St. Maroun Church: A citadel for a lost language

In the far north of Israel, in a stone church tucked onto a remote hillside, Christmas Mass will be recited, as it is every year, in the language Jesus Christ spoke. Aramaic remains the liturgical language of the Maronite Christians in the Galilee, where Christ grew up and a resilient congregation struggles to revive the language in everyday life.

“Two thousand years ago it was very known,” says Father Bshara Suleiman, pastor of the St. Maroun Church, named for the 5th century monk who inspired the movement in the Aramean region in what is today Syria. By then Aramaic had been the lingua franca from Egypt to Afghanistan for perhaps 1,000 years, though few Americans had heard of it before The Passion of the Christ. The controversial 2004 feature directed by Mel Gibson was the top-grossing non-English film in history.

I spent some time in Los Angeles, oh, about eight years ago, trying to find William Fulco, the Loyola Marymount professor who translated Gibson’s script. I had in mind an article exploring the controversy surrounding the Aramaic used in the film – how much is guesswork, and how much of a dying, boutique language can be reasonably reconstructed.  Never found him, never happened.

Clearly, I was in the wrong place.  I should have headed for the town of Jish in Israel, where the language is still spoken.  I’m fascinated by these dead and dying languages – you might have guessed that from my post here from David Harrison‘s talk at the Modern Language Association convention in Scottsdale last fall – and Christmas brings thoughts of Aramaic, the tongue that first described it.

So read Karl Vick‘s Time Magazine article on the Aramaic here.

Tonight, on Christmas Eve, the Stanford Theater on University Avenue is showing Frank Capra‘s It’s a Wonderful Life, as usual.

I will not be going.  You have to book ages in advance, long before you have sorted your plans out – or had any thoughts about Christmas at all – otherwise it is sold out before you arrive at the ticket counter.  After all, it is an annual ritual, a “heart-warming Christmas film,” “a sentimental favorite” … or is it?

I’m reminded of the New York Times article, by Wendell Jamieson, of a few years’ vintage:

A terrifying, asphyxiating story?

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.

Jamieson has it wrong on some points:  relinquishing dreams is an inevitable part of growing up.  You can’t be a brain surgeon, a stand-up comedian and a playboy with a yacht. You won’t be 6’4″ if you’re destined to be 5’5,” and you can’t marry all the handsome men who ask you out.  Making one choice necessarily means sacrificing others, and there are worse choices than George Bailey’s marrying a pretty, adoring girl, keeping his dad’s business going, and dutifully being a kind father and a good citizen.

Jamieson’s general theme seems to be catching on, however. In a critique of modern Christmas films, “Too Many Turkeys from Tinseltown,” Mike Shaw in London’s Independent also discusses  “the ‘feel-good family favourite’ and regular winner of polls to find the public’s favourite Christmas film”:

Picture the scene: It’s a wild and snowy night. A man stands on a bridge, staring into the icy river rushing below him and contemplating his life. We have already been witness to extortion, fraud and domestic abuse. Over the next hour, this man’s little brother will drown, and our character will plunge into depression, assault a police officer and crash his car while drunk. …

The fact that It’s a Wonderful Life is a tad downbeat is nothing new. For decades, the film has attracted as many humbugs as it has admirers, by virtue of it being “too depressing”. Love it or hate though, there is no denying that by the end of Frank Capra’s film that elusive warm fuzzy feeling is well and truly kindled.

"Business! Mankind was my business! Their common welfare was my business!"

However, if a good Christmas movie can be judged by how Christmassy it makes you feel (Christmassy being a complex scientific measurement best described to the layman as “happy, hopeful and harmonious with a slight tinge of sadness”), then modern festive films fail on almost every count, and I know why.

Simply put, they’re just not miserable enough. By playing it safe and desperately trying to not upset or offend anyone, Christmas films today miss the key element required for success: despair and salvation – the light at the end of the tunnel.

Maybe.  But this week’s Yahoo poll on the favorite Christmas film of all time has me questioning public taste. 137,444 voted, and came out with It’s a Wonderful Life pulling 44 percent of the votes, Miracle on 34th Street with 30 percent, and A Christmas Carol coming out with a mere 26 percent.  Perhaps no surprise, considering the crappy screen versions of the Charles Dickens classic.

For all-out scariness, I’ll still plump for A Christmas Carol, the (admittedly stagey) 1951 English version, with Alastair Sim as Scrooge and a very young Michael Hordern as a Marley.  Hordern’s eerie howling and chain-shaking will frighten the bejeebers out of any smarmy kid. And Sim is the best Scrooge yet.

Better yet, try the book.

Postscript:  CNN has an op-ed on the Capra film today, here.

I remember reading about an university art student who, on a test, was asked to describe a painting of the Adoration of the Magi.  The painting, she replied, was of a mother and newborn child in an ancient era. The men are bringing gifts, because everyone is happy at the birth of a child.

Nothing to indicate that she recognized that this was a particular birth, and a particular child.

Archaeologist Patrick Hunt is out to change all that.  Last week at the Stanford Bookstore he gave a talk on his newly published Puer Natus Est: Art of Christmas, a book “deciphers the many layers of formula and accumulation of stories added to Christmas.”

“It doesn’t matter what one’s faith is – it’s a talk about art,” he told the group.  “It’s a religious story, but also a story about continuing life, great hope, and great expectations.  This story has something that we all need, regardless of our religion, something that is central to all human experience – hope.”

As he writes in his preface:

“Art is often the voice of the people rather than the voice of the powerful. Christmas art is no exception. Even if the subject of Christmas Art appears a sacred cow with a hands-off label, it is not above scrutiny. The life and death of Jesus continues to elicit deep and even explosive reaction—no matter how often it is reinterpreted by each generation, running the gamut from skeptical reflection and scorn to reverence and worship. What many call the greatest story ever told—always able to stir up emotions and controversy—has as much raw appeal in its beginning as in its ending. Dogma is not fond of real examination. But art can be looked at from almost an infinite variety of angles, and is in no way lessened by multiple reference points or interpretive approaches.”

Fra Angelico: "while magpies joke and peacocks preen"

According to Patrick, the texts of Luke and Matthew are merely starting points:

“Apocryphal texts added color and vigor, folklore, popular themes, puns, and sometimes magical details to the bare skeleton provided in the scriptures. Talking beasts; exotic and extravagant tapestries of costumes, crowns, and turbans; fragrant spices; and all the language of miracle and medieval allegories augment the text. Countless bright angels dressed in every silken damask and wing hue hang above frightened shepherds or rickety stable rafters to signal heaven and earth are momentarily one. Wicked, bloodthirsty tyrants like King Herod compete with Joseph’s peasant cunning. Bridled camels and pet leopards plod along in unusually mobile starlight while magpies joke and peacocks preen. Even humble plants like chamomile give off their allegorical fragrance, symbolic of Christ when trampled by all the retinue of this huge Christmas cast. … Yet, each participant in this Christmas pageant has at least one meaning to be fleshed out, and no symbol is too shadowy for the microscope and the zoom lens of this project.”

It all rather reminds me of the exchange between Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh‘s Brideshead Revisited:

“But, my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all.”
“Can’t I?”
“I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.”
“Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.”
“But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.”
“But I do. That’s how I believe.”

Pining for a lost love?

in a 16th century edition of Chaucer‘s works, a Florida professor has discovered a naughty poem in Latin, written by Elizabeth Leyburne, Duchess of Norfolk (1536–1567) to her former tutor, Sir Anthony Cooke (1504–1576).  She was 17, he was in his 40s when their paths crossed.  He was a hard-core Protestant; she was from a family of Catholic recusants.

Nothing interesting ever pops out of the books I open, except for the occasional shopping list, train ticket stub, or unpaid bill.  Still … the articles that have been written about this long-lost, lovelorn poem in Latin have mostly grabbed the wrong end of the stick.

Press attention has focused on the sole risqué line in the entire, rather plaintive poem.  Huffington Post rather prudishly calls it a “crude love poem” and “raunchy love poem” on the basis of this single line.  Yet the line in question is not even an original – it’s pinched from Martial.  Apparently, it still strikes modern people as a surprise that their forbears were not celibates, although our very existence would seem to argue to the contrary.

Cooke, the recipient of the letter, went on to become a mentor to Edward VI, the kid brother of Queen Elizabeth and also a Protestant hard-liner with a puritanical streak.

Elizabeth Leyburne went on to marry twice – at the age of 19 to Thomas Dacre, 4th Baron Dacre of Gilsland, and shortly after his death over a decade later, to the queen’s cousin, Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk.  The poem was apparently written when she was a young mother and wife of Dacre, perhaps glancing back at what never was.

More warm-blooded than he seems?

The articles seem to take no particular interest in who these people are, beyond the simplest outlines of their lives, and blithely wonder why she did not divorce to get it on with Cooke.

What is missed is a far more subtle, and nuanced tragedy of the terrible English Counter-Reformation.  While I was reviewing Peter Ackroyd‘s Shakespeare: The Biography for the Washington Post, I noted the author’s confusion over Shakespeare’s Protestant and Catholic pals, as he tried to draw conclusions over the playwright’s religious affiliation.  He overlooked the obvious conclusion: the government cared a lot more about theological distinctions and church affiliations than the people did.

For example, although he was a Protestant reformer, Cooke’s daughter Margaret became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary, the Catholic sister who succeeded Edward VI (the epithet “Bloody Mary” is not entirely fair, and could just as easily been bestowed on her half-siblings).  Meanwhile, Cooke was exiled during Mary’s reign – he had backed the doomed nine-day reign of King Edward’s childhood pal, the scholarly Lady Jane Gray.

Cooke’s memorial at the Romford parish church notes his “exceptional learning, prudence and piety.”  However, his recent biographer Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, describes him as “a strong protestant of a dark and unforgiving colour.”

Just the kind of glowering, older Heathcliff a young 17-year-old girl might want to die for.

The article goes quickly to cite what the professor calls Howard’s “cruelty” in not calling for a priest as his wife was dying in childbirth: “the Duchesse . . . desir’d to have been reconciled by a Priest, who for that end was conducted into the garden, yet could not have access unto her, either by reason of the Duke’s vigilance to hinder it, or at least of his continual presence in the chamber at that time.”

The man she married...

Not so fast.  The Howard family was a prominent recusant family.  Or was it? The line between “Protestant” and “Catholic” was much more fluid and complex than we assume it to be today.  The nature of the Great Elizabethan Compromise was the queen’s promise to leave her subjects’ beliefs alone, as long as they attended her Church each Sunday. It was a subtle maneuver:  How long can you keep your beliefs unaffected by your daily actions? Those who complied with her requirements, over the years, or over generations, became Protestant in their hearts.  What you do is as important as what you think.

The battle was won, but the debt is being paid centuries later:  A 2006 New Yorker article described how Elizabeth’s machinations led to a church which, founded on compromise, is now compelled to compromise  itself out of existence in the 21^st century.

The Great Compromise also set loose a network of government spies, headed by Walsingham.  For the government knew that a man’s thoughts, not his compliance, were the true indicator of his allegiance, so thoughts became the enemy.  Perhaps that’s why, in Shakespeare’s plays, there’s always someone behind a bush or arras, eavesdropping on a private conversation.

How, after all, could you find out what was in a man’s heart?  However, only those who insisted on an outward fidelity, rather than merely an inward one, could be executed.  So Howard’s reluctance to invite a priest in for last rites was probably mortal terror rather than religious scruples or hard-heartedness. Harboring priests could get you killed.

He got killed in any case, and for reasons mixed up with religion. As Elizabeth’s widower, would meet his own death after trying to negotiate (yet another) marriage with the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots, a rallying force for the Catholics in England and a fervent Catholic herself.  The Scottish queen’s plotted alliance with a kinsman of Queen Elizabeth, and the richest man in the kingdom, would have further solidified her claims to the throne.  The queen’s beloved coz was beheaded in 1572.

Her son-in-law, in the Tower

His son, Philip Howard, previously an aristocratic wastrel, converted to Catholicism and died a prisoner of conscience – and after long neglect of his wife, he became a devoted husband to boot.

As he lay dying in the Tower of London, he asked the queen if he could have a final visit with his wife and son, who was born during his imprisonment. The Queen responded, “If he will but once attend the Protestant Service, he shall not only see his wife and children, but be restored to his honors and estates with every mark of my royal favor.”

He replied: “Tell Her Majesty, if my religion be the cause for which I suffer, sorry I am that I have but one life to lose.”

Elizabeth Leyburne would have taken note with a motherly pride:  The wife to her stepson was her own stalwart daughter, Anne Dacre, who has also been mentioned as a candidate for sainthood.

All of which makes a far more interesting story than one overheated line, recalling a love that was likely unrequited.  Cooke seems rather a cold fish.  One never knows, however.  Even cold fish get fried.

Read the rest here or here or here.  You’ll even see a photo of her precise Latin penmanship.

Coimbra

‎Today is the birthday of journalist and author H. Allen Smith, born on this date in 1907, who wrote, “The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of Ten Best.”

The Book Haven is no exception, so naturally we were suckers for Flavorwire‘s list of “25 Most Beautiful College Libraries in the World”:

The college library, whether ornate or modern, digital or dusty, is in many ways the epicenter of the college experience — at least for some students. It is at once a shining emblem of vast, acquirable knowledge, a place for deep discussions and meetings of the mind, and of course, a big building full of books, which, as far as we’re concerned, is exciting enough. Colleges and universities are understandably quite proud of their libraries, which can be a selling point for prospective students and donating alumni alike, and they often become the most well-designed and beautifully adorned buildings on campus.

Salamanca

OK, this isn’t a Ten Best, but a 25 best.  It also cheats a bit – Oxford’s many colleges are treated separately, so it gets to hog a few extra places.  Cambridge claims awards for both St. John’s and Trinity; Oxford bags honors for Queen’s College, All Souls’, and the Bodleian. Commenter Ravi notes that 13 of the 25 libraries are in the U.S., and five in England – which hardly seems a global perspective, anyway.

But two of the top spots (#1 and #3) go to the Iberian peninsula, and libraries I’d never heard of:  the University of Coimbra General Library in Portugal and the University of Salamanca Library in Spain.  We can’t resist these photos.  We can’t resist half the photos in Flavorwire‘s collection.

Closer to home … Green Library

Among the comments: “Looks like the only criteria is a high ceiling,” grumbled  Kevin.  A commenter called “H” noted that “Many of the American ones look like dining halls.”  Jonathan Miller had an observation: “The most beautiful library is one filled with readers. Too many of these photographs are of empty libraries.”

California gets a few of the honors:  Doe Library at Berkeley gets a mention.  So does UCLA’s Powell Library  … but, but, but … may we make our own nomination? (One commenter, Maggie, noted the same omission).

Stanford’s Green Library is splendid, but then I’m prejudiced.  I’ve spent more hours in its nooks and crannies than any other library on the planet. I used to have fantasies of the “Big One” happening while I was buried in the stacks of West 7, leaving my body forever unrecoverable beneath the books. But perhaps I would have gotten in a few quiet reading hours in the meantime.

What a way to go!

Havel: "warm, intense, a concentration of nervous energy"

Václav Havel is dead.  All the talk about the man as activist, leader, the Czech Republic’s first democratically elected president, tends to overlook the playwright and writer, renowned in the Cold War for his 145 published prison letters to his wife, Letters to Olga.

So I turned to the only Havel book in my library, Living in Truth, a collection of 22 essays by and about him, published on the occasion of the award of the Erasmus Prize in 1986.

In “Prague – A Poem not Disappearing,” Timothy Garton Ash recalls that, during the 1980s, he was  “determined to visit Václav Havel.”  This is what he found:

“Havel is a short, stocky man with curly blond hair; his moustache and lower face remind me of a friendly walrus.  … He is warm, intense, a concentration of nervous energy. …

He talks about the nervous strain of writing under these conditions, when at any moment the police might walk in and confiscate a year’s work. How he has crept out into the woods at night and buried parts of his typescript in the hole of a tree.  How as a manuscript piles up he writes faster and faster: the fear of a house search concentrates the mind wonderfully. Far more effective than any publisher’s deadline. Just yesterday he was writing about this nervous tension. Then his wife came in and said ‘The police are outside again. I’m afraid they aren’t our usual ones.’ …

Determined to visit

This is nothing compared with the conditions under which he wrote in prison. There he was not allowed to write at all, except for one letter a week to his wife – maximum four sides, and only about ‘personal matters’, as the prison regulations specify. This was his only opportunity to express himself as a writer, over a period of almost four years.  If any part of a letter was unacceptable, the whole letter would be confiscated. The commandant of the prison camp at Hermanice took a sadistic delight in enforcing this instructions. … His particular delight was censoring the writer’s letters. Havel started writing a ‘cycle’ of letters about his philosophical views. He mentioned the ‘order of being’. ‘The only order you can write about’, declared the commandant, ‘is the prison order’. Then he decided Havel should not write about philosophy at all.  ‘Only about yourself.’  So Havel designed another cycle of letters on the subject of his moods: sixteen of them, two to each letter, one good, one bad. And he numbered them.  After eight, the commandant called him in: ‘Stop numbering your moods!’  ‘No foreign words!’ he ordered one week. ‘No underlining!’ the next.  ‘No exclamation marks!!'”

"an end to the finite"

A chapter earlier, Nobel writer Heinrich Böll, in “A Courtesy Towards God,” quotes Czech politician Jiří Dienstbier that “Václav Havel was a particular target for persecution.’ His overall manner of courtesy, of having been ‘well brought up’, gave the impression that he was ‘soft and easily broken’.  It was seductive.  ‘Those around him reacted all the more excitedly to Havel’s unyieldingness, to this “inaccessible systematist”, who even tidied up his prison cell in so precise and presentable a fashion that it could have served as the model for the graduates of an officers’ training school.'”  Then Böll adds:

“Havel nevertheless managed, in spite of the censorship, to smuggle out a scale of his moods … he devotes himself at great length to the ‘dejectedness of Sunday’, to what he calls this ‘problem of civilization bearing the name Sunday’. These moods, in particular those on Sundays, are to him ‘the typical cracks through which nothingness finds its way to man, this modern face of the Devil’.  He does not shrink from calling it by name.  …

‘The global wonder of existence’, that peace of mind which ‘Christians call mercy’, was also allowed through. One would have had to be a censor in order to review these letters.  Is not so much metaphysics more dangerous than many a direct message?  The following resulted from a particularly beautiful moment in the prison yard: ‘The more beautiful the moment, the more distinct is the growth of the eerie question:  What else? What more? What now? What next? What am I to do, and what will I achieve? I would describe this as the feeling of having arrived at a kind of end to the finite.'”