Jesse joins Sue as a Laureate of this blog (she, you recall, a few months ago offered a very fine, terse, elegant limerick). Jesse has solved with great aplomb all the conundrums (-a?) in the Summer Examination Paper. He was not the first to spot the authorship of the S Paschasius Radbertus passage - a certain erudite parson not a million miles from Lancing Coll did that. (Do RC priests mind being called parsons?). Motu proprio, Vincent de Paul, Fr Terry and Chris were also snapping at the fox's heels. But Jesse put pretty well everything together very nicely in elucidating the Cranmerian topos of the Lord's Body saving/cleansing our bodies, and his Blood our souls; and Cranmer's liturgical jiggery pokery.
Despite Dix's comment, the speculation is not necessarily medieval. 'Ambrosiaster', who wrote early enough to be a witness of the vetus Latina, made the speculation (PL 17:243 ... Caro enim Salvatoris pro salute corporis, sanguis vero pro anima nostra effusus est, sicut prius praefiguratum fuerat a Moyse), and explained that the reason is to be found in Leviticus 17:11, "the life [soul] of the flesh is in the Blood" [Vulg: anima carnis; MT: NPS HBSR].
I wonder if it has always been obvious to everybody what S Thomas meant by that stanza in Verbum supernum prodiens about Body+Blood being necessary to save the Whole Man. In my view he clearly is referring to the Ambrosiaster/Paschasius speculation; see S Th III art I 'tertio'.
Well done to all.
I am sorry to say that the term "parson" is always taken to mean CofE clergymen amongst us Romans.
ReplyDeleteA good man was ther of religioun,
ReplyDeleteAnd was a povre Person of a Toun
Tho' I suppose one might argue that Chaucer's Parson was a "CofE clergyman" ....
Indeed, I will avoid that minefield and simply say that I was talking about the custom post Reformation.
ReplyDeleteStrictly speaking only a rector is a parson. Vicars and curates (perpetual or assistant) are not - nor a fortiori non-parochial clergy.
ReplyDeleteFather, I'm truly honoured to be made a "Liturgical Notes Laureate". Thanks for such a stimulating assignment. It was fun to dip back into Dix, even if I found my second reading of his chapter on the Prayer Book Communion to be just as unsettling as the first. "If the Anglican reader is distressed by some things in it, I am sorry. But the fact is that I am distressed, too" (p. 699).
ReplyDeleteBut I have been much comforted by Newman's words in Tract 90: "We are not better than our fathers; let us bear to be what Hammond was, or Andrewes, or Hooker; let us not faint under that body of death, which they bore about in patience; nor shrink from the penalty of sins, which they inherited from the age before them."