Sanctus Deus, sanctus fortis, sanctus immortalis, miserere nobis

Here’s a fascinating liturgical curiosity, courtesy some weird Dutchman named Gerrit Gerritszoon.

I’d love to know if anybody has tried to use this, and/or if anybody has tried to set any of it to music.

On the efficacy of prayers and chemotherapy

My father-in-law, Joe McKamey, was told that if the chemotherapy was working, he’d feel better (despite the chemo itself being debilitating). I will say that when I saw him this last weekend, had I not known he was sick, I don’t think I would have been able to tell — he played drums for three hours at a church picnic on Sunday, and it was only at the very end that he flagged at all.

So, he had bloodwork done on Monday to see how things were going — and the good news is, the chemo is working very aggressively and his body is responding well. At this rate, they think the treatment will get all of it. They’re now talking about having years left, not months. The other side is that while this is a form of pancreatic cancer which is more treatable, it is also prone to recurrence, so he will need to be vigilant moving forward.

I know Joe’s been prayed for by a lot of people. Has that made a difference? As a Christian, I certainly am inclined to think so — and there have been other cases involving prayer, involving my mother, for example, and other people I’ve known, where what seemed to be an open-and-shut scenario turned around remarkably quickly. My sense of things is that when doctors get confused by a recovery, probably there’s more to what’s happening than meets the eye. Joe’s is not necessarily one of those cases, but I will say that he went from having 3-6 months and his wife talking about planning his funeral, to having a more treatable form, to the current state of things within about ten days. No matter which way you cut it, that’s a dramatic reversal.

What are we to make of that? I don’t know. I believe we’re supposed to pray for the sick as a matter of faith and believing that God can work miracles, but I also believe it’s presumptive to assume that He will. The prayer of a righteous man availeth much, but that doesn’t mean it’s a magic spell which binds a supernatural entity to do our bidding, in other words.

All I can say is, I’m mighty thankful, both for everybody’s prayers and the chemotherapy, and I’d say that both are still needed.

All ye saints, pray to God for us!

An announcement that I may have an announcement later

So, I’m going to be deliberately vague about the details because you never totally know what’s going to happen between the moment somebody says, “Yes, this is a good idea, let’s do it” and the time when the ostensibly accepted suggestion is theoretically supposed to be implemented, but it would seem that a couple of pieces which have appeared in this forum are being picked up by a print publication for down the road use. Actually — it might be better to say that a few brain-dump style (let’s be honest) postings here have served as the raw data from which more organized and economical essays were culled, and a certain magazine has indicated that these versions will be run in the near future.

Lest any further misleading impressions be out there, nobody stumbled across my blog and was so impressed that they had no choice but to contact me immediately. Rather, I thought I had some things here which might be appropriate for the publication in question, if I could only find something useful buried under all of those words. Once I had cleared enough of the prolix dust away to have an idea of just what I had, I queried the editor by e-mail and asked if he/she was interested. He/she was, and asked if I might have anything else. I got an e-mail yesterday from this person asking for a short bio to run with the pieces in question, so I think it will happen, but I’ll believe it 100%, and subsequently tell you about it concretely, once I’ve got the actual issue(s) in my hands.

Assuming it happens, hopefully both of you out there reading this will be pleasantly surprised. Regardless — it’s been a nice model of how the query process is supposed to work. I probably shouldn’t get used to it.

Price comparison shopping for Greek textbooks

So, as it works out, I’m taking Modern Greek this fall, and that’s it. I’ve canned further Syriac for the time being — frankly, it’s just tough to justify the time commitment at this point, since I was doing it to prepare for the path of further graduate study, and now that hardly seems likely to come to fruition. I’ve got enough Syriac at this point to be able to bash through texts I’m likely to run into with a dictionary and a grammar; for what I’m likely to need it for going forward — which is what, exactly? — that ought to be fine.

Modern Greek is a little easier to justify. There are people I know now with whom I could speak it. I still very much want to travel in that region, even if it probably isn’t going to be for the purpose of grant-funded research, and there are other reasons it could be useful — such as finding myself someplace where the only church is a Greek-language parish, maybe. (Using that as justification, I acknowledge that Russian, Arabic, and Romanian would also be a good plan from here.)

It also might make asking questions of His All-Holiness about his book a bit easier. (I still have never talked much about that, have I? I’ll have to get around to that someday.)

Anyway — today I ordered my Greek textbooks. The course is using Communicate in Greek by Kleanthis Arvanitakis and Froso Arvanitaki. Rather than just snatch them on a whim from the campus bookstore, I decided to do a little poking around online to see if that was actually going to be the best way to go. Here’s what I came up with:

• Campus bookstore — $103.75 for the first year textbook, workbooks, and CD
• Amazon.com — unavailable, for some unknown reason
• Greece In Print — with shipping, $105.21 for the set
• Direct from the Communicate in Greek website — $99.08 (approximately, since it’s actually priced in euros)

All more or less comparable. At this point it seemed like going direct from the website would be the best way to go — hey, four bucks is four bucks — but the tradeoff was going to be that they were shipping from Greece, and it would be difficult to know for sure that they’d arrive before 2 September.

Then I checked one more place — and as it worked out, Orthodox Marketplace had the whole set, with shipping, for $72.63.

That’s probably the one time it will ever cost less to order from there, but I’ll take it.

“Tell them it’s okay to talk about the cancer”

My uncle George was thought a few weeks ago to have bladder cancer.

Turns out they were wrong.

He has prostate and lung cancer instead. Aggressive cases, too.

I’m hopefully going to get to see him in a couple of weeks. His brother’s son may be the only connection he makes with his brother this side of the parousia.

All of that is to say, if you could sneak in a prayer for George Barrett right after you say one for Joe McKamey, that’d be great. Maybe one for Richard Barrett, elder and younger alike (we’re not senior and junior) while you’re at it.

The Divine Liturgy in English — one last comment (for now)

Many thanks to Esteban Vázquez, proprietor of The Voice of Stefan, who has been kind enough to notice a couple of recent postings.

One last comment about The Divine Liturgy in English for the moment that doesn’t directly have to do with The Divine Liturgy in English — can somebody once and for all clarify what the deal is with the response “Most Holy Theotokos, save us” being chanted during litanies at “Commemorating our most holy, pure, blessed, and glorious Lady, the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary…”? It was something which leapt out at me the very first Divine Liturgy I ever attended because it spoke to a fundamentally non-linear approach to worship, and I’ve been struggling to figure out the rhyme and reason to why some parishes do it, and some don’t. My parish does it, the first couple of parishes I visited did it, it’s done on the Angelopoulos, Mount Lebanon Choir, and Boston Byzantine Choir recordings of the Divine Liturgy, but it was conspicuously absent during the Hierarchical Divine Liturgy which Pope Benedict XVI attended a couple of years ago, and it’s not done on the Cappella Romana disc. It strikes me as a curious omission, given how exhaustive they’ve tried to be otherwise in terms of making sure that this Liturgy is presented as complete. Anybody want to take a stab at clearing this up for me?

Good news (but please don’t stop praying for Joe McKamey)

It took a few days longer than anticipated to gather all the facts, but the bottom line is that my father-in-law has stage 4 pancreatic cancer, and has likely had cancer for perhaps as much as five years. Now, the good news (which we just found out yesterday evening) is that it is a rare form of this cancer which can actually be treatable, and the doctor specifically said, in terms of having X months left or anything like that, we’re not there yet. He has options; he has time. He starts chemo on Monday. My wife has been out there (Seattle) since 31 July; I head out there next weekend.

Keep praying.

The Divine Liturgy in English by Cappella Romana: the review and other thoughts

As someone who has sung in church at a more-or-less professional level for many years and who always had a deep love and appreciation for, shall we say, more historic forms of liturgical music, when I first became aware of Orthodox Christianity it was a very natural instinct for me to seek out this aspect of the faith. The trick here, of course, is that when you don’t know what you’re looking for it’s a bit difficult to find it, but eventually what I found was the Boston Byzantine Choir’s recording of the Divine Liturgy, called Mystical Supper: Byzantine Chant in English. I was quite struck at how similar the approach on this recording sounded to something like Shapenote/Sacred Harp singing, to say nothing just how much of the service was sung rather than spoken. When I told my friend Mark Powell about this, he said simply, “Listen to the Greek Byzantine Choir’s recording of the Divine Liturgy in Greek. Then we’ll talk.” It was not an easy recording to find in the States in 2003; I wound up having to order it from a Canada-based Hellenic specialist, as I recall. (It’s much easier to find these days, at least for the moment. Amazon seems to no longer sell it directly — which has changed from a month ago — which suggests to me that the current pressing is gone, the distributor is out of stock, and whoever has it, has it, whoever doesn’t, doesn’t.) This recording really blew the lid off of my nice, safe, clean world of church singing, and redefined a lot of my expectations. Between that and getting to hear Cappella Romana’s Fall of Constantinople program in the summer of 2004, I began to develop a strong affinity for the Byzantine repertoire.

What I didn’t learn, and what I wouldn’t fully appreciate until I was leading an Orthodox parish choir myself for the first time, from these exposures to Byzantine music — which are, admittedly, highly-idealized “best case scenario” presentations; as one musicologist told me, “Field recordings made at monasteries in Greece don’t sound anywhere close to the Greek Byzantine Choir” — is how divisive the repertoire can be for some people. It is clear that for certain ears, the otherworldly musical characteristics are, to say the least, less transcendent than foreign — “music to whip camels by” and “the nasal-sounding stuff the old man sings before the Divine Liturgy” being among the characterizations I’ve heard. I’ve even heard somebody say that Byzantine music “sounds more like the Muslim call to prayer than Christian singing.” The common assertion appears to be that there’s no way to make Byzantine music sound “friendly” to Western ears — it’s always going to sound like an ethnic import, “too Arabic” or “too Greek” or too something. A related concern is that it’s unison singing (save for the ison, the drone underneath), and Western ears expect four-part harmony as a non-negotiable given, period. It is certainly fair to say that Byzantine music is not appropriate for harmonization; this is for the simple reason that the conventions of four-part harmony are based on a tonal system, and Byzantine music is modal. You can’t harmonize a modal melody according to tonal conventions (i. e., “What Would Bach Do?”) without largely eliminating the distinctives of the given mode (as can be made clear when a new cantor instinctively, but erroneously, assumes that the ison for Byzantine Modes 2 and 4 is supposed to be C/Ne instead of G/Dhi and E/Vou, respectively).

There’s also the more specific complaint that Byzantine music doesn’t play well with English. This is a view shared by some rather visible and influential people; for example, the Preface of Mother Mary and Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware)’s edition of The Festal Menaion (St. Tikhon’s Press, 1969) says the following:

In course of time English-speaking Orthodox will doubtless evolve a musical tradition of their own, which will takes its place alongside those of Greece, Russia, and the other Orthodox nations. As yet, no such tradition has had time to develop: and Orthodox of English language must therefore draw for the present upon some existing musical heritage within Orthodoxy. The best adapted for this purpose seems to be that of Russia. Byzantine chant is too intricate: if it is to be used, then the stress and rhythm of the Greek original must be preserved almost exactly in English translation, and this raises insuperable difficulties. But Russian music is far more flexible; and in particular the simpler Russian monastic chants can easily be adapted to an English text. (p. 13, emphasis mine)

I have to be honest and say that I find this to be an odd claim (and yet one which seems to have influenced the assumptions and thinking of many people since its publication); it seems to me that Byzantine music is far more extensible and expressive when it comes to being adapted to English texts, where many forms of Russian chant, at least as presently used in English adaptation, tend to utterly disrespect the needs and conventions of English. It’s true that in many of the attempts to adapt the Byzantine repertoire to English — Kazan’s Byzantine Project, for example, being the one I use week in, week out — it seems like one winds up with melismas on odd words or emphases on the wrong syllables and so on, but I’d argue only that this means we haven’t perfected the system of adaptation yet (or perfected the English version of the text, for that matter), not that it fundamentally can’t work or that somehow we need to “file the corners off” of Byzantine chant, or in general make it something it isn’t, in order to make it work for English-speakers.

But nonetheless, the assumption is held by many that Byzantine chant fundamentally won’t work for English-language, Western Orthodox folks. The lengths to which some marginalize Byzantine music as being merely one of those pesky, overly ethnic, “little-t traditions” which drive away people who are culturally Western is demonstrated by a recent discussion on the PSALM Yahoo! group which involved speculation as to whether or not use of Byzantine chant might contribute to a decline in attendance in parishes.

Which brings me, at last, to Cappella Romana’s masterful, ground-breaking new release, The Divine Liturgy in English, which serves as the definitive response to all of these concerns, providing a fantastic model to emulate, transparency enough in the process to make it replicable, and, for the foreseeable future, the standard to meet for liturgical singing.

This is the recording of Byzantine chant in English which says, “Yes, we can.” This is the CD which you will see wearing black body armor and fighting off Rottweilers on an IMAX screen and telling Michael Caine, “Byzantine chant in English has no limits.”

Several years in the making and part of Cappella Romana’s “Excellence in Orthodox Liturgical Music in English” project — which includes the delightful Lay Aside All Earthly Cares, a collection of the liturgical music of Fr. Sergei Glagolev, which I’ll say more about shortly, and a future release of a Divine Liturgy setting by Peter Michaelides — this 2-disc set represents the monumental effort of adapting the traditional Byzantine repertoire so that it fits the English language idiomatically, often recomposing melodies from scratch in order to match the text. Conducted by Artistic Director Alexander Lingas, these settings are presented in a natural church acoustic, using native English speakers, and in their proper liturgical context, with Archimandrite Meletios (Webber) and Dn. John Chryssavgis serving as the clergy. The result is at once prayerful and phenomenally well-sung, full, rich, and in tune, and entirely Byzantine in character while never straying from understandable, natural-sounding English. It is ecclesiastical ensemble singing of the highest order, easily ranking with the recordings of Lycourgos Angelopoulos and the Greek Byzantine Choir, as well as with the best of English-language recordings of liturgical music such as those by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge.

Because it is a Divine Liturgy entirely sung in one musical idiom, and therefore comes across as a seamless garment of whole cloth as it were, it is difficult, if not inappropriate, to make critiques of particular sections, so I’m not going to do that. I would say that the best way to get a sense of exactly what has been accomplished with this recording is to become familiar with a recording of the traditional Greek repertoire such as Angelopoulos’, getting a sense for the function and aesthetic which govern hymns such as the Trisagion or the Cherubikon, and then to listen to this recording and hear how those principles are maintained in the English language adaptation. The exact notes of the Greek versions are not preserved because they’ve applied the Byzantine compositional process to the English text, not simply slapped the existing Byzantine melody over the English text and then figured out how to make the syllables fit. The result is a new melody which is completely faithful to the spirit of the model and the conventions of Byzantine music, and fits the English text like a glove at the same time. These adaptations — which Cappella Romana are publishing on their website in both Byzantine and Western notation — range from simple and syllabic (such as the troparia and the Anaphora) to florid and melismatic (the Dynamis of the Trisagion, the Cherubic Hymn), according to the rubrics and intended liturgical function. The booklet credits John Boyer, Protopsaltis of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of San Francisco, with much of the work of adapting of the chants, and his sensitivity to the English text while maintaining the Byzantine ethos is to be highly commended.

Let’s be clear — The Divine Liturgy in English is not intended as a musicological curiosity for specialists, but rather as a practical liturgical model for the wider Church. In other words, this is meant to be a clear demonstration of how we can do things now, not an obscure example of how some people used to do it. As such, the set presents a complete Divine Liturgy as would be found on a typical, non-festal Sunday after Pentecost (a “vanilla Sunday” as some choir directors jokingly call it). This includes the celebrant’s spoken prayers, the Epistle and the Gospel, as well as the full Alleluia and Prokeimenon with verses — only a homily is omitted. (An argument can be made that the way they’ve harmonized the various Typika, they’ve in fact left some things out such as the Beatitudes, but this is addressed in the liner notes.)

Among the many delights of this recording is the text. The official translation of the Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain is used, the product of a panel involving scholars and clergy such as Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash), Metropolitan Kallistos, and Fr. Andrew Louth. Certain renderings are initially unfamiliar — in particular, the use of “Mother of God” instead of Theotokos, and “Holy Strong” in the Trisagion — but It is nonetheless a wonderful translation which adheres quite closely to the Greek text. The booklet includes a helpful essay by Archimandrite Ephrem about the methodology and pastoral principles guiding the Thyateira translation. ”Holy Strong” is arguably closer to the actual meaning of the Greek text than “Holy Mighty,” despite the English tradition of the text; see this paper for a thorough look at translating the hymn. I would have liked the “Mother of God” usage to have been addressed in the liner notes; as it is, it is unclear why the Greek word Theotokos, surely standard usage for English-speaking Orthodox by now, is not retained when Greek words such as Dynamis are. Such questions aside, the Thyateira text is an incredible effort which would ideally influence future undertakings of the translation of liturgical texts. 

I will admit to being somewhat puzzled as to why, given the clearly considerable vocal resources Cappella Romana has at its disposal, antiphonal choirs were not used; the liner notes say that “some elements of of the traditional interchange between two choirs are preserved through the use of alternating soloists”, but this strikes me as an unnecessary reduction given everything else they go out of their way to achieve on the recording.

Another major plus of this recording is something which actually isn’t sung — it includes the entire ensemble speaking the Creed and Lord’s Prayer with conviction. This is sadly lacking on the Mount Lebanon Choir recording, where one guy limply reading the prayers into a microphone is too-obviously spliced in after the fact.

Can the musical level achieved on this set, and/or the acoustic in which it was recorded, truly be seen as practical or normative? To be sure, the kind of training needed to meet this standard is not yet widely available in the United States, and many parishes do not have the resources to either provide such musical instruction or to give attention to proper acoustics in their building design. Nonetheless, The Divine Liturgy in English should be understood as a presentation of the “best-case scenario” to which liturgical singers may aspire. As well, Lingas opts for an all-male ensemble — the traditional arrangement, certainly, but unlikely to be the pastoral reality in most places.

The Divine Liturgy in English also shows the way for future adaptations of other Orthodox liturgical music into English, not just Byzantine. To slavishly preserve music written for a different language when adapting it to English is to miss the point of adaptation; that approach does violence to the language and, eventually, the music as well. Rather, those who would adapt the chants for use in a different language must understand the principles which guided the composition in the first place, and then apply those to the new text, while preserving the spirit of the original as much as possible. The music on the previously-mentioned disc of Fr. Sergei Glagolev’s liturgical settings — I said I’d get back to him, didn’t I? — demonstrates his own mastery of how this works for music in a Russian idiom; it is identifiably Slavic in terms of musical character, while still being sung, and sung well, in natural-sounding English in a way which does not obscure the meaning of the text. Perhaps with both the Glagolev settings as well these Byzantine adaptations, one inevitably runs into the objection, “Nobody knows them!” That will simply take time to overcome.

Cappella Romana’s recording is no less than a gift to the English-speaking Orthodox world which will inspire and instruct. Thyateira’s Archbishop Gregorios writes in the liner notes that The Divine Liturgy in English is intended to “increase the understanding and appreciation of both the spirituality of Orthodox worship and the heights of musical expression to which its chanting aspires”; this it does stunningly well. Highly recommended (in case that wasn’t clear by now).

“The image of Christ according to Theodore the Studite” by Fr. John Meyendorff (part 1 of 2)

This was my final project for the French reading knowledge class I took this summer. It is a short essay Fr. John Meyendorff wrote for a book entitled Synthronon: Art et Archéologie de la fin de l’Antiquité et du Moyen Age (Paris: Libraire C. Klincksieck, 1968). I’ve seen it cited before, but to the best of my knowledge it has never been translated into English. This is the first half; the second half is forthcoming. Numbered footnotes are Meyendorff’s; cross notes are mine (usually a comment, for the sake of the instructor, as to why I chose to translate something the way I did, in at least one occasion in response to his remarks on an early draft).
–

Nowhere other than in Byzantium has the problem of Christian art sparked off a purely theological debate. The Christian, and non-Christian, philosophers often discussed the religious implications of art and, conversely, were able to establish that the religious sentiment is inseparable from an aesthetic experience. In Byzantium, however, during the course of the long Iconoclast controversy, the problem acquired straightaway a whole other dimension and effort of thought and of expression which the adversaries of images, as well as their defenders, provided, and which left a deep mark on Byzantine art. For the Byzantine, the icon became at the time a confession of faith and a quasi-sacramental presence, and “the Christian doctrine was left enriched by the Iconoclast crisis.”[1]

The debate concerned, first of all, the very nature of the “image.” The cultural, psychological, and social elements which contributed, within Christianity, to the formation of an “iconoclast” tradition and an “iconodule” tradition, in the centuries which preceded the crisis, were resolved through a philosophical problem: was the image a suitable representation of the prototype, “consubstantial” with it, or, by contrast, was it only a crude form, only fitting to distract the intellect and to divert its natural enthusiasm towards the Invisible? But this philosophical problem itself depended on a precondition: the nature of the Protoype. If, for a Jew and a Muslim, God is essentially invisible and one could not therefore make an image of Him, is it the same for a Christian who believes that “the Word became flesh”?

Thus it is that, from the third century, until the age when the problem of religious images began to be debated between the Neo-Platonists Celsus and Porphyry on one side, and, on the other side, the Christian apologists who attacked pagan idolatry, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation of the Word found itself at the center of the debate. Accused of idolatry by the Christians, the Neo-Platonists proceeded to the counterattack:

If some Greeks (writes Porphyry) are so weak of mind as to believe that gods live inside of idols, their thought remains rather more pure than the thought of these (Christians) who believe that the Divine entered the bosom of the Virgin Mary, became a fetus, was begotten and wrapped in linens, full of blood, of tissue, of bile and of things even more base.[2]

The contemptuous tone set aside, the argument of Porphyry was not lacking in gravity: if the Christian faith was founded on the historic fact of the Incarnation, there was no longer a question for the Christians of despising matter. Consequently, a recent historian was able to write:

There came a moment, between the third and the fifth centuries, when the Christians adopted (in the problem of images) the pagan arguments.[3]

Certainly not in order to restore idolatry, but in order to say that the images, within Christianity, were genuinely able to be suitable to the Prototype, since the Object of Christian worship is the Word Incarnate, a visible and circumscribable† reality.

From the beginning of the Iconoclast quarrel itself, the Orthodox recalled this argument. Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople, writes, for example:

This is in memory eternal of the life in the flesh of Our Lord Jesus Christ, of his passion, of his salvific death and of the redemption for the world which resulted, that we have received the tradition of the depiction of his human body, that is to say his visible theophany, understanding well that by it we glorify the humiliation of God the Word.[4]

The Iconoclasts responded by elaborating their own Christological argument: Christ is at once God and man; he possesses, therefore, two natures, which the Council of Chalcedon (451) declared to be united “without mixture, without transformation, without division, without separation”; in rendering the image of Christ, does the iconographer depict the humanity of Christ? But then he “separates” the humanity from the Divinity and becomes guilty of Nestorianism. Does he represent at once the two natures? If such is his claim, it is not possible to avoid saying that he represents “God” himself, he who is inconceivable.[5] The union of the two natures makes, therefore, according to the iconoclasts, a “suitable” image of Christ impossible.

This iconoclast Christology necessitated a response from the orthodox side. This response would be worked out by theologians from the beginning of the ninth century, the patriarch Nicephorus and Saint Theodore the Studite. While continuing the debate regarding the notion of the “image” and the educational value of Christian art, they developed the argument which, for them, was certainly decisive: Jesus was truly man, visible, therefore “circumscribable” (περιγραπτός),† and the Council of Chalcedon, while defining the union of the natures, had specified that “each of them (the natures) retained its proper manner of being.”[6] Being circumscribable constitutes a character proper to humanity: no man could be deprived of it without ceasing to be man; thus, according to Theodore the Studite, “Christ would not be Christ, if he could not be depicted.”[7] This new insistence regarding the fully real humanity of Jesus certainly contributed to the turnaround of the dominant tendency for Byzantium, since the age of Justinian, to favor exclusively the Alexandrian Christology and to exclude the Antiochene heritage, in which it had something eminently positive: the vision of the Christ-Man.†

---

[1] A. Grabar, L’Iconoclasme Byzantin. Dossier Archéologique, Paris, 1957, p. 5.

[2] Against the Christians, fragment 77, ed. A. Harnack, in Abhandlungen der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1916, p. 93.

[3] P. J. Alexander, The Patriarch Nicephorus, Oxford, 1958, p. 33.

† See following note.

[4] De Haeresibus et synodis, P. G. 98, col. 80 A. In one his first articles devoted to iconoclasm, G. Ostrogorsky drew attention to the central character of the Christological argument, “Soedinenie voprose o sviatykh ikonah s khristologicheskoi dogmatikoi”, in Seminarium Kondakovianum, I, 1927, pp. 35-48.

[5] Mansi, Collectio Conciliorum, XIII, col. 252 AB; 256 AB; for a recent analysis of the arguments of the iconoclast council of 754, see M. Anastos, “The argument for iconoclasm as presented by the iconoclastic council of 754”, in Late Classical and Medieval Studies in Honor of A. M. Friend, Jr., Princeton, 1955, pp. 177-188.

† The French word Meyendorff uses, descriptible, is translated in most dictionaries as “describable” or “representable”; as he is using the word to translate the Greek word περιγραπτός, a technical term in the Iconoclastic controversy for which the proper English translation is “circumscribable,” I have translated the Greek term in both instances of descriptible rather than translating Meyendorff’s translation.

[6] Mansi, Collectio, VII, col. 116.

[7]Χριστὸς οὐ Χριστὸς εἰ μῂ ἐγγράφοιτο, Antirrh. III, 1, P. G., 99, col. 389.

† Consulting this author’s works in English on similar topics, “Christ-Man” is a term used a number of times, and it appears unlikely that “Man-Christ” is what he intends here. See, for example, Meyendorff, Living Tradition, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975, p. 180.

Prayers for Joe McKamey, please

I’d appreciate any prayers anybody might feel inclined to offer for my father-in-law, Joe McKamey. I’ll explain a bit more towards the beginning of next week or thereabouts. Many thanks.