The Ark of the Testament

HOW DID Saint Anthony come to write the great series of Commentaries on the Sunday Gospels that we now know as his ‘Sermons’? We know, of course, that he began his career as an Augustinian Canon, first at Lisbon and then at Coimbra. Here he gained the familiarity with the Scriptures, and with the writings of the Fathers – to say nothing of the scientific works of Classical writers – that he was to utilise so skilfully in his own writings. But then he felt the call to be a humble friar, preaching the Good News of Jesus Christ, if possible to the Muslims of Morocco. When it became clear to him that God had other plans, he was content to serve as chaplain to a group of friars, and was better known for his willingness to wash the dishes than for his learning. What changed this?

We need to look at the background, at the circumstances of the Church of his day – the early thirteenth century. Besides the confrontation with Islam (which had positive as well as negative aspects), the Church had its own internal problems. Some of these were intellectual – theories about God and the world that undermined Christian belief, and some were moral – the sub-Christian standards of behaviour prevalent among both clergy and laity. All-in-all, this seems to be the situation of the Church in every age, including our own! That is why the renewed interest in the writings of Saint Anthony is not surprising. The superficial differences between his age and ours do not destroy the more profound likenesses, and the relevance of what he teaches.

The Cathars

One serious heresy that troubled the Church of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was Catharism. Historians still argue about its origins and its extent, but broadly speaking it believed in a ‘dualistic’ interpretation of the world. That is to say, it believed in a God who is entirely good and spiritual; but it believed that ‘evil’ is the same as ‘unspiritual’. The material world we live in, with all its mess and muddle, cannot possibly come from God. It must come from some other principle. The relationship between this creator of the material world and the true God is not clear, but in crude and popular terms you might say that Cathars believed that the world was created by the Devil. Salvation meant escape from the material, back to the purely spiritual.

Strict Cathars lived very austere lives, and could appear very holy. By contrast, Catholic clergy could often seem (and sadly often were) worldly and materialistic. Popes such as Innocent III were well aware of this, and desired reform. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 was the ‘Vatican II’ of its day. And the example of Saint Francis, with his message of delight in the goodness of God’s world, combined with an ardent willingness to renounce all possessiveness, and to follow the poor and crucified Saviour, seemed to the Pope a providential gift of God to the Church. The Franciscans were ideally placed to counter the influence of the Cathars by their austerity, combined with loyalty to the Catholic faith.

Training the friars

Example alone, however, was not enough. The Cathars were adept at theological debate, and here the first friars could not match them. Church leaders urged Francis to allow his friars to study, but he was most reluctant, fearing a loss of simplicity. At last someone (my own guess is that it was Cardinal Ugolino, friend of Francis and Protector of the Order) suggested that Brother Anthony might be asked to teach theology to the brothers. Francis agreed, and wrote to Anthony commissioning him to undertake this task. The wording of the letter suggests that it was sent around the time that the Rule of 1223 was approved. This is an important clue to the chronology of Anthony’s life.

What little evidence we have indicates that at first Anthony thought to fulfil his role by speaking to groups of friars in Chapter – for instance, the one recorded at Arles, when Francis miraculously appeared to one of the friars while Anthony was speaking. He is said to have lectured at Bologna, Montpelier and Toulouse – but these can hardly have been full courses of theology. Very soon, Anthony must have realised that he could only reach the widely scattered friars – in England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and elsewhere – if he put something in writing that could be copied and distributed. He probably began to do this while superior at Limoges, maybe using the libraries of nearby monasteries for reference – the friars as yet had no libraries of their own.

Curriculum and method

What was Anthony to put into his book, however? A highly academic approach was inappropriate for preachers who were not well-educated, and whose preaching was directed more towards moral reform than to intellectual debate. It struck Anthony, I think, that the best defence of Catholic orthodoxy against Cathar heresy was to show how the whole of Scripture   – the Old Testament as much as the New – was in harmony, and pointed to Christ. He also thought to appeal to ‘the Book of Nature’, enabling creation to bear witness to its true Maker.

It took Anthony some time to get into his stride. It seems likely that while at Limoges, and maybe taking up two winters, he produced the commentaries for the Sundays from Septuagesima to Pentecost – Volume I of the new translation. Then, I think, he was forced to pause. Saint Francis died in October 1226, and when he heard the news Anthony knew that he would have to be in Assisi for the General Chapter at Pentecost. He would have set out early in 1227, and may have arrived in Rome by Easter: this may have been the occasion when he preached before the new Pope (Gregory IX, the former Cardinal Ugolino), and was hailed by him as ‘the Ark of the Testament’. At the Chapter he was elected Provincial in northern Italy, a post he was to fill until 1230. It was probably the winter of 1227/8 that he settled at Padua, and resumed work on his Sunday Commentaries.

The peak of his power

By this time, his ideas on method had crystallised. From the First Sunday after Pentecost (there was no Trinity Sunday in those days), we see a very clear development in the arrangement for each Sunday. The harmony between Old and New Testaments, together with the use of the Epistle and Introit of the day, continued to be the basis. But whereas Lent and Eastertide had provided a strong base-line for the harmony, the time after Pentecost did not. The number of Sundays varied from year to year, while the Office readings were arranged according to the Calendar months. Anthony decided to impose his own scheme on this variety, giving a general pattern which individual preachers would need to adapt to their own circumstances.

As readers of Volume II will quickly see, Anthony allots four Sundays to each Calendar month, beginning with June. He gives a short ‘prologue’ to each group, explaining the relationship between Gospels and Old Testament readings. (Since July continued the readings from the books of Kings begun in June, it does not have its own prologue.) August has readings from the Wisdom literature, while September draws from Job, Tobias, Judith and Esther.

Each Sunday Gospel is then divided into several ‘clauses’, three or four being the usual number. The same is done for the Epistle. For each clause, Anthony then finds one or more passages from the Old Testament book currently being read, introducing them with the phrase, “There is a concordance in...” (whatever book it is). Where he cannot find a suitable passage from the current readings (this happens occasionally), or to supplement the material, he chooses passages from elsewhere, but he does not call these ‘concordances’. At the end of each clause, he refers to the corresponding section of the Epistle, normally remarking that this section “is concordant with” the clause in question. He ends each clause with a short prayer, and moves on to the next clause, where he starts again. Somewhere in each Sunday’s commentary he makes a reference to the Introit chant.

Anthony’s legacy

This pattern, and the use of the term ‘concordance’ to express the harmony between different parts of the Scriptures, is Anthony’s own. It is his ‘trademark’, so to speak. It enables him to cross-reference hundreds of Scriptural passages with the Gospels – something that can easily be seen in the new translation, where the Scriptural quotations are inset, and in italic type. One can only marvel at his familiarity with the Bible.

It has to be admitted that not all of Anthony’s interpretations will stand up to modern Scriptural scholarship: he was working when original Hebrew and Greek texts were not easily available, and modern scholarly tools had not been developed. But this is unimportant. His work was in any case offered as an example, a ‘text-book’, from which preachers might compose their own sermons. It is still capable of inspiring priests and others to base themselves on the Bible. Anthony used the tools available to him, the standard reference books of his day – St Isidore’s Dictionary, for instance, or Pliny’s Natural History. We are fortunate to have the fruits of a further seven centuries of study at our disposal, but we can still learn a great deal from Anthony himself.

The second Volume of the new translation, which contains the Commentaries from June to September, the first to the sixteenth Sundays after Pentecost, exhibits the best and most typical examples of Anthony’s method. The parables of the rich man and Lazarus the beggar, the great banquet, the lost sheep, the ten lepers, and many others, are treated here. There are also vivid illustrations drawn from the herb and animal lore of the period. Those for whom Saint Anthony is already a heavenly friend and patron will come to know him even better from his own words.