St Romuald, who started a monastic movement, died today in 1027. He became a monk because as a young man in his home town of Ravenna, he acted as second to his father in a duel over a family quarrel, and his father killed his relative. Mortified, Romuald went to the church of Sant’Apollinare in Classe (above) to do 40 days penance, and then stayed on as a monk. Forty years later founded the Camaldolese Order in Tuscany. His brief rule gives the flavour of his intense spirituality.
Sit in your cell as in paradise.
Put the whole world behind you and forget it.
Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish.
The path you must follow is in the Psalms – never leave it.
Brief rule of Romuald
Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, inventor, theologian, satirist, philosopher, litterateur, physicist, and much too gifted person in general, was born in Clermont-Ferrand, France, today in 1623. A child prodigy, he produced a geometric theorem at the age of 16 that was so brilliant it irritated Descartes, and a mechanical calculator at 19 which pointed towards the future of computing.
Today is the birthday of the original Nicene Creed, which was released to the world on this day in the year 325. The creed was the product of the Council of Nicea, the first-ever worldwide meeting of Church leaders, whose purpose was to declare that Christians who don’t believe Jesus is truly God are not truly Christians. The leader of the opposition, a deacon from Egypt named Arius, serenaded the Council with songs he had written to express his view that Christ was not co-eternal with the Father, including his catchy ‘God made the Son out of nothing’, which was popular with the donkey drivers of Alexandria. After which, St Nicholas punched him in the face.
Fast forward 774 years, and this morning in 1099 the city of Nicea was the first city to be recaptured from its Muslim conquerors in the First Crusade. The French and Italian Catholic crusaders besieging the city had been looking forward to sacking and looting Nicea, but at the last minute, infuriatingly, the Muslim garrison surrendered not to them, but to their ally, Alexius, the Byzantine emperor. He made it up to the Catholic foot soldiers by sending them gifts of food, and to the crusading princes by giving them captured gold and jewels.
The Baptist superpreacher Charles Spurgeon was born in Essex, England, today in 1834. He was converted at 15, started preaching at 16, became a church pastor at 18, and the minister of London’s largest Baptist church at 19. By the age of 22, he was preaching to congregations numbering thousands of people. But it was in the small Baptist church in the village of Waterbeach, Essex, at the age of 18, that he learned how to preach.
‘In a short time, the little thatched chapel was crammed, the biggest vagabonds of the village were weeping floods of tears, and those who had been the curse of the parish became its blessing. Where there had been robberies and villainies of every kind, all round the neighborhood, there were none, because the men who used to do the mischief were themselves in the house of God, rejoicing to hear of Jesus crucified.’ CH Spurgeon, Autobiography
Image: Lawrence OP