Greek lesson

In the Liturgy of the hours, today we have a hymn for S Jerome written by Dom Lentini himself. It is in a metre called variously the Second (sic my own Mods tutor, the fabulously erudite Margaret Hubbard; it was outside her study door as we queued up for a Homer Class - happiest of days - that I met Pam) or Fourth (sic Wickham) or Third (sic Page) Asclepiad. This consists of three asclepiads (tumtum tumtittytum tumtittytum tytum) followed by a glyconic (tumtum tumtittytum tytum). Those of you who did some Horace are most likely to remember it from Odes 1:33; where Horace frivolously tells the elegist Tibullus not to keep writing daft infatuated poems about Glycera, because she's going for a younger bloke; everybody always seems to go for someone unsuitable.

Like all of Horace's metres, this was used by the Greeks before him. An Oxyrrhynchus papyrus reveals that Alcaeus wrote at least a couple of (probably political) poems in the same metre. In Christian Latin, Rabanus Maurus, a Carolingian poet, may have written Sanctorum meritis and Bellarmine may be the author of Custodes hominum (which you will get in a few days time at Vespers of the Holy Guardianm Angels).

Why did Lentini select this metre? Because there's no other metre used in Christian Latin into which you can fit Jerome - Hieronymus. But it will go into the Second Asclepiad, EITHER (this is the clever bit) if you read the name as short-short-long-short-anceps and elide the e of 'laude' before it, OR, in medieval style, pronounce the Hi- as J- without elision.

Shame Lentini went to all this trouble when, in direct contravention of the explicit mandate of the Council, the use of Latin in the Office was, to all intents and purposes, about to disappear and no John Mason Neale was at hand to translate the Office Hymns into an English which preserved the flavour of the Latin originals.

Did Christians ever worship inthe vernacular?

Writing in 1959, something like a decade before the Novus Ordo Mass was rendered into the impoverished English of Old ICEL, Christine Mohrmann showed that the very nature of Christian liturgical language, from the earliest times, had been sacral and hieratic. "Christians sought for prayer forms which were far removed, in their style and mode of expression, from the language of everyday life. This tendency was combined with a conscious striving after sacral forms of expression". Taking the Didache , that strange early text sometimes admired by liturgists unsympathetic to what were to be the classical forms of East and West, she shows "a linking up with the Old Testament sentence structure and parallelism - such as we find also in the New Testament Canticles and prayers, and ... the introduction of Aramaic and Hebrew elements which clearly indicate a striving after sacral stylisation. There is here an obvious differentiation from the language of everyday life ...". Moving on to the introduction of Latin into the worship of the Church, she demonstrates, as I showed in an earlier post, that the dialect deliberately constructed for this purpose was deliberately archaic and sacral; based upon those pagan Roman formulae of immemorial antiquity by which fields were lustrated or the gods of an enemy city persuaded to desert it. The "monumental verbosity coupled with juridical precision ... wealth of words ... parallelism, alliteration and rhyme ... " in the pagan formulae are to be found, above all, in the Canon of the Mass. " A sacral style has been created which links up with the old Roman prayer of the official Roman cult". One finds oneself idly wondering if the members of old ICEL were ignorant of Mohrmannn's weighty arguments, or whether for their own doctrinal-cultural reasons had decided deliberately to ignore her findings.

ME!

I feel quite chuffed to see THREE photographs of myself on the NLM blog

See if you can identify me!

Pope Benedict

The blogosphere suggests that once again Diabolical forces are having a go at the Holy Father.

I've said before and I'll say it again: this is no time for "On the one hand .... on the other ...". The Enemy just loves those who say "Of course there is much good in what he does and says, but ...". It is so clear that Pope Benedict is the front guy whom the forces of Evil are attacking because he is to them the ultimate personal symbol in the world of Christ's Body the Church and of its Tradition; indeed, the representative of Christ himself in a very special way. As so often in the past, those who attack are very commonly motivated by their own sexual incontinence to attack those whose witness, whose very existence, seems a condemnation. Our support must be unambiguous, and our prayers - for example, to the Mother of God of Walsingham - must be real.

While I'm on about it, I'm not keen either on listening to attacks on Patriarch Cyril and his close assistants.

Meddling galore

Since Orders depend upon a valid episcopate, where does all this leave Anglicans? I prefer not to answer this question by drawing out the implications of the last two posts, or to investigate the politicking of Cardinal Vaughan in the last years of the nineteenth century. For more than a century we Anglicans had persecuted the heroic young clergy from the Seminaries and cheerfully connived at the horrors of their execution simply 'for priesthood'. The condemnation of our Orders in the Bull Apostolicae curae is our justly deserved punishment for our collaboration in this evil. The bull settles the juridical question of our Orders - Leo XIII described it as hoc caput disciplinae - and we have to live with that and with its consequences. I am prepared to do so and I consider it both charitable and dignified not to criticise those involved in the events of the 1890s. And I have a rooted disinclination to go around saying that Roman Pontiffs have 'got it wrong'.

But one can contextualise it. There has been a recurrent tendency throughout history for bad feeling between Christian groups or individuals to lead to hard words about the orders of other people, rather as when Pope Stephen VII 'annulled' the ordinations of his predecessor (and had his corpse exhumed and tried!). And an episode in Bede gives, in my view, a bit of a hint as to how we Anglicans might conduct ourselves. S Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, told S Chad that he was non rite consecratus; Chad had been consecrated by "Celtic" bishops according to "Celtic" rites. We do not know the rites used by "British" and "Irish" bishops when conveying orders or what S Theodore disliked about them; but Bede does not regard their orders as invalid and there has not been much of a tendency since then to consider that their orders were invalid. Current Roman praxis in Calendar and Martyrology certainly treats the "Celtic" episcopal Saints as truly bishops. But S Chad conducted himself with great humility; S Theodore then ordinationem eius denuo catholica ratione consummavit.

I think most Anglican Catholic priests will be more than happy, when received into Full Communion, to have their orders catholica ratione consummari, and their bishops to offer to recede from episcopal ministry. The Chad Solution!

Do it yourself

Well, today, for Padre Pio, I used the old Mass of the Stigmata of S Francis, with the new collect for the Saint.

Tomorrow, following what was pre-Conciliar usage at the (Anglican) shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, for her feast I will say the old December Mass pro aliquibus locis of the Translation of the Holy House (omitting the words from the Collect about how it was miraculously placed in the midst of the Church). And I shall use the very beautiful Office for that festival.

Let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone.

Catullus and the Continuum

I don't keep in touch with the Continuum, whatever that may be, but could friends who do so let me know if it still attacks me? I don't want to know what, if anything, they say, just whether ...

It occurs to me that, for Latinists who have read Catullus (XXXII), the word Continuum might refer to a species of sexual athleticism which is now well beyond an old gentleman like me.

English Missal

I am doing a bit of research on the genesis and early history of The English Missal Missale Anglicanum. I have been unable to detect a copy of the First Edition, said by Google to be 1910, in Bodley (which suggests that the Anglo-Catholic publishing firm of Knotts failed to send the statutory copies of its productions into the copyright libraries). Or indeed anywhere else in Oxford. But I'm not very good on computers; if anyone can detect a copy any Oxford library or church, I'd be grateful for the help. Or if anyone is aware of research already in the public domain on this subject.

I'm sure someone out there must possess as First Edition; if so, and if you're not in Oxford, it would be kind if you would send me your email address so that I can ask you some questions about it.

VERSUS OCCIDENTEM

The other day Pam and I walked up the Thames to Eynsham and - how nice to find a RC church unlocked - looked in S Peter's, built on the site of Eynsham Abbey. It was begun in 1940, but because of WW2 only the sanctuary was completed; the rest of the church was just a wooden hut. And that sanctuary was a nice apse in a pared-down Romanesque style, at the East end of the site, thus maintaining the old tradition of Orientation.

Fr Lopes, the priest responsible, was a resolute man, and was determined that the church should be completed to its original design; a good egg; One Of Us, you might say. So it wasn't until after his death that a scaled down version was built; consecrated in 1968.

By then, of course, the Smoke of Satan etc. etc.. So a new sanctuary was constructed at the West End with a free-standing Altar so that the priest would stand behind it (thus facing East) facing his people who would thus be facing West. In fact, just as in Roman basilicas such as S Peter's. The old apse at the East was converted into a baptistry.

Fast-forward to 2009. We have been taught, originally by Anglican liturgists such as Fr Michael Moreton but more recently by RCs such as Dr Lang , that 'Towards the East' is the proper thing. And so it is. There are heaps of patristic evidence for celebrating towards the East, from where we expect the Dayspring; the returning Saviour and Judge; because, as Origen put it, it is from the East that Redemption comes. But this has, in practice, mutated into something subtly different: a belief in the importance of celebrating versus apsidem; facing the sanctuary wall, facing away from the people and in the same direction as them. Much has been written to justify this.

But what are we to make of a church like S Peter's Eynsham? If you face East, you will be facing the people. If you celebrate 'with your back to the people', you will be facing West. Just imagine that one of the splendid new brand of High Church RC priests were appointed to Eynsham; let's call him, for convenience, Fr Theophilus Finegan (because the English RC Church is in dire need of as many Finegans as it can get). Should he get a local carpenter to make him a portable gradine so that when he says an EF Mass, he can pop it onto his altar and celebrate facing away from the people? Or should he face East, even at the cost of his face being visible to the laity, and use the rubrics in the EF Missal which give clear directions about how to use the Old Rite while facing the people (many people tend to forget that S Pius V gave careful instructions how to do this; he had to, didn't he, because he was Bishop of Rome and so many Roman basilicas are thus arranged).

Frankly, if my name were Finegan, I'd face (the real) East. (And if I were Fr T Finegan Cong Or I would feel a bit of a bias towards saying my Masses at that superb - real Italian Baroque - Lady Altar at Brompton which does face East.) But I bet a lot of you out there think - despite the insistance of the Fathers on facing East - that facing away from the people is the most important thing.

(Don't bother to write in with the obvious suggestion of getting the masons in and swinging the church round. And if anyone points out that several times a week I say Mass in S Thomas's at the Holy Rood Altar, which faces North, I shall delete the contribution unless it comes from one of my particular favourites.)

Via Nordica Media

In i933 Dom Gregory Dix wrote a couple of scintillating articles about the errors of one Dr N P Williams (formerly, I have to admit, a priest on the strength of S Thomas's). Williams had invented "Nordic Catholicism", "neither Roman nor Byzantine ... non-Papal, but at the same time specifically Western in its outlook and temper". He associated this with the 'Nordic' lands of Britain, Scandinavia, Holland [included presumably so as to incorporate the minute gang of schismatics called the'Old Catholics'] and North Germany.

Interesting, isn't it, that a donnish Oxford Anglican should be devising this Aryan racist nonsense just as Hitlerism was on the up. Of course Williams did not get all this from Nazism; it is, rather, a superb example of how things can be in the air; the fashion of the times ... the spawn of the Zeitgeist ... an idea whose time has come and whose time will through the mercy of God undoubtedly go. You will recall the parallel of Eugenics and racial purity, which were already being peddled by birth-controllers in America and Europe when the euthanasia of the unfit and the elimination of European Jewry were merely a gleam in Herr Hitler's artistic eye.

Dix was merciless in the satirical bite of his articles (I believe Williams never spoke to him again). I will give but one example. Williams had written of the "essential religious genius of the Northern peoples ... mystical soaring quality ... beneath grey and weeping skies ... quality which urges it to pierce straight upwards to the ineffable Godhead itself, and forbids it to take over-much delight in symbols, or to rest with satisfaction in material objects of devotion". Dix begins his clinical demolition of this claptrap thus:
It is a vivid and sympathetic picture. One can almost see these mystical and polygamous freemen at their simple devotions, and catch the rustle of their golden beards as they bend forward to breathe unsuperstitious prayers into their winged casques, seated on damp logs beneath the grey and weeping dome of heaven.

At the end of his first article, Dix writes:
It has been the nemesis of all racial Christianities from St Paul's opponents to the present day that they have proved sterile and inadequate just in proportion as they have expressed only the emphatic qualities of a race. Truth will be held most entirely and in due proportion in a Church which is truly "universal", supra-racial, AND UNAFFECTED BY THE TRANSIENT SPIRIT OF A PARTICULAR AGE.

And in the other paper, he writes:
Above all else, the Oxford Movement was an attempt to recover for the magisterium of the Church that final control of belief which "liberalism"claims for irresponsible private scholarship. ... "liberal Catholics" ... seek to impose on the Oxford Movement a theology which is not its own, which springs indeed from the principles of that "liberalism" which, as Newman said, "is the enemy".

66 years later, how relevant are Dix's words to the Liberal establishment of today, to its servitude to the Spirit of the Age in matters such as Priestesses, and to its certain transience.

Embers???

According to the Book of Common Prayer, the Missal of S Pius V, my Ordo, and the admirable S Lawrence Ordo, today is the Saturday of the the September Ember Days, or 'Quater Tense' as I have heard them called (Quatuor Tempora, Latin for 'Four Times'). We observe them on the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after Holy Cross Day. But the silly old C of E Common Worship moved them to the week before the Sunday nearest to Michaelmass - which would be next week.

At this point my eye strays to the Gricigliano Calendar hanging, for its nice pickies, beside my computer. Di immortales! There I see that the Institute is keeping these Ember Days on the Common Worship date. I find this highly mysterious. Does anybody know the reason? As an Anglican Catholic I feel I have to warn them that this is a slippery slope which will end up with Women Priests (just imagine them in the blue pompoms!) and Episcopussies (apologies to Professor Tighe for not using his rather clever flaminicae).

In am not often moved to miss my breakfast, but after all those readings and collects about fasting in this morning's EF Mass (I said that option), and the fact that today is also the anticipated Vigil of S Matthew, I was shamed into doing so.

I shall make up later when the news comes through that Good S Januarius has liquefied. I hope Neapolitan readers will keep me informed.

Consecration

How lovely to see distinguished blogger Brother Lawrence Lew being solemnly professed in the Oxford Blackfriars on Sunday. May God bless him and give him multos annos in his service to his people.