Four resources and an essay

In sliding down the 'web, I've found several items that may be of value to a number of people.

In particular, I have begun a conversation with Daniel Muller, who really should start his own web page, if he hasn't already. In the course of that conversation, we have both decried the lack of learning in Latin and Greek which is present among Catholic bishops. I suppose it ridiculous to ask them to start learning, when we ourselves do not, and so I've been looking into ways of correcting that. One means of correction is a marvelous resource for obtaining free public domain latin and greek primers, grammars, courses in Homeric, Attic, Septuagint, and NT Greek, and many translations of classical texts.

I also found a central web page for learning Classical, NT and Modern Greek, as well as a lovely online course for modern Greek, with wav. and mp3 files of vocabulary and dialogue.

Finally, while reading through The Recovering Choir Director's webpage, I found an excellent set of links for those interested in Roman Catholic liturgical studies. While perusing that excellent list of links, I found an essay by the eminent Eastern liturgical scholar Fr. Robert Taft, S.J., published by that Sterling Silliphant of Catholic (We)blogdom and all around dear soul, Gerard Serafin, at his web site, which itself is worth reading, along with his weblog.

The essay is basically an analysis of the Byzantine liturgical tradition, and its value of itself and to the west. It is perhaps the most reasoned and perceptive critique of Byzantine liturgy that I have ever seen, showing its strengths, but also, its weaknesses. But he also gives an encomium of Western traditional spirituality that I have not seen before, and recommendations which I think are quite appropriate. I have taken the liberty of quoting the last portion of that essay, and giving emphasis to particular sections of it:

Let us rediscover where we came from before it is too late. The west does not need to turn east, nor does it need to return to a medieval or Tridentine past. It needs to return to its roots. Latin Christianity is just as apostolic, ancient, traditional, patristic, spiritual and monastic as that of the east. I am not really convinced all Catholics know and believe this.

That does not mean we have nothing to learn from the east. One can learn from everyone. If the eastern churches are beginning only now to face the problems of modernity, it is the fault of the circumstances in which these churches have been forced to live, either as minority confessions in an at-best tolerant Islamic world, or for the past three generations under Communist persecution.

But it would be wrong to think that eastern Christianity does not have within itself the spiritual means to cope with modernity. As we have seen, eastern liturgy--and liturgy is simply the mirror to eastern Christianity's inner world--has preserved from the storehouse of its past elements that are not only desperately needed, but also of great appeal to modern men and women: an attachment and profound rootedness in what is best in its own past; a deeply reverential spirit; a sense of the utter transcendence and holiness of God; a high Christology; the only truly integral and effective pneumatology in Christian history; an emphasis on the local church; and the consequent synodal or sobornal structure of church koinonia and governance.

But the east also needs the modern and typically "western" virtues of flexibility; the ability to cope with change as a law of our modern culture; objectivity, openness, fairness, self-criticism; and a sense of the unity of modern global culture in which no one is or can remain an island. If Christianity is to survive as a viable lifestyle attractive to modern men and women, it will not be as an obscurantist, anti-intellectual culture of folklore and ritualism, sustained by the rejection of modernity and change.

This is true for all of us: the choice is there for those able to make it. In the meantime, what the west needs to do is not turn nostalgically to the east for solutions to its own problems, but to penetrate once again into the riches of its own storehouse, to bring out from it things both old and new. A Christian culture that produced Chartres and Mont Saint Michel, Cyprian, Augustine and Cassian, Benedictine monasticism and Citeaux, Francis of Assisi and Dominic, Ignatius of Loyola, John of the Cross, Charles de Foucauld, the two Saint T(h)eresas and Mother Teresa, and Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II, does not have to apologize to or imitate anybody except Jesus Christ.