Death of the Son, Episode IX: Dinner with a Murderer

Death of the Son, Episode IX

Dinner with a Murderer

[Episode One; Episode Two; Episode Three; Episode Four; Episode Five; Episode Six; Episode Seven; Episode Eight; Episode Nine] 

[This episode concludes the serial novel 'Death of the Son.' Until the sequel!]

They were back in the cool of the Imperial Palace, walking through the endless marbled corridors: Theodotus, the eunuch of Constantine, and a single soldier. 

The men in front of him showed no concern; the eunuch sauntered slowly, swinging his hips theatrically from side to side, and even the soldier slouched as he walked. Again and again, Theodotus had to abruptly slow his pace to keep from bumping into them; and each time he did, he gripped the dagger stowed at his waist, making sure it did not jostle or fall. He could not fail now through impatience; too much was at stake. 

In a few minutes, he told himself. I am going to have dinner with the Emperor Constantine. Then I will kill him. 

But somehow, none of it seemed real; he was in a dream, sleeplessly wandering the corridors of the haunted palace. Any moment now, the dead Empress would emerge from a doorway and speak to him again. "For my children," she had said, her mouth dripping blood. But where were her children? He shook himself, and nearly stumbled into the eunuch in front of him again; then nearly did so again as the eunuch stopped completely, then turned slowly to face him. 

Theodotus looked around; they were in front of a small door in the corridor. As he watched, the eunuch gestured him, with a complex, flourishing wave, to enter. Steeling himself, he stepped inside.

But he was only in a small storeroom, lit with a single, wavering oil lamp. The eunuch tittered, covering his mouth with one hand. "Did you really think we would take you to see the Emperor looking like that?" His thin hand traced its way across Theodotus' dirty black tunic, stained with blood. "Here's what's going to happen; I'll leave, and you'll put this on. Then we'll go to the Augustus." One hand touched Theodotus in the chest, while the other gestured towards an ornate silver-and-black assemblage set in the corner. "And you should really clean yourself up while you're at it," he added, gesturing to a bowl of water and a brush beside it. "You clerics...no sense of propriety." He shifted his hand to touch Theodotus on the arm, then shut the door, leaving Theodotus to dress in the flickering darkness.

As he reached for the robe, a stray memory flickered to life: the first time he had put on his deacon's robes, in the little sacristy of the cathedral in Antioch, just before his ordination. Those robes had been linen; these were silk, and the crosses were woven of real silver. He put on the heavy tunic, then the chlamys, clasping it with a golden broach. Apart from the crosses and the richness of the fabric, it might have been a military cloak; a reminiscence cemented as he reached down and slid the pugilo into the leather belt, under the chlamys, fastening the clasps just as he remembered.

But which was he, the soldier or the deacon? Or was he somehow both? 

He shook these thoughts away, and stepped out of the room to find the eunuch and soldier lounging against the wall opposite, laughing together. The eunuch looked him up and down, then stepped over and began adjusting small parts of his robes, pulling out a part there, tucking it in here, and clucking gently to himself all the while. As his hand strayed toward the belt, Theodotus grabbed him roughly. "Enough," he said. "Take me to Constantine."

The eunuch tittered again. "Why, deacon..." he said. "I don't know what you've heard about eunuchs, but...I have standards." He withdrew his hand. "And you didn't even touch the brush...well, the Emperor has no one to blame but himself. Very well. Come." His sauntering air gave way to sudden brusqueness, and he was away, walking faster this time, and gesturing impatiently for Theodotus and the soldier to follow. 

The soldier brought up the rear this time, his armor clattering as he walked; Theodotus barely suppressed the urge to seize the dagger at his waist. The corridors were nearly empty now, as bishops and courtiers dined and rested from the effort of the morning's assembly; but here and there slaves moved silently about, cleaning and carrying out small errands. A slave holding a large tray pressed himself against a wall just in time to avoid the eunuch, who was racing forward with small steps and did not slow his pace or look at him. As they passed by, Theodotus glanced at the slave: it was the German, Flavius. Theodotus felt the man's eyes narrow, and for a second saw reflected in them the strange scene he must be: the unkempt appearance, the rich robes, the soldier and the eunuch and the deacon.

Then Flavius had disappeared again, and abruptly they were there, outside the large, ornate door of what was obviously a dining room. The eunuch stopped, and gestured Theodotus forward. "Go on," he said, frowning. "The Emperor's been in a mood all day...I'm not going in there. And if he complains about your appearance..." The eunuch raised his hands in mock frustration. Theodotus, though, needed no reminder; he had already wrenched open the door a small crack and stepped through.

The Council of Nicaea: A Historical Explainer

 The Council of Nicaea: A Historical Explainer

This year is, among other things, the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Ecumenical commemorations have already begun, focusing for the most part on the dual institutions of the Papacy and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople--institutions both deeply entwined, though in different and somewhat ironic ways, with the event. 

Later this year, two men will meet in Nicaea: Pope Leo XIV-- an American born in Chicago who spent his ministry in Peru, places that none of the bishops at Nicaea had ever heard of, but the latest sitter on what was already in the fourth century the ancient and venerable seat of the bishop of the Church of Rome, and Patriarch Bartholomew--an ethnic Greek whose see was, at the time of Nicaea, a minor suffragan of Heraclea, who today presides over a tiny, purely vestigial Christian flock in what was, in the 4th century, the population heartland of Christianity, but which now resides within the borders of an ethnic nation-state named after Central Asian nomads and populated by the largely secularized followers of Islam, a Christian offshoot that would emerge centuries later from a portion of the world that nearly all the bishops of Nicaea would have regarded as a minor scrap of territory stuck rather awkwardly between two great Empires. These two men will no doubt issue appropriate statements of fraternity and commemoration for what both traditions they represent regard as the first Ecumenical Council of the undivided Christian Church of the first millennium. 

Accompanying these commemorations will come many, many explanations by the popular press the world around, designed to communicate to ordinary folks from America to Siberia to India and back again just what the Council of Nicaea is, anyway, and why it's important enough to make the Chicagoan Pope go all the way to Turkey. Alas, the popular press being what it is, the vast majority of these explanations will be wrong. This event will also be accompanied, no doubt, by many intelligent and intellectual explanations of just what the Council of Nicaea is, in podcasts, tweets, blueskys and the like: and as is frequently the case, these will be even more wrong. 

Hence, to get out ahead of these takes, I wanted to issue, as a scholar who has published an academic volume among other things on Nicaea and its context and legacy, a brief explainer on the historical event of the Council of Nicaea. This will be a deliberately broad take, deliberately designed to skirt most controversial scholarly questions; but nevertheless unavoidably based on my own opinions and scholarly judgments. 

As such, I am confident it will contain a great deal of information that will come as a surprise to most moderately-informed people, and an even higher percentage of information that both ordinary, good people and wicked take-having intellectuals have never heard of. I hope it will prove both informative and reasonably diverting.

Future Heresies: A Thought Experiment

Future Heresies: A Thought Experiment

The following post will most likely interest very few people; but, well, it interests me. 

I have spent a great deal of time and energy studying the history of Christian and Catholic doctrine; and have even published a scholarly volume on the subject. There are a number of interesting facets or aspects of such a study: one, which is absolutely central to any serious contemporary Christian theology, may be called the theory of development, or more precisely theories of development, encompassing all the various attempts, from Antiquity to the present day, to understand theoretically the mix of continuity and change visible in Christian doctrine over time, its causes, and its results. These theories have spanned the entire range from naive to absurd to self-contradictory to insightful and back again; and to have a real theology, in any sense, it is necessary to operate on the basis of some such schema, if only implicitly: and to have a rational, explicit, truthful theology, it is necessary to have a rational, explicit, truthful theory of development.

However, that is not what I am going to be talking about in this post, at least not directly. Rather, what I have been trying to develop, based on my studies, here and elsewhere, is what I might call a theory of deformation, or perhaps (with a nod to Whip It) a theory of devolution.

This is, however, to put the matter somewhat dramatically, as well as somewhat polemically. The more basic truth is that Christianity as such, not to mention Catholicism, embodies a highly particular metaphysics, ethics, philosophy, ethics, history, and way of living, and that there are few, if any, things in human life that it does not in some way touch on or incorporate into its grand synthesis. 

For precisely this reason, however, Catholicism necessarily overlaps withareas of human life also dealt with by more human and secular and historical sciences and philosophies and cultures and politics. It not only covers the same ground as them, but frequently addresses the same concepts, even uses the same words. It typically does so, however, in very different ways, ways that are opaque, confusing, and often even offensive to many people, and which are therefore highly susceptible to being reinterpreted entirely in light of their more common usages.

To take only one instance, the use of the term nature in Catholic Christology necessarily overlaps to some limited extent with the uses made of this concept in science, philosophy, genetics, ethics, etc, of our own or indeed any historical society--but for all that, the concept of nature used in Catholic Christology is highly different than that used in any contemporary domain. To simply take the Christological sense of nature and insert into a discussion of, say, ecology would produce nonsense; while to take the contemporary ecological sense of nature and insert it into Christology might produce nonsense, but might also produce something a great deal more like a heresy.

This framing, however, is a bit more abstract than is necessary. I do not think, really, that most historical or contemporary heresies arise from mere confusion of the technical language of Catholicism with the technical language of contemporaneous science or philosophy. This has been, in the past, a common way of interpreting historical heresies; and it usually produces historiography (and heresiography) that is overly schematic and conceptually muddled. 

As a matter of fact, in most cases technical domains, so long as they remain technical and specific, remain to that extent open to broader domains of philosophy and metaphysics and theology, or more precisely subordinate to them in the sense that they deal with more particular matters that can and should and to an extent even must be integrated with broader domains: and to the extent this is true, engagements between technical domains and theology, so long as they are done skillfully, can produce positive fruit in both domains. 

Rather, what usually happens in regards to serious deformations of Catholic doctrine, I think, is quite a bit more subtle than this, and much harder to resolve simply with reference to mere definitions.

Most people do not study technical fields; but most people do live in societies, in communities, and in institutions. And these societies, communities, and institutions, explicitly or implicitly, run off of and embed and embody and incarnate particular views of the world, particular anthropologies, particular practical ethical goals and conceptions of the good. And it is these, in particular, that most directly and frequently clash with the overarching, holistic ethics and metaphysics of Catholicism; and which most frequently and impactfully lead to reinterpretations and deformations of Catholic belief and practice.

To take only one example, my scholarly book (AVAILABLE NOW!) focuses in part on the complex conceptual and practical clash between the implicit and explicit views of God, man, person, nature, equality, hierarchy, etc, found in the world of Late Imperial politics and Late Antique Christianity: and the various ways in which this led to radical reinterpretations of Imperial politics in terms of Christianity, and of Christianity in terms of Imperial politics. This is, of course, by no means a simplistic one-way affair, without ambiguity.

Still, if one accepts the basic framework above, it becomes clear that something like this has happened again and again in the history of the Catholic Church; and, considered soberly, to some degree must happen, in every age, place, institution, culture, and time. For, after all, the truth, even considered qua abstract and universal, must be concretely and particularly received and understood in every age, by every person: and for it to be understood, it must be related to existing stores of knowledge, culture, terminology, and so on. And if it is possible for this to be done well, in a way faithful to the essential meaning of Christian revelation, subordinating earthly knowledge to divine revelation, it is also possible, and intrinsically a great deal more likely, to be done badly.

And more interestingly, all this must happen here and now, and in the future: and must be, to some degree, predictable and understandable, even where said deformations are only implicit or only incipient. 

Here, then, is the ambitious and likely ludicrous "thought experiment" I wish to engage in this post: namely, to see if I can to some extent predict, to some extent extend, and to some extent make explicit the implicit deformations of core Catholic doctrines created by, or likely to be created by, our contemporary institutions and social systems. In so doing, I wish to be clear that I am using the term "heresy" only in a colloquial sense, as a helpful abstraction, and that I am in no way attempting to preempt Church authority, define a canonical crime, and/or accuse anyone of being a formal heretic deprived of divine grace and/or liable to ecclesiastical sanction. Similarly, in dealing with the below "heresies," I am in no way predicting, even theoretically, that anyone in particular will ever explicitly argue for the positions laid out below, let alone turn them into widespread theological or popular or religious movements. I am merely postulating that the following deformations of Catholic belief do exist or will exist, explicitly or implicitly, to vastly varying degrees, in the lives and thoughts and arguments of Catholics: and as such, will have, to vastly varying degrees, negative effects.

For my next blog post, most likely, I will be examining what I think are the emerging political principles likely to govern global and American politics over the next several decades. Before doing that, though, I wish to preserve the proper hierarchical order of things, and deal first with the higher domain of theology, before proceeding to lesser matters. 

Death of the Son, EP 7: Apollon's Tale

Death of the Son, Episode Seven: Apollon's Tale

[Episode One; Episode Two; Episode Three; Episode Four; Episode Five; Episode Six]

When they reached Hosius' chambers again, after a long, silent tramp through the streets and corridors (Theodotus having to run to keep up with Hosius' heedless strides), the rooms were empty.

Theodotus glanced at Hosius in surprise, but the old man was still silent; after a few minutes, he crossed the sitting room into his private cell, and the door shut with a click. 

Theodotus shook his head in frustrated resignation. I demanded that we meet with Constantine; and he agreed. But he will need time to adjust to what we just discovered. 

Theodotus, though, needed no such time, at least in his own mind. He began pacing the floors of the chamber, around the chairs and tables piled with scrolls and codices, around and around and around.

So we are all doomed. Very soon now, Helena will leave Rome; and Constantine will learn what we have done. And if we do not reach him first...who knows what he will do? Perhaps he will send his soldiers here, and arrest us. Hosius and Eustathius will be disgraced; and I will be punished as a scapegoat for them all. And all I will have to comfort myself with is that I fulfilled my bishop's commands, that I upheld my penance, that I solved the puzzle. 

But how can I solve the puzzle? Helena instigated Fausta's death; about that there can be no doubt. But who else was involved? Who were these conspirators Constantine made use of, who were so afraid of her being publicly tried, who were so afraid of a secret she might tell?

The slave Flavius told me that a one-eyed man had led Fausta to her death; a martyr? A terrible thought...and then the slave-woman told me that a priest had accosted her, heard her story, and forgiven her sins, swearing her to silence; the same man, or another? And if he was not the same man, how would he have known what had taken place? Or even known to interrogate the slaves? 

Somewhere in this palace, there is another clergyman, or many perhaps, who knows as much as me, or more. But why? Is he responsible for what has happened, covering his tracks, or only curious? Is he an ally, or an enemy?

And still we are no closer to learning why Crispus himself was put to death. Helena blamed Fausta for instigating Crispus' death, to advance her own childrens' claim to the throne. But what evidence did she have? None at all. Hosius and Eustathius are engaged in theological controversy, with Eusebius and many others...they claim Crispus for an ally, but was he? They blame their theological opponents for his death, but what evidence do they have? None at all. 

It is all mirage, a phantom. This is not an investigation; it is a ghost story, a myth, a hall lined with mirrors. And why should it be an investigation at all? What mystery is it that Emperors kill? That men of violence commit violence? We clergy, so recently escaped from the Persecution, should know that better than anyone. And yet we wish to delude ourselves into believing Constantine is different;  just as we delude ourselves into believing that behind petty human wickedness, cruelty, violence, there is some higher purpose at work, for good or evil. The Persecution was not a plan of God, or the Devil; it was merely policy. There is no mystery in Constantine killing his son. Crispus was a war hero, a great general, a gifted administrator; a natural successor; a natural threat. Why shouldn't Constantine kill him?

And what am I doing here, now, in this palace, dressed in deacon's robes, investigating the death of Emperors at the command of a Christian bishop? I was only a poor man. The Tetrarchs made me a soldier, made me kill, for their own purposes. The old man drove me into the clergy for his own purposes. Vitalis made me work in the Episcopal Court for his own purposes. And then Eustathius, forced me to come here. He, too, is playing politics, stirring up controversy and conflict for his own reasons. He is an ideologue, a fanatic; such men are not to be trusted. He told me nothing. And I am less than a pawn.

He stopped walking abruptly, breathing heavily; and as if at a signal, the door opened, and Apollon tumbled into the room.

Three Prayers

 [These are three prayers of my own composition that I pray daily. Perhaps others might find them helpful as well.] 

Prayer For Divine Correction

English:

Receive, beloved God,
all my words, deeds, and intentions of this day:
complete them, correct them, if necessary replace them entirely with your own: 
so that your words may be heard, your deeds done, your intentions fulfilled, for the good of those whom you love.
Amen.

Latin:

Recipe, amate Deus, 
omnia mea verba, facta, intentionesque huius diei:
ea perfice, corrige, si oportet muta pro tuis:
ut audiantur verba tua, faciantur facta tua, compleantur intentiones tuae, ad bonum eorum quos amas.
Amen.

Prayer to the Blessed Virgin for Healing

English:

True and loving Mother of God,|
Mary,
Take me into your arms, embrace me, caress me, and kiss me,
And remove from my midst all those lies which the Devil has inscribed in my flesh,
in my body, heart, mind, and soul, in order to hinder the work of God.
Heal me and save me, most sweet mother.
Amen.

Latin:

Vera et amans Dei Mater,
Maria,
Recipe me in brachias tuas, me complectere, me mulce, me basia,
Et omnia mendacia quae diabolus ut operi Dei impediat
inscripsit in meam carnem, in corpus et cor et mentem et animam meam,
a medio me remove.
Me sana et salvum fac, dulcissima mater.
Amen.

Prayer to the Blessed Virgin Before Sleep

English:

Mother,

I entrust into your hands all my own affairs:

property, duties, cares, souls.

Guard them while I sleep,

and do for them all the good which I cannot:

find what is lost,

fix what is broken,

attend to what is forgotten,

heal what is wounded.

Oh most blessed Mother of God, I beseech you,

make my life whole, and lead everything to God.

I have hoped in you, Mary;

let me never be put to shame.

Amen.

Latin:

Mater,

commendo in manus tuas omnes meas res: 

propria, officia, curas, animas.

Dum dormio, eas custodi:

fac eis omne bonum quod non possum ego:

erratam inveni;

fractam repara;

ad oblitam attende;

vulneratam sana.

O beatissima Mater Dei, te quaeso:

fac meam vitam integram, et duc totam ad Deum.

Speravi in te, Maria;

non confundar in aeternum.

Amen.

Column 09/03/2024: Testament of Belief

Testament of Belief

[I apologize for doing so little writing on here, as I have been both rather busy and also my creative energies have been directed towards (1) fiction, and (2) academic writing, neither of which is yet polished enough to post here. I have several pieces in various stages of construction, however, which should be appearing on here soon enough. This is not really any of those pieces, but an impromptu decision to say something about my belief and its bases, inspired mostly by my thoughts as I was going to bed and written in about an hour and posted in honor of Pope St. Gregory the Great on his feast-day. His writings are much more worth reading than mine.]

Every one, I suppose, has their own function when it comes to the Church and the life of grace; which is another way of saying their own testament, a thing to which they are able to witness. One of mine, I suppose, is to give the lie to the basic idea that faith is essentially a form of wish-fulfillment, that it is bound up with thoughts and emotions and beliefs and doubts and moral hypocrisies, in short something entirely other and opposed to reality in the sense believed in by scientists and engineers and so-called practical mean. 

To that, I can only say, for better or worse, that my belief, in its foundation and inceptions, has nothing really to do with the former, and everything to do with the latter. 

I sometimes envy people with what I would call a natural belief, or even a natural disbelief: people who find it difficult, if not impossible, to see where their own minds end and the reality to which all these things refer begins. Belief is natural to human beings: it is a necessary corollary of having a mind. Believing, and disbelieving, are simply things that people do, all the time, without much in the way of thought or even necessarily interest; and these acts of believing and disbelieving are naturally intertwined with all the other operations of people's minds, emotions and hopes and desires and fears and traumas and loves and hates. Among these beliefs, and disbeliefs, are mental states referring to God, or Christianity, or the Catholic Church--beliefs which may be important, but are not fundamentally different from any other similar mental state. Hence, even the most honest believer or disbeliever may, and should, ask themselves: am I sure that my beliefs (or disbeliefs) are accurate, that they refer to reality, that they are not unduly influenced by my own emotions? After all, it is so tied in with me that it may turn out to be all me after all. 

Alas, this is not how I relate, or have ever related, to God or the Catholic Faith. My relationship with God is in this sense based more on experience than belief: and it is not an experience, even, of having an idea confirmed by observation, or a hypothesis advanced by testing, or even a desire fulfilled by fruition. To the extent the experience may be analogized to other types of experience, it may be compared to any sudden, unanticipated physical reality: the step you miss while walking and thinking of other things, the car you collide with while listening to music, the pain you feel suddenly from the beam you did not see. It simply and undeniably asserts its reality precisely by its utter heedlessness, its utter lack of relation, to everything in your head and your heart. 

There was, and is, simply no proportion, no real relation, between my ideas and beliefs and hopes and fears and desires about God, and the experience of God I came to in and through my entrance into the Catholic Church. I did not anticipate it; I did not in any straightforward sense seek it out or ask for it or desire it. It was simply there. 

To the extent beliefs about God or Catholicism emerged from this experience, they are in no sense, really, beliefs about me. I do not believe that I believe in God; I do not believe that I experience God. I believe in God. God is; and the interesting (psychological) truth is that since that time period I have not really been capable of doubting the existence of God. That God exists is simply not something that is in any sense dependent on me, and so it is not something I have any straightforward capacity to challenge or occlude or disbelieve. 

Of course, to say this is not to make any particular claim about my own positive virtue or fidelity or indestructibility. Psychologically and physically speaking, I am certainly capable of denying that God exists, or even coming in some sense to believe it; as I am capable of being lobotomized, or decapitated, or losing all my memories, or coming through some strange series of freakish accidents to believe that I am a shoe. But as I said, this is not really something that has anything in particular to do with the fact of God's existence or my belief in it.

Or rather, if I am being completely honest, the truth is that not only does my belief in God, or in the Catholic Faith, not have anything in particular to do with any belief in my own intelligence or virtue or correctness; it is positively correlated with the opposite, which is to say, with my stupidity and sinfulness and incorrectnesss and lack of existence. This is, I suppose, something in the same sense in which the strength of a hammer striking my skull is positively correlated with the weakness of my skull, or the strength of gravity and a gravel road is positively correlated with the weakness of the small hay wagon out of which I was flung when I was ten years old, and of the skin of my leg as it was dragged across said gravel at high velocity. I have generally become aware of God's reality precisely through my own lack of reality, so closely that they could be said to be nearly one and the same reality.

All this may well seem extremely negative, if not cold and unfeeling. I cannot help that, I suppose. Yet it is worth saying that by no means was my experience of God solely or primarily an experience of divine wrath or power or judgment or any of those things--that it was, emphatically and overwhelming and in its totality an experience of divine mercy, benevolence, and indeed love. 

Yet if it is true that our lack and nothingness may be demonstrated to us by something opposing or overpowering us, it is no less true that our lack and nothingness can equally be demonstrated to us by something giving to and loving us. Perhaps a metaphor would help here. The more water is poured into a cup, the higher the proportion of the cup that is filled, the more the cup's prior emptiness is necessitated and demonstrated. The more that is given, the less that there could have been before the gift.

There were in fact dimensions in which my experience of God was one of my own will, my own self, being checked and overruled from without. Yet the more fundamental experience even in these instances was of something giving to me, giving to me so much of my self that it necessitated and demonstrated that before that gift I could not have had a self at all. I experienced being given everything that I was and had and have and will have--will, thoughts, desires, fears, emotions, losses, victories, defeats, doubts, acceptance, resistance, sins, life, death, moment to moment existence--and even more; much more; infinitely more. This was at one and the same time and for the same reason and in the same degree an experience of divine love and of my own nonexistence.

For this reason, I find it impossible, generally speaking, to doubt not only that God exists, but also that he loves me. After all, my own moment-to-moment experience of my own existence is, quite simply, the experience of divine love. Yet as with God's existence, so too with God's love; my belief is not really, for better or worse, a belief about me. For whatever it may mean, there is a real sense in which I find it habitually easier to doubt and deny my own existence than to doubt that God loves me; or at least that God loves.

Before I close this odd rambling, I should also add, briefly, what all this has to do, for me, with the question of belief in the Catholic Faith and the Catholic Church as opposed to other religious bodies or beliefs Christian and non-Christian, a question that preoccupied me a great deal when I was younger. I am, or have become, very familiar with the bases for intellectual belief in all the above, and do my best to communicate them and live them out. 

Yet the simple truth is that my belief in Catholicism, and my entrance into the Faith, is not ultimately based on any of those things, but again on an experience of what appeared to me, and appears to me still, simply as reality: indeed, precisely that same heedless, overpowering, proportionless reality spoken of above. My experiences of the Catholic Church have, without exception, been simply experiences of God. Hence, in the most immediate sense, my experience and principal belief about the Catholic Church is simply that it is God; or rather, to weaken and perhaps make comprehensible the claim, that the experience of God I discussed above came and comes entirely and solely in and through and with reference to the Catholic Church, her words and deeds and saints and clergy and monks and laypeople and liturgy and Sacraments. The latter statement, though, is a rationalization of my actual experience: which is, as I said, simply that God and the Catholic Church are one and the same thing. 

(I may also say parenthetically that in about the same way, my experience is that God and the poor and suffering people are one and the same thing.)

I have now spent many years of my life reading and writing theology in an attempt to work out what I believe that experience reflects; which is, put in correct theological language, the mystery of the Incarnation, of God become man, tangible and material and natural and historical, and of his union with the Church his inseparable Body and Bride, and his consequent presence and activity in the authority of the clergy and the Sacraments and above all the Eucharist. This theological thinking-out is much more mixed with my own thoughts, has proceeded much more naturally, by hypothesis, thought, trial and error; and I consequently believe it in a different sense from the above. But that God is in the Church, in the Eucharist, in Catholic words and deeds and saints and doctrines, I believe not for these reasons, but because I have experienced it--like a blow to the head.

I am quite conscious that all this may well seem insane, incomprehensible, fanatical, or what is worse, fundamentally unappealing and even frightening to people. As I said, I cannot really help that; at least without dishonesty. From this basic set of experiences, I have striven very hard to understand and to integrate the various aspects and dimensions of earthly faith, including personal piety and religious emotion and social and communal life and institutional functioning and historical tradition and all the complex and amusing byplay of belief and doubt, proof and evidence and argument, thought and claim and counterclaim, so necessary for the life of the human beings and the Church on earth: and I have come to love and appreciate them all. 

Yet for all that, I have no choice but to finally acknowledge that the fundamental thing that is the basis of my faith, the fundamental thing that I have, I suppose, to testify to, is different from all this. 

This is my (very poor) attempt to express a little of that.

Buy My Book!

Those readers of this blog who do not otherwise know me may be interested to learn that my first academic book, from Oxford University Press, has just been published.

Entitled Christ the Emperor: Christian Theology and the Roman Emperor in the 4th Century AD, the book aims to give a new, intertwined narrative of the dynasty of Constantine and the Arian Controversy, focusing on the political theologies espoused by both Emperors and bishops and by theologians on both sides of the controversy. 

You can order it from the Oxford University Press website here, as well as from Amazon here. It is also available at a number of other online retailers, including international ones. Amazon and Google Books both feature roughly ~50 page previews that you are welcome to check out even if you don't end up buying. 

This is obviously a work of academic historiography and so quite different from the sort of writing I do on this blog. However, if you can stomach my overly-long essays and are generally interested in the sort of topics I cover here, I would imagine you would enjoy and get something out of the book as well.

Godspeed!

Feast of Pope St. Martin I (April 13th)

Today is the feast of a saint that is very near and dear to my heart, and to which I owe a lot personally: Pope Saint Martin I.

While today fairly obscure, Martin's general claim to fame is that he is the last universally-acknowledged martyr Pope. He was taken from Rome by the Byzantine Emperor Constans II in the 7th century and done to death by starvation in what is now Crimea in Ukraine. Martin suffered this fate for opposing the Imperial heresy of Monothelitism, the belief that Christ has only one will and operation, and for asserting dogmatically the complete humanity of Christ and his possession of a fully human and free and sinless intellect and will alongside and in harmony with his eternal divine will. 

More immediately, he suffered for refusing to abide by a universal Imperial gag order declared by Constans to end the controversy, which autocratically forbade any discussion of the theological issue at all on either side. It was for breaking this silence to anathematize both the Monothelites and those who forbade public confession of Christ's two wills that he was killed.  

Martin was and remains a powerful bridge between East and West. While he was a strong asserter of Papal authority and infalliblity, broke communion with the Church of Constantinople, and refused to acknowledge the authority of the Byzantine Emperor over theology or Rome, he spoke Greek fluently and was deeply conversant with Eastern theology. During his short reign he received numerous refugees from the Byzantine Empire fleeing theological persecution and the rise of Islam, made copious use of their knowledge and skills, and distributed them and their cultural and ecclesiastical learning throughout the West--so that shortly after his reign a Syrian monk from Tarsus, St. Theodore, was appointed by Papal decree to the throne of Canterbury in England. He was a close cooperator and ally of Saint Maximus the Confessor, the greatest of all Byzantine scholastics, and is still venerated in the Eastern Orthodox churches today. 

He was also a thoroughly human and humane saint, who died in part because of his absolute refusal to countenance active resistance to the Emperor's armies and his insistence that "I have judged it better to die a thousand times than to allow the blood of even one person, anyone, be shed onto the earth." In this, he was a powerful witness and contrast to a century that was all but drowning itself in the blood of holy wars and persecutions. Likewise, in his few surviving letters written from his exile, he openly and movingly describes his bodily sufferings and his feelings of abandonment by his friends, allies, clergy, and spiritual children. 

In this humanity, his insistence on the importance of human will and freedom for salvation, his resistance to autocratic power, his refusal to allow the truth to be silenced along with error, his intercultural and ecumenical focus, his common condition with the oppressed and prisoners, and even in his death in what are today bloody and war-torn regions, I believe he is an important saint for our times. 

One of my goals in life is to spread devotion to Martin. Hence, you can find on this blog a novena to him I composed to him a few years ago, which I urge anyone who wishes to pray or spread or make use of for your own purposes. Likewise, I have done my own translation of the letter in which Martin describes his capture by the Emperor and the early period of his exile, as well as another letter shortly before his death describing his condition of starvation and lamenting his abandonment. Finally, here is a somewhat florid and imprecise account of his life which I wrote many years ago, but which contains a fuller description of Monothelitism and quotes from a contemporary document describing his sufferings and death. 

Ora pro nobis! 

Column 03/23/2024: The Trouble with Catholic Journalism

The Trouble with Catholic Journalism

"Transparency" is the most important issue in the Catholic Church today. How do we know this? We know this because journalists tell us so. What is transparency? Transparency is when journalists tell us what the most important issues in the Catholic Church are.

A question for all my readers, Catholic and non-Catholic: how many times in the last month have you read or watched or listened to a Magisterial document of any kind in its totality? For Magisterial document, let's start with a maximally broad definition, including Papal speeches and homilies, documents produced by Episcopal conferences, documents put out by your local bishop, speeches and homilies by your local bishop, even homilies by your local pastor. Now let's narrow the field a little bit: how many times in the last month have you read a full document officially promulgated by a Pope, such as an encyclical, Apostolic Exhortation, Apostolic Letter, etc? Now let's narrow it even further: when is the last time you read a full document promulgated by the present Pope?

Now another question: how many times in the last month have you watched or listened to a journalistic report and/or analysis and/or editorial about a Papal document? Let's again start with a maximally broad definition, including not only Catholic journalists but mainstream media journalists, social media figures, heads of lay apostolates, lay pseudo-apostolates, celebrity priests, blogs, podcasts, random Twitter accounts, and so on, and focusing not just on Papal documents but on Papal or episcopal or presbyteral speeches, homilies, actions, activities, and/or sins. And, again, a narrower question: how many times in the last month have you read or watched or listened to a report of any kind of a document officially promulgated by a Pope? By the present Pope?

Now one more question: what is the crisis in the Catholic Church again? And is transparency the answer to that problem? Or is transparency in fact the problem itself?

Death of the Son, Episode Five: Imperatrix, Dominus, Episcopus

Death of the Son, Episode Five:

Imperatrix, Dominus, Episcopus

[Episode One; Episode Two; Episode Three; Episode Four]

When his vision cleared, he found himself outside, standing on the brow of a low hill, looking down into what he recognized as a chariot-racing course, surrounded by gleaming white marble stands larger than any he had ever seen. The stone glistened in the sunlight, nearly blinding him. 

Forcing himself to tear his eyes away, he looked around. Hosius was by his side, watching him with an expressionless face.

"I..." Theodotus was momentarily taken aback. "I did not know we would be leaving the Palace."

"You thought Helena stayed in the Palace?" Hosius seemed to consider that for a moment. His voice, when he spoke, was slower than before. "No, no...not the mother of Constantine. Her son built her a palace of her own, to the Southeast, in the gardens." He paused, seemingly lost in thought: but his eyes did not leave Theodotus' face.

"You are from the East; you know that Emperors have not stayed in Rome for centuries. Even Constantine has been here only...twice? Three times in ten years? But he has given Rome to his mother as her own." His lip twisted, seemingly involuntarily, but his face did not change otherwise. "Many have wondered at this: that Constantine, who loves his mother so deeply and so publicly, should keep her so far him--that he should wander like a soldier, from Trier to Arles, Nicomedia to Seleucia, and leave Rome, the Mother of the Empire, only to his mother."

Theodotus was finding it harder to regain his composure than he had expected, with his eyes still adjusting to the light and the grandeur of Rome before him. Also I have eaten nothing since rising, and it must be nearly noon. 

Is this a test?

But he had little time to reflect on this possibility, for Hosius was still speaking, slowly and reflectively and with the subtle intonation of an orator, a preacher: and still with his eyes fixed on Theodotus' face, ignoring the splendors of the City.

"Some say it is because of Helena's piety, because of the tombs of the Apostles and the holy virgins and martyrs. Others that it is for Helena's pride, to pay her wounded dignity back for the years of suffering and shame his father caused her. Or perhaps for her fear, to keep her far from the son who reminds her so much of that father--above all in his anger. And finally there are those who say that it is the son who is afraid, and keeps away from the mother, for what reason only those who know his heart can say. I once thought myself one of these, but now...?" He sighed suddenly, a forceful release of air, and for a moment lowered his eyes before raising them again to Theodotus.

But Theodotus' own eyes and mind had begun to adjust; and he realized abruptly that these words were not just a test: they were also a confession, like the confessions he had received from so many criminals in court. Eustathius told him I am sent by God to discover guilt; and so he is revealing his guilt to me.

"But if the son is an enigma, so too is the mother. Who can say anything about Helena that is true?" Hosius' lip twisted again, and for the first time he chuckled humorlessly. "I cannot even say where she is from. An innkeeper's daughter, they say: but from Asia? Greece? Illyria, like his father? Savage Britain? I have heard all these, but never a word from Helena herself.  Even her name is a mask: 'the Greek woman,' of whom there are hundreds in every city in the Empire. Even in Spain...and yet her statues are everywhere, in all the splendors of the first Helena, and the number of cities named after her rises with each day."

He sighed again, but this time more slowly, and sadly, not taking his eyes off the deacon at his side.

"But now her home is Rome, and she stays here, mostly, in her palace, in her gardens with the holy virgins and the priests and bishops and ascetics who visit her and pray with her. I myself have visited many times, and thought myself in a house of prayer. But now...I doubt myself...I doubt everything. Was it a house of prayer, of ascesis that I visited, or only a house of luxury in disguise? Or perhaps a refuge, for a hunted woman? Or a prison?"

Hosius' face now was no longer a neutral mask; it was openly anguished.

"It is strange, is it not? In all the times I have seen her, in all our conversations on holy things, I never thought to ask her these questions." He shook his head with decision, and his face cleared. "Eustathius is right. We bishops of these dwindling times, coddled by luxury, are so easily swayed by talk of God, cosmos and ousia, theoria and ascent. When men speak such words to us, we believe them, we think they have seen the very face of God, and we remain ignorant of all else they do, ignorant of their hearts. The Holy Martyrs of the great times knew better; they knew that in the final balance, the heart of man is a ravening wolf, and our task is to draw its teeth."

Finally, Hosius tore his eyes away, and for the first time looked down at the circus. His face, abruptly, broke into a smile.

"The circus maximus. Where Nero burned Christians alive to light his games. This is a holy city, and in it sins will not remain buried long."

Column 1/30/2024: Food, Conspiracy, and the Homo Imperialis: A Theoretical Look at the Political Crises of Modernity

Food, Conspiracy, and the Homo Imperialis: A Theoretical Look at the Political Crises of Modernity

Over the last few months, years, and/or decades of my life, I have seen some interesting things, read some interesting books, and come to some conclusions about the crises of modern political life. In the last few months in particular, these conclusions have been sharpened by discussions, debates, and reading and crystallized into a few relatively simple, albeit very broad and rather tentative, theses. 

In Defense of Overly Broad Theoretical Nonsense

I fully recognize that this blog post constitutes in essence a smattering of overly broad theoretical nonsense (see above). However, I would, as a historian, defend the value for history and politics alike of extremely broad theoretical constructions of particular topics, periods, etc. While there is always a great danger that theoretical constructions will overwhelm the actual concrete complexity of different societies, situations, events, persons, etc, in fact this danger is generally less, I think, when the theoretical constructions in question are deliberately broad and explicitly theoretical. No one is likely to mistake a blog post or a Chesterton book about the economic and social problems of humanity en masse for a work of historiography; but they may well mistake an academic-historical theory of life or death or economics or religion or human nature contained in and shaping a history textbook for historiography. Academia is in fact littered with half-baked general theories, littering the footnotes and text of books and articles of esteemed historians and college freshmen alike. I have at least, I hope, had the decency to separate my grand theories out and put them elsewhere to be laughed at.

For the moment, however, I must formally ask you to trust, not only that the below theses are based on many hours and thousands of pages of reading in various historical topics and periods, but that the below theses are not designed to replace such content or such reading, but merely to (hopefully) illuminate it.

These theses, I think, have at least something to say about the disasters unfolding around us, and what to possibly do about them. So here they are.

Column 1/09/2023: Christmas and the Divine Creativity

Christmas and the Divine Creativity

Cur Deus homo? 

"Why is God a man?"

So asked St. Anselm of Canterbury, long ago; and so many us are hopefully compelled to ask, for the first or the hundredth or the thousandth time, by the Christmas season. Or perhaps not; perhaps, after a dozen or two or three or five or seven dozen Christmases, perhaps we simply take the angels and the Mother and Child and Wise Men and Shepherds all as givens. Perhaps we have never questioned them at all. Perhaps all our knowledge of Christmas comes from Hallmark Christmas movies. Perhaps we always thought that Christmas was a fictional holiday invented for Jim Carry's How the Grinch Stole Christmas. 

Why is God a man? Why is God a human being? Why is God a child, an infant, held in the arms of his mother, watched over by a stepfather, surrounded by animals and poor shepherds and exotic magicians? Why is God nursing, why is he crying, why is he sleeping? Why is God the descendant of the founding king of a minor Near Eastern dynasty? Why is God a political subject of Gaius Iulius Caesar Augustus? Why does God need a blanket?

Why is God something?

Of course, to even begin to answer the question posed above, we have to have some understanding of what God is; and also (a much harder question) what man is. Anselm had one very good answer to these questions; and I invite you to consider this answer at your leisure. For now, I will merely suggest some thoughts that came to me recently, and which were for me wrapped together inextricably with the event of Christmas. 

Column 10/21/2023: Pope Francis and the Third World War

Pope Francis and the Third World War

In the far-off year 2014, the sun shone, Barack Obama was President of the United States, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies was released, and the top-selling song of the year was named "Happy." And the Pope of the Catholic Church announced the beginning of the Third World War. 

Amid the ever-repeated excitement of such scintillating mass-media events that year, few people in America noted or marked the centenary of World War I. While in Britain and France, this war is still clearly remembered--if nothing else for its devastating toll on the population and landscape--in America it has always been a forgotten war, a mere footnote on the path to World War II and global dominance. Still, events were held, here and there, most in Europe and a few in America, and to one of them the recently-elected Pope Francis came. While a South American by birth, he is also the descendant of Italian immigrants, who no doubt passed on some of the legacy and legend of the Great War to him. And so, in September, he visited a cemetery where soldiers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that great rival of united Italy, were buried, and mourned the dead, and prayed for them, and said a few words in reflection on the conflict in which they died, as Popes have done for many decades now in regular succession.

In doing so, however, Francis, as he so often does, went off script, and began reflecting on contemporary events. "Perhaps," he mused, "one can speak of a third world war, one fought piecemeal."

This is, so far as can be told, the first time Francis mentioned the concept, only a little over a year after his election. He has since used the phrase and concept of "a third world war fought piecemeal" over and over again, dozens if not hundreds of times, mentioning it with greater and greater frequency as time has gone on and the world has grown more unstable.

Many things could be said about Pope Francis, for good and for ill, in many different dimensions. I hope to eventually write more about him and his significance.

The point of this essay, however, is to say that about this, at least, he is right, and has been since 2014. Something fundamental has changed, and the world has begun to look back to and recapitulate the horrors of the 20th century. And this must be understood, and stopped, while there is still time.

Column 09/25/2023: Prudence, Wisdom, and the Contemporary Crisis in Catholic Ethics

Prudence, Wisdom, and the Contemporary Crisis in Catholic Ethics

I am going to attempt what I fully understand is both a very difficult and very presumptuous task: that is, to summarize what I see as a centrally important concept to ancient philosophical and Catholic ethical theories, and to indicate why lack of proper understanding of this concept wreaks havoc with attempts to understand and apply these concepts in the modern world. This is quite an obnoxious thing to do; if you are annoyed by it, please pray for me. If you like it, pray for me anyway. 

In contemporary Catholic ethical discourses and debates, especially on a popular level, but increasingly also in academic and even clerical circles, there are two terms that are thrown around more than any others. These terms, in fact, are thrown around with such frequency that one would think that there were more or less no other issues in Catholic ethics at all; and what is perhaps oddest of all, they are thrown around by both sides of virtually all contemporary Catholic ethical debates, and in highly similar terms.

In watching these debates unfold, I have grown more and more and more certain that, put simply, these terms are being used all wrong--not just trivially or technically wrong, but in ways that, frankly, I can find no parallel in the tradition prior to the 20th century, and which taken together threaten the very edifice of Catholic ethics. This is a strong claim; but it is strong precisely because these terms refer, however increasingly remotely, to base assumptions of Catholic and ancient philosophical ethics without which the whole edifice of Catholic ethics simply makes no sense, and simply cannot be lived out or applied.

I refer, of course, to the two terms intrinsically wrong and prudential. 

Poem: Blood

Blood 

The leaves on the trees are wet with blood

From the heart of the dying sun.

***********************************************************************

Jesu, do you really know what it is like

To be created?

To be nothing?

How could you have done this to us?

How could you have created us, and left us alone

In this dark of which you made us

With only each other’s faces

To reflect the light from heaven

And make us be a little while?

In the end, we are thrown on the garbage dump

In Gehenna, where the worm does not die

Nor is the fire quenched:

Darkness devoured into light

And life

And feeling

It is better to be damned

Than not to exist

Than never to have existed.

But oh, what sorrow, whether in hell

Or in heaven

To be only darkness

Forever

Are you really inside of me?

No, I don’t care about that now:

Are you really with me?

Do I face you, exist to you,

And you to me?

Do I have a face?

I know that you have a face,

And that your Father is with you,

And that you face him for all eternity,

And for all eternity he is with you

And you with him.

How happy you must be!

To never be alone.

To be all light

With no darkness at all.

But Lord, do you really know

What it is like to be created?

Poem: Who Jesus is to Me

Who Jesus is to Me

“He said to them: 'But you, who do you say that I am?'”

The Father said: tell others

tell the flock

who Jesus is to you

who is Jesus to me?

he is the terror in the night

that puts the terrors to flight

the stranger more strange

than the strangeness of the world

the monster more monstrous

from which the monsters flee

he is that broken, twisted body

hanging on the pole

the pierced flesh

all pierced flesh

bleeding

rotting

the curse

blasphemy

horror

in the sunlight

foulness offensiveness

obscenity

of the body

emptiness

of the heart

the pause, cessation, caesura

of the mind

and the soul

rest

respite

fulfillment

Column 08/26: Homo Vanus Patiens: On The Interpretation of Seven American Nights and A Modest Primer on How to Read Gene Wolfe

Homo Vanus Patiens 

On the Interpretation of Seven American Nights and A Modest Primer on How to Read Gene Wolfe

The passing of Gene Wolfe in 2019 went, like much of his literary career, mostly unnoticed by the world at large. As before, plaudits were published by his admirers--a piratic crew of literary critics, academics, fellow science fiction authors, Catholics, and nobodies--declaring him, for the umpteenth time, the greatest [blank] of his generation--with the blank to be filled in, depending on one's personal preferences, with "literary sci-fi writer," "sci-fi writer," or even just "writer." These praises make for odd reading, and I imagine would be odder for anyone who had not read him before: as they consist usually of writers struggling to find the right adjectives and express just what about this guy was so good. And usually failing.

Gene Wolfe, it must be said, is hard to describe. He is also, at least for some, hard to read. As I write this, the top prompts for "Gene Wolfe" on google include the plaintive cry, "How do I read Gene Wolfe?" 

How do I read Gene Wolfe? This is very emphatically the right question to ask. Most classic works of literature are, at heart, exceedingly simple in content--love story, adventure, horror, relationship drama, novel--even if frequently daunting in execution. For most such books and authors, the right advice is exactly the opposite of what we were taught in high-school English class: relax, forget all about symbolism and subtext and social and cultural context, and try to enjoy the book exactly as you would Animorphs. The paradox of Gene Wolfe, however, over which many literary critics and random forumgoers have struggled in the decades since he began his career, is that despite writing for a "pulp" genre shared with Animorphs, he is the rare author who does, in fact, demand to be read carefully, thoughtfully, analytically, considerately. 

Column 8/19/2023: Death of the Son, Episode Four: At the Court of the King

Death of the Son, Episode Four: At the Court of the King 

[Episode One; Episode Two; Episode Three]

Day had dawned before he was even aware he had been asleep, and when he awoke the priest Apollon was waiting by his cot, his old face drawn and worn, as if he had slept even less than Theodotus. Such hours suit me; the soldier and the deacon alike. Less sleep means less time for dreams.

Surely the old confessor must have similar dreams? For a moment, as the sleep cleared from his mind, he toyed with the idea of asking him about them. I saw so many like you, old man. Do you dream of the walls and the chains that held you? Or the men in fine robes who questioned you, day after day, always the same question, over and over again? Or the soldiers who held you by the arms and struck you on command? Or do you merely dream of the day they put out your eye? But the first words he spoke were more to the point: 

"My investigation of the palace is proceeding well. Today I must interview the clerics of the court."

Column 07/19/2023: Twin Peaks is America and David Lynch Needs Religion

Twin Peaks is America and David Lynch Needs Religion

[Warning: the following contains spoilers for the shows and movie Twin Peaks. I would highly advise watching it first, as it's quite good and very worth watching.]

There is something very strange about the human mind. 

One thing that, for me, makes Chesterton such a valuable thinker is that he is one of the very few authors I have ever read who actually seems to understand modernity--because he sees it, properly, not in terms of technology or mythical historical processes or even more mythical economic discoveries, but in terms of fundamental anthropology and human psychology, which is perhaps the only way to ever understand any human epoch or civilization. 

One of his more misunderstood quotes is the famous tag that the world is divided not between dogmatists and anti-dogmatists, but between conscious dogmatists and unconscious dogmatists. This is not merely, as it may seem, an ironically clever taunt, but a reflection of a much broader anthropological theme. Man, as Chesterton puts it, is defined by the making of dogmas; he is homo dogmaticus; which does not mean merely a creature that has beliefs or that codifies them, but first and foremost an entity whose mind, in some strange way, cannot think at all, cannot function at all, cannot even exist, without an entire universe to sustain it. Mind implies, desires, demands world: in his Thomas Aquinas he compares the meeting of the two to a marriage. As in a human marriage, in seeking the world, the mind becomes one flesh with it, incorporating it into itself and itself into it, relating to it as the defining context and atmosphere and background and content for all its own acts of thought and apprehension and speech. World in this sense is not merely a mechanical or abstract construct, an equation in physics: it is all those materials of reality and being and atmosphere and emotion and, in short, content, within and through which the mind moves and acts and exists.

A marriage between real world and mind is the ideal, the telos--but it is not always achieved. Even when the marriage fails, when the mind is cut off from the real world, it does not cease to dream dreams, see visions, and construct, out of its own desire and lack and disappointment, worlds of its own. The mind must exist in a world to exist at all--if only in a world of its own making. And yet, even in their deformities and absences, such universes reflect, inevitably, the shape of the one real world.

Column 06/12/2023: Death of the Son, Episode Three: The Haunted Palace

Death of the Son, Episode Three: The Haunted Palace

[A continuation of my pulpish historical-fiction story on the deaths of Constantine's son Crispus and wife Fausta in AD 326. Part one may be found here, and part two here.]

"Theodotus."

In a heartbeat she had entered the room, her bare feet floating just above the marble floor. Moonlight surrounded her, but did not reflect off her or the jewels that covered her; it merely hung about her, illuminating and discoloring, turning rubies to sapphires and gold to silver. She was dressed as he had seen her statue in Antioch, in a long tunic with gems sewn in elaborate patterns down the front. Her hair, dark as the night air, was teased elaborately into rows of curls and bound just behind her head, exposing a long, slender neck wound about with gold chains, a neck too thin to hold up the ponderous diadem that bowed down the top of her head; but she stood erect and wore no veil. 

When he saw her, he made to get up from his bed, but his legs felt heavy, like lead; he managed to swing them to the floor, but there they sat, fixed in place, refusing to lift him. His arms too were like weights, pinned to the bed at his side. Another second more, and she had sat down beside him, with no weight, no presence, not even a whisper of breath; her face seen up close was hard and angular, with full lips and a long nose; her eyes, large and dark, looked intently into his.

"Theodotus." She said again.

"Yes, Empress."

"Theodotus. You must help me."

A wave of familiar emotions swept over him, sorrow, contempt, anger...for a second, his voice caught in his throat.

"I'm sorry. It is too late."

But her face only moved closer to his, and one of her hands, small but with long fingers, touched his arm; it was cold as ice. She was no longer dressed in her finery, but in the rags of the young woman in the arena; the wound he had made on her face, under her mouth, dripped blood. "No, Theodotus. Not for me. For my children. My children. My children. My children. My children. My..."

Her voice grew more shrill with each repetition, and the cold on his left arm grew more intense, spreading up his arm to his shoulder and across to his chest. He cried out; and in a second more, old instincts had taken over, and he had leapt up out of his bed, clutching at a non-existent spatha.