spolia

“Some people were talking about the temple and the beauty of its fine stones and ornaments. He said, ‘These things you are gazing at–the time will come when not one stone will be left upon another; they will all be thrown down.’ (Luke 21:5-6, REB)

Twenty-three years ago I slapped my hand on the Romanesque wall, exposed by renovations, of Chester Cathedral and said to my host, this is the church Anselm knew. There has been a church on the site since the eighth century. The building now is Gothic in style, but that is wrapped around an earlier Romanesque structure. And so I knew that back when “Cur Deus Homo” (Why a God-Man?) was hot off the copying desk, its author, Anselm the Archbishop of Canterbury, was visiting, the wall he would have touched was the wall I touched.

Ten years ago in Jerusalem I placed my palm against a large well-worked stone. It was set in the Western Wall, foundation stone of the third Temple, built under the direction (and the lash) of Herod the Great, just before Jesus was born. Despite our Savior’s words of prophecy, not every stone fell away from every other. The Romans, when they came in destructive fury, left a few standing, just a few. They are the largest and oldest and best-fashioned of the stones in the wall. Though I doubt the soldiers of Titus spared them out of respect for the stone masons.

Stones last. Sometimes they are repurposed: they become spolia, salvaged or stolen from an old ruined (mostly) building and put to new use. Churches in Rome have pillars from pagan bath houses. Churches in Spain have stones that were once in mosques that were once churches. 

Sometimes they stay where they were put, for a very long time. Sometimes they are in ruins, evocative of earlier, lost ages, and forgotten rituals.

Stones last. But not forever. And they don’t matter anyway. That is what Jesus tells us. “The Lord is faithful” - the steadfast love of God : that is what endures. 

JRL+

https://chestercathedral.com/about/heritage-culture/the-building-and-its-history

https://www.mezquita-cordoba.com/en

Anselm

Chester Cathedral

https://chestercathedral.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/chester_exterior.png

Dorothy Nicholl took me to Chester while I was visiting her at the home in Betley near Crewe where she and Dorothy's husband Donald had retired, after a career and service together that had taken them across the world, from England to Santa Cruz to Jerusalem and then home. 

Before we went to the pub, we went to Chester. There in the cathedral the Gothic stonework was impressive, but it was an overlay on the centuries-earlier Romanesque. During renovations a section of the earlier work was left exposed. I slapped my hand on the ancient stone, and said, "This is the cathedral that Anselm knew." Dorothy replied, "Donald would have said exactly the same thing." 

Donald was a historian and I was his student. Anselm had been a friend of the dean of the cathedral and had come to visit - from Canterbury. 

I first knew Anselm as Anselm of Bec, in an undergraduate philosophy course taught in a Stevenson College classroom. The textbook referred to him that way, as it described his 'ontological proof of the existence of God' - Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man). Written around 1094-1098 of our era. He had been in Bec, as monk and abbot. But they did not tell us the rest of the story: he became Archbishop of Canterbury. A stellar intellectual. 

In face a prominent English theologian recently remarked on the retirement of one of Anselm's successors (a friend of Donald and Dorothy as it turned out) that, "he's the most intellectually gifted man to become Archbishop of Canterbury since St Anselm.”

So that I came to know in time. What we know of a man changes some perception of him. It was only years after that first encounter in a college classroom that I came to know of Anselm in his religious garb, in a religious building.

At first he was a dusty-book author, who came up with what was at the time (his or mine?) an ingenious shortcut to demonstration of a reality beyond our conception. 

In fact that was something the point. God is that than which no greater can be conceived; and to be honest, we still don't get it. We really can't. Can we?

Can we be satisfied seeing through a glass darkly, knowing that someday, with Anselm, Donald and Dorothy and all the saints, we will see the reality face to face?


https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/anselm-curdeus.asp

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-press-and-journal-aberdeen-and-aberdeenshire/20120320/283897339955847

Almighty God, through your servant Anselm you helped your church to understand its faith in your eternal Being, perfect justice, and saving mercy: Provide your church in all ages with devout and learned scholars and teachers, that we may be able to give a reason for the hope that is in us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

https://episcopalchurch.org/lectionary/anselm-canterbury-archbishop-canterbury-and-theologian-1109

Revised Lesser Feasts and Fasts, 1980. p. 240-241. https://extranet.generalconvention.org/staff/files/download/21034