the original Saint Nicholas has enough written about him already

So, no Niklaas notes for 2010. I have other saints to...wait, I made the mistake of looking at Wikipedia. Can you actually buy miraculous myrrh today in the Saint Nicholas Shop in Bari? I had never until this moment heard of the manna di San Nicola and its curative properties.

"It is said that in Myra the relics of Saint Nicholas each year exuded a clear watery liquid which smells like rose water, called manna (or myrrh), which is believed by the faithful to possess miraculous powers. After the relics were brought to Bari, they continued to do so, much to the joy of the new owners. Even up to the present day, a flask of manna is extracted from the tomb of Saint Nicholas every year on 6 December (the Saint's feast day) by the clergy of the basilica. The myrrh is collected from a sarcophagus which is located in the basilica vault and could obtained in the shop nearby."

I am slightly stunned, not being au courant on Catholic practice. Here is a more definitive account, demonstrating that Wikipedia is wrong again:

"From 1980 onwards the manna is formally extracted every May 9, the Feast of the Translation (of the relics from Myra to Bari), by the Rector of the Basilica, in the presence of the delegate of the Pope, the Archbishop of Bari, an Orthodox Bishop, Civil Authorities, the Clergy and Faithful, after the solemn celebration of the Eucharist. The Bishop gives the blessing and after him the Orthodox Bishop too, to the excited assembly of the faithful, with the crystal vial containing the freshly extracted precious liquid, artistically handpainted and is called 'glass of St. Nicholas.' The annual output of pure 'santa manna' is no more than about 50 ml.


"The devotees from time immemorial have always recoursed to the Protector Saint to ask for health in mind and body, by using the 'manna'. The liquid distributed to the faithful is holy water in which the 'pure santa manna' was mixed. This liquid, conserved in ampules, are taken in as a drink or sprinkled in the part of the body that is suffering from an illness. The Baresian families, from an ancient tradition, kept them as a relic in big bottles designed by local artists depicting episodes from the life, miracles and protection of the Saint. These bottles are very precious whether in the area of religious devotion or cultural-artistic heritage.

"The pious use of the manna is a source of hope and health for those who trustingly abandon themselves to God and true devotion to the Saint of Myra, beseeching his intercession and special protection. Recourse to the virtues of the miracle worker of this liquid leaves in anyway a sign that strengthens the Christian faith and the witness of good works.

"The relics of Saints (and the manna is a unique relic of St. Nicholas), like the Sacraments, are spiritual helps for us believers to enliven our faith and to sustain us in the midst of our human weakness."

I had no idea. Somehow this eludes the journalists who write the annual stories.

what I originally meant to say was....

The Episcopalians are the only ones who commemorate Clement of Alexandria on December 5, when I was unable to find time to write anything regarding the most interesting remarks about him by Guy Stroumsa in his Hidden Wisdom (which I'm sure I've written about before; another of Brill's sale books at AAR)...



which would, alas, have led to an update on the fruitless debate over whether Morton Smith's purported discovery of a Secret Gospel of Mark in a letter of Clement's copied by an eighteenth-century monk was actually a forgery by Smith himself in blank pages of a book in Mar Saba Monastery

...a possibility that some authors claim is made more likely by the existence of a 1940 novel in which a forged manuscript is found in Mar Saba that has been planted there in hopes of destabilizing Christianity:



which would doubtless have led to a discussion of remarkable adventures in Orthodox monasteries by yours truly, out of which, however, came no miraculous manuscripts, just bizarre anecdotes of curious coincidences;

having missed my launch window, however, this will all have to wait till 2011, if ever. I see that Clement was originally commemorated in the Church on December 4, a fact I probably discovered with equal fascination in 2009, and 2008, and 2007, and 2006. He was removed completely from the canonical list of saints' days on grounds of being a suspect intellectual, though not quite as suspect as Origen. The Episcopal Church doubtless moved him to December 5 because December 4 is best reserved for John of Damascus, a fascinating fellow in his own right (and you could look it up):





I suppose I take some degree of pleasure in the thought that I succeed in offending everyone by taking these things with such seriousness in the fashion in which I take them. I learn from browsing around in Sean D. Kelly's blog that Nietzsche defined the sacred as that in any given culture at which it was impossible to laugh. Nietzsche, of course, was a philologist who would not have known the sacred if it came up and bit him in the ass, which it has done to many of the faithful over the generations since the Paleolithic caves.

Nietzsche, Nicholas, the whale...you know, the usual

And at this point I shall have mercy on my mostly atheist readership by putting all this behind an LJ-cut:

( click. )

Okay, I lied, there was nothing more in there about Nicholas.