ORALITY

No; this is not another discussion on Tucho Ferdinadez' best-known book. Unlike his Almost-Eminence, I, not being an Argentinian high-flying curial careerist, have no advice to offer about how far down your partner's throat your tongue etc.etc..

Instead, I want to offer some observations about a subject which has been out in the academic world since the 1990s; Orality and Literacy: the interaction between the written and the orally transmitted word  in the times of Classical Antiquity.

I referred to Orality in my piece a few days ago; arguing in favour of the synthetic account, first fully presented by S Gregory the Great, of S Mary of Magdala. Before that, I had written a piece on the evolution of the Words of the Lord in the Canon Romanus, where I described the processes of 'magnetic' agglutination which lie behind the traditional Roman liturgical text of His Words.  

Authors who have influenced me have included, in the field of Classical Studies, Ros Thomas; New Testament Studies, Loveday Alexander; Liturgy, Catherine Pickstock. The last of these, although a Cambridge Anglican, wrote very positively about the Authentic Roman Rite, demonstrating how bankrupt and ridiculous were the cultural pinnings of the Novus Ordo.

What a shame ... and how curious ... that "Professional Liturgists" of the male gender refer so little to such work by women academics, just as so many of them ignored the wide implications of Christine Mohrmann's demolition of the Bea Psalterium. What are the Chaps so scared of ...

Aidan Nichols discusses Pickstock's book After Writing (1998) very positively in his Looking at the Liturgy. I would commend After Writing more warmly if it were not so full of neologisms ... new technical terms invented in Greek, which can make it slightly hard going. But here's a good, and clear, bit from it. 

She refers to a

"characteristically oral type of supplementation, namely , the bardic tradition  of narration, according to which, there can be no definitive account of a particular story, but each performance of a tale constitutes a supplemented 'origin' in its own right. Thus, the liturgy reflects the oral character of the NewTestament itself, for the Institution Narrative in particular is perforce derived from three gospel and one Pauline accounts: none of these is more original or authentic ..." She cites the accounts of Ss Matthew, Luke and Paul; one might add the version in the Qui pridie, not to mention the variant forms in so many other rites.

Alexander writes about  

"a social context where a living teaching tradition, conservatively preserved and yet constantly adapted to changing circumstances, has priority over written school texts."

If readers desire ... DIY ... to peruse an example taken from the New Testament text itself, try comparing Acts 9:1-9; Acts 22: 6-11; Acts 26: 12-18.  

Each account is crafted to suit its own context.