Sad to hear of the plans to close Saint John’s College, Nottingham

Saint John’s College, Nottingham … due to close next summer (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

It was sad to read in the Church Times at the weekend that Saint John’s College, Nottingham, is to close after 156 years.

While I was on the staff of the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, I worked closely with Saint John’s and the college staff. The principal, Canon Christina Baxter, was an external examiner at CITI and a regular visitor, and I also worked closely with other staff members, including the Revd Dr Tim Hull, tutor in theology.

With other members of academic staff at CITI, I lectured on the three-year course for NSM ordinands leading to Certificate in Christian Studies awarded by Saint John’s in association with the Open University and the University of Chester. I also supervised post-graduate research leading to the MA in theology and art from Saint John’s College and the University of Nottingham.

I regularly visited theological colleges in England, to compare notes and network with academics who were teaching in the same fields as I was teaching in, including Church History, Liturgy and Patristics, and I was welcomed to Saint John’s in 2013.

A statement last week said the college council agreed last month [11 November 2019] ‘that the operation of the current configuration of St John’s is no longer financially viable in the long term,’ and that the process of closure would begin.

It now looks as though most of the 28 people working at Saint John’s, including tutors, are to transfer to new posts in institutions that continue the college’s distance-learning and youth-ministry work. But, inevitably, there will be job losses and redundancies by next summer.

Students have been reassured that their courses will continue until they have completed them.

The Principal of the Eastern Region Ministry Course, the Revd Dr Alex Jensen, a former lecturer at the Church of Ireland Theological College, suggested there is ‘great fear’ in the Theological Education Institutions (TEI) sector that other closures could follow. ‘Hardly any college or course is financially sustainable,’ he told the Church Times last week, wondering when ‘the next college or course falls by the wayside.’

The broader context for theological education was illustrated by figures seen by the Church Times, suggesting a target in the Church of England of a 50 per cent increase in ordained vocations is unlikely to be met by 2020.

The Church Times said there have been ‘signs of trouble’ at Saint John’s ‘for some time.’ The college had 60 students last year, compared with 108 in 2016-2017, and 223 in June 2016.

Saint John’s decided in 2014 to stop recruiting students, including ordinands, to study on campus. Plans were announced for ‘remodelling the college to meet the future training needs of the Church.’ It was renamed Saint John’s School of Mission in 2015, although it later returned to calling itself Saint John’s College.

Plans were made to place students with a church and to study for two days a fortnight at the campus. All recruitment was suspended for the academic year 2016-2017, and the last ordinands finished training in June 2017.

Healthier finances were secured in 2017 when land was sold for a new housing development. The college reported a surplus of £1.3 million in 2018, compared with a deficit of £612,853 the previous year. The Revd Dr David Hilborn, who welcomed me to Saint John’s six years ago, resigned as principal at the end of last year, and is now Principal of Moorlands College, Christchurch, an evangelical college in Dorset.

As far back as 1997, the college was facing financial pressures and falling student recruitment. But a ‘mixed-mode’ delivery of ordination training was introduced, and two years later the Midlands Institute for Children Youth and Mission (MCYM) was opened on site, in partnership with Youth for Christ, offering two undergraduate degrees. This became the college’s main source of income.

However, the MCYM announced in October it was moving to Leicester to merge with the Institute for Children Youth and Mission. That move includes moving a collection of 10,000 books, while discussions are taking place way with the Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham, and Saint Mellitus College, East Midlands, to ensure the Saint John’s library has ‘a new home in Nottingham.’

The last remaining building owned by Saint John’s will be sold, and the three parts of the legacy – MCYM, distance-learning, and the library – will be given funds to help to secure their future in new homes.

The Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham, is to take over the Extension Studies department, offering distance-learning courses and degrees validated by the University of Durham. The majority of staff, including tutors, are expected to transfer to Leicester or Birmingham.

In the gardens at Saint John’s College, Nottingham (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Saint John’s was originally founded as the London School of Divinity, an evangelical college, in 1863. Former principals include Donald Coggan, later Archbishop of Canterbury, and the evangelist and theologian Michael Green. Another Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, trained at Saint John’s, as did Bishop Christopher Cocksworth of Coventry, Bishop Vivienne Faull of Bristol, Archbishop Janani Luwum of Uganda, and the recently retired Bishop Harold Miller of Down and Dromore.

The college was founded by the Revd Alfred Peache and his sister, Kezia, after they inherited their father’s fortune. The college was established to provide an evangelical theological education to ordinands who could not go to university. Canon Thomas Boultbee was the first principal and Lord Shaftesbury became the first president of the college council.

The first premises near Kilburn High Road Station were known as Saint John’s Hall, and Saint John’s became an informal name for the college, perhaps because Boultbee was a graduate of Saint John’s College, Cambridge.

The college moved to Highbury in 1866 and remained there for almost 80 years, with close links to Arsenal FC and their grounds at Highbury. During World War II, the faculty, staff and students were evacuated to Wadhurst School in Sussex in 1942 when the Highbury buildings were damaged by air-raids.

The future Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan, became principal in 1944, and for the 10 years he was principal, the college was based at Harrow School and then at Ford Manor in Lingfield, Surrey.

Under Dr Coggan’s successor, Canon Hugh Jordan, discussions began on moving away from London. Canon Jordan believed the future of the college was outside London but near a university. A site was available in Nottingham, where the university’s theological department was growing in reputation. His successor as principal, Canon Michael Green, oversaw the move from London to Bramcote in Nottingham in 1970.

With the move from London, the London College of Divinity changed its name to Saint John’s. As Saint John’s, the college pioneered distance learning programmes in theology in the late 1970s, and made new theological thinking and research accessible to a wide audience through its A5-sized Grove Booklet series.

Later principals included Colin Buchanan, who became Bishop of Aston, Professor John Goldingay, Canon Christina Baxter, the first lay principal, Dr David Hilborn and Dr Sally Nash.

Former staff members include Dr George Bebabwi, an Egyptian scholar who was one of my lecturers at the summer school on ‘The Ascent to Holiness,’ organised by the Institute for Orthodox Studies at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 2008. I still recall how he barely managed to stick to his script as he delivered his paper on ‘Discernment’ with great style, compassion and humour.

Dr Bebabwi warned against what he described as ‘learning wisdom.’ He quoted from the Egyptian Desert Father, Abba Poemen, who said: ‘A man who teaches without doing what he teaches is like a spring which cleanses and gives drinks to everyone, but is not able to purify itself.’

In the chapel at Saint John’s College, Nottingham (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

How shall I sing that majesty in Cambridge?

Bicycles are part and parcel of daily life in Cambridge (Photograph © Patrick Comerford, 2008)

Patrick Comerford

As the University of Cambridge prepares to celebrate its 800th anniversary next year, I had a pleasant week in Cambridge this summer, thanks to the generosity of the J.E.L. Oulton Memorial Fund. I was staying at Sidney Sussex College while I studied at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, one of the eight theological colleges in the Cambridge Theological Federation.

William Thackeray first coined the term Oxbridge in the 19th century. Yet, despite the ubiquitous bikes and the ever-present flurry of gowns in the narrow streets, there is a world of difference between Oxford and Cambridge.

Magdalene Bridge and punts on the Cam ... two dozen bridges cross the River Cam on its way through Cambridge (Photograph © Patrick Comerford, 2008)

Insiders know the difference between a quad and a court, tutorials and supervisions, Magdalene and Magdalen, Queen’s and Queens’, and the real end of a punt. Cambridge has a more intimate feeling about, and more green space. Everyone knows the charms of the Backs, where several colleges back onto the River Cam, is spanned by about two dozen bridges as it wends its way through Cambridge, from Queens’ to Magdalene.

Cambridge is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world, yet it is also one of the most modern. It is consistently ranked in the world’s top five universities, and at 82 has given the world more Nobel Laureates than any other university. Cambridge has a strong reputation for both mathematics and the sciences, and the university is closely linked with the development of the high-tech business cluster around Cambridge known as “Silicon Fen” or the “Cambridge Phenomenon.”

Cambridge also has strong humanities and social science faculties, and the church and the teaching of theology has played an important part in the stories of the university and most Cambridge colleges.

Exiles from Oxford

The university dates from 1209, when two Oxford scholars were convicted of murder and hanged publicly. The University of Oxford suspended its activities in protest, and many teachers and scholars fled, with some choosing Cambridge, where John Grim had been running a school from at least 1201. These exiled students and researchers formed the nucleus of a new university in Cambridge in 1209. By 1226, we find the first mention of a chancellor. University status was mentioned in a decree by Pope Gregory IX in 1233, Cambridge was described as a studium generale by Pope Nicholas IV in 1290, and university status was confirmed by Pope John XXII in 1318.

The first faculties were arts and theology, and for many generations theology was at the heart of learning in Cambridge. The office of the Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity is the oldest chair in Cambridge. At the dissolution of the monasteries, the university disbanded the Faculty of Canon Law and stopped teaching the “scholastic philosophy” associated with John Duns Scotus.

Cambridge is a federation of 31 self-governing colleges, with each college a mini-Cambridge in itself, appointing its own teaching staff and fellows. The oldest college, Peterhouse, was founded in 1284. More colleges were founded in the following centuries. The most recent college is Robinson, built in the late 1970s, while the newest college is Hughes Hall, which achieved full college status in April 2007.

Many mediaeval colleges are named after sacred figures and were founded under the patronage of saints or for students who prayed for the souls of the founders. Peterhouse was founded by the Bishop of Ely in 1284. Gonville and Caius (pronounced Keys) was founded by a Norfolk rector. Trinity Hall was founded by a Bishop of Norwich who lost almost 700 of his clergy in the Black Death in the 1340s and needed new priests for his diocese. Corpus Christi was founded by two town guilds so students could pray for the members’ souls, and at they first used Sain Bene’t’s (Benedict’s) Church as the college chapel.

Saint Catharine’s was founded for a master and three fellows to study nothing but “philosophy and sacred theology.” Christ’s College began life as the College of God’s House. St John’s stands on the site of a monastic hospital and – like Christ’s College – was founded by Lady Margaret Beaufort, who also established the Lady Margaret Chair in Divinity. Magdalene (pronounced Maudlin) began as Monks’ Hostel. Sir Walter Mildmay, the founder of Emmanuel, wanted his college to be a “seed-plot of learned men” for the Reformation.

The most interesting modern connection between church and college life is found in Selwyn College, which was built in memory of George Augustus Selwyn, the first Bishop of New Zealand, and later Bishop of Lichfield. The foundation charter limited membership to baptised Christians and said the college should “make provision for those who intended to serve as missionaries overseas and … educate sons of clergymen.”

Among the 31 Cambridge colleges, three admit only women – Murray Edwards (formerly New Hall), Newnham and Lucy Cavendish. Magdalene, the last all-male college, began admitting women in 1988. Two colleges – Clare Hall and Darwin – admit only postgraduates. Some colleges maintain a bias towards certain subjects, so that Churchill leans towards the sciences and engineering, while others such as St Catharine’s College aim for a balanced intake.

Eight theological colleges or foundations are loosely affiliated with the university through the Cambridge Theological Federation. They include two Anglican colleges – Westcott House and Ridley Hall, both founded in 1881. In addition, the Eastern Region Ministry Course is ecumenical but more than 80 per cent of its students are Anglicans. The five other theological colleges in the federation are Wesley House (Methodist), the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology (Roman Catholic), Westminster College (United Reformed Church), the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations, and the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies (Eastern Orthodox), which organised my summer course.

Early church history

Cambridge is part of the Diocese of Ely, and unlike Oxford has no cathedral. But it has a lengthy church history that predates the university. In 695, a group of monks from Ely arrived in Cambridge looking for a stone coffin for Saint Ethelreda, and found an empty and desolate settlement. Church life was soon revived, and Saint Bene’t’s Church has a Saxon tower and arch dating from 1025 – the oldest building in Cambridge. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or the Round Church, is one of the few round churches in England. It was built around 1130, following the design for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and has been described as “a mushroom in a forest of Gothic and traffic.

There has been a church on the site of Great Saint Mary’s, the university church, since the year 1200 or earlier. The present church was built in 1478, and was used for conferring degrees until the 18th century, when this function moved to the Senate House.

The connections between Cambridge colleges, church history and the life of the Church of England continues to this day: the library at Corpus Christi College has a sixth-century Gospel believed to have been given to Saint Augustine by Pope Gregory and it continues to be used at the enthronement of the Archbishops of Canterbury.

Theologians and Cromwell

Among the great Cambridge theologians was John Duns Scotus (ca 1266-1308), one of the most important theologians and philosophers of the High Middle Ages. For some time he was a member of the Franciscan community in Cambridge, whose friary stood on the site of Sidney Sussex College. He died on 8 November 1308, but 700 years later the debate continues over whether or not he was Irish.

Prior to the reformation, Erasmus had rooms at Queens’ College while he taught Greek in Cambridge between 1510 and 1514. A generation later, three of the key Reformation bishops and martyrs who met their deaths in Oxford were all Cambridge men: Thomas Cranmer (Jesus), Hugh Latimer (Peterhouse) and Nicholas Ridley (Pembroke). In 1557, the body of Martin Bucer, who had been Regius Professor of Divinity for a brief period, was exhumed from Great Saint Mary’s. On the orders of Queen Mary, the dead German reformer was put on trial for heresy, and sentenced to be burnt at the stake in the Market Place.

Oliver Cromwell, who has been the subject of recent re-evaluation in television documentaries and new biographical studies, was an undergraduate at Sidney Sussex. His portrait hangs in the hall where I dined each evening, and his head is buried in a secret place in the ante-chapel. Dr Samuel Johnson stayed at Sidney Sussex, and this is also the college, according to deductions by Dorothy L Sayers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has placed Sherlock Holmes as an undergraduate. Perhaps he might have well placed to unmask the Cambridge spies, Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby, had he been there a few generations later.

Irish connections

Cromwell’s head apart, the Irish connections with Cambridge are numerous. Lucy Cavendish College is named after Lucy Cavendish, whose husband, Lord Frederick Cavendish, was assassinated in the Phoenix Park in Dublin in 1888. More recently, the historian Professor Nicholas Mansergh (1910-1991), from Co Tipperary, was Master of St John’s College from 1969 to 1979. During my stay in Cambridge, I was entertained to dinner at Christ’s College by the chaplain, the Revd Christopher Woods, who studied for ordination at the Church of Ireland Theological College.

Today, one of the best-known Irish academics in Cambridge is Professor David Ford, who has been Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge since 1991. Previous holders of this chair include the reformer Martin Bucer, Bishop Brooke Foss Westcott, who founded Westcott House, Charles Raven, Archbishop Michael Ramsey, Henry Chadwick, who died earlier this year, and Bishop Stephen Sykes.

Dr Ford was born in Dublin in 1948. He was educated at the High School and studied classics at Trinity College Dublin before going on to study theology at Saint John’s College Cambridge, Yale University and the University of Tübingen. He is a fellow of Selwyn College and a former chair of the council of Westcott House. He is the first Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge not to be an ordained Anglican priest.

The best-known building in Cambridge must be King’s College Chapel. Each Christmas Eve, BBC radio and television broadcasts the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, a festival that began 9o years ago in 1918.

But my favourite piece of church music associated with Cambridge is Coe Fen, described in the Companion to Church Hymnal as “one of the outstanding hymn tunes of the 20th century. It was written by Kenneth Naylor, when he was the music master at The Leys School, Cambridge, as the tune for John Mason’s hymn, “How shall I sing that majesty.”

Coe Fen is close to Peterhouse, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Backs. As I left Cambridge the words of that hymn remained in my heart:

How great a being, Lord, is thine,
Which doth all beings keep!
Thy knowledge is the only line
To sound a vast so deep.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, Church of Ireland Theological Institute. This essay was first published in the October editions of the Church Review (Dublin and Glendalough), the Diocesan Magazine (Cashel and Ossory) and Newslink (Limerick and Killaloe).

Sipping spiritual cocktails by the spiritual swimming pool

The chapel at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where we worshipped throughout the summer school

Patrick Comerford

During the summer, I spent a week at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, where I took part in the Ninth Cambridge Summer School organised by the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies.

The institute is based around the corner from Sidney Sussex at Wesley House on Jesus Lane and is part of the Cambridge Theological Federation. The theme of this year’s summer school was “The Ascent to Holiness,” and my participation was possible because of a generous grant from the Oulton Fund. The theme, “The Ascent to Holiness,” was inspired by The Ladder of Divine Ascent, a devotional work by an important Church Father, Saint John Climakos of Mount Sinai, who died in the year 606.

If anyone doubts the potential for humour among the Early Fathers, the wisdom of taking part in a summer school on Patristic studies or whether humour and relevance can be found in these subjects, then the opening day of the summer school would have dispelled those misgivings.

Dr George Bebabwi only barely managed to stick to his script as he spoke about “Discernment” with great style and humour. An Egyptian scholar now living in Indianapolis, he is a former director of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, has lectured on Islam and Judaism in Cambridge, and was a tutor at Saint John’s College Nottingham while Bishop Richard Henderson was a student there.

At an early stage in his presentation he warned us against any “method” being applied to discernment and the search for holiness. “Christian life is not controlled by methods or guided by techniques. We have a fellowship with the persons of the divine and Holy Trinity,” he told us. “So, to participate in the life of God denies for us a method or a technique. We cannot be part of the life of a person – any person – by learning a method or a technique.”

He told the story of a monk in Egypt who wanted to be martyr. His abbot warned him against false heroism and told him it was easy to be unusual. True heroism, the abbot said, is found in daily life, looking for reality and finding God’s will there.

And he reminded us of an old priest who once told him: “You live the cross when you make the sign of the cross – accepting the harsh times when they come.” It was a serious treatment of discerning between good and evil, right and false doctrine, the intentions of the heart and its secret movements, and holy angels and evil ones, drawing on the writings of the Desert Fathers.

But throughout the discussion, there were moments of great compassion and humour. But then, as he quoted Saint Anthony, the founder of monasticism: “Joy and not fear are the signs of the holy.”

Playful holiness

Later, Dr Bebabwi also looked at “Holiness in the Eastern and Western Churches.” Holiness is not a virtue, he told us, but is “a participation in the holiness of God, period.” Humility, silence and ascetism are virtues in the practice of holiness. But holiness is not a virtue – it is a participation in God’s holiness. We can protect holiness by ascetism, but we cannot acquire holiness.

He told the story of a rabbi who once suggested to God: “Let’s play.”

“Play what?” asked God.

“Let’s play hide and seek,” suggested the rabbi.

“But I’ve been doing it all along in Old Testament,” said God.

“Then hide in the human heart,” the rabbi prompted.

“Why?”

“Because that’s the last place humans will look into and search.”

The beauty of holiness

Other speakers included Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of Pembroke College, Oxford, who introduced many people to Orthodoxy through his popular book, The Orthodox Church. For 35 years he taught Eastern Orthodox Studies at Oxford. I first heard him as a visiting lecturer when I was a student at the Irish School of Ecumenics 25 years ago.

In that book, Metropolitan Ware tells the story of Prince Vladimir of Kiev, who was still a pagan when he felt the need to know what the true religion was. He sent his followers to visit different countries in turn.

They first visited the Muslim Bulgars of the Volga, but reported back: “There is no joy among them, but mournfulness and a great smell; and there is nothing good about them.”

The envoys next visited Germany and Rome. In both places, they found the worship more satisfactory, but complained too that the worship was without beauty.

Finally, they travelled on to Constantinople, where they attended the Divine Liturgy in the Great Church of Aghia Sophia, and discovered what they desired. They reported back to Kiev: “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. We cannot describe it to you: only this we know, that God dwells there among humans, and that their service surpasses the worship of all other places. For we cannot forget that beauty.”

The Monastery of Saint John the Baptist in Tolleshunt Knights in Essex (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

On the feast day of Saint Vladimir of Kiev, the participants in the summer school experienced some of that beauty and holiness when we visited the monks and nuns at the Stavropegic Monastery of Saint John the Baptist in Tolleshunt Knights, near Maldon in Essex.

The envoys from Kiev would have agreed that the early morning Divine Liturgy in the monastery church was one of unforgettable beauty.

After breakfast, Sister Magdalen spoke about “Monastic Holiness” and “Monastic Spirituality.” For her, “holiness is the divine life lived in human life, made possible in the incarnation, which shows us it is possible to live as the sons or daughters of God.”

Sister Magadlen is the author of a number of books, including Conversations with Children: Communicating our Faith. For her, the world is sustained by prayer, and every prayer is a cosmic event with cosmic dimensions and cosmic consequences. We shared a meal again with the monks and nuns at lunchtime, before returning to Cambridge that afternoon. But in spiritual terms I had spent a summer’s day sipping spiritual cocktails by the spiritual swimming pool.

An icon of the Ladder of Divine Ascent, illustrating the themes at the heart of the book by Saint John Climakos

‘To love is not just to be nice’

At Sidney Sussex, one of the monks of the monastery, Dr Nikolai Sakharov, looked at “Holiness in the Old and New Testaments,” tracing the movement from early ideas that saw holiness as the holiness of God to the New Testament concept of holiness that comes with living the word and following Christ in loving others. “For us Orthodox Christians, to love is not just to be nice,” he said. “To love is no longer an ethical or moral category, but an ontological category.”

The Revd Dr Fraser Watts spoke about “True and False Holiness,” looking at holiness and the personal transformation of the person on the pathway to holiness. Dr Watts is an Anglican priest and Starbridge Lecturer in Theology and the Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, a post that owes its origins and inspiration to the author Susan Howatch.

Referring to the developments in forgiveness therapy in psychology in the past decade or so, he said psychology is now better at giving helpful advice about forgiveness. But forgiveness should not be just because of the benefits, but because it is right and proper, he said. “God has forgiven humanity, so we should forgive.”

Professor Andrew Louth, one of the leading patristic scholars in Britain, has been Professor of Patristic and Byzantine Studies at University of Durham since 1996. In a paper on “The holy man in Late Antiquity,” he looked at the difference between the saint and the martyr, the holy man and the saint, the holy man and the wise woman, and the holy man and the holy place.

The liturgy of the heart

Professor Sebastian Brock of Wolfson College, Oxford, was introduced by the Principal of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Professor David Frost, who described Dr Brock as the world’s foremost Syriac scholar. The two worked together on the translations of the Psalms used in the Alternative Service Book of the Church of England (1980) and the Alternative Prayer Book of the Church of Ireland (1984).

Dr Brock spoke of the interior liturgy of the heart which is required as a response to the outward liturgy of the Church, and spoke of the three churches that need each other and need to function together: the heavenly church with the heavenly liturgy; the church of the altar and the liturgy on earth; and the church of the human heart with its interior liturgy.

Dr Marcus Plested, Vice-Principal and Academic Director of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, and author of The Macarian Legacy, explored the Homilies of Saint Macarius when he spoke on “Experiencing Holiness: Saint Macarius.”

Professor David Frost, who has a particular expertise in Shakespeare, spoke about “Shakespeare and Nous: Holy Fools in King Lear.”

Great artists are the prophets and seers of their age, with enduring relevance and the power to influence beliefs and change lives, he told us. King Lear, while apparently the most agnostic and despairing of Shakespeare’s works, in essence is both compatible with Christian belief and fundamentally Christian in its message, which is matched only by great Russian writers such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, he said.

The purpose of the Liturgy

Archimandrite Ephrem Lash spoke about the Liturgy in his paper, “Sober Drunkenness: Holiness in the Liturgy.” Father Ephrem comes from an interesting family: his uncle, a Downside monk, was Bishop of Bombay, his brother is the theologian Nicholas Lash, while he is a monk of Mount Athos who works in a mainly Greek-Cypriot parish in London.

He said the Liturgy is a communal act, not private devotions. “We do not go to church to pray as individuals, we go to make a joyful noise unto God.” Everything about the Liturgy is holy, and the object of the liturgy is to make us partakers of God’s holiness, to have communion. He said the purpose of the Liturgy is not to produce the “real presence” but is communion, with the holy gifts transformed so that we may eat and drink them.

On our final evening, some of us – Anglicans, Lutherans and Orthodox, from Ireland, England, Iceland, and Canada, the Church of Ireland, the Church of England, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland, the Antiochan Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church – adjourned to the Mitre, near Magdalene College.

Later as we sipped port in the Cloisters back at Sidney Sussex, we agreed the Mitre was appropriately named. Were we indulging in sober drunkenness or was it drunken sobriety? We may not have been holy fools, but we certainly came close communion with one another during that summer week in Cambridge.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological College. This essay first appeared in the September editions of the Church Review (Dublin and Glendalough), the Diocesan Magazine (Cashel, Ossory and Ferns) and Newslink (Limerick and Killaloe).

Holy Fools and Sober Drunkenness in the Cloisters

Master’s Court in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (Photograph Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware has been a popular speaker on Orthodoxy for decades, and introduced many people to Orthodoxy through his popular book, The Orthodox Church, which was first published in 1963, when he was only 29, and only five years after he joined the Orthodox Church.

Metropolitan Kallistos is a monk of the Monastery of Saint John on Patmos, titular Bishop of Diokleia and as assistant bishop in the Orthodox Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain, under the Ecumenical Patriarchate. A Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, for 35 years he was Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies at the University of Oxford.

I first heard Metropolitan Kallistos as a visiting lecturer when I was a student at the Irish School of Ecumenics (1982-1984). It was wonderful to hear him again this week in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, at the summer school on “The Ascent to Holiness” organised by the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies.

In his paper, Metropolitan Kallistos asked: “What is a Saint?” When the priest in the Orthodox liturgy says: “The holy things for the holy people,” he pointed out, this could also be translated as: “The sacraments for the saints,” or: “The holy things for the saints.”

There is one who is holy, Jesus Christ. Sanctity belongs to God, and we merely participate in God’s holiness. But sanctity is a universal vocation, to be a saint is the norm; a saint is a normal human being, as God intended humanity to be. All the baptised are called to be saints.

He related sainthood and sanctity to the descent of the Holy Spirit to Pentecost. In the Orthodox Calendar, the Sunday after Pentecost is All Saints’ Day. We are spirit bearers, and this is the fulfilment of Pentecost (Acts 2: 4), all are conferred with the gift of the Holy Spirit.

As he offered three descriptions of what it is to be a saint, he said is always good to have three points to make. He had been told to always have three points in sermon – although when he heard some sermons it would be good if they even had one point, and “some have none.”

He recalled a visit to Mount Athos in the early 1970s with Philip Sherrard and Gerald Palmer while they were working on their translation of the Philokalia. As they sat on a balcony on Chilandar overlooking a lake, they listened to frogs singing below. “These frogs were quite liturgical. First they started on the right bank, then on the left bank. They sang antiphonally, and there were a few soloists too, as they glorified God.”

For Gerald Palmer, a saint is someone who is conscious of God all the time, someone who sees Christ everywhere, and that way fulfils Paul’s call to pray without ceasing. A saint is a person of continual prayer, someone who not only prays all the time but is prayer all the time.

He shared a story he heard in a sermon when he was a boy of 10. An old man was sitting and appeared to be doing nothing for a long time. A child asked him why he was sitting there and doing nothing for such a long time. I’m not doing nothing, he explained. I sit and look at God, and God sits and looks at me.

The saints are intensely alive, and living in and with the living Christ, he said. They share the mind of Christ and hear our prayers.

He listed the three qualities of a saint as sociability, specificity and secrecy.

Looking at sociability, he said koinonia teaches us that the communion of saints is a relationship with one another and of God with us. It is a mark of sanctity to share. God is love, but not self-love, turned inwards. God is shared love, mutual love. When we are made in the image of God we are made in the image of the Trinity and we are called to reproduce on earth the movement of mutual love that passes between the three divine persons, the perichoresis of the Trinity.

To be a true human being is to reproduce the love of the Trinity. This is the basis or the origin of the holiness that marks the saints. John McMurray defined personhood in terms of relationship: “I need you in order to be myself.” The saint is the one who realises this to the highest possible way.

The Lord’s Prayer uses the word us five times, our three times, and we once, but never uses the words I, me or my, we were reminded.

Metropolitan Kallistos told the story of Saint Macarius who came across the skull of a pagan priest who told him he was in hell. The saint asked him what hell was like, and was told that those who were there were bound one to another, back-to-back, unable to see each other’s faces. “There is the essence of hell – not to be able to see the face of the other, not to be able to relate, not to be able to love.”

Speaking of specificity, he spoke of the variety among the saints: “The saints are surprising. It is sin that is monotonous. Sanctity is surprising. There are no new sins, always new forms of sanctity … Saints express the uniqueness of our human vocation.”

Martin Buber had once written about an Hasidic rabbi who was afraid that at the last judgment he would be asked not why he was not Abraham, not why he was not Moses, but why he had not been the unique person God had created him to be.

His third description of sainthood was hidenness. He said the saints were often ignored and attacked in their own lifetimes, and it was only after death that they had been glorified. He gave examples from the lives of Saint John Maximovitch of Shanghai and Saint Seraphim of Sarov.

“They did not have an easy time. Often they were secret, hidden, not recognised in their own lifetimes. That’s why we have the Feast of All Saints … The world is being supported by hidden persons of prayer ... the saints are hidden from the outside world, and from themselves, often not aware of their position.”

The Macarian Homilies

When we were having lunch in the Monastery of Saint John the Baptist in Tolleshunt Knights on Tuesday, one of the monks was reading from the Homilies of Saint Macarius during our lunch. And so it was interesting to hear Dr Marcus Plested explore the Homilies of Saint Macarius on Thursday when he spoke on “Experiencing Holiness: Saint Macarius.”

Dr Plested is Vice-Principal and Academic Director of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, and author of The Macarian Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2004).

As he distinguished Saint Macarius of the Homilies from other saints with the same name, he too told the story of Saint Macarius of Egypt coming across the skull of a soul now languishing in hell. He also told the story Saint Macarius of Alexandria who healed a hyena’s blind whelp, and was thanked by the hyena later with a sheepskin.

Saint Macarius of the Homilies wrote simply under the title of “the Blessed One.” His homilies are extraordinarily worked, with rich imagery and a vibrant symbolism in Syriac poetry that combines the spiritual traditions of the Syriac and Greek theological, ascetic and spiritual traditions.

For Saint Macarius, when the soul becomes the dwelling place of God, man’s purpose becomes fulfilled. The movement is double one. The throne of the Godhead is our intellect, and the throne of our intellect is the Godhead and the Spirit. God serves the person in the city of the soul, and the souls serves God in the heavenly city. God’s love bridges the gap between the Creator and the creature. Sainthood is not to be attained only in the afterlife, but is to be achieved here within the soul, although it is only at the resurrection that this sainthood becomes evident on the outside.

Macarius is a deeply practical theologian when it comes to sin and evil. By the experience of sin and grace, the soul is educated and becomes more perceptive and vigilant. He says: “The soul has got to undergo its own Passover” – we have to taste both the sweetness of the lamb and the bitterness of the herbs.

Holy Fools and King Lear

The Principal of the IOCS, Professor David Frost, is a distinguished translator of liturgical texts and the Psalms, and with a particular expertise in Shakespeare. It was a culturally uplifting experience to hear him talk on “Shakespeare and Nous: Holy Fools in King Lear.”

Great artists are the prophets and seers of their age, with enduring relevance and the power to influence beliefs and change lives, he told us. For many, King Lear is the most agnostic and despairing of Shakespeare’s works, but he said in essence it is both compatible with Christian belief and it is fundamentally Christian in its message, which is matched only by great Russian writers such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, he said.

The play constantly raises questions about morals and the origins of evil, offers ambiguous or agnostic answers, and defies any efforts to resolve.

The naïve faith in the powers above of some of the “rational” characters is called into question by the defeat of Lear and Cordelia’s defeat, the murder of Cordelia and the death of Lear. Albany tries to tidy up afterwards and set things to right. Yet Shakespeare remains deliberately ambiguous, providing an altered ending from an older story to reflect on how things turn out in the world.

Dr Frost then took the unnamed character of the Servant, who is moved by pity and who suffers death, as an example of nous, which is seen by both Plato and Plotinus, and in Eastern Orthodoxy, as “the eye of the soul.” This Servant is ordinary, unredeemed humanity, capable of acts of common decency.

To Cordelia is reserved role of redeeming the play from black despair. When she replies to her father, “No cause, no cause,” she refuses to accept that anything done to her allows her to seek vengeance or to hate. Love is feely given to those who don’t deserve it. The acceptance of undeserved love allows re-establishment of relationship. Reconciliation is made possible by the power of nous. Cordelia forgives as we would wish to be forgiven. The power of nous breaks in when it is least expected. Whatever the practical fate of those who forgive, the Christian ethic of forgiveness is vindicated in the play. The alternative is that the world will tear itself apart. We know what we must choose, even if the world around us may not survive.

‘Sober Drunkenness’

Later, Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, who has been a regular lecturer at the institute in Cambridge, spoke about the Liturgy in his paper, “Sober Drunkenness: Holiness in the Liturgy.” Father Ephrem comes from an interesting family: his uncle, a Downside monk, was Bishop of Bombay, his brother is the Roman Catholic theologian, Professor Nicholas Lash of Cambridge, he is an uncle of the actor Ralph Fiennes, while he is a monk of Mount Athos and an archimandrite attached to the Ecumenical Throne in Constantinople, and is now working in a mainly Greek-Cypriot parish in London.

He said the Liturgy is a communal act, not private devotions. “We do not go to church to pray as individuals, we go to make a joyful noise unto God.” Everything about the Liturgy is holy, and the object of the liturgy is to make us partakers of God’s holiness, to have communion. The gifts are made holy by the work of the Trinity, where the Holy Spirit is the agent of the Holy Trinity. The Epiklesis or invocation of the Holy Spirit is not a magic moment, but about hallowing or making holy.

He said again that the purpose of the Liturgy is not to produce the “real presence,” but is communion, with the holy gifts transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ so that we may eat and drink them. And he was so right when he said: “There is no magic moment.” The whole Liturgy is one complete holy action, and it cannot be broken up into parts.

The Mitre and the Cloisters

At the end of the day, we held our celebration dinner in the Old Library in Sidney Sussex. And then a few of us – Anglicans, Lutherans and Orthodox, from Ireland, England, Iceland, Canada, the Church of Ireland, the Church of England, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland, the Antiochan Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church – adjourned to the Mitre, between Sidney and Magdalene.

Later as we sipped port in the Cloisters back at Sidney Sussex, we agreed the Mitre was an appropriately named pub. Were we indulging in sober drunkenness or was it drunken sobriety? We may not have been holy fools, but we certainly had what came close to “magic moments” or even communion with one another this past week.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland of Ireland Theological College

Visiting Christ’s Garden and God’s House

The Revd Christopher Woods in Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he is chaplain (Photograph © Patrick Comerford, 2008)

Patrick Comerford

Last night, a former student at the Church of Ireland Theological College, the Revd Christopher Woods, invited me to dinner in the Fellows’ dining room at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he has been chaplain since last September.

Christ’s College is the college of the poet John Milton, who came up in 1628; Erasmus Darwin (1825), to my delight because of his Lichfield connections; the historian Simon Schama; the satirist Sacha Baron Cohen; and Archbishop Rowan Williams, who must be facing the toughest weeks ever at the moment at the Lambeth Conference.

This year in Christ’s, they are marking the four-hundreth anniversary of Milton’s birth; next year, the plan to mark the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth; the portraits of both hang in the Hall, which was largely rebuilt by George Gilbert Scott the younger in 1876. Perhaps after this year’s events at the Lambeth Conference they will want to hang a portrait of Archbishop Williams in the Hall too. Christ’s was also the college of the novelist C.P. Snow, who was a fellow of Christ’s in the 1930s and 1940s, and he described the college in his novel The Masters (1951).

The Fellows’ Building in Christ’s dates from 1642, and is one of the earliest examples of classical architecture in Cambridge. The central gates lead to the Fellows’ Garden, which was laid out in the early 19th century. Despite that date, it claims to still have Milton’s mulberry tree. This mulberry tree was probably planted 400 years ago in 1608, the year of John Milton’s birth, on the orders of King James I to encourage the silk industry. The scheme was short-lived, because the wrong sort of mulberry bush was planted. But it is said Milton sat under the tree to write his poetry. It is said that Milton was a pale, delicate, long-haired young man, and that the other students nicknamed him “the Lady of Christ’s.” The Fellows’ Garden also has several beehives, and even has an early 18th century bathing pool, built for hardy bathing.

The origins of Christ’s College date back to 1440s, when the small College of God’s House was established in the aftermath of the Black Death as one of the first dedicated teacher training colleges in England.

Almost a century later, Bishop John Fisher used his influence with Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of King Henry VII and grandmother of King Henry VIII, to secure a new charter on 1 May 1505 that turned the College of God’s House into a new college dedicated to Jesus Christ. But it is has been known ever after as Christ’s College. I wondered why it wasn’t known, perhaps, as Jesus College. But Jesus College – the college of Thomas Cranmer – is in Jesus Lane, just around the corner from me at Sidney Sussex College. But I’m still learning about the peculiarities of Cambridge college names – Jesus College was established in 1496 as “The College of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint John the Evangelist and the Virgin Saint Radegund.”

The entrance to Christ’s College is also peculiar. In many ways, it is similar to the magnificent gateway of Lady Margaret Beaufort’s other foundation, Saint John’s. But due to the rise of the street levels over 500 years, the bottom of the wooden entrance gates has had to be removed. When I walked through these entrance gates, I found that the First Court, which dates from the time of God’s House, is not square like other Cambridge college courts, because it follows the street line.

The chapel of Christ’s dates back to God’s House, and retains on the north side some of the oldest stained glass in Cambridge, dating back to pre-Reformation days of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, as well as one of the few surviving mediaeval eagle lecterns. High on the wall on the south side of the chapel is the window of Lady Margaret’s oratory, which allowed her to view the worship in the chapel below. The window, which connects the chapel with the Master’s Lodge, was later blocked up but was reopened in 1899. The chapel was enlarged in 1506, and Christopher showed me some of the original features, now hidden behind the wooden panelling which dates from 1702.

On the north side of the altar, there is a peculiar monument to two inseparable fellows of Christ’s, Sir John Finch and Sir Thomas Baines – Baines died in Constantinople, and Finch had his body embalmed and shipped back to England, so they could be buried together in Cambridge. I wonder what a Lambeth Conference would have thought of that in those days.

Christ’s College also played a central role in the story of the Cambridge Platonists, whose numbers from Christ’s included Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, Benjamin Whichcote and William Paley, author of the Evidences of Christianity (1794). They believed, in contrast to many of their contemporaries, in reason as the primary route to God, “for the spiritual is most rational,” as Whichcote declared. Charles Darwin later lived in Paley’s old rooms in First Court.

The last ordained Master of Christ’s College was the Revd Dr Charles Raven an outspoken pacifist in the 1940s and 1950s who was a great friend of the late Archbishop George Otto Simms. And in the 1950s, the Revd John Brown was chaplain before moving to the Church of Ireland Theological College.

There is an apocryphal story that once after he had said grace in Latin before dinner in the theological college, he was challenged by a student who said: “I didn’t understand what have you said.” To which John Brown retorted immediately: “I wasn’t speaking to you.”

We said grace in Latin before and after dinner last night. Then, after a bottle of port it was back to the B Bar, which was once the old Arts Cinema in Market Passage, a few steps away from Sidney Sussex, to catch up with my email, my Facebook messages, and my blogging.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, Church of Ireland Theological College

The Ascent to Holiness and the Search for the Holy Man

A view across Cambridge from my room in Sidney Sussex College (Photograph © Patrick Comerford 2008)

Patrick Comerford


The participants in the Cambridge summer school organised by the Institute for Christian Orthodox Studies – lecturers and students – come from a variety of backgrounds, although we are mainly Orthodox and Anglican, with a large number of priests from both traditions. And so it is very that we began today with Orthodox Matins in the Anglican Chapel of Sidney Sussex College.

The summer school topic is “The Ascent to Holiness,” drawing on The Ladder of Ascent by Saint John Climakos. Dr George Bebabwi was back with us this morning and looked at “Holiness in the Eastern and Western Churches.” And once again, there were real nuggets of wisdom as he strayed from his prepared text.

Holiness is not a virtue, he told us, but is “a participation in the holiness of God, period.” Humility, silence and ascetism are virtues in the practice of holiness. But holiness is not; rather, it is a participation in God’s holiness.

To be holy is to receive or to participate in the holiness of God. When we receive Holy Communion, we receive and participate in the holiness of Christ. But we cannot acquire holiness. We can protect holiness by ascetism, but we cannot acquire holiness.

To stay in the realm of grace requires practice. But grace is received, not achieved.

For the Fathers of the Church, to be holy is to receive the spirit of holiness. God is holy, but holiness in the New Testament and for the Early Fathers is to partake in the divine nature.

Christ is the head of the body, which is the Church, and every member of the body participates in the holiness of Christ. Holiness, in its definition, is deification; it is not a virtue, but is the work of the Holy Spirit within us.

Every human being is made in the image of God. And so, if holiness means being dedicated to God, then in every person there is a glimpse of God.

He told the story of a rabbi who once suggested to God, “let’s play.”

“Play what?” asked God.

“Let’s play hide and seek,” suggested the rabbi.

“But I’ve been doing it all along in Old Testament,” said God.

“Then hide in the human heart,” the rabbi prompted.

“Why?”

“Because that’s the last place humans will look into and search.”

Saint Macarius had written that the outer form of life is fading away, but in the inner life we can sense the bones and tissues of Christ.

Cardinal John Henry Newman once explained that he preferred beauty to food, because once you eat a meal the food gone, but when you see something beautiful, the memory of it lasts for a long time, and offers a glimpse of immortal life.

Later in the morning, Professor Sebastian Brock spoke on “Holiness in Song: St Ephrem the Syrian.” Dr Brock was introduced by Professor David Frost, who described him as the world’s foremost Syriac scholar. The two worked together on the translations of the Psalms used in the Alternative Service Book of the Church of England (1980) and the Alternative Prayer Book of the Church of Ireland (1984). Dr Brock was a reader in Syriac Studies at the University of Oxford’s Oriental Institute in the university of Oxford, is now a professorial Fellow at Wolfson College, oxford, and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Saint Ephrem wrote most of his theology, at the height of the Arian controversy, as poetry. For Saint Ephrem, right being means responsible living, on a horizontal plane with the rest of humanity and the rest of creation, and on a vertical plane with God. It is only our with realisation of the inter-connectedness and interdependence of every human being that right action becomes an imperative that is directed towards all other human beings, and towards the whole environment and whole creation.

He spoke of the interior liturgy of the heart which is required as a response to the outward liturgy of the Church, and spoke of the three churches that need each other and need to function together: the heavenly church with the heavenly liturgy; the church of the altar and the liturgy on earth; and the church of the human heart with its interior liturgy.

In the afternoon, Professor Frost read a paper by his wife, Dr Christine Mangala, on “Holiness in Eastern Religion: an Orthodox Perspective.” She comes from an ancient family of Brahmin poets, sages and priests in the Shivite religious tradition in India, and was the first woman to win Nehru Memorial Scholarship. Today, like her husband, she is an Orthodox Christian. It would have been fascinating to meet her, but she cannot be in Cambridge this week because she is teaching on behalf of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Aleppo.

She tells the story of an ashram near Madras that is visited regularly by a well-dressed Westerner. Once he arrives, he takes off all his clothes, covers himself in white ashes and renounces the world. The local people respect and venerate this naked sadhu, flocking in their hundreds to be in his presence. But what they do not know is that back in Europe he is high-flying, French fashion designer, who needs to cast off his life as a fashion guru in order to liberate himself from the world of fashion and to explore seek out his inner self.

She described bizarre bazaar in India, especially on the banks of the Ganges, of so-called holy men with their ascetic practices, many of them extreme cases with fakirs, swamis, and gurus engaging self-torture, growing lengthy nails and beards, standing on one leg, or lying on beds of nails.

But this raises questions for Orthodox Christians, she said. Can there be saints in non-Christian religions? Can there be manifestation of the Holy Spirit in other religions? And how should Christians respond to them?

She spoke about Eastern teachers who encouraged their followers to make a clean sweep of suffering and evil as delusional. But she found they were often shallow and slick, offensive and patronising, with inadequate answers about evil and suffering, which they dismissed as delusional. With their futile philosophical quests for self-realisation, they did not inspire a sense of holiness; they were not purifying the ego, but destroying it.

Holiness is inconceivable within an impersonalist world view, she said. Holiness is the luminous, active mystery of God, present in all his transcendent actions.

But then the question had to be asked: is there anything in Hindu traditions that we can acknowledge as genuine? She had also found true holiness in the everyday life of ordinary Hindus, expressed in their everyday lives, their music, their poetry and even in their dance. The search for the love and grace of a personal God are deeply rooted in the Hindu psyche, and in their poetry especially we can find a longing for the divine, the holy, the pure.

She compared some of the bakthi poets with those who are called blessed in the beatitudes because they are hungering for God. Some of them had experienced God in a vision that was a vision of light; they celebrate life and exude joy, but also sorrow over a suffering world. Their pleas to God are deeply poignant, but they rejoice at the same time. And joy in sorrow and sorrow in joy must be recognised as trait of saintliness.

The holy women and men we remembered this evening during Orthodox Vespers in the college chapel included Saint Marina the Martyr of Antioch and Saint Andrei Rublev, the great Russian icon writer. Then it was off to dinner with a former student at the Church of Ireland Theological College, the Revd Christopher Woods, who has been the chaplain at Christ’s College, Cambridge, for the past year.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological College

A bus from Jesus to monastic holiness

Sister Magdalen at Saint John's Monastery in Tolleshunt Knights, near Maldon, Essex (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, in his classical introductory book, The Orthodox Church, tells the story of Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, who was still a pagan when he felt the need to know what the true religion was. He sent his followers to visit different countries in turn. They first visited the Muslim Bulgars of the Volga, but reported back: “There is no joy among them, but mournfulness and a great smell; and there is nothing good about them.”

The envoys next visited Germany and Rome. In those places, they found the worship more satisfactory, but complained too that the worship was without beauty.

Finally, they travelled on to Constantinople, where they attended the Divine Liturgy in the Great Church of Aghia Sophia, and discovered what they desired. They reported back to Kiev: “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. We cannot describe it to you: only this we know, that God dwells there among humans, and that their service surpasses the worship of all other places. For we cannot forget that beauty.”

Bishop Kallistos is due to speak tomorrow on “What is a Saint?” at the summer school in Sidney Sussex College Cambridge organised by the Institute for Orthodox Studies. Today, Saint Vladimir of Kiev was being commemorated in the Orthodox Calendar, and the participants experienced some of that beauty and holiness when we visited the monks and nuns at the Stavropegic Monastery of Saint John the Baptist in Tolleshunt Knights, near Maldon in Essex.

This monastery, which was founded by Archimandrite Sophrony (1896-1993), a disciple of Saint Silouan (1866-1938) of Mount Athos, is a mixed community and gives a central place to the Jesus Prayer and is a popular place for pilgrims and Orthodox visitors.

Our visit involved an early start from Cambridge, catching a bus on Jesus Lane at 6 a.m. so we could be in the monastery just after 7 for the Divine Liturgy. And there we experienced as liturgy commemorating Saint Vladimir, but a liturgy that would have gripped Vladimir’s envoys with its unforgettable beauty.

After breakfast, Sister Magdalen spoke to us in the Silouan Hall about “Monastic Holiness” and “Monastic Spirituality.” For her, “Holiness is the divine life lived in human life, made possible in the incarnation, which shows us it is possible to live as the sons or daughters of God.”

In the monastic life, she explained simple, if you love Christ then you o his will. If you were irritated by the habits or behaviour of another member of the community, you did not get angry or complain, but prayed in words such as: “Lord have mercy on Sister Magdalen and by her holy prayers have mercy on me.”

Sister Magadlen is the author of a number of books, including Conversations with Children: Communicating our Faith. As she communicated her faith to us, she was full of wisdom, learning, humour and personal humility. For her the world is sustained by prayer, and every prayer is a cosmic event with cosmic dimensions and cosmic consequences.

And she told the tender story of a monk who came to the city and wept when he saw a finely dressed prostitute. He was asked why he was crying, and explained that he was weeping “for her soul and for myself.” He had understood that she had spent many hours in dressing herself and preparing herself for what he knew was going to be a short moment, while he knew he was constantly standing before the Eternal Throne but felt he had spent little time in preparation.

We had a shared meal again with the monks and nuns at lunchtime, before returning to Cambridge this afternoon. But in spiritual terms I had spent a summer’s day sipping spiritual cocktails by the spiritual swimming pool.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological College

Humour with the Desert Fathers in Cambridge

A view with a room: looking up towards my room (K5) in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2008)

Patrick Comerford

If anyone has doubts about the potential for humour among the Early Fathers, the wisdom of taking part in a summer school on Patristic studies or wonders where humour and relevance might be found in these subjects, then the opening day of the summer school on ‘The Ascent to Holiness’ at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, today (Monday, 14 July) would have dispelled all misgivings.

Dr George Bebabwi only barely managed to stick to his script as he delivered his paper on ‘Discernment’ with great style and humour. Dr Bebabwi is an Egyptian scholar now living in Indianapolis. He is a former director of the Institute for Christian Orthodox Studies, has lectured on Islam and Judaism in Cambridge, and was a tutor at Saint John’s College Nottingham while Bishop Richard Henderson was a student there.

At an early stage in his presentation he warned us against any “method” being applied to discernment and the search for holiness. “Christian life is not controlled by methods or guided by techniques. We have a fellowship with the persons of the divine and Holy Trinity,” he told us. So, to participate in the life of God denies for us a method or a technique. We cannot be part of the life of a person – any person – by learning a method or a technique.”

But he also warned against what he described as “learning wisdom.” He quoted from the Egyptian Desert Father, Abba Poemen, who said: “A man who teaches without doing what he teaches is like a spring which cleanses and gives drinks to everyone, but is not able to purify itself.”

He told us the story of a monk in Egypt who wanted to be martyr. His abbot warned him against false heroism and told him it was easy to be unusual. True heroism, the abbot said, is found in daily life, looking for reality and finding God’s will there. The monk persisted in his quest for martyrdom, however, and headed off to an area controlled by nomadic tribes, and demanded to become a martyr. But once they captured him, he was unable to resist, and rather than accept the pain of martyrdom he worshipped their idols. He returned to the monastery, where the abbot reminded him that true heroism often lies in dealing with daily realities rather than seeking to be dramatic or unusual. And he reminded us of an old priest who once told him: “You live the cross when you make the sign of the cross – accepting the harsh times when they come.”

Waiting for godly action

In another story he told, the Devil appeared to a rabbi saying he wanted to repent. The rabbi said this was too much to deal with on his own and he needed to call a minyan or quorum of rabbis to deal with it. The rabbis prayed, and eventually, when God appeared to them in a cloud, he asked them: “Why doesn’t he speak to me directly. Let him repent.”

The first rabbi returned, and reported to the Devil, who said “Yes, I’ll repent. But he has to accept me as I am.”

Once again, the rabbis went back and told God what the Devil had said. To this God replied: “He has to repent, and he has to accept me as I am.”

It was a serious treatment of discerning between good and evil, right and false doctrine, the intentions of the heart and its secret movements, and holy angels and evil ones, drawing on the writings of the Desert Fathers. But throughout the discussion, there were moments of great compassion and humour. But then, as he quoted Saint Anthony, the founder of monasticism, as saying: “Joy and not fear are the signs of the holy.”

At one stage, he told a story from the Abbot Sophronius of a desert monk who was called on for an exorcism. The monk slowly took out the scroll of the Book Genesis and started to read methodically and carefully at Chapter 1, Verse 1, not verse-by-verse, or even word-by-word, but letter-by-letter: “I-N T-H-E B-E-G-I-N-N-I-N-G, G-O- …” Before he got any further, the Devil interrupted the monk, demanding in an outraged voice: “This is an exorcism – aren’t you supposed to be reading the Psalms.” “I’ll get to them, in my own good time,” the monk replied nonchalantly. “I can’t wait that long,” was the impatient response. “I’m out of here now.”

Holiness in Scripture

In the first paper at the morning session, the Revd Dr Nikolai Sakharov looked at “Holiness in the Old and New Testaments.” He traced the movement from early ideas that saw holiness as the holiness of God, whose holiness was linked to being separate from the world, through later ideas about the physical dimensions of holiness, including the holiness of inanimate objects set aside for the worship of God, the holiness of people who were set aside for worship and who were expected to be ritually pure, or the holiness of soldiers, prophets and Israel as a nation, before moving on the concept of the holiness of people being found in spiritual holiness.

However, in the New Testament, holiness comes with living the word and following Christ in loving others. “For us Orthodox Christians, to love is not just to be nice,” he said. “To love is no longer an ethical or moral category, but an ontological category.”

And he added: “Christ is our living commandment. How otherwise can you teach people to love? There is no other way aside from example.”

The morning lectures were chaired by the Principal of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Professor David Frost, who was a key contributor to the collects and the translations of the Psalms in the Alternative Prayer Book published by the Church of Ireland in 1984.

‘True and False Holiness’

In the afternoon, the Revd Dr Fraser Watts spoke about “True and False Holiness,” looking at holiness and the personal transformation of the person on the pathway to holiness. Dr Watts is the Starbridge Lecturer in Theology and the Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, a post that owes its origins and inspiration to the author Susan Howatch. An Anglican priest, he is also vice-chaplain at the Church of Saint Edward the Martyr in Cambridge.

He said that theology, like philosophy, is better when it is done with another discipline. He spoke of the benefits of binocular vision, and said it is difficult with to estimate depth with just one eye.

He said it was clear to psychologists that spiritual practices have a transforming effect on people who are on the path to holiness, helping them emotionally, reducing their anxieties or freeing them from addictions, he said. But for Christians, the path to holiness cannot be advanced on pragmatic grounds, he said. It must be the right and proper response to God’s saving work in Christ and our life in the Church, and not about the benefits such as reducing anxiety and guilt.

Referring to the developments in forgiveness therapy in psychology in the past decade or so, he said psychology is now better at giving helpful advice about forgiveness. But forgiveness should not be just because of the benefits, but because it is right and proper, he said. “God has forgiven humanity, so we should forgive.”

Looking at key moments of personal transformation found in encounters with Jesus in the Gospels, he said they were marked by three characteristics: Promise, involving the promise of enormous, deep personal transformation; Cost, in which that promise was balanced by a warning of the Costliness of moving towards transformation, “which doesn’t come cheap”; and Reassurance – on this costly path, we will not be on our own, for the Spirit will be with us.

He said psychotherapy and counselling understand the needs for hope and expectation, but also understand the cost involved. If we find ourselves stuck in one limited way of relating to people, there is a promise of another, better way, but it comes at the cost of letting go of limited ways bin order to move onto something higher and bigger. That journey need not be faced alone, and the need accompaniment and support along the way is recognised by the counsellor or therapist.

We are all different people, he said, with different journeys, different starting points, so there is no identikit model of what it is to become a holy person. There is a variety of people, each on our own journey. But our similarities mean that there are points on the map that may help us all, even if we do not have identical journeys.

Later there was an interesting discussion about the psychology of grace and deep and superficial forms of forgiveness. “Forgiveness is not just forgetting, but is costly,” he said. “And it carries obligations.” And yet he recognised that there are times when forgiveness is not possible, “not just because people haven’t reached the point where possible, but also because of the enormity of what has happened.”

Holy men and wise women

The Revd Professor Andrew Louth is one of the leading patristic scholars in Britain today. He has been Professor of Patristic and Byzantine Studies at University of Durham since 1996. He was received into the Orthodox Church in 1989 and was ordained in Durham in 2003. He spoke in the afternoon about “The Holy Man in Late Antiquity.”

In a very wise paper, he looked at the difference between the saint and the martyr, between the holy man and the saint, between the holy man and the wise woman, and the between holy man and the holy place.

Tomorrow we’re off to meet some modern holy men and wise women when we visit the Monastery of Saint John the Baptist in Tolleshunt, Essex, where Dr Sakharov is a monk.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological College.

Simply Sidney

Chapel Court, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

Patrick Comerford

There’s a popular story in Drogheda of a young child proudly bringing a group of her friends into Saint Peter’s Church to show them “the head of Blessed Oliver Cromwell.”

Well, they don’t have the head of Oliver Plunkett in Cambridge, but they do have the head of Oliver Cromwell, which is said to be buried under the floor of the Chapel of Sidney Sussex College, where I took part in Matins this morning.

I arrived in Cambridge last night for the Ninth Cambridge Summer School, which has been organised by the Institute for Christian Studies, which is part of the Cambridge Theological Federation. Before we got down to work this morning, we had dinner in the Dining Hall at Sidney Sussex College last night and then went around the corner to Wesley House on Jesus Lane for Vespers and for a very relaxed reception on the lawn.

The theme of this year’s summer school is “The Ascent to Holiness,” and my participation is possible because of a generous grant from the Oulton Fund. Throughout the week, the summer school is taking place in Sidney Sussex College, and my room, which looks out towards Sidney Street, is K5 – what a laugh if they really had placed me in K9. My stairs is in New Parlour, which is part of Cloister Court, and looks out over Sidney Street to Sainsbury’s and Trinity College. Cloister Court is an inspired and charming neo-Jacobean building designed by Pearson as New Court and built in 1890 to provide more room for the growing numbers of undergraduates.

Sidney Sussex is sometimes known simply as Sidney, although students from neighbouring colleges also call it “Sidney Sainsbury’s” – well I am only a few steps across the street from the Sidney Street branch of Sainsbury’s, which every Cambridge student uses because of its central location.

Sidney is one of the 31 colleges that make up the University of Cambridge. But Sidney Sussex is a very well-kept secret. Its legacy of Nobel Prize winners, its Elizabethan brickwork, its charming Cloister Court, its haunting Chapel, its exquisite rococo Hall, mediaeval cellars and its beautiful ancient gardens all lie behind a rather self-effacing wall of Roman cement. The student population is relatively small with about 350 undergraduates and 190 graduates. But Sidney Sussex has traditionally excelled in certain subjects, notably engineering, history and law. And Sidney boasts strong women’s football and netball teams … and performs well at darts.

The college also claims to have the cheapest bar in Cambridge, although I have yet to find it … perhaps it’s not open at the moment.

For those who delight in Trivial Pursuits, Sidney Sussex had a winning team on University Challenge in both 1971 and 1978-1979, and the 1978 team went on to win the “Champion of Champions” University Challenge Reunion in 2002. But then, this small college has always punched way above its weight and from 1596 Sidney fellows and students have made a huge impact on all aspects of English national culture, religion, politics, business, law and science.

A Puritan foundation

From the beginning, Sidney Sussex was an avowedly Puritan foundation: “some good and godlie moniment for the mainteynance of good learninge.” The college motto is: “Dieu me garde de calomnie.”

Oliver Cromwell was among the first students here, although his father became ill and he never graduated. His head is now buried beneath the college chapel. Sidney has produced soldiers, political cartoonists, alchemists, spies, murderers, ghosts and arsonists as well as media personalities, film and opera directors, a Premiership football club chairman, best-selling authors, the man who introduced soccer to Hungary, the 1928 Grand National winner and – according to Dorothy Sayers – it must have been the college of Sherlock Holmes.

Sidney excels academically across the board in most subjects yet retains its unique friendly, informal yet traditional atmosphere. It has given us five Nobel Prize winners (the fourth highest among Cambridge colleges). From the 1940s, history has also been a huge success story with Asa Briggs, David Thomson, Derek Beales, Tim Blanning, Otto Smail, John Brewer and Helen Castor among the many names who have acquired international reputations. Politicians and commentators include the former Foreign Secretary David Owen, and Frank Owen, the legendary editor of the Evening Standard. In the arts, there is John Madden, director of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and Christopher Page, who brought the music of the mediaeval mystic Hildegard of Bingen to our attention.

Who was Lady Sidney Sussex?

For a college officially founded on Saint Valentine’s Day, Sidney also had a “Lovers’ Walk.” But was Lady Frances Sidney Sussex a romantic person, and how did Sidney Sussex College get its strange name?

Before Sidney was founded, the Grey Friars, or Franciscans inhabited this site for almost 300 before the upheavals of the Reformation which led to Sidney's foundation as an explicitly protestant college. The cellars housing Sidney’s wine below Hall Court are said to be mediaeval structures from that monastic age.

Long after the Reformation and the dissolution of the monastic foundations, Sidney Sussex, founded in 1596, and was named after its founder, Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex. Lady Frances Sidney is an enigmatic woman. She was the aunt of the poet Sir Phillip Sidney, and was married to the leading courtier and soldier, the Earl of Sussex. At Queen Elizabeth’s court, she was an adviser and patron of literature and music. Her homes included Bermondsey, near the royal palace at Greenwich, and the magnificent New Hall at Boreham, Essex, close to the Mildmay family who founded Emmanuel, another Protestant college in Cambridge.

She died in 1589 and is commemorated in a grand physical monument in Westminster Abbey as well as the “goodly and godly” one at Cambridge. But what inspired Lady Frances to found a college in Cambridge in the first place? Her will was written just after the Spanish Armada and five years after the death of her husband, who had been a loyal Catholic under Mary and a fierce rival of Leicester and his protégé, Lady Frances’s nephew, Sir Philip Sidney. Was it her idea to leave a small sum to found a college, or did the idea come from powerful and influential her theological mentor, Archbishop Whitgift?

Whitgift was a moderate Calvinist and a strong enemy of radical Puritanism. Nevertheless, he wanted a serious transformation of the training of priests in the Church of England priests. James Montagu, the first Sidney master, was James I’s editor and one of the translators of the Authorised Version of Bible in 1611.

Other fellows and students in the crucial years leading up to the English Civil War included: Thomas Gataker, a classical scholar and Puritan theologian who became embroiled in a debate about predestination and gambling; the High Churchman and Hebraicist John Pocklington, whose Sunday No Sabbath was burned in 1635; Samuel Ward of Ipswich, who was a celebrated preacher based in Ipswich and one of Britain's first political cartoonists; Jeremiah Whitaker, the oriental scholar and friend of Cromwell who took a leading role at the seminal 1643 Westminster Assembly of Divines; the royalist Sir Thomas Adams, founder of an Arabic professorship at Cambridge and Lord Mayor of London; and Thomas Adams, who was a major influence on John Bunyan.

However, there is a question as to whether Sidney was ever really a Puritan college, for royalists abounded at Sidney too. The most notable was Archbishop John Bramhall (1594-1663) of Armagh, who played a crucial role alongside the saintly Bishop Jeremy Taylor in the Church of Ireland after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

Sidney took a lead in science and medicine too. Bishop Seth Ward of Winchester was a major mathematician and astronomer and a founder of the Royal Society. John Sterne was founder of the Royal College of Physicians in Dublin as well as a professor of law and Hebrew.

Perhaps the most important figure at Sidney in the early 18th century was the theologian and moral philosopher William Wollaston, whose Religion of Nature Delineated (1724) led to his being one of five British “worthies,” alongside Newton and Boyle. The Lichfield-born writer, Samuel Johnson, famed for his dictionary, is known as Dr Johnson because of the honorary doctorate he received in Dublin. But he once made visit Sidney which nearly led, it seems, to the great doctor becoming a Fellow.

A High Church tradition

Although the head of Oliver Cromwell was somewhere beneath the chapel floor as we sang Matins this morning, the Chapel of Sidney Sussex now has a very visible High Church tradition, now adorned with a previously unthinkable Catholic altarpiece by the Venetian painter Pittoni. The Chapel was redesigned by James Essex in the 1770s and is an impressive make-over of a plain if evocative 17th century religious space.

For much of the early Victorian period, Sidney became in effect an Anglican seminary. The Victorians included Robert Machray, who became Canada’s first archbishop, the pioneering Anglo-Catholic Thomas Pelham Dale, who was jailed for his ritualism and High Church practices, and John Wale Hicks, who became an Anglo-Catholic Bishop of Bloemfontein. A new chapel was built in Sidney in the Edwardian era, becoming in the eyes of many the finest and most elaborate modern Catholic-style chapel in Cambridge.

But why did this once “Puritan” college respond so positively to the rise of the High Church tradition and Anglo-Catholicism? I hope to find out over the next week, even if I don’t find the cheap beer.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological College.