Eutychus: A Miracle in the Early Church

My Second Sermon, by John Everett Millais

Three Episodes in the Life of Saint Paul, from the series The Story of Saint Paul, Designed by Pieter Coecke van Aelst the Elder, possibly woven by Willem de Pannemaker

Paul raises Eutychus from the Dead, from the Acta Apostolorum, by the workshop of Philip Galle, after Jan van der Straet

Acts of the Apostles 20:1–12

Works of art by Jan van der Straet, John Everett Millais, Philip Galle, Pieter Coecke van Aelst the Elder and Willem de Pannemaker

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A Father’s Compassion

Commentary by Amina Wright

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There can be few people who have never found themselves nodding off at an inappropriate moment. This painting of a sleepy young churchgoer echoes the description of Eutychus battling to stay awake (Acts 20:9).

In an old-fashioned box pew, the well-dressed little girl is fast asleep during an evening sermon. Her fashionable Garibaldi hat with its uncomfortable chin strap has been laid aside to reveal a nodding head of golden ringlets, while her pudgy legs dangle limply. On the left, the wooden upright framing the entrance to the box pew suggests that ours is an accidental glimpse from a position outside the child’s private space.

For many Victorian children, sleeping in church was deemed the gravest of offences. Preachers often quoted the fate of Eutychus as a terrible warning against the physical and spiritual dangers of dozing during sermons. Writing a century earlier, John Wesley was one of many who identified the boy’s weakness of flesh with moral negligence: ‘How many of those who have allowed themselves to sleep under sermons … have slept the sleep of eternal death, and fallen to rise no more!’ (Wesley 1754–65: Acts 20.12).

At the 1864 Royal Academy exhibition, the Archbishop of Canterbury singled out My Second Sermon for particular attention: ‘I see a young lady there … who has by the eloquence of her silent slumber … given us a grave warning of the evil of lengthy sermons and drowsy discourse (Fleming 1998: 208). For him, it was not resting children but thoughtless clergy who were to be condemned.

John Everett Millais’s sentimental comedy, modelled by his own daughter Effie, was designed to charm, delight, and arouse affection for a child’s vulnerability. In the same way, at Troas, Paul does not condemn the weary young Eutychus or take offence at his drowsiness but rushes to hold him in the fatherly embrace that restores the boy’s life.

References

Fleming, Gordon H. 1998. John Everett Millais: A Biography (London: Constable)

Wesley, John. 1754. ‘Explanatory notes on the Whole Bible: Acts 20.12’, available at https://ccel.org/ccel/wesley/notes/notes.i.vi.xxi.html [accessed on 9 August 2024]

A Spark of Life

Commentary by Amina Wright

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In this detail from an extravagant royal tapestry, Paul’s week in Troas has reached its climax: the moment Eutychus is restored to life.

The drama is acted out by three pairs of figures. Two women hover anxiously on the threshold of the meeting house as Eutychus lies at death’s door. The passive, huddled women are contrasted with two active men dashing round the corner towards the fallen youth, their arms, legs, and cloaks flying. The two men may be Paul’s travelling companions: one wears a heavy purse on his belt, perhaps the offering gathered from the Greek churches that they are now carrying to Jerusalem (Romans 15:25–27).

Together, the bystanders represent the two sides of Christian life, prayer and action, which both meet in the single figure of Paul.

The intensity of Paul’s expression is striking, gazing into the distance as though drawing in the life-restoring power of the Holy Spirit from far beyond his own strength. Equally hard to miss is the torch that Eutychus appears to have dropped on his way down from the window; a reminder of the ‘many lights’ lit in the room above. This flambeau also recalls Genesis 15:17, when Abraham sees God’s presence as a burning torch, a theophany that prefigures the burning bush and pillar of fire of Exodus (chapters 3 and 13). Perhaps too it echoes a motif found on certain funerary monuments in which an extinguished torch may presage resurrection hope.

While his life hangs in the balance, Eutychus’s insensible finger points towards the torch as it smokes and flickers. It is not clear from the text whether the young man has been killed outright by his three-storey tumble (Acts 20:10), but the flickering torch is a sign that ‘his life is in him’. God is present, he is already safe in Paul’s arms, and by morning he will be fully alive again.

References

Cleland, Elizabeth A. H. (ed.). 2014. Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art), pp.156–61

An Upper Room

Commentary by Amina Wright

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Paul leaves the third storey where he is preaching and goes down to rescue Eutychus. Here, the whole narrative is compressed into a single space: a crowded, fuggy room packed with people; the newborn church of Troas.

Eutychus, imagined here as a child, is stretched out on the floor, surrounded by anxious adults and curious children. Paul bends over him, pressing his hand to the boy’s heart. The open window that caused the accident gapes darkly above their heads and the air is filled with the smoke of hanging lamps. To the right is the focal point of the room: Paul’s preaching chair raised up on a dais.

In his designs for engravings Jan van der Straet (a Flemish artist mainly active in Italy) interpreted scripture for a society in which discourse on the nature and purpose of the church was tearing Europe apart. This inward-looking composition may reflect the religious chaos of the artist’s times. In the Netherlands, the idea of a community worshipping secretly in the loft of a private house was no longer confined to stories from the New Testament, but was a daily reality for many.

This retelling of the story of Eutychus offers many points for meditation. Paul has stepped down from his throne-like seat and laid aside his book, showing how the authority of the Word reaches its full expression in acts of what St Bede called ‘loving help’ (Martin 1989: 160). The peaceful nursing mother seated near Paul recalls the ancient Roman personification of Charity, and scriptural images likening God’s people to infants nurtured with maternal care (Isaiah 66:5–13; 1 Peter 2:2). Eutychus is healed not outside the meeting house where his fall cast him down, but within the upper room, raised up from below by the strong arms and silent prayers of concerned believers and the apostle’s loving kindness. He is saved within the heart of the church.

References

Baroni Vannucci, Alessandra. 1997. Jan Van Der Straet detto Giovanni Stradano (Milan: Janda Sapi Editori)

Martin, Lawrence T. (ed.). 1989. Bede: Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications)

John Everett Millais :

My Second Sermon, 1864 , Oil on canvas

Designed by Pieter Coecke van Aelst the Elder, possibly woven by Willem de Pannemaker :

Three Episodes in the Life of Saint Paul, from the series The Story of Saint Paul, Second third of 16th century , Tapestry

Workshop of Philip Galle, after Jan van der Straet :

Paul raises Eutychus from the Dead, from the Acta Apostolorum, 1582 , Engraving

A Living Body

Comparative commentary by Amina Wright

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The period of travelling at the end of Paul’s third missionary journey appears uneventful, until a moment of miraculous grace suddenly breaks in. The death and resurrection of Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost form the spiritual backdrop to the gathering at Troas, where the church is growing and a young man is saved from death.

For the Renaissance designers of the tapestry and the engraving in this exhibition, the cultural backdrop, the Graeco-Roman world of the first Christian communities, was equally inspiring.

The tapestry was designed by Antwerp master and humanist scholar Pieter Coecke van Aelst during the 1530s, while translating the architectural treatises of the Roman Vitruvius (Cleland 2014: 86–90). Coecke’s version of the Troas house church is a textbook exercise in the Ionic order, a perfectly proportioned edifice of coloured marble more like a Renaissance Italian church than the inconspicuous three-storey townhouse described in Acts (20:8–9). Its well-ordered symmetry reflects a cosmos built by a rational, omniscient, and all-loving creator. Against this background, we see the broken body of Eutychus restored to wholeness and perfect order by Paul’s embrace and the life-giving fire of the Holy Spirit.

A generation later, Jan van der Straet attempts a reconstruction of the architectural and social layout of the meeting house. The design closely matches the description of church ordering in the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions, which had recently been published in Venice. Here we read: ‘In the middle let the bishop’s throne be placed, and on each side of him let the presbytery sit down; … And let the women sit by themselves, they also keeping silence’ (Apostolic Constitutions 2.7). The preacher’s seat is at the centre of the meeting room, as in many Reformed churches of the artist’s own time.

The Constitutions go on to address the question of behaviour in church: ‘let the deacon oversee the people, that nobody may whisper, nor slumber …; for all ought in the church to [have] their attention fixed upon the word of the Lord’ (2.7). In the fourth-century church, as in the time of the book of Acts, weekly meetings appear to have taken place on the evening of Sunday, which was then a working day (‘the first day of the week’; v.7), and often late into the night: drowsiness must have been a common nuisance.

Sunday evening preaching was still putting young churchgoers to the test 1800 years after the writing of Acts, when John Everett Millais painted My Second Sermon. The traditional conflation of physical failings with moral ones must have caused young Christians agonies of shame, but the seventeen-year-old Carmelite Thérèse of Lisieux, writing in 1890, took a more pragmatic view. ‘I ought to be very upset that I fall asleep during my prayers’, she wrote. ‘Well, I don’t feel upset. I just think that little children are as dear to their parents when they are asleep as when they are awake …. After all, “The Lord knows our weakness; he remembers that we are but dust [Psalm 103:13–14]”’. (Thérèse 1911: 132).

While restoring the young life of Eutychus, Paul was well aware of his own impending death as he moved towards Jerusalem and imprisonment (Acts 20:23). This story of a fatal accident and Paul’s life-restoring intervention are a reminder that, in the light of the resurrection, death has been conquered (1 Corinthians 15).

Like Christ, Paul teaches with authority and heals a young person who is ‘not dead but sleeping’ (Mark 5:39). He hurries downstairs to save Eutychus then returns to the gathering to finish the night’s business. While the community gathered above is celebrating Christ’s rising to eternal life, the boy outside slowly revives. Although Paul has already effected the healing, he leaves its conclusion to other members of the congregation (Acts 20:11–12).

In these visual representations of the church at Troas, we see how those many different members knit together to form one body. We see the preaching and healing apostle, the presbyters presiding at the gathering, men carrying a share of their goods to their poorer brothers and sisters, the solicitous women praying and nurturing children, the deacons keeping order, and little children learning from Christ, Paul, and their followers what it is to be fully human and fully loved.

References

Cleland, Elizabeth A. H. (ed.). 2014. Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Donaldson, James (trans.). 1885. ‘Constitutions of the Holy Apostles’, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, ed. by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (Edinburgh: T&T Clark)

Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus et de la Sainte Face. 1911. Histoire d'une âme écrite par elle-même (Paris: Librairie Saint-Paul)

Next exhibition: Acts of the Apostles 20:13–38