The Authority of Nasrudin

I've just posted at The Other Place on Nasrudin, the Muslim comic hero whose stories also pervade Greece and Cyprus. I finished my post there with a Nasrudin joke from Wikipedia, which I chose to render in Ancient Greek (and in the process forget the declension of "this".) Here's the joke again:

A neighbour comes to the gate of Mulla Nasrudin's yard. The Mulla goes out to meet him outside.
"Would you mind, Mulla," the neighbour asks, "lending me your donkey today? I have some goods to transport to the next town."
The Mulla doesn't feel inclined to lend out the animal to that particular man, however; so, not to seem rude, he answers:
"I'm sorry, but I've already lent him to somebody else."
Suddenly the donkey can be heard braying loudly behind the wall of the yard.
"You lied to me, Mulla!" the neighbour exclaims. "There it is behind that wall!"
"What do you mean?" the Mulla replies indignantly. "Whom would you rather believe, a donkey or your Mulla?"

I smirked.

Then I shared some of the jokes with a colleague, and he didn't smirk as much. Which led me to wonder whether there was a particular culture dependency on this humour that I was missing, because I had an overlapping culture with it and my Anglo colleagues did not.

That evening, I was invited over to some friends' for an evening of dinner and Settlers of Catan. Well, dinner without me eating, as has been the norm with my dietary regime for the past six months, that has seen me lose 13 kg in 3 months, and then remain static for another 3 months. My friends have a seven–year-old and a six–year-old. Since seven–year-olds make excellent developmental testbeds, and I was informed the kids had recently discovered humour, I took it upon myself to try the joke out on said seven–year-old (let's call her Mary), and see what happened.

NICK: [Joke]

MARY: ...

MOM: OK, let's try translating this to her context now.

NICK: [You mean the context isn't universal?]

MOM: So, we're going to translate this to [Region of Eastern Melbourne, Mainstream Protestant Denomination] Church context.

Let's pretend you go over to Dave's house. And Dave has a big dog. (In fact... he does have a dog.)

NICK: [The pastor's name is "Dave". I think I see a problem...]

MOM: ... and you say to Dave, "I want to play with your dog." And Dave says, "I haven't got a dog!" And then you hear the dog. Woof. WOOF WOOF. WOOF WOOF WOOF.

MARY: *giggle*

MOM: And then you say to Dave, "But I can hear the dog!" And then he says, "Who ya gonna believe. Me, or the dog."

MARY: ... The dog. Coz I can hear the dog.

MOM: *Looks at me triumphantly*

And Mom (er, my friend) then gave me the key to unlock why the joke wouldn't work in a [Mainstream Protestant Denomination] Church context. Which I was halfway there with already, when I registered the pastor was Dave and not The Right Revd. David Davidson.

A mullah, and even more so an Orthodox priest, can summon a lot of intellectual authority over their community. The Nasrudin joke is parodying how far that claim to authority can go. A pastor, on the other hand, doesn't get to do that; because Protestantism is about noone getting in between the parishioner and their interpretation of Scripture.

That's something I knew intellectually, but I doubt I had quite clicked on. As I've hinted before, I'm not entire as fluent in my host culture as I think I am.

Of course, even if Protestantism doesn't afford the pastor that kind of authority, being called "The Right Revd." does somewhat. And with a society radically changed enough that authority figures ask to go by first names, pastors accommodate to the World, and ask to go by first names, and surrender a little more of their authority. Which fits the Protestant ideal.

I think it's going to be a fair while before any Orthodox clergyman in Greece says "Call me Lefteris". (Not Papa-Lefteris, mind you, where the title, however familiarly, is still doing the work of "The Right Revd.")

There is another way of viewing the interaction between Mary and Nasrudin, too. Big Media Matt was a philosophy major before he was a political pundit, and he occasionally lapses into philosophy on his blog. One such recent instance had him disapprove of the simplism of prefacing a cartoon by They Might Be Giants, encouraging kids to get into science, with a Cartoon-Rudolf Carnap: the crude reduction that Science is only about direct experience, and not noting how much of a social process it is.

I don't know my Carnap, though I have been warned by another friend not to assume the Cartoon version. And the thread at Matt Yglesias' went to and fro, but a couple of commenters did point out that after all, the audience was just kids. Get them started early with differentiating between unicorns and horses; you can talk them through the social situatedness of that differentiation by I dunno, their undergraduate History & Philosophy of Science.

And as another friend pointed out, when I retold the previous evening's events (yes, the anecdotes have done the rounds): there are contexts in which you really do have to overrule your sensory evidence, as Nasrudin suggests. Not perhaps for the reasons Nasrudin suggests—but Nasrudin is supposed to get you thinking, not just guffawing. Still, seven is still a little too early for that.

Though not too early for Mary to know a word I didn't. Subitise, quotha. I just knew it as Gestalt perception.

*That* made me feel old...

Pseudo-Chrysostom: Catechetical sermon on Easter

Leafing through the Holy Synopsis (the summary of movable feast services), I find that in leaving on the dot when John Damascene's Canon started for offal and eggs, I had also been missing out on a lovely sermon by John Chrysostom, wedged in after the bible readings. The Synopsis groused that the sermon was intended to prepare the faithful for communion, so it should have been before Mass proper, but Tradition had moved it up too close after the readings. The point of Orthodoxy is tradition, of course: it cuts both ways.

The sermon is, I've gotta say, surprisingly... Christian for its liturgical context: it's closer to Jesus' commensality than I'm used to from the Orthodox mass. (To put it less eruditely: more Christian love and charity and acceptance of human frailty than I'm used to from the mass. Especially when "Christ is risen from the dead", an hour or so before, wished that sinners would melt away before God like wax from a candle.)

The text is in Migne's Patrologia Graeca 59.721-724, with some slightly different wording from what I found in the Synopsis. The two sources are about as reliable as each other, but I'll stick with the Migne, because it's in the TLG (2062.259). The work is spurious, which is no surprise: Chrysostom was a famous orator (hence the nickname, Goldmouth); so many an anonymous Byzantine sermomiser would guarantee their work would be transmitted by attributing it to him. That's how Chrysostom ends up the most prolific author in the TLG corpus, with something like 4 million words. Which is close to all the literary output we have from Classical Athens...

I'll indulge myself with attaching my translation here. Happy Easter, ye people!

If anyone is pious and God-loving, let them enjoy this beautiful festival. If anyone is a grateful servant, let them enter gladly into their Lord's celebration. If anyone is tired from fasting, let them now receive their coin of payment. If anyone has been working since 7 in the morning, let them accept today what is justly owed them. If anyone came to work after 10, let them gratefully celebrate. If anyone arrived after 1, let them not doubt: they'll suffer no harm. If anyone showed up late at 4, let them approach, and not hesitate. If anyone has arrived even at 6, let them not fear for their tardiness. The Master is generous, and he will receive the last just like the first. He will rest the one from 6 in the evening, just like the one working since 7 in the morning. He will have mercy on the last, and restoration for the first. He will give to the one, and gift to the other. He honours good works, and praises good intentions.

So everyone, enter into our Lord's celebration. Both first-ranked and second-ranked, receive your payment. Rich and poor, dance with each other. Both disciplined and lazy, honour the day. Both fasting and not fasting, rejoice today. The table is full, everyone indulge. There's plenty of calf, none will leave hungry. Everyone enjoy the riches of wholesomeness. Noone lament their poverty; for the common Kingdom has appeared. Noone bemoan their misdeeds; for forgiveness has shone out of the tomb. Noone fear death; for the Saviour has freed us from death. He has extinguished Death while possessed by Death. He has punished Hell by descending into Hell. He has left Hell embittered, when Hell tasted his flesh.

Anticipating this, Isaiah cried out: "Hell is embittered". Hell met You down below, and was embittered, for he was abolished. He was embittered, for he was mocked. He took in a corpse, and happened upon God. He took in earth, and met Heaven. He took in what he could see, and fell from what he could not see. "Death, where is your sting? Hell, where is your victory?" Christ is risen, and you are overthrown. Christ is risen, and demons fall away. Christ is risen, and angels rejoice. Christ is risen, and no dead are in the tombs. "For when Christ arose from the dead, he became the firstfruits for those who slept." To Him glory and power, world without end. Amen.

Good Saturday Tomato Soup

So yes, I don't know what the Anglo-Catholic for Good Saturday is. It's simpler in Orthodoxy, where each day of Holy Week is Great: Great Monday, Great Tuesday, Great Wednesday. And each day of Holy Week matters: Orthodoxy has a well-ordered liturgical calendar around Holy Week. The Office of the Bridegroom on Great Monday, the hymn of Kassiane Great Tuesday, the Blessed Oil Great Wednesday. The Twelve Gospels on Great Thursday, each marked off on a candelabra, with candles signalling the flow of the Passion narrative: just like a menorah, but quicker, and on the opposite side ideologically. After Simon of Cyrene lifts the cross (Mt 27:32) in the Fifth Gospel, the priest lifts the cross around the church—

Σήμερον κρεμᾶται ἐπὶ ξύλου
ὁ τὴν γῆν τοῖς ὕδασι κρεμάσας.

Στέφανον ἐξ ἀκανθῶν περιτίθεται
ὁ τῶν ἀγγέλων βασιλεύς.

Ψευδῆ πορφύραν περιβάλλεται
ὁ περιβάλλων τὸν οὐρανὸν ἐν νεφέλαις.

Today He is hanged from a tree
Who hanged the earth on the waters.

He is placed with a crown of thorns
the King of angels.

He is surrounded with false purple
Who surrounded the heavens with clouds.

The funeral of Christ comes on Great Friday, with the Canon "By a wave of the sea", running through all nine minus one odes, each with its own Old Testament reference. (The canon was a very strict poetic form—its intertextuality is regimented—though now more allusively, since the Old Testament canticles it is based on are nowadays left out. And its structure is odd: the second ode only gets used on Lent weekdays, and there are numerous digressions and recaps. But at its best it is effective poetry.)

The canon is followed by the Encomia, lamenting Christ (surprisingly, composed only in the Ottoman period, but the highlights of the liturgical year), followed by the Epitaphios, the funeral procession of Christ, taking over the streets around the church.

Easter Matins, which are Saturday midnight, launch pretty quickly into the victorious anthem, "Christ is Risen from the dead", followed soon after by John Damascene's joyous canon,

Ἀναστάσεως ἡμέρα, λαμπρυνθῶμεν λαοί.
Πάσχα, Κύριου Πάσχα.

Day of resurrection: shine ye people!
Easter, the Lord's Easter.

In Greece, Damascene is intoned to a mostly empty church, despite the priest's annual request to "please stay, it is a lovely Mass". The canon is the exit queue for the congregation, who have offal soup and hardboiled eggs to get back to: the problem with the point of Orthodoxy being tradition is, the laity have their traditions too. I forced my folks to stick to the end one Easter, so I could find out what the Mass was like; I think they were happier to stay back in theory than in practice. Though when I was in Easter services in the States, I found not a soul budged when Damascene started. In the US, people are Orthodox first in Church, and Greek only incidentally—it's been one more generation of assimilation than here. So the laity's traditions take a back seat: you'll get your offal soup when the Mass is good and over.

(Can't stomach the offal soup btw.)

But it's Good Saturday that I wanted to reminisce on after all that. When a community is overtly religious, as a Greek village is, religion impinges on daily life, even if you yourself are not going to all the masses. When we'd go to the village for Easter, Orthodox dietary restrictions were in place at my grandmother's house. Lent abstained meat and dairy, of course: we didn't stick to all 42 days, but Holy Week in the village, it was hard to sneak out and get a cheeseburger. (Much easier here; in fact, my sister and I instituted a tradition of going to McDonald's after Good Saturday morning communion, as preemptive breaking the fast. Latterly, it's ended up the only time I set foot in Macca's.)

Fasting meat and dairy is not as big a deal in a pre-modern agricultural society, when meat is pretty scarce to begin with. So Orthodoxy has a way to enforce fasting on even the perforce vegan peasantry: no oil. The strict rules on fasting, which banned oil on all but a feast day coinciding with a fast day, had been relaxed by 1980 in the village; but in Holy Week, Good Saturday was still a day with No Oil. With No Oil, your culinary options get very limited very fast. In fact, all we ended up eating was a thin watery tomato soup, and boiled potatoes. With all the salt and pepper I could muster to make them palatable. It made Good Saturday pretty bleak. Which of course was the idea.

The other striking thing about Good Saturday was Good Saturday Vespers, the one time I went to them in the village. The Passion services are somewhat out of sync, because the Orthodox liturgical day starts at sundown. So the Twelve Gospels, Thursday 8 PM, are actually Good Friday Matins, fitting the Passion narrative. The Good Friday evening mass is actually Good Saturday Matins; hence Christ is buried.

And Good Saturday Vespers, which somehow end up on Saturday afternoon, do something Orthodox masses don't do a lot of; halfway through the Vespers, there's a sizeable chunk of the Old Testament. There are bits of the Prophets and Psalms in the mass through the year, but they're not highlighted, and the Old Testament has not captured popular imagination. The only Greek Abrahams and Solomons I know of are Cypriot; the only Greek Davids I know of are Pontian; and the only Greek Daniel I know of is Jewish. So it came as a surprise to me to hear, Saturday afternoon in a Greek church, Genesis 1, Jonah 1, and Daniel 3.

Jonah 1 and Daniel 3 are a quite straightforward metaphor: Jesus is harrowing hell, and is compared to Jonah in the whale and the three boys in the furnace explicitly in the canons; the bible readings reiterate the comparison. Genesis 1 is a more clever intertextuality: the church calendar of movable feasts comes to an end on Good Saturday, and Jesus' mission on earth is concluded. Genesis looks back to the start of everything, at the end of everything. I find that moving.

What I did not remember from the two or three times I've stayed past John Damascene on Easter midnight mass, is that the bible readings do the same thing after "Shine ye people!" The readings that I missed by going home to crack eggs and avoid offal soup are Acts 1 and John 1. Every mass has an Apostle reading (Acts or Epistles), and a Gospel reading. Easter is the start of the movable church calendar (the fixed calendar starts September 1, Byzantine New Year), and both the Apostle and Gospel readings go back to the beginning.

I'll wrap this up tomorrow, before heading to the Easter Festival Of Meat, with a sermon from John Chrysostom. We'll resume normal godless broadcasting after that...

Western Orthodoxy

It struck me, as a Greek-Australian kid reading Shakespeare, that English used to be a more Mediterranean language than it is now. Which is to say, the society reflected in the language of Shakespeare had more in common with the traditional Greek culture I caught the very tail end of, than did the Australia I now found myself in. In large part, that was a matter of both having been traditional cultures, less individualistic, more land-bound, and more tribal. Both were caught up in marital loyalty, so both made ample reference to cuckolding. Both cared about appropriate politeness addressing—although the Tu/Vous system in both was breaking down (and the Greek Tu/Vous with singular/plural was an urban veneer on top of the native expressions, like μωρέ vs. του λόγου σου.)

And both were still religious societies. More to the point, Greece has a pre-Lutheran culture; and although Mary Queen of Scots was already executed, and Shakespeare's father had to hide Catholic literature in his attic, English was still a Catholic language. "Marry" was still an oath to the Virgin Mary, the Puritans had not yet gotten rid of "God's Wounds".

English is now not a Catholic language—which is a very well-thought out thing to say, since English is now the language of still quite Catholic Ireland (and Irishdom). But a lot of the institutions that had made cosy homes for themselves in Middle English are now awkward to express; and the secularisation of Anglo culture makes them even more awkward. English knows of compadres via Spanish, so there is a hook for the Greek cognate (via Venetian) κουμπάρος to hook up to. But Middle English godsib is long gone, surviving only in the telling fossil word gossip. The feast of Υπαπαντή (which my village church was dedicated to) does correspond to Candlemas; but outside of old Scottish lawyers, who's heard of Candlemas? And as much because of secularisation as Protestantism, I never quite got the English days of Holy Week. Good Friday, uh, Maundy Thursday, um, Good Saturday?

So translating Greek Orthodox references is easier with Early Modern English than contemporary English. (That's why I made a point of speaking of rood screens previous post.) Of course, if you wind the clock back on English, you don't get Mediaeval English Orthodoxy: you get Mediaeval English Catholicism, which is not the same thing. But if you do some Creative Anachronism, you can come up with an alternative universe in which Galicia or Britain stayed in communion with Constantinople.

And I thank John Cowan in comments for pointing out to me the existence of Western Orthodoxy, which I had never come across—and which attempts exactly that. As John was astute to point out, Western Orthodoxy reconstructs an Orthodox Galicia or Britain, which allowed it to marry Eastern dogma to Western tradition: that's why the Western Orthodox care about St Dunstan. The point of Orthodoxy, after all, is tradition. But it is an invented tradition (actually, several invented traditions, hence the six different reconstructed liturgies); which is why John compared it to the Christianities of the fictional world of Ill Bethisad, in which Britain stayed Celtic. (You achieve enlightenment when you realise that all traditions are invented, and all are manipulated in their practitioners' interest.)

And that in turn is why the Eastern Orthodox are so suspicious of the experiment. The point of Orthodoxy, after all, is *their* tradition. I was somewhat shocked to see the arguments against Western Orthodoxy in Wikipedia made by the Eastern Orthodox, me being culturally Western and all ("But they're doctrinally identical!") But I'm not that surprised, and John was more right than I'd realised in his etymological argument—the Orthodox haven't been as tolerant of ritual difference as the Catholic hierarchy, at least, has been:

If your church calls itself with a name beginning with "O", you expect them to want everyone to believe and do the same things. If their name for themselves starts with "C", you expect them to want to include as many varieties of practice as they can, short of compromising on real dogma. Sapir-Whorf strikes again.

Return of the Chantry

I'm still here; I had the ill luck to fall... ill last week (abed Wednesday and Thursday), and spent the long weekend either doing Greek lemmatisation, or socialising. I've tried combining the two, it doesn't work.

I've opened up my Greek linguistics blog, in reaction to a post my friend George forwarded me. I don't think I'll post there anywhere near as much as I should to relieve my conscience; but it's something.

A post that's been waiting to be written a very long time: h/t Steve Benen at Washington Monthly (I've remained addicted to American politics after my three years living there; everything was so much larger than life about politics Stateside), I too note the arrival of Information Age Prayer, A New And Exciting Way To Connect With God:

Information Age Prayer is a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget.

We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying. Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen.

...

Yeah. Of course, having read a history of the Reformation once, I immediately realised that we've seen thing kind of thing before. That fine institution in Western Europe that eventually gave rise to the University, but started out as the Chantry college. Where state of the art monastic prayer consultants were used to voice prayers for noblemen as a subvention service, giving them the satisfaction of knowing that their time in purgatory would keep getting shortened even if they woke up dead—but not forgotten.

Assorted wisdom of the interwebs, has any wayfarer before me made the connection between Information Age Prayer and Chantries? Why yes. Someone has:

Ah, it's like the Reformation never happened - let's open up the chantries and get some serious industrial praying going!

Also, I want my dog-saint back.

posted by jb at 12:46AM UTC on March 26, 2009

Le Woof. Speaking of the Catholic Church, I went to a christening Sunday (at a time of year which that moiety of Christendom which does not stick to a 2000 year old system to calculate its lunar calendar calls Easter Sunday, and the moiety which does calls Palm Sunday). Not having been to a lot of Catholic services, and not really having gotten the Vatican II memo, I was surprised at how, well, relaxed the whole service was. Hippy guitar songs in the voice of Jesus (1st person), congregants in shorts and T-shirts, lay ministers, no incense or bell, no rood screen. (I told you I didn't get the Vatican II memo; in fact, not even the Council of Trent memo, since that's how long ago the Catholics did away with them.) If the priest wasn't wearing an alb (and the Powerpoint with the Hippy guitar song lyrics hadn't spelled הַלְלוּיָהּ as Allelulia), I wouldn't have clicked that the service was Catholic. I didn't know that there was diversity of liturgic practice in Australian Catholicism; I assumed it was as top-down as the moiety I grew up in...

I wasn't the target audience of course, and the congregation were very happy with how welcoming and friendly the Mass was. Me, I was missing the sense of awe that comes from having a priest who's not on speaking terms with the congregation. But that's neither an unalloyed good, nor an inevitable outcome. (And again, I'm not the target audience, so I don't get a vote.)