Yearning for God, Like the Deer for Running Streams

On this St. Paddy's Day morning a much-beloved American professor here, Fr. Joseph Carola, S.J., who teaches Patristics (which is the study of the Early Christian writers, or "Fathers of the Church"), preached at the Station Church of Saint Clement. Pope St. Clement of Rome is one of the earliest Church Fathers – in fact, so old that he is called an Apostolic Father. He was martyred, interestingly enough, in Crimea around 99 AD after being exiled there from Rome. Fr. Carola's homily was a beautiful meditation on the theology expressed in the basilica's central mosaic, pictured below. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

A. M. D. G.

SAINT CLEMENT OF ROME, LENT 2014

Yearning for God like the deer for running streams

Reading: Daniel 9:4-10; Psalm 78 (79); Gospel: Luke 6:36-38

            At the center of Masolino da Panicale’s twelfth-century mosaic adorning the San Clemente apse stands the Cross of Christ revealed as the tree of life.  The lignum vitae arises from a lush acanthus plant whose vine sprawls across the entire apse.  The Latin inscription at the base of the apse mosaic reads: “We have likened the Church of Christ to this vine; the Law made it wither but the Cross made it bloom.”  Beneath the tree of life and its blooming branches flow the four rivers of Eden.  Two deer drink from its running streams.  In the bush above those streams stands a third deer contending with a serpent.  Even though Saint Patrick may have driven the serpents out of Ireland, at San Clemente a snake remains in the Irish Dominicans’ grass.

[Photo detail: courtesy of Fr. Joseph Carola, SJ]

            The story of the deer and the serpent depicted in the apse mosaic comes from antiquity.  In his monumental first-century study, Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder observes that deer fight with serpents.  “They seek out the serpents’ dens and by the breath of their nostrils they drive them out despite their resistance” (Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 8.32.118).  In sixth-century Calabria Cassiodorus applied Pliny’s zoological science to his exegesis of the first verse of psalm forty-two: “Like the deer that yearns for running streams, so my soul is yearning for you, my God.”  Each year on this second Monday of Lent we begin our Morning Prayer with that very psalm.  Cassiodorus explains that the deer “attracts snakes with its nostrils; when it has devoured them, the seething poison impels it to hasten with all speed to the water-fountain, for it loves to get its fill of the purest sweet water” (Cassiodorus, Expositio in psalmo 41.2 (CCL 97, 380)).  So it likewise is with Christ’s faithful.  As Cassiodorus continues: “[W]hen we imbibe the poisons of the ancient serpent, and we are feverish through his torches, we may there and then hasten to the fount of divine mercy.  Thus the sickness contracted by the venom of sin is overcome by the purity of this most sweet drink” (ibid.).  It is Christ the Lord, Cassiodorus concludes, who “is the Fount of water from which flows all that refreshes us” (ibid.).  Cassiodorus’s sixth-century exegesis eventually found its way into the twelfth-century Glossa Ordinaria—a vast patristic scriptural commentary contemporaneous with Masolino da Panicale’s magnificent mosaic.

            The deer and the serpent placed at the base of the apse mosaic Cross symbolize Original Sin whose seething poison finds its antidote in the waters of Baptism.  In Adam all men have sinned and stand justly condemned.  Our first parents’ sin, which we have contracted, has been compounded by the actual sins, which we ourselves have committed.  On this account the prophet Daniel rightly laments: “We have sinned, been wicked and done evil; we have rebelled and departed from your commandments and your laws.”  Given our sins both original and actual, we are like prisoners “doomed to death.”  The Old Law only served to convict us of sin.  It could not redeem us from it.  But the Just Judge is compassionate and forgiving.  Having heard our cry for deliverance, God sent His only-begotten Son as an expiation for our sins.  From the wounded side of the Crucified Christ flow the blood and water in which we are cleansed.  Christ’s grace restores us.  Withering no longer we bloom.

            Who of us, however, cannot lament that the occasional snake still gets into the grass?  Baptized and forgiven we recognize our continual need for an abundant measure of mercy.  Since the measure with which we measure we will be measured back to us, Christ exhorts us to be merciful with others as our Father has been merciful with us.  For mercy shared is mercy received.  In this overflowing exchange of mercy, we not only bloom but indeed flourish like the Christ-vine’s ecclesial branches lavishly filling the San Clemente apse.

Father Joseph Carola, S.J.

Rome, 17 March 2014

The Commemoration of Saint Patrick