IMAGES OF GLUTTONY AND GRATITUDE IN JACOB OF SERUGH (original) (raw)
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Review of Amir Harrak, trans., Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Partaking of the Holy Mysteries; Scott F. Johnson, trans., Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Sinful Woman; Edward G. Mathews, trans., Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Creation of Adam and the Resurrection of the Dead; Adam C. McCollum, trans., Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Jesus’ Temptation, Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 19, 33, 37–38, The Metrical Homilies of Mar Jacob of Sarug 17, 31–33 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013–2014). Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 19, no. 1 (2016): 267–271.
In this essay, I present eating as a vital theological concern and an integral part of the church's ministries and mission in the world. I argue that food is not reducible to the status of a commodity but is instead God's love made delectable. The production and the sharing of good food is a witness to God's presence among us.
St Vladimir's Theological Quarterly, 2022
The nature of the relationship between embodiment and humanity’s creation according to the divine image in Gregory of Nyssa’s anthropology remains a lively question among students of his theology. The present article seeks to shed light on this question by focusing on Gregory’s writing about food—a pertinent though perhaps understudied feature of his corpus. Ancient food culture has proven useful for understanding several facets of early Christianity, not least aspects of Gregory’s oeuvre. This essay contributes to this growing body of literature by attending to three passages that have food and eating in view, namely De beatitudinibus 4, De oratione dominica 4, and Oratio catechetica 37. We argue that these texts illuminate Gregory’s understanding that eating is a matter of virtue and, thus, because God is virtue, eating presents an important site in which the dependence that characterizes embodied finitude can be inhabited in ways that image God’s impassible freedom from necessity. While Gregory’s understanding of the image of God has often been appreciated in terms of the importance he places on free will (προαίρεσις, proairesis), self-governance (αὐτεξούσιον, autexousion), and other related terms (ἀδέσποτον, ἐλευθερία; adespoton, eleutheria), the analysis here demonstrates Gregory’s distinct appreciation of the role virtue and assimilation to Christ’s incarnate life play in nourishment and material necessity.
Jacob of Serugh Metrical Homilies on the Name Emmanuel and on How the Lord is Known in Scripture as
The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings Volume 4. Christ: Chalcedon and Beyond, Edited by Mark DelCogliano, 2022
Jacob of Serugh (ca. 451–521) was a miaphysite (Syrian Orthodox) bishop of Serugh in Turkey, southwest of Edessa. In the West Syriac tradition, Jacob is the most celebrated poet-theologian after Ephrem the Syrian and is called the “Flute of the Holy Spirit and the Harp of the Church.” In the first poem translated below, the Metrical Homily on the Name “Emmanuel,” Jacob, following Matthew 1:23, interprets the prophet Isaiah’s reference to an “Emmanuel” as foreshadowing the coming of Christ. For Jacob the meaning of the name Emmanuel – “God is with us” – demonstrates the prophet’s recognition of Christ’s divinity. Jacob analyzes the name of the Lord as “Emmanuel” to show how this title predicted and declared the reality of the incarnation. His homily is meant to instruct the faithful on how God’s entrance into time and creation as the incarnate Christ was a gift of love meant to restore humanity. In the second homily, the Metrical Homily on How the Lord is Known in Scripture as Food and Drink, Jacob teaches his congregation how scripture and the church’s Eucharistic feast sustain the faithful. For Jacob the Old and New Testaments contain narrative exempla of how God nourishes his people with food and drink (1). The Eucharist is the climactic event in a series of examples throughout sacred history that show how God feeds his people. In much of this homily Jacob guides his congregation on interpreting scripture and the liturgy's symbols (33). Jacob, like most ancient Christians, did not read the Bible literally. Rather, he searched for the symbolic and typological significance of scripture. Christology, for Jacob, is present in hidden ways in biblical narrative, and it is the job of the poet-exegete, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to uncover its meaning.
Homilies communicated complex theological concepts to ordinary people in antiquity. The sermons of Jacob of Serugh (451–521) demonstrate this process in the Roman Near East during an intense period of conflict related to the Christological debates that followed the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Jacob’s extant works include the third largest corpus of homilies from antiquity. Yet their poetic style and paucity of references to contemporary events have prohibited previous efforts to situate his homilies historically. This dissertation takes a new approach by reading his homilies in light of his letters. It identifies for the first time the pairing of miracles and sufferings as a formulaic expression used by late antique authors to express competing views on Christology. The widespread attestation of this phrase in Latin, Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian sources contextualizes the use of the pairing in Jacob’s letters and homilies. His correspondence with a monastery near the city of Antioch, a military leader in the Roman Near East, and the Himyarite community of Najran in South Arabia, firmly situate him within a specific post-Chalcedonian Christological debate. He uses the pairing of miracles and sufferings to criticize his opponents and to discuss his own views on Christology both in these letters and in his homilies. Before examining the homilies in detail, this dissertation creates a new synthesis of the evidence for the recording, circulation, and transmission of homilies in late antiquity. This process suggests that preachers took into account both the audiences before whom they delivered sermons and the readers who would encounter their homilies in circulating manuscripts. This forms one reason that preachers chose to include complex Christological concepts within homilies delivered before a broad range of society. Close examinations of homilies that Jacob preached before wide audiences reveal the subtle ways that homilies communicated complex Christological concepts to elite and non-elite audiences. By exposing the potential of Jacob of Serugh’s letters and homilies to reconstruct the formative period of the Syriac Orthodox Church in the Roman Near East, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of homilies for understanding the various levels of society that participated in religious debates.