’t really deserving of such honour. The verdict of the last clergyman to minister to his spiritual needs embodies the life of Gerald Bonner, a life that transported him from the pre-World War II London borough of Haringey to a distinguished visiting professorship at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC.

The child of an ex-Indian Army officer and a London County Council primary schoolteacher, Gerald was called upon to take up responsibilities at an early age following the premature death of his father. His dedication to repaying the sacrifices of the mother who raised him and to caring for his younger brother Nigel stayed with him throughout his life and he held in high regard the person of Father Damien, the Roman Catholic priest who gave his life for the lepers of Molokai.

A scholarship boy at the Stationers School, he joined the Army in 1944 and saw postwar service with the King’s Dragoon Guards in Palestine. In 2011, when the uprising against Colonel Gadaffi was in its formative stages, he recalled how the troopship carrying him home had docked at a “one-camel hamlet” called Misuratah. After demobilization, he went up to Oxford for three years of study at Wadham College (1949-1952), which he often remarked would have been impossible without the university grant for ex-servicemen.

From Oxford, he entered into service at the British Museum, where he would serve as a keeper of manuscripts for over a decade. During these years he demonstrated a zeal for independent scholarship that led to the publication of his seminal study of St. Augustine of Hippo in 1963. He was also an enthusiastic participant in the work of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, building connections with prominent Anglican and Orthodox churchmen. He spoke regularly at the Fellowship’s annual conference, and was an irrepressible teller of anecdotes at the Entertainment on the final evening.

In the mid-1960s, at the instigation of Professor Hugh Turner, Gerald was invited to Durham to join the Theology Department, where he served as the resident historian among a group of theologians. For many years he carried the burden of teaching church history from the patristic era to the present day. He started courses on Augustine of Hippo, and also on St. Cuthbert and St. Bede, as he felt it wrong that, at that time, nobody in the Theology or History Departments was working academically on the two northern saints whose mortal remains lay in the Cathedral.

Gerald organised a conference on Bede in 1973, attended by around ninety scholars from many countries, and later edited the proceedings under the title Famulus Christi. Bede was also the subject of Gerald’s 1966 Jarrow Lecture, and of his Cathedral Lecture in 1970; more recently, he suggested, at the request of Canon Jones, the text to be put above Bede’s tomb. The guides tell us that this text is an inspiration to visitors and pilgrims at the Cathedral, some even making return visits to pay their devotion. In 1986, David Rollason, Clare Stancliffe and Gerald collaborated in organizing a conference on Cuthbert, and although Gerald felt that his own contribution to this was small, David has written very appreciatively of the help he gave.

Retiring early in order to guarantee that a successor would be appointed, he was granted a new lease of academic life with his selection as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Early Christian Studies at the Catholic University of America (1990-1994). Here he found a community that valued his gifts and students who represented an academic crème de la crème. CUA knew his calibre and set an appropriate value on it. Five years later, Villanova University (a Catholic institution near Philadelphia, where he had delivered an Augustinian lecture in 1970) offered him a semester’s teaching that proved equally rewarding.

He taught several summer schools at Nashotah House Seminary in Wisconsin, following in the footsteps of Michael Ramsey; and was an invited lecturer at academic institutions from Vancouver to Rome, with many places in between. His reputation as an international authority on Augustine was further demonstrated by requests to contribute so many articles to the mammoth Augustinus Lexikon, though he remarked that he was unlikely to be around when the article on Zosimus was needed!

Gerald’s book on Augustine has since been reprinted in paperback; and some of his many articles on Augustine, Bede, Cuthbert, and early church controversies, have been published as collected volumes. A further volume was planned, but his deteriorating health prevented this. He was very touched to be honoured with a Festschrift edited by Augustinian friends in Rome.

As well as his writing, Gerald was always generous with help and encouragement to students, colleagues and friends. A young Austrian scholar who was attempting to catalogue all the Augustinian manuscripts in English libraries found the task taking longer than expected. Gerald responded by spending several days in Salisbury Cathedral library that summer, and several at Holkham Hall in the depths of a very cold winter, to help out in the cataloguing. He welcomed all comers, and was only too glad to share information and insights; he was ‘given to hospitality,’ whether in welcoming new members of staff, entertaining visiting colleagues, or simply bringing old and new friends together for the pleasure of their company. Some will remember him enthusiastically stoking the bonfire and letting off fireworks at our annual bonfire party, whose participants ranged in age from ten weeks to their early nineties.

Gerald eschewed the combative enthusiasm of many Anglican conservatives, but he never allowed that to impede his deeply held convictions. He was deeply committed to upholding the sanctity of life, speaking and writing to that effect in the public arena. In 1994, after the narrow vote by the General Synod in favor of the ordination of women, he long agonised about his decision not to take up his seat in General Synod in order to accept an American professorship. Convinced of the unwisdom of a decision which might impede the reunification of Catholic Christendom, he had trouble accepting that his presence would not have changed the outcome.

He remained a devoted Anglican, being a regular worshipper both at the Cathedral and here at his parish church, where he was a Server at the early morning communion services until infirmity made this impossible. He was always ready to help in any way he could, and one year, when the then vicar was particularly overstretched, Gerald took the weekly service at the Low Newton Remand Centre, doing everything himself, taking the service, giving an address and playing the piano for the hymns.

Gerald was a man of deep learning and powerful convictions, who made it a point never to neglect contact with those he knew. He kept up a regular correspondence with family and friends and his letters were by turns entertaining and profound. In many ways a pessimist (a preoccupation with Augustine’s theology could hardly have made him anything else) and with a private side that even those closest to him could not touch, he nevertheless loved his wife, his children and grandchildren, and the many friends he made over a lifetime that saw his world change out of all recognition. If his loss is grievous to us all for a little while, those whose lives he touched have but to follow the example that he set for them.

He used to say that the Dies Irae, with its emphasis on sin and judgement, was the only suitable hymn for a funeral: but he touched many lives for good, and we pray that his sins may be forgiven and his love and kindness remembered. May he rest in peace, and may light perpetual shine upon him.

********************************* 

We would like to say how grateful we are to all the staff at Melbury Court, where Gerald spent the last five months of his life. They cared for him so well, and with such kindness and consideration, and gave such support to us as well. He couldn’t have been better looked after, and we are so grateful for all they did.

********************************* 

There have been so many loving tributes to him in the letters that we have received that we wish there was space to give them all: 

Gerald was always a gallant gentleman among academics, a link with a world that has passed I think, a world of high principle, courageous views, and scholarship untainted by the modern grab-every-opportunity-you-can. 

It is [Gerald’s] capacity for forgiveness and reconciliation that is above all etched on my mind whenever I think of him . . . [He] was a great-hearted man; just to think of him puts me in fuller touch with the sense of the love of God that is the foundation of life itself. 

I had many conversations with Gerald over the years, mostly on the road to and from St. Cuthbert’s, and invariably found him engaging company . . . I shall remember him as he was, with his good-humoured and ironic acceptance of the odd ways of the world. 

He was always such a good raconteur. We shall remember him as a lively and knowledgeable teacher who brought fun to the lecture room. 

Gerald was a great man and a great scholar. For me, he was a humbling inspiration to whom I owe more than I can say. 

Even though I was never a great fan of Augustine of Hippo, I received from Gerald warmth and encouragement for which I am ever grateful. I will look back fondly on his contribution to my life, a contribution that extended well beyond any immediate academic involvement. He was a wonderful scholar and a true mentor. 

[Gerald] was always so kind and encouraging to me in my academic work; and a good friend who will be much missed. 

Gerald was an enormously faithful friend over the years since Oxford days. There must be many, many people whom his friendship and goodness have touched. 

His life goes on through his immense scholarly achievement and the inspiration and care he gave to his students and postgraduates. I remember with special gratitude and affection his genial kindness to a very half-baked young librarian, when I first came to Durham, and his ready help with any enquiry. 

[He] took an interest in and had a kind word for “new hands” . . . What impresses me is not only Gerald’s own learning but also his humility and humanity – the work of a truly great scholar, to which his many publications bear eloquent testimony. 

One of my earliest memories, as a very small child, was Gerald giving me a model Rolls Royce, powered by batteries - an inspired gift that few would have made for a little girl in the 1950s. I went on to make model ships, build Bayco houses, and eventually drive a tank! I still have the atlas Gerald gave me on my twelfth birthday and although many countries have changed their names and boundaries, it is a much loved book and I use it frequently. 

He was a lovely man and will be dearly missed.

In Memoriam: Gerald Bonner, 18 June 1926-22 May 2013

Thou Hast Made Us For Thyself And Our Heart Is Restless Until We Rest In Thee

(St. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, Book 1)

Yesterday, in his eighty-seventh year, my father Gerald Bonner passed to his heavenly reward surrounded by his loving family and in the City of Durham that had been his home for so many years. Funeral arrangements are pending.

Husband, Father, Friend and Scholar, he has touched the lives of many, both in Europe and North America.

His earthly journey has ended but his reception among the Redeemed (while observing all the Anglican proprieties) will be a joyful one.

Requiescat In Pace    

I Have Fought The Good Fight, I Have Finished The Race, I Have Kept The Faith

(St. Paul, Second Epistle to Timothy, 4:7)

Holy War, Unholy Peace: The Chalcedonian Compromise and the Decline of Christianity in the Middle East

Review: Philip Jenkins, Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years. New York: HarperOne, 2010.

When Philip Jenkins first published The Next Christendom in 2002, it swiftly achieved cult status thanks to its prescient vision of the shifting center of gravity of global Christianity from the industrialized First World to the rapidly expanding nations of the Global South. Eight years on, and after the publication of such works as The New Faces of Christianity (2006) and The Lost History of Christianity (2008), Jenkins has chosen for his subject the narrower canvas of a Fifth Century Christian world menaced from without by the Hunic and Vandal hordes and subverted from within by frenzied doctrinal disputes over the human and divine natures of Christ that pitted the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Rome against one another. The failure of the theological compromise engineered at the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) to reconcile followers of the Monophysite (One Nature) school – centered on Alexandria – to Catholic Christianity set the stage for the withdrawal of members of some of the oldest Christian churches in Syria and Egypt to ultimate eclipse under the suzerainty of an emerging Islamic state that was willing to afford them religious toleration in exchange for political submission. This, as Jenkins soberingly puts it in his penultimate chapter, is “How the Church Lost Half the World.”

Jenkins’ approach concedes the importance of historical contingency. While the vocabulary of the Catholic West has been shaped by the assumption that Chalcedon was a decisive rebuke to the pretensions of Alexandria and the beginning of the inevitable ascendancy of a “Two Nature” understanding of the person of Christ, Jenkins argues that such ascendancy was far from inevitable. Monophysite theology endured throughout the East, even when Chalcedonian-inclined emperors deposed hostile bishops and imposed episcopal overseers more to their liking. Furthermore, the ecclesiastical history of the Fifth Century, as retold by Jenkins, relegates the Roman primacy to a relatively humble position in the struggle, with few occupants of that office – aside from Leo the Great –enjoying the status of the eastern patriarchates. Yet historical contingency goes only so far. “In one sense,” writes Jenkins, “ancient Christians were exactly right to be so passionate about their causes, if not the means by which they pursued them. Far from being philosophical niceties, the central themes in the religious debates really were critical to the definition of Christianity and to the ways in which the faith would develop over the coming centuries. The Christ controversies did, and do, have immense consequences, for culture and politics as much as for religion.” (2-3)

American – and for that matter English – readers will find aspects of the story to have a contemporary ring, a fact to which Jenkins does not fail to allude (15-16). The eclipse of Alexandria and Antioch, he notes, ensured that the church-state alliance promoted by the western Church would become the model for world Christianity, while the Chalcedonian-Monophysite cleavage ensured that Islam would face little resistance in the lands of Christianity’s birth. While the heated nature of theological debate is all too evident today, the lengths to which the protagonists are willing to go in defense of their position are, thankfully, absent. And yet there is a very real irony in discovering that the forerunners of those who today argue for theological pluralism and the free exchange of ideas were more likely to be found within the imperial administration than among ecclesiastical officeholders. For the leaders of the Church, the preservation – at least on paper – of the ideal of an undivided Church left no room for those whose views were, frequently temporarily, in the minority.

The struggle that faced the Fifth Century Church, Jenkins argues, was not over whether Jesus should be considered divine – that had been resolved at Nicaea – but preventing him from becoming “entirely God.” (19) It was, however, a struggle lacking defined processes, and “the councils were marked by name-calling and backstabbing (both figurative and literal), by ruthless plotting and backstairs cabals, and by the pervasive threat of intimidation.” (22) Such debacles as the infamous Second Council of Ephesus of AD 449 (the “Gangster Synod”) offer a less than happy picture of Christian deliberation. The parade of mutual anathemas, depositions and vigilante ‘justice’ which characterize the era from First Nicea (AD 325) to Chalcedon (AD 451) and beyond is far removed from what we often conceive of as the Early Church. Here one arguably finds the second modern-day comparison, since Jenkins argues that the religiously-inspired instability and violence of the period reflect the increasing inability of the state to regulate private violence. While his assertion that violence is no more in the DNA of Islam than it was in Fifth Century Christianity (30) will be controversial, those Monophysite monks who razed pagan temples, assaulted imperial officials and threatened recalcitrant bishops present unhappy testimony to the mood of the times.

Theology, as Jenkins points out, can be a singularly elusive discipline and at times one could be forgiven for thinking that the distinctions served purely as cover for ecclesiastical political maneuvering. And yet the conflict embodied a very real difference in outlook. Between the poles of an Alexandrian church that celebrated the hypostatic union of the human and divine natures of Christ such that the human elements were subsumed in the divine and an Antiochian church that favored notions of the Logos-sax, or the assumption by Christ of a fully human status, lay a grey area that would provide the basis for depositions of patriarchs and bishops. (51-53) Much of the theological language involved subtle distinctions that made misunderstanding and misrepresentation all too easy.

For Alexandria, with its Greek influences and powerful monastic tradition, the age seemed to offer its patriarchs the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of Athanasius, who had triumphed over the Arians at Nicea, and propagandize the rest of the Christian world. As the secular Roman world trembled from the onslaughts of the pagans and Arian Christians, Cyril of Alexandria carried the day against Constantinople’s Nestorius (a product of Antioch), for the offense of questioning the title of the Virgin Mary as Theotokos (God-bearer), and with the backing of the Emperor Theodosius II oversaw his deposition at the First Council of Ephesus in AD 431. Eighteen years later, the aforementioned Gangster Synod marked the high tide of the crusade against Antioch by Cyril’s successor Eutyches in a council, which, even by contemporary standards, had more the characteristics of a kangaroo court than a synod of bishops, with critics even prevented from taking notes of the proceedings. (187-192)

The death of Theodosius II in AD 450 paved the way for the Council of Chalcedon and the reversal of Alexandria’s run of success. The new emperor Marcian’s sympathies were with the opponents of Eutyches, as were those of Pope Leo. Chalcedon accepted the condemnation of “Nestorianism” (which did not necessarily correspond with the beliefs of its purported founder) at First Ephesus, but rejected the deliberations of Second Ephesus – and its depositions of those who opposed its teaching – in favor of the “in two natures” formula that later came to inform the wording of the Athanasian Creed. (212-214) As a compromise, however, it represented a distinct shift away from the Alexandrian position and one which many Egyptian Christians profoundly resented. From that date, Egypt would begin a process of steady disassociation, while Antioch – hitherto a bastion of Two-Nature theology – would witness the triumph of the Monophysite party in AD 469. Though the imperial authorities would struggle on for another 200 years, their ability to marry the aims of state and church was increasingly constrained. Quoting the contemporary historian Evagrius on the situation in AD 500, Jenkins strikes a surprisingly familiar note:

the Eastern bishops had no friendly intercourse with those of the West and Africa, nor the latter with those of the East. The evil too became still more monstrous, for neither did the presidents of the eastern churches allow communion among themselves, nor yet those who held the sees of Europe and Africa, much less with those of remote parts. (243)

What lessons, then, can we draw from this narrative? Humility, perhaps, about the inevitability of salvation history. Not that God has no purpose, but that the Church often gropes haphazardly towards divine design. At the same time, however, Chalcedon may be seen as the working out of Divine Providence precisely because at the time it seemed so far from inevitable – a political compromise effected against the reality of Monophysite strength throughout the eastern churches. “Somehow, amazingly, the church preserved its belief that Christ was human as well as God. And today, that belief is the standard, official doctrine for the vast majority of Christian institutions – all Catholic and Orthodox believers as well as virtually all Protestants.” (270)

Jesus Wars packs a great deal into less than 300 pages. It comes well supplied with appendices that provide details on the various councils, doctrinal debates and principal protagonists that are helpful to non-specialist and specialist alike. It has much to teach about the process of theological debate and disagreement and cautionary warnings both to those who glorify consensus and those inclined to view every theological battle as one to be fought to the bitter end. The questions are not new; it is the story of salvation history that is ever-changing.