FRIENDS OF MOUNT ATHOS BOOK REVIEWS
© 2002
The Synaxarion: The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church: Volume 3: January, February. By Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra; translated from the French by Christopher Hookway. Ormylia, 2001. 664 pages. ISBN 960-86143-5-X. Price h/b £25.00 or US $40.00.
Available from the Holy Convent of the Annunciation, Ormylia, Greece GR 630 71, tel. +30237141498, fax +30237198314. May be ordered in England from Elisabeth Hookway, tel. 01621 819357. Prices include packing and shipping.
This is the third of a projected six volumes but it is the last to be translated by Christopher Hookway, who died at Christmas 2000. He was working on the final text of JanuaryÐFebruary only two weeks before his death and with justification regarded this as his best translation so far. Indeed, as he became increasingly ill and knew he was dying, his daily work on the life and death of these saints became deeply intertwined with his own thinking, prayer, and living out of his last days. This underscores a feature of the Synaxarion that comes through repeatedly in these pages: we are dealing here less with biography than with prophecy, in the biblical sense of seeing GodÕs hand in the day-to-day events of history and human lives. This is not to undermine the attention to history found here. These volumes have been widely praised for their care to historical scholarship and a number of the accounts, especially of the great Church Fathers, enter into the complex circumstances and distressing factionalism of church history (e.g. St Athanasius and St Cyril of Alexandria 18 Jan.,
St Gregory the Theologian 25 Jan., St Photius 6 Feb.). There is some refreshingly honest realism about church history. St Gregory The Theologian, for example, is reported to have been Ôexhausted by so much factiousness and broken hearted to see the church of Christ thus dividedÕ (p. 294). Likewise, the controversial canonization of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, commemorated with the New Martyrs of Russia on the same day as St Gregory, is handled with an admirable combination of honesty and reverence. The Life acknowledges that he was politically incompetent and under the excessive influence of Rasputin, but the profoundly Christian manner in which he and his family faced their humiliation, suffering, and death makes them worthy examples of ÔPassion bearersÕ. The Synaxarion is also conscious of the wide sweep and diversity within the history of Orthodox saints and draws on examples from throughout the Orthodox world and from every age. These include Western saints of the first millennium (e.g. Cedd of Lastingham 7 Jan., Bathild of France 30 Jan., Brigid of Kildare 1 Feb., Aethelbehrt of Kent 24 Feb.), saints of North America (Alexander Hotovitsky 25 Jan., Raphael of Brooklyn 27 Feb.), and newly canonized Russian saints (Xenia of St Petersburg 24 Jan., the New Martyrs 25 Jan.).
The lives are refreshingly free of that piety and polemic that make one embarrassed to show such works to someone outside the Orthodox family. Yet they retain an accessible, almost ÔfolksyÕ feel that marks them as Ôour ownÕ, in the sense of belonging to everyone in the Church who shares the same vision of God at work in the world, guiding people in their decisions and sufferings, strengthening them, giving them boldness or meekness as the case requires. This is not to say that the lives are pedantically moralistic and serious. One expects and finds many distressing accounts of steadfastness in martyrdom, but throughout there is a quality of Christian joy, good humour, and gentle irony. I am told that Christopher Hookway laughed out loud at some of the stories as he worked on the translation.
In this sense the Synaxarion requires of the reader an evangelical and child-like purity of heart which is the prerequisite for entering the Kingdom. The natural context for reading these lives is therefore as part of oneÕs prayer life (the volumes are sturdily bound in order to withstand just this kind of daily use over a period of years). Although they can be, and are, used also for reading in communal settings, they demand the kind of reflection that is best done alone and combined with personal prayer, intercession, silence, and pauses for reflection. This outlook makes it possible to bracket our questions about historical fact and read even embellished accounts for profit as part of the ChurchÕs inheritance of spiritual wisdom. In this way these lives are taken from the realm of the interesting and curious and transformed into acts of communion that help mould our own Christian life.
Fr JOHN JILLIONS