Next book, first chapter written!

As much as I enjoy having written, I don't always enjoy the writing itself. 

Like Flannery O'Connor famously said, writing well is "like giving birth to a piano, sideways."

I'm the sort of writer that needs incentives to put words on paper. So when an email came into my inbox announcing two seminars--one the Uni Regensburg Post-Graduate Theological Seminar this past week, and another as part of a Göttingen-Regensburg Theological Seminar scheduled for late March--I knew it was time to commit to presenting two chapters--the first two I'll write! 

Because promising to colleagues that I'll present on two chapters means that I'll have to actually write those two chapters in order to present them. And that's progress. 

The Regensburg seminar happened this past Friday. Via Zoom, it turns out, because of inclement weather--Glatteis, which also cancelled our daughter's school that day. 

The paper was called "'The World’s Most Miraculous Place’: Christian Telos, the Hagiapolis and Early Churches." The basic idea was to present how the concept of the Heavenly Jerusalem and, by extension, the New Jerusalem from Revelation, by the fourth century came to be associated by Eusebius of Caesarea with the basilicas and churches that were being built around the empire as a consequence of the so-called Edict of Milan. That's when the Emperors Licinius and Constantine restored property to Christian communities and allowed them to publicly practice their faith again. My ultimate point was that as instantiations of the true heavenly Jerusalem above, the New Jerusalem described in Rev. 21, physical churches (not just the spiritual church, constituted of the redeemed) both illustrated, housed, encouraged, and in a sense embodied the fundamental human telos, which is for us to be united with our creator and join Him in His plane of existence, even as He had joined our in the incarnation. The broader idea of the New Jerusalem as a poetic expression of the fundamental human telos I already floated in the final chapter of my first book, City of Gods (Brill, 2025). 

The final presentation was about 5000 words out of what is currently a 7000 word chapter (but is bound to become considerably longer). Due to time, I could only present on a few examples of this development: 

1. Eusebius's panegyric on the church in Tyre in about 314 (Hist. eccl. 10.4) 
2. Eusebius's description of the building and dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem about 20 years later (Vit. Const. 3.29-35 or so)
3. Zeno of Verona's Tractate 14 On the Building up of the Church marking the dedication of the basilica in Verona (mid-4th. c.).
4. The anonymous hymn of dedication Urbs beata Jerusalem (7th. c.?) and the later hymns that came from it
5. The ceremony for the dedication of a church from the Pontifical of Egbert of York (mid-8th c.).

There was a lot of material that I've begun sketching out that I'd wanted to cover, but the hour I was allotted for the paper and discussion wasn't enough, so I had to leave to one side these wonderful texts and pieces of material culture: 

1. The St. George Rotunda in Thessaloniki
2. The Dedication of Church in Antioch (349), described in Socrates Scholasticus, Eccl. hist. 8.2, 
3. Balai’s Madrošo on the Rededication of the Church in Qenneshrin (Beroea) from the early 5th c. 
4. The Cleveland Ivory Pyx (Byzantine, ca. 500)
5. Procopius' On Buildings 1.61 (theological reflection on Hagia Sophia)
6. The Edessa Hymn (Sogitha) (ca. 526)
7. The Cleveland Ivory Pyx (Byzantine, ca. 500)
8. A few other minor sources (the number of which keeps increasing)

In the end, the paper, which ended up being about 40 minutes in the delivery, was well received, and I got an overwhelming number of really excellent comments, questions, observations, etc. from my colleagues, including Prof. Tobias Nicklas, Dr. Emanuela Valeriani, Dr. Judith König, Fr. Thomas Vogt, and Veronika, who helps out at the Beyond Canon Center and whose name I embarrassingly can't remember (or even look up!). 

Tobias, because this is how he is, sent me a WhatsApp message the next day (a Saturday!) with six really pertinant observations and questions to help me improve the chapter, which he kindly said didn't actually need much updating at all. 

So a fine presentation, which I put myself under a lot of pressure to finish up over my holiday in South Africa and when I returned in the days leading up to the date. 

It was worth it! Not only do a have a rough draft of the meat of the chapter (which should be chapter 6 of my next book), but I've finally put pen to paper to write that book. It's one thing to be writing a book in one's head; it's quite another to actually sit down and start doing it. Remember the piano?

So the writing of monograph #2 is officially underway! 

Next stop: a presentation of the rough draft of a separate chapter (ch. 7, on church art!) to the Göttingen-Regensburg Theological Seminar in late March. I've provisionally titled it "Visions of the End: Depicting and Achieving the Christian Telos in Late Antique Roman Apse Art." 

Meanwhile, if you're interested in looking at a very rough draft of the chapter to weigh in with thoughts and questions, please send me an email at my email address, which you can find here.

Image: Brussels, KB, 9278 (15th century)