Part 2 of Duccio's Maestà; the Passion of Christ in pictures

And an invitation to join our paid subscribers' chat discussing Benedictine spirituality

Annunciation panel, Duccio di Buoninsegna. c. 1311. Photo by me.

We’re back to Siena today, looking in depth at the smaller narrative panels of the great Duccio altarpiece.

Before I put in the paywall for article for paid subscribers I thought I’d update on our paid member book group. We’re reading and discussing the Benedictine spiritual classic, “The Spiritual Life and Prayer According to Holy Scripture and Monastic Tradition,” by Abbess Cecile Bruyere, the first abbess of Dom Gueranger’s Solesmes congregation.

Every week, I send out via email an initial post commenting on the bit of the book I’ve read (we’re up to chapter IV), and then whoever wants to can chime in with their thoughts. So far, the discussion has been extremely uplifting and useful. Very encouraging. I’m including below today’s introductory post (edited for length), expanding a little on a theme I’ve been mulling over for several years. (You can buy the book here and here.)

“I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one. So I will pour out my wrath on them and consume them with my fiery anger, bringing down on their own heads all they have done, declares the Sovereign Lord.”

Ezekiel 22: 30 - 31

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I've been thinking a lot about the various times people have asked me why I have given up activism, (not entirely, obviously, if you've seen my Twitter feed...) and turned away from my former work…I don't think that kind of activism actually does anything. At least, not anything positive.

But Abbess Cecile is in this chapter helping me see that my intuition was correct, all through those years, that the only truly practical way of "saving the world" or saving the Church is to seek this union with God, and to help others seek it, and achieve it, and then to spread that to the rest of the world…

"And no doubt this is why holy Scripture attaches so much importance to the expression, 'God of our fathers,' for to our mind it signifies, in most places, a transmission of the divine blessing and of holiness, rather than a carnal filiation."

And she comes out and says it plainly:

"Let those who love the Church give a thought to this. If they would work for her, the most efficacious process for so doing is to possess the science of the saints, and to be able, by means of it, to have weight in that centre where human events are controlled."

And she doesn't mean Washington, Westminster or Brussels. Or Rome…

So, it brings me back to the unbelievable scenes of violence and civilisational collapse we are now watching in realtime on Twitter happening in the UK this weekend. Literal mobs of heavily armed Islamic jihadists are rampaging around English cities, the once-great industrial north, looking for British people to beat... I don't know what is going to be left of my ancestral homeland - my family are from Manchester and I lived there as a child - by the end of the week…

Here's my real thought on what's happening throughout the formerly Christian world right now: I think we have to start over again from the beginning, and the collapse of all our institutions is necessary for that. I believe we are called to start over, as though we are living again at the end of the old pagan empire. Our times are simply pagan again, and I think the great spiritual inheritance - the great reservoir of grace our ancestors filled up for us through the Ages of Faith and that we have been living on for the last few centuries, is now, finally completely dry. We have been living on our inheritance for at least 250 years, and it is now empty. Gone.

I don't know what work others are called to but I think some of us are going to be again called out from among our decaying societies to live apart and start filling those empty cisterns again… I have come to believe that there is simply no saving whatever was left, until this weekend, of the old Christian order. Not in any natural sense of activism or politics or any of that. That window has closed. So what is left?

There are a few little monastic settlements happening here and there - mainly in France and the US, but I think these ambitious places, where they are pledging to build beautiful Gothic monasteries with lots of pointed arches and flying buttresses, are making a fundamental mistake. We aren't at that elevated stage anymore. Nowhere near it. The old civilisation that supported such things in the 13th century is entirely gone, and barbarism is literally being installed in its place. We shouldn't be thinking about returning to the glories of the Middle Ages, simply because we have not earned that. There were 700 years of work to be done before we got to the pointed arches and flying buttresses stage. It would be like trying to teach a cave man to sing Gregorian Chant.

No, I think our time is much more analogous to the end of the Old Empire, where chaos was breaking out everywhere, and a few strange souls broke away at the sound of an inaudible inner voice.

You can join the chat any time once you’ve become a paid member.

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Now, on with Duccio. Join us below…