There is one, just one, rather interesting argument for the 'uniqueness' of the Acropolis Marbles which rises above the banal and the pathetic. At the risk of being accused of deftly constructing my own Aunt Sally so that I can triumphantly knock Her down, I will attempt a summary of what I understand the thesis to be.
"The art and architecture of Periclean Athens constitute precisely the triumphant and uniquely significant moment of the Classical Period in Greek Art. It soared above the rather wooden Archaic Period which preceded it. It was at its height until the brutally militaristic Macedonian Ascendancy destroyed Athenian democracy and independence. What followed it was simply 'Hellenistic decadence'".
The subjectivism of this attitude is, I would have thought, fairly obvious. Who says that any one Art History 'period' is superior (which is what 'classical' really means) to any other? Personally, I prefer the 'Hellenistic' period (Alexander the Great onwards), both in terms of Art (Pythocritos of Lindos) and Literature (Callimachus); and the continuities which link it to Roman Art and Literature. I am absolutely fascinated by the wonders emerging at this very moment from the soil of Macedonia; and I am still reeling from the enormous loan exhibition of 'new' Hellenistic art and artefacts from Macedonia which the Greek Ministry of Antiquities, with such immensely gracious generosity, sent to the Ashmolean two or three years ago. It is in Royal Macedon that great Palaces were designed and built which were imitated in the palaces of Rome and the Bay of Naples (and in Herod's seaside palace in Palestine, and in the palace of another client king at Fishbourne in Sussex).
Other Greek cities, besides Athens, were great political and cultural centres. Miletus had some 90 colonies ... far more than Athens. It was the birthplace of the Greek philosophical (which is to be taken to include what we would call Scientific) tradition called the 'Milesian School'. It is where Greek 'Town planning' was invented. It was a great city in the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods; the birthplace, indeed, of the architect of Hagia Sophia (surely a much more significant architectural expression of the Hellenic spirit than the Parthenon?). It possessed a very remarkable structure of its own called the 'Market Gate' ... which was dismantled in toto and re-erected in a museum in Berlin. Why don't the Clooneys go and sit on Mrs Merkel's doorstep and demand its 'return'? What's that you say? ... that the site of Miletus is in modern-day Turkey? Well, of course it is. Everybody knows that. 'Hellas' was a very much bigger thing than the limits of the modern Greek Nation State. So what?
Let me explain where the myth of the uniqueness, and the effortless superiority, of Periclean Athens come from. Victorian Schoolmasters. British Imperialism, at its apogee, identified itself with Periclean Athens. Boys were set to read its texts ... Thucydides and Aeschylus and Sophocles and Aristophanes ... and to write prose and verse in Attic Greek of the 'Classical Period' ... you get the idea. That was the moment in Greek History which seemed so uniquely parallel to the grandeur of the high noon of the British Empire. Schoolboys were invited to absorb the moral Virtues held to be embedded in 'Classical Greek Civilisation'. They hurried from reading Xenophon to winning battles on the playing fields of Eton. Play up! Play up! And play the Game!
Just as ... I explained this in the previous part of this series ... I do not see why Greeks need to form their identity in the matrix of the Western European 'Enlightenment', I also fail to understand why some of them seem so helplessly entranced by the arrogant ideology of British Imperialism and bewitched by the fagging-and-flogging culture of the Arnoldian Public School. The World would respect them so much more if, culturally, they would just stand on their own two feet. In conclusion, let me remind you what those Two Feet are.
I hope that the recovery, in our own day, of an understanding of the marvels of the Royal Establishment in Macedonia, will stir up among Greeks proud and confident memories of when Macedon conquered the World ... well, as far as India, anyway ... and planted its culture in the Alexandrias and the Antiochs and Seleucias which crowd all over the maps of the Middle East; and then, intellectually and artistically, took Rome captive. It should remind the Athenians that 'Greece' is not synonymous with 'Athens' ... a very necessary lesson. And I pray for a realisation by its true heirs of how this scintillating civilisation formed a marriage with Byzantine Christianity, resulting in one of the most amazing syntheses the world has ever seen.
Callimachus and the Akathist Hymn! Both infinitely beyond the capacities of any lesser nation!
Concluded.
________________________________________________________________________________
A henotikon: the BM could loan Athens half a dozen pieces at a time in rotating exhibitions, changing every 5/10 years or so. This would mean that, if Athens decided to break its word and not send one lot back, then, true, London would have lost six pieces, but it would know better than to send any more pieces across. And where London has tiny fragments 'belonging' to a large fragment held in Athens, perhaps they could be sent on semi-permanent loan (and ditto, mutatis mutandis, the other way round). And both the Athens museum, and the Acropolis, should be open to all, free of charge.
Then we could see how the arrangement developed ...
10 December 2014
9 December 2014
Marbles (3)
This series continues.
There are detailed reasons why the return of the Marbles to Athens would be pointless. Some people, for example, are under the impression that the metopes would be replaced upon the Parthenon, thus giving back its artistic integrity to an important building. But they would not. The Greeks plan simply to put them into a museum ... with a distant view of the Acropolis!! ... thus shifting them from one museum to another and leaving the gaps on the Temple itself still completely empty! And there is no reason why a Principle of Return should not apply to the contents of all the great museums of the West ... to the Venus de Milo in Paris, or the very classy exhibits secured by the Getty dollars. True, the Greek Government has given assurances that it would urge no such precedent. For myself, I do believe those who, in this generation, are giving these assurances. But such undertakings, hardly enforceable in, say, two hundred years' time, surely rest upon the pragmatic realisation that it is not a good idea to fight on too many fronts at the same time; and upon a policy of maximising international sympathy for their campaign against the Brits ... after all, who doesn't enjoy seeing the Brits getting a bit of grief? Certainly not FIFA ... but I digress ...
The widespread notion that the Marbles are somehow unique is based principally upon modern concepts of the Nation State. It implies that because Athens is the Capital of the modern Greek Nation State, therefore the Acropolis is the very heart of the identity of what it means to be Hellenic. But, far from being ancient, this idea is recent ... in fact, nineteenth century. Ancient Greece was not a Nation State. And Athens was not its capital. Athens was just one city-state among very many others (the Romans didn't even make it the capital of their province of Achaea, and Constantine set his new capital somewhere else). There was a time when Athens had a short-lived 'Empire', but that was a dominion ruthlessly exercised over a number of city-states who certainly did not all gaze with sentiment at the Acropolis Hill as the centre of their own self-identification. And other states in Greece waged long and bloody wars against Athenian aggression until that imperial arrogance itself died a sordid death in the quarries of Syracuse. If these marbles did not come from a temple in the middle of the modern Greek capital but, for example, from somewhere in a Peloponesian back-of-beyond, how keen would the government be for their return? Why don't they evince any wish to get the very fine Aphaia Marbles back to Aegina from the Glyptothek in Munich? Why so little interest in the Marbles from Bassai?* (Where on earth's that? Ask George Clooney. He's the expert on all this sort of thing.)
There are detailed reasons why the return of the Marbles to Athens would be pointless. Some people, for example, are under the impression that the metopes would be replaced upon the Parthenon, thus giving back its artistic integrity to an important building. But they would not. The Greeks plan simply to put them into a museum ... with a distant view of the Acropolis!! ... thus shifting them from one museum to another and leaving the gaps on the Temple itself still completely empty! And there is no reason why a Principle of Return should not apply to the contents of all the great museums of the West ... to the Venus de Milo in Paris, or the very classy exhibits secured by the Getty dollars. True, the Greek Government has given assurances that it would urge no such precedent. For myself, I do believe those who, in this generation, are giving these assurances. But such undertakings, hardly enforceable in, say, two hundred years' time, surely rest upon the pragmatic realisation that it is not a good idea to fight on too many fronts at the same time; and upon a policy of maximising international sympathy for their campaign against the Brits ... after all, who doesn't enjoy seeing the Brits getting a bit of grief? Certainly not FIFA ... but I digress ...
The widespread notion that the Marbles are somehow unique is based principally upon modern concepts of the Nation State. It implies that because Athens is the Capital of the modern Greek Nation State, therefore the Acropolis is the very heart of the identity of what it means to be Hellenic. But, far from being ancient, this idea is recent ... in fact, nineteenth century. Ancient Greece was not a Nation State. And Athens was not its capital. Athens was just one city-state among very many others (the Romans didn't even make it the capital of their province of Achaea, and Constantine set his new capital somewhere else). There was a time when Athens had a short-lived 'Empire', but that was a dominion ruthlessly exercised over a number of city-states who certainly did not all gaze with sentiment at the Acropolis Hill as the centre of their own self-identification. And other states in Greece waged long and bloody wars against Athenian aggression until that imperial arrogance itself died a sordid death in the quarries of Syracuse. If these marbles did not come from a temple in the middle of the modern Greek capital but, for example, from somewhere in a Peloponesian back-of-beyond, how keen would the government be for their return? Why don't they evince any wish to get the very fine Aphaia Marbles back to Aegina from the Glyptothek in Munich? Why so little interest in the Marbles from Bassai?* (Where on earth's that? Ask George Clooney. He's the expert on all this sort of thing.)
I cannot believe that I am the only philhellene to want the Marbles to stay exactly where they are. In their magnificent home in London, they are a superb shrine and monument to the most refined tastes of the French and British and Russian 'Enlightenment', and accessible free of charge to millions from all over the world. The Acropolis Hill in Athens, white, bloodless, and ghost-like, not to mention the shiny new museum some distance away, is now of very little cultural significance. After all, the original appearance of the Parthenon would have been dramatically polychromatic ... the passion for white stone is characteristic of 'Enlightenment' aesthetics (and a taste not even shared by some of the best informed 'Enlightenment' scholars). If the Greek Government badly needs a new, tasty exhibit to get its turnstiles clicking and to distract its suffering people from their financial woes, George Clooney and his current wife (I do hope they are both still together as I write this), both stuffed, mounted, and bleached ... then slightly foxed and with the sticking-out bits distressed to make them resemble Periclean statuary ... would be very suitable. And truly unique. What a tourist attraction!!
To be concluded.
________________________________________________________________________________
*The German nobleman who packaged up Aphaia and Bassai in 1811 had to pay a (rather small) bribe to the local Turkish Governor to get them out of the country. Surely that ought to make their removal even more 'illegal' than Lord Elgin's activities are alleged to have been?
To be concluded.
________________________________________________________________________________
*The German nobleman who packaged up Aphaia and Bassai in 1811 had to pay a (rather small) bribe to the local Turkish Governor to get them out of the country. Surely that ought to make their removal even more 'illegal' than Lord Elgin's activities are alleged to have been?
8 December 2014
THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
A Sermon I once preached for the Immaculate Conception; at Pusey House, Oxford.
On May 13, 1917 .… Yes, if I were Jeremy Paxman and that were a Starter Question, you would all by now laudably have pressed your buzzers. But I wonder how many of you recall the first words which that Lady ‘brighter than the sun’ said to those three Portuguese peasant children, nearly a hundred years ago. They were ‘Do not be afraid’. ‘Afraid’ is what frail humans so often feel when confronted by evidences of divine power; the Lord himself said it on His Easter Morning: me phobeisthe. But I like to indulge myself an idiosyncratic fantasy that Our Lady, when she appeared on that stony, arid field at Cova da Iria - although I imagine she spoke to Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta in some Portuguese dialect - was really addressing England; Protestant England with its underlying anti-Catholic bigotry (‘scratch an Englishman...’) even when it is overlaid by the broader anti-Christian secularism of our own age. (When the 1928 Prayer Book came before Parliament, someone asked an atheist MP why he was so keen to vote against it, and he explained ‘But I am a Protestant atheist’.) And such English, I put it to you, are scared, dead scared, scared out of their wits, by the great Mother of God, Mary most holy. Have you noticed that there's a certain sort of churchperson who twitches rhythmically at the very phrase 'Mother of God'. If you explain that Jesus is God and so his mother Mary is the Mother of God, they give you that sort of sideways look that implies they know you're playing some sort of Jesuitical trick on them, but they can't quite spot the catch. Well, of course, there is a catch; it is that they don't live with a real faith that Jesus is God. As Newman once analysed it, liberal protestants demote our Lord Jesus Christ into the slot reserved for Mary (I am butchering Newman's elegant periods into journalese so I will call it "Top Creature Slot") and then they're puzzled when we Catholics situate Mary in exactly that place. 'Romanism is not idolatry unless Arianism is orthodoxy', Newman observed.
So what - if they can't completely avoid talking about Mary - do liberal protestants call her? 'The mother of Jesus’; 'the Virgin'; and - get this - 'the Madonna'. As if it's safer to refer to her in Italian than to use the Prayer Book phrase 'Our Lady'. So let's keep her, they feel, in an Art History context - the Madonna ... weird, really, isn't it: you wouldn't, probably, refer to the Head of an academic institution as ‘the Il Principale’ or the 'il prevosto'; or to our beloved Prime Minister as ‘the Il Duce’. Or perhaps she will be called 'the bee vee', as if it sanitises and makes her safe to turn her into an English acronym.
In a sermon I preached nearly half a century ago, at the Mattins of Christmass Day in the year of my diaconate, I said that the Incarnation meant that God was in the belly of a Palestinian peasant girl who is Queen of Heaven. Critics fell into three categories: those who disliked my phrase because of its physicality and because it placed the origins of our faith among foreigners (surely Mary must have been a middle-class Englishwoman and if not a member of the WI then at least of the Young Wives); those who didn't like the phrase Queen of Heaven; and those who disliked both.
'The Immaculate Conception'. It's a lovely rolling phrase, isn't it (we classicists might analyse its rhythm as a trochaic dimeter). And it's a phrase, too, that can scare people silly. Is it sometimes the physicality – again, of conception - that disturbs them; conception, a process that occurs a little way south of the tummy button? Not the sort of thing the fastidious want to have dragged in front of their noses. C S Lewis points out that the devils too are fastidious in their horror at the flesh: Screwtape refers to a human as 'this animal, this thing begotten in a bed'. Or perhaps people are scared of the word 'Immaculate'; perhaps it suggests foreign religion - little old Irish women clutching their rosaries or Spanish ladies in black making their five successive First Saturday communions in honour of the Immaculate Heart (a devotion which Cardinal Ratzinger with his gentle irony once called 'surprising for people from the Anglo-Saxon and German cultural worlds'). But 'immaculate' is a completely biblical concept in its Hebrew and Greek equivalents: it means spotless; and only what is without blemish is truly for God (for example, a spotless sacrificial lamb). Because: Mary is to be wholly for God, is to give God his body, to give God his endowment of genes, to give God the food of her breast: so Mary by God's gift is to be the Immaculate, the one without blemish, the one in whom the Divine likeness has never been marred.
It is because Mary alone in the roots of her being is unmarked by sin that Mary alone is truly and wholly free. In our hearts, too, we should make her free and 'fear not'; she is never to be locked up in the tourist industry as a statue of doubtful taste carried in processions by foreign peasants for the English to photograph from within their coaches; Mary is not to be detained at the pleasure of the Heritage business in a Merry England; she is not to be 'the Madonna' of the Art Historians imprisoned in glossy coffee table books.
If Mary is the Mother of God Incarnate, she is our Mother too, because we are in Christ, limbs of his body by our baptismal incorporation. Mary comes to us this day, and what would a true mother bring to hungry children except food; food for her children in exsilio; food packed for our journey. Mary comes to this place and to this moment of time; Mary comes, bright with all the beauties known by men and angels; Mary comes to set upon our lips the blessed fruit of her womb Jesus.
So what - if they can't completely avoid talking about Mary - do liberal protestants call her? 'The mother of Jesus’; 'the Virgin'; and - get this - 'the Madonna'. As if it's safer to refer to her in Italian than to use the Prayer Book phrase 'Our Lady'. So let's keep her, they feel, in an Art History context - the Madonna ... weird, really, isn't it: you wouldn't, probably, refer to the Head of an academic institution as ‘the Il Principale’ or the 'il prevosto'; or to our beloved Prime Minister as ‘the Il Duce’. Or perhaps she will be called 'the bee vee', as if it sanitises and makes her safe to turn her into an English acronym.
In a sermon I preached nearly half a century ago, at the Mattins of Christmass Day in the year of my diaconate, I said that the Incarnation meant that God was in the belly of a Palestinian peasant girl who is Queen of Heaven. Critics fell into three categories: those who disliked my phrase because of its physicality and because it placed the origins of our faith among foreigners (surely Mary must have been a middle-class Englishwoman and if not a member of the WI then at least of the Young Wives); those who didn't like the phrase Queen of Heaven; and those who disliked both.
'The Immaculate Conception'. It's a lovely rolling phrase, isn't it (we classicists might analyse its rhythm as a trochaic dimeter). And it's a phrase, too, that can scare people silly. Is it sometimes the physicality – again, of conception - that disturbs them; conception, a process that occurs a little way south of the tummy button? Not the sort of thing the fastidious want to have dragged in front of their noses. C S Lewis points out that the devils too are fastidious in their horror at the flesh: Screwtape refers to a human as 'this animal, this thing begotten in a bed'. Or perhaps people are scared of the word 'Immaculate'; perhaps it suggests foreign religion - little old Irish women clutching their rosaries or Spanish ladies in black making their five successive First Saturday communions in honour of the Immaculate Heart (a devotion which Cardinal Ratzinger with his gentle irony once called 'surprising for people from the Anglo-Saxon and German cultural worlds'). But 'immaculate' is a completely biblical concept in its Hebrew and Greek equivalents: it means spotless; and only what is without blemish is truly for God (for example, a spotless sacrificial lamb). Because: Mary is to be wholly for God, is to give God his body, to give God his endowment of genes, to give God the food of her breast: so Mary by God's gift is to be the Immaculate, the one without blemish, the one in whom the Divine likeness has never been marred.
It is because Mary alone in the roots of her being is unmarked by sin that Mary alone is truly and wholly free. In our hearts, too, we should make her free and 'fear not'; she is never to be locked up in the tourist industry as a statue of doubtful taste carried in processions by foreign peasants for the English to photograph from within their coaches; Mary is not to be detained at the pleasure of the Heritage business in a Merry England; she is not to be 'the Madonna' of the Art Historians imprisoned in glossy coffee table books.
If Mary is the Mother of God Incarnate, she is our Mother too, because we are in Christ, limbs of his body by our baptismal incorporation. Mary comes to us this day, and what would a true mother bring to hungry children except food; food for her children in exsilio; food packed for our journey. Mary comes to this place and to this moment of time; Mary comes, bright with all the beauties known by men and angels; Mary comes to set upon our lips the blessed fruit of her womb Jesus.
7 December 2014
Marbles (2)
The Acropolis Marbles, or, if you prefer, my Lord Elgin's Marbles, are in the most natural place for them to be.
The arguments for this do not rest simply upon the legality of their removal by Elgin*. They rest upon broader cultural and historical considerations.
The sole reason why Elgin wanted the Marbles was that he shared the cultural assumptions of the so-called 'Enlightenment'. What was 'Classical' was fashionable; so much so that it was seen as normative. The marbles migrated ... I will say: 'Naturally! ... to a significant cultural centre where that they could be studied and imitated ... and they were studied and imitated. I doubt if there is town in Britain, or in Western Europe or America, where there is not a building with its design or detailing influenced by the Parthenon. The moment the Marbles took their place in London is that pivotal, symbolic, cultural moment when in Thamesim defluxit Ilissus**.
It was not until later that my Lord Byron (who was just leaving Harrow for Cambridge when Elgin secured the Marbles) taught the Greeks that their glory, and the marker and symbol of their identity, ought to be found in pre-Christian Antiquity, or rather in the idiosyncratic reconstruction of Classical Greece favoured by the 'Enlightenment'. From the Advent of Christianity down to the Ottoman invasion, Hellenic identity had, on the contrary, been identical with Byzantine Christianity (that admirable civilisation which renamed Aphrodisias Stauroupolis and converted hundreds of temples into churches). Until the Turks turned the Parthenon into a mosque and then an arsenal, it had for many centuries (more centuries than it served the pagan cults of glaukopis Athene and Mahomet) been a Church dedicated to the true Queen of Heaven, the Virgin Theotokos. Much of the statuary was defaced by the Christian Greeks themselves because of its pagan nature, especially at the East end, where a liturgical apse needed to be constructed. I would willingly contribute to a fund to restore the Parthenon so that it could again be used for the Divine Liturgy of S John Chrysostom.
But that would probably be pointless. There would be no congregation to worship there. The Acropolis Hill, until it was deliberately stripped bare, was a Levantine maze of little streets and alleys; of buildings Frankish and Ottoman and Greek; of homes and bazaars and churches. The 'iconic' scene so often now thrust before us, of a lonely arid rock, scraped nearly bare, with some damaged stonework atop, is a ghastly symbol of a culture which clutches at a colourless 'Antiquity' of ruins, and despises the human, not to mention the true Divine which was the glory of Hellenism when it was faithful to Christ and His Mother. The present scene is 'iconic' only of the 'Enlightenment' preference for nostalgic memories of a long-lost pagan religious culture and a matching contempt for Christendom. This is the same preference, indeed, as was demonstrated in that infamous draft European Constitution which did a very Olympic long-jump from Ancient Greece and Rome to the 'Enlightenment', consigning the intervening centuries of Christendom to contemptuous oblivion. In the 1890s, the Greek Director of Antiquities showed himself to have been brainwashed by exactly this anti-Christian spirit: he proudly proclaimed that the Acropolis had finally been 'cleansed' of all 'barbaric' encroachments. Two millennia of Greek History and culture written off as 'barbarism'! What a Greek! Who needs Turks when you've got Greeks like that!
Just for one pointless but magical moment, imagine what it would have been like to pant uphill and then to turn a corner in some narrow and grubby little street and, suddenly, to see the Parthenon, majestical, rearing up in front of you; and to hear, from inside, the sound of a great-chested deacon intoning the ektene.
To be continued.
_______________________________________________________________________________
* Sometimes Greek apologists deploy legal arguments about the legal processes by which Lord Elgin secured the Marbles from Ottoman officials. It is, in my view, a waste of time to engage in a detailed debate about such matters, simply because it would not solve the 'problem' even to win such a debate. The Greek Government apparently holds the view that there is some transcendent Law of the Universe prescribing the 'return'. Recently, a Mr Fotopoulos, Cultural Attache at the Greek Embassy in Copenhagen, referring to the two Marbles held by the National Museum in Copenhagen, said "Regardless of when or how Denmark got them, the two heads belong in Greece".
** Brilliant, yes? You just can't deny it! It might even scan!! (Does it?)
The River God Ilissos flows through Athens ... Socrates and Phaedrus wandered down his bed barefooted, in Plato's interestingly Theocritean narrative ... but you can't go and have a good look at him now because, in modern Athens, he has been covered over by roads, and his course has even been diverted (that's how much modern Athenians really care about their 'Classical Heritage'). You wanna see Ilissos at this very moment, you gotta go to ... ... the BM loan exhibition in the Hermitage!! Yes! That's what we've sent to the Ruskies! I hope Vladimir Vladimirovich appreciates it.
The arguments for this do not rest simply upon the legality of their removal by Elgin*. They rest upon broader cultural and historical considerations.
The sole reason why Elgin wanted the Marbles was that he shared the cultural assumptions of the so-called 'Enlightenment'. What was 'Classical' was fashionable; so much so that it was seen as normative. The marbles migrated ... I will say: 'Naturally! ... to a significant cultural centre where that they could be studied and imitated ... and they were studied and imitated. I doubt if there is town in Britain, or in Western Europe or America, where there is not a building with its design or detailing influenced by the Parthenon. The moment the Marbles took their place in London is that pivotal, symbolic, cultural moment when in Thamesim defluxit Ilissus**.
It was not until later that my Lord Byron (who was just leaving Harrow for Cambridge when Elgin secured the Marbles) taught the Greeks that their glory, and the marker and symbol of their identity, ought to be found in pre-Christian Antiquity, or rather in the idiosyncratic reconstruction of Classical Greece favoured by the 'Enlightenment'. From the Advent of Christianity down to the Ottoman invasion, Hellenic identity had, on the contrary, been identical with Byzantine Christianity (that admirable civilisation which renamed Aphrodisias Stauroupolis and converted hundreds of temples into churches). Until the Turks turned the Parthenon into a mosque and then an arsenal, it had for many centuries (more centuries than it served the pagan cults of glaukopis Athene and Mahomet) been a Church dedicated to the true Queen of Heaven, the Virgin Theotokos. Much of the statuary was defaced by the Christian Greeks themselves because of its pagan nature, especially at the East end, where a liturgical apse needed to be constructed. I would willingly contribute to a fund to restore the Parthenon so that it could again be used for the Divine Liturgy of S John Chrysostom.
But that would probably be pointless. There would be no congregation to worship there. The Acropolis Hill, until it was deliberately stripped bare, was a Levantine maze of little streets and alleys; of buildings Frankish and Ottoman and Greek; of homes and bazaars and churches. The 'iconic' scene so often now thrust before us, of a lonely arid rock, scraped nearly bare, with some damaged stonework atop, is a ghastly symbol of a culture which clutches at a colourless 'Antiquity' of ruins, and despises the human, not to mention the true Divine which was the glory of Hellenism when it was faithful to Christ and His Mother. The present scene is 'iconic' only of the 'Enlightenment' preference for nostalgic memories of a long-lost pagan religious culture and a matching contempt for Christendom. This is the same preference, indeed, as was demonstrated in that infamous draft European Constitution which did a very Olympic long-jump from Ancient Greece and Rome to the 'Enlightenment', consigning the intervening centuries of Christendom to contemptuous oblivion. In the 1890s, the Greek Director of Antiquities showed himself to have been brainwashed by exactly this anti-Christian spirit: he proudly proclaimed that the Acropolis had finally been 'cleansed' of all 'barbaric' encroachments. Two millennia of Greek History and culture written off as 'barbarism'! What a Greek! Who needs Turks when you've got Greeks like that!
Just for one pointless but magical moment, imagine what it would have been like to pant uphill and then to turn a corner in some narrow and grubby little street and, suddenly, to see the Parthenon, majestical, rearing up in front of you; and to hear, from inside, the sound of a great-chested deacon intoning the ektene.
To be continued.
_______________________________________________________________________________
* Sometimes Greek apologists deploy legal arguments about the legal processes by which Lord Elgin secured the Marbles from Ottoman officials. It is, in my view, a waste of time to engage in a detailed debate about such matters, simply because it would not solve the 'problem' even to win such a debate. The Greek Government apparently holds the view that there is some transcendent Law of the Universe prescribing the 'return'. Recently, a Mr Fotopoulos, Cultural Attache at the Greek Embassy in Copenhagen, referring to the two Marbles held by the National Museum in Copenhagen, said "Regardless of when or how Denmark got them, the two heads belong in Greece".
** Brilliant, yes? You just can't deny it! It might even scan!! (Does it?)
The River God Ilissos flows through Athens ... Socrates and Phaedrus wandered down his bed barefooted, in Plato's interestingly Theocritean narrative ... but you can't go and have a good look at him now because, in modern Athens, he has been covered over by roads, and his course has even been diverted (that's how much modern Athenians really care about their 'Classical Heritage'). You wanna see Ilissos at this very moment, you gotta go to ... ... the BM loan exhibition in the Hermitage!! Yes! That's what we've sent to the Ruskies! I hope Vladimir Vladimirovich appreciates it.
6 December 2014
Liturgical Continuity
A number of comments on a previous thread (November 27) have raised interesting questions about the differing degrees of innovation in the liturgical actions of different Pontiffs. I reprint below a couple of old posts of mine (with original threads) which point out that:
(1) It was printing that enabled innovators to impose radical innovations overnight (e.g. Cranmer, Whitsunday, 1549).
(2) S Pius V was not a centraliser imposing uniformity, but a conservative repressing innovation.
(3) The actions of S Pius V, then Urban VIII, then S Pius X, then B Paul VI, show popes gradually becoming bolder in imposing novelties to be accepted and implemented "with immediate effect".
(1) It was printing that enabled innovators to impose radical innovations overnight (e.g. Cranmer, Whitsunday, 1549).
(2) S Pius V was not a centraliser imposing uniformity, but a conservative repressing innovation.
(3) The actions of S Pius V, then Urban VIII, then S Pius X, then B Paul VI, show popes gradually becoming bolder in imposing novelties to be accepted and implemented "with immediate effect".
S Pius V (originally posted February 2014)
There are two pervasive myths about S Pius V's liturgical interventions which will doubtless go on being purveyed until the Eschaton.
(1) That he suppressed the local rites of the Middle Ages, only permitting the survival of those which had existed for more than 200 years. He was a centraliser and a standardiser.
(2) That his actions, following on from Trent, are closely analogous to, and provide a close precedent for, what Paul VI did after Vatican II.
Each of these myths is a travesty of history. Each results from a reading of History with the hindsight of knowing What Happened Afterwards, instead of trying to understand events in their own historical contexts. Since devils reside in details, and since I have written before about what he did with his Missal, I shall focus today on what he did to the Breviary.
The papal document Quod a nobis, which introduces the 'Tridentine Breviary', repays careful reading. The Divine Office put in place by Gelasius and Gregory and reformed by Gregory VII had, S Pius tells us, diverged ab antiqua constitutione. So the pope wishes it to be recalled ad pristinam orandi regulam. Some people had deformed this praeclara constitutio by mutilations and changes; an awful lot of people (plurimi) had been seduced (allecti) by the brevity of a Breviary produced by the Spanish Cardinal Quignon. Even worse, in provincias paulatim irrepserat prava illa consuetudo ["that depraved custom"], namely, that bishops in churches which, from the beginning, had used the Roman Office, were producing privatum sibi quisquam Breviarium.
What S Pius V is dealing with here is the chaotic liturgical result of a century of printing. It may be difficult for us to appropriate imaginatively the differences that this invention made. Only in the age of this new technology could trendy clergy buy and use in vast numbers the new slick and fast Quignon Breviary; only now could meddling bishops, full of Good Ideas, thrust their latest clever novelties with ease upon their helpless dioceses. The words of S Pius seem almost to describe the chaos which was to follow under Pius XII and his successors: "Hence the total disruption of divine worship in so many places; hence a complete ignorance among the clergy of ecclesiastical rites and ceremonies; so that numberless ministers of the churches carry out their duty unbecomingly, not without enormous offence to the devout".
S Pius was reacting to to this technology-driven chaos by a reinstatement of Tradition; by the elimination of novelty and by a return to what had been received. Hence, he provided a form of the Roman Breviary carefully emended by the best scholarship available to him. It was, of course, a paradox that his reform was itself carried through by the use of the same technology which had created the problem!! But that paradox does nothing to change the fact that his action was an assertion of Tradition, a repression of innovation.
S Pius V's reform was thus an act of deliberate and profound conservatism. This is shown by his treatment of local usages which dated from well before the invention of printing. As for uses which were of more than two centuries standing: "that ancient right of saying and singing their office, we do not take away". Recognising, however, that many who possessed such ancient usages might nevertheless themselves prefer the revision which he is now promulgating, he permits them to adopt it, but only if the Bishop and the entire chapter agree. Entire!! Come-lately diocesans were thereby restrained, according to the words of this legislation, from abolishing the ancient uses of their churches; apparently, it needed only one curmudgeonly traditionalist on the Chapter to interpose his veto and thus to preserve the local customs. This seems to me a fairly rigorous affirmation of the the traditional diversities with which a process of organically evolving liturgy had endowed local churches, combined with a determination to eliminate novel fancies which had corrupted liturgy since printing made it easy for hierarchs to impose their whimsies. I wonder what he might have said could he have known that, four hundred years later, his own successors would be using printing to impose their whimsies!
S Pius V's reforms, as I have said, are commonly described as symptoms of counter-reformation centralisation and as an attempt rigorously to standardise the worship of the Latin Church. I think this profoundly and anachronistically misreads both the liturgical situation which he is addressing; and the legal framework which he carefully puts in place. Previous popes had fairly recently flirted with the idea of radical revisions of the Breviary, intending thus to bring it into line with the ('Humanist') fashions of their age. But in S Pius V, a truly great pontiff, we see at its very best the ancient function of the Roman Church as a remora against innovation; as well as an assertion of the principle that the Tradition is not ours to destroy, but to hand on carefully with - as Vatican II actually says - only such changes as grow organically out of what is already there, and are truly necessary. (Among later pontiffs, perhaps Benedict XIV came closest to the instincts of S Pius V.)
If S Pius V had been a B Paul VI, he would have confirmed and extended the papal permission for the use of the Quignon breviary; he would have encouraged diocesan bishops to forge ahead with their own 'inculturations'. He did nothing of the sort; he did the opposite. Perhaps the only faint resemblance to the events of the 1960s is S Pius's somewhat root-and-branch approach to a Calendar which had become overloaded (calendars constantly silt up and then need to be dredged; it's a natural cycle like the successions of ice ages and interglacials)*. But that had the result of revealing old Roman treasures which an excessive Sanctorale had left unchanged in the physical texts while the newer insertions had been preventing their actual use. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was those archaic features themselves that fell victim to an elite in a hurry (during this Advent season, we might particularly remember the demise of the old Excita Sunday collects).
You are entitled to think what you like about the events of the 1960s. I have no power to pop you into my own personal private prison! But please do not go around saying that what B Paul VI did after Vatican II was indistinguishable from S Pius V had done after Trent.
It. Was. Nothing. Of. The. Sort!!
______________________________________________________________________________
*The elimination as 'non-Biblical' of S Anne and the Presentation of our Lady was very swiftly reversed by a succeeding pontiff.
Attempts to assert a parallel between S Pius V and Paul VI also involve a massive suggestio falsi: that S Pius's 'revision' was as radical, and with as little rootedness in what had gone before, as B Paul's.
(1) That he suppressed the local rites of the Middle Ages, only permitting the survival of those which had existed for more than 200 years. He was a centraliser and a standardiser.
(2) That his actions, following on from Trent, are closely analogous to, and provide a close precedent for, what Paul VI did after Vatican II.
Each of these myths is a travesty of history. Each results from a reading of History with the hindsight of knowing What Happened Afterwards, instead of trying to understand events in their own historical contexts. Since devils reside in details, and since I have written before about what he did with his Missal, I shall focus today on what he did to the Breviary.
The papal document Quod a nobis, which introduces the 'Tridentine Breviary', repays careful reading. The Divine Office put in place by Gelasius and Gregory and reformed by Gregory VII had, S Pius tells us, diverged ab antiqua constitutione. So the pope wishes it to be recalled ad pristinam orandi regulam. Some people had deformed this praeclara constitutio by mutilations and changes; an awful lot of people (plurimi) had been seduced (allecti) by the brevity of a Breviary produced by the Spanish Cardinal Quignon. Even worse, in provincias paulatim irrepserat prava illa consuetudo ["that depraved custom"], namely, that bishops in churches which, from the beginning, had used the Roman Office, were producing privatum sibi quisquam Breviarium.
What S Pius V is dealing with here is the chaotic liturgical result of a century of printing. It may be difficult for us to appropriate imaginatively the differences that this invention made. Only in the age of this new technology could trendy clergy buy and use in vast numbers the new slick and fast Quignon Breviary; only now could meddling bishops, full of Good Ideas, thrust their latest clever novelties with ease upon their helpless dioceses. The words of S Pius seem almost to describe the chaos which was to follow under Pius XII and his successors: "Hence the total disruption of divine worship in so many places; hence a complete ignorance among the clergy of ecclesiastical rites and ceremonies; so that numberless ministers of the churches carry out their duty unbecomingly, not without enormous offence to the devout".
S Pius was reacting to to this technology-driven chaos by a reinstatement of Tradition; by the elimination of novelty and by a return to what had been received. Hence, he provided a form of the Roman Breviary carefully emended by the best scholarship available to him. It was, of course, a paradox that his reform was itself carried through by the use of the same technology which had created the problem!! But that paradox does nothing to change the fact that his action was an assertion of Tradition, a repression of innovation.
S Pius V's reform was thus an act of deliberate and profound conservatism. This is shown by his treatment of local usages which dated from well before the invention of printing. As for uses which were of more than two centuries standing: "that ancient right of saying and singing their office, we do not take away". Recognising, however, that many who possessed such ancient usages might nevertheless themselves prefer the revision which he is now promulgating, he permits them to adopt it, but only if the Bishop and the entire chapter agree. Entire!! Come-lately diocesans were thereby restrained, according to the words of this legislation, from abolishing the ancient uses of their churches; apparently, it needed only one curmudgeonly traditionalist on the Chapter to interpose his veto and thus to preserve the local customs. This seems to me a fairly rigorous affirmation of the the traditional diversities with which a process of organically evolving liturgy had endowed local churches, combined with a determination to eliminate novel fancies which had corrupted liturgy since printing made it easy for hierarchs to impose their whimsies. I wonder what he might have said could he have known that, four hundred years later, his own successors would be using printing to impose their whimsies!
S Pius V's reforms, as I have said, are commonly described as symptoms of counter-reformation centralisation and as an attempt rigorously to standardise the worship of the Latin Church. I think this profoundly and anachronistically misreads both the liturgical situation which he is addressing; and the legal framework which he carefully puts in place. Previous popes had fairly recently flirted with the idea of radical revisions of the Breviary, intending thus to bring it into line with the ('Humanist') fashions of their age. But in S Pius V, a truly great pontiff, we see at its very best the ancient function of the Roman Church as a remora against innovation; as well as an assertion of the principle that the Tradition is not ours to destroy, but to hand on carefully with - as Vatican II actually says - only such changes as grow organically out of what is already there, and are truly necessary. (Among later pontiffs, perhaps Benedict XIV came closest to the instincts of S Pius V.)
If S Pius V had been a B Paul VI, he would have confirmed and extended the papal permission for the use of the Quignon breviary; he would have encouraged diocesan bishops to forge ahead with their own 'inculturations'. He did nothing of the sort; he did the opposite. Perhaps the only faint resemblance to the events of the 1960s is S Pius's somewhat root-and-branch approach to a Calendar which had become overloaded (calendars constantly silt up and then need to be dredged; it's a natural cycle like the successions of ice ages and interglacials)*. But that had the result of revealing old Roman treasures which an excessive Sanctorale had left unchanged in the physical texts while the newer insertions had been preventing their actual use. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was those archaic features themselves that fell victim to an elite in a hurry (during this Advent season, we might particularly remember the demise of the old Excita Sunday collects).
You are entitled to think what you like about the events of the 1960s. I have no power to pop you into my own personal private prison! But please do not go around saying that what B Paul VI did after Vatican II was indistinguishable from S Pius V had done after Trent.
It. Was. Nothing. Of. The. Sort!!
______________________________________________________________________________
*The elimination as 'non-Biblical' of S Anne and the Presentation of our Lady was very swiftly reversed by a succeeding pontiff.
Attempts to assert a parallel between S Pius V and Paul VI also involve a massive suggestio falsi: that S Pius's 'revision' was as radical, and with as little rootedness in what had gone before, as B Paul's.
5 December 2014
Blair days: Roads and Marbles (1)
I have not been an admirer of Tony Blair since he took to dragging us into American wars in the Middle East. But I certainly was in 1997, when, immediately after his election, he declared that
(1) a road, planned to be built through an extraordinarily beautiful piece of the South Downs, cutting off Lancing College from the outlying parts of its estate, would not now be built; and
(2) the so-called 'Elgin Marbles' would not be 'given back' to Greece.
Gracious me, I thought, this is the Prime Minister for me!!
(1) Now, that dreadful Mr Clegg, the one who boasted about having committed fornication with 'about thirty' women, has announced the resurrection of the scheme.
(a) Such proposals cost a great deal for protesters, NIMBYs if you like, to resist. It seems most unfair that when plans are rejected, they should then be brought back, to be fought over again, only 17 years later.
(b) When such plans are rejected, they keep reappearing ... until eventually they get through. But once the road is built, you won't find then that there is a Planning Enquiry every 17 years about whether to retain the road or to dig it up and restore the site to the status quo antea. Deficit of equity? It amounts to "Heads I win; Tails I'll try again in a decade's time; and once I win, it will be for good". In a rather graver area: we had all that in the Church of England in the repeated votes about the Ordination of Women; which (of course) kept coming back onto the table for yet another vote ... until the Right Answer was secured.
(2) Marbles: this subject is in my mind because the Clooneys have been retained by the Greek Government for a New Push to get the Marbles 'back'.UPDATE: I wrote this post, and numbers (2) and (3) in this series, on December 1. I had ABSOLUTELY no idea that, this morning, it would be announced that one of the Elgin Marbles is being lent to the Hermitage in S Petersburg as part of its 250 year Anniversary, which it is celebrating with an Exhibition on the artistic aspects of the Enlightenment. That is exactly what I have written about in my Part (2).
The Hermitage is a remarkably generous Museum which, in the past, has sent some superb loan exhibitions to London. I thoroughly applaud this gesture by the BM towards the Hermitage and the people of Russia ... not least, at this time of international ill-will and Russophobia. No 'sanctions', happily, in this sphere!
More on this later.
(1) a road, planned to be built through an extraordinarily beautiful piece of the South Downs, cutting off Lancing College from the outlying parts of its estate, would not now be built; and
(2) the so-called 'Elgin Marbles' would not be 'given back' to Greece.
Gracious me, I thought, this is the Prime Minister for me!!
(1) Now, that dreadful Mr Clegg, the one who boasted about having committed fornication with 'about thirty' women, has announced the resurrection of the scheme.
(a) Such proposals cost a great deal for protesters, NIMBYs if you like, to resist. It seems most unfair that when plans are rejected, they should then be brought back, to be fought over again, only 17 years later.
(b) When such plans are rejected, they keep reappearing ... until eventually they get through. But once the road is built, you won't find then that there is a Planning Enquiry every 17 years about whether to retain the road or to dig it up and restore the site to the status quo antea. Deficit of equity? It amounts to "Heads I win; Tails I'll try again in a decade's time; and once I win, it will be for good". In a rather graver area: we had all that in the Church of England in the repeated votes about the Ordination of Women; which (of course) kept coming back onto the table for yet another vote ... until the Right Answer was secured.
(2) Marbles: this subject is in my mind because the Clooneys have been retained by the Greek Government for a New Push to get the Marbles 'back'.UPDATE: I wrote this post, and numbers (2) and (3) in this series, on December 1. I had ABSOLUTELY no idea that, this morning, it would be announced that one of the Elgin Marbles is being lent to the Hermitage in S Petersburg as part of its 250 year Anniversary, which it is celebrating with an Exhibition on the artistic aspects of the Enlightenment. That is exactly what I have written about in my Part (2).
The Hermitage is a remarkably generous Museum which, in the past, has sent some superb loan exhibitions to London. I thoroughly applaud this gesture by the BM towards the Hermitage and the people of Russia ... not least, at this time of international ill-will and Russophobia. No 'sanctions', happily, in this sphere!
4 December 2014
I shall be in town ...
This coming Saturday, December 6, S Nicolas' Day, I shall, DV, be at the Brompton Oratory (a CIEL one-day conference). Sung Mass in the Little Oratory at 11.00; I shall read a paper at 2.30; and the august President of FIUV, Colonel Jamie Bogle, will read a paper after mine. Benediction afterwards; and chat.
It would be jolly to meet friends, both those I've met face-to-face already, and those I haven't.
It would be jolly to meet friends, both those I've met face-to-face already, and those I haven't.
Ratzinger on Marriage
Benedict XVI, as we all know, has revised for republication an earlier piece on the Admission of Remarried Divorcees to Holy Communion. Both his old and his new texts are at Chiesa.
Brief points: (1) I sense that the Pope Emeritus is rather attracted by the idea that the Matthaean Exception (porneia) is an addition to the authentic words of Jesus which are to be found in S Mark. This whole question is rather amusing. Liberal 'Biblical Criticism' tends to believe in the Priority of Mark ... and thus to favour his record of the verba Domini ... except in this one matter, where they inconsistently clutch at the Matthaean Exception because its content happens to suit them. Traditional Catholics tend to dislike this sort of way of handling Scripture, and accordingly feel obliged to accept the Matthaean Exception ... and are then lumbered with the problem of finding an explanation of it. (The solution propounded by Fr Mankowski in Remaining in the Truth of Christ is attractive and well-argued, but, frankly, is one theory among many.) Benedict XVI ... like Aslan ... is not predictable!
(2) Benedict XVI gives an account of the evolution of the 1983 CIC of which I, for one, was unaware.
(3) He also seems open to development in the matter of 'baptized Pagans', about whom he writes with great pastoral compassion.
Points of my own:
(4) Some 'previous unions' may not have been sacramental unions if the baptism of one of the partners was performed by a minister of a non-Catholic ecclesial community who failed validly to confer that Sacrament. A possible area here, surely, for the exercise of the 'Petrine Privilege'? This situation is commoner than is often assumed by all the 'ecumenical' rhetoric about 'united by Baptism'.
(5) A wild and irresponsible speculation: if a 'first marriage' was disastrous and brief, while a 'second' has lasted a long time and been in every way apparently fruitful, might that fact be empirical and strictly supplementary evidence as to which 'marriage', being valid, was a source of Grace?
(6) Current praxis maintains the validity of a first union until its invalidity is juridically demonstrated. Might we be moving into a social order in which it will sometimes quite simply be a matter of complete uncertainty whether or not a particular union was valid? Suppose, for example, the validity of this marriage, which is now under investigation, depends upon the invalidity of another wedding 30 years ago ... and, upon examination, that union depends for its invalidity upon another marriage 30 years before that having been valid? How will the Church judge these matters when Western Society has lived for two ... then three ... four ... generations of endemic Divorce, and those whose evidence would be necessary for a tribunal to adjudicate, are long-since dead?
There is no doubt that we are living in a world in which mores and their presuppositions have changed so very radically that the safe assumptions of half a century ago no longer apply. I am not sure that we are still in a position of being able merely to apply inherited rule-of-thumb.
For a variety of reasons, I have after some thought resolved not to enable comments on this post. I take this opportunity of apologising for my discourtesy to those who took the time to write to me, by not having made this decision earlier.
Brief points: (1) I sense that the Pope Emeritus is rather attracted by the idea that the Matthaean Exception (porneia) is an addition to the authentic words of Jesus which are to be found in S Mark. This whole question is rather amusing. Liberal 'Biblical Criticism' tends to believe in the Priority of Mark ... and thus to favour his record of the verba Domini ... except in this one matter, where they inconsistently clutch at the Matthaean Exception because its content happens to suit them. Traditional Catholics tend to dislike this sort of way of handling Scripture, and accordingly feel obliged to accept the Matthaean Exception ... and are then lumbered with the problem of finding an explanation of it. (The solution propounded by Fr Mankowski in Remaining in the Truth of Christ is attractive and well-argued, but, frankly, is one theory among many.) Benedict XVI ... like Aslan ... is not predictable!
(2) Benedict XVI gives an account of the evolution of the 1983 CIC of which I, for one, was unaware.
(3) He also seems open to development in the matter of 'baptized Pagans', about whom he writes with great pastoral compassion.
Points of my own:
(4) Some 'previous unions' may not have been sacramental unions if the baptism of one of the partners was performed by a minister of a non-Catholic ecclesial community who failed validly to confer that Sacrament. A possible area here, surely, for the exercise of the 'Petrine Privilege'? This situation is commoner than is often assumed by all the 'ecumenical' rhetoric about 'united by Baptism'.
(5) A wild and irresponsible speculation: if a 'first marriage' was disastrous and brief, while a 'second' has lasted a long time and been in every way apparently fruitful, might that fact be empirical and strictly supplementary evidence as to which 'marriage', being valid, was a source of Grace?
(6) Current praxis maintains the validity of a first union until its invalidity is juridically demonstrated. Might we be moving into a social order in which it will sometimes quite simply be a matter of complete uncertainty whether or not a particular union was valid? Suppose, for example, the validity of this marriage, which is now under investigation, depends upon the invalidity of another wedding 30 years ago ... and, upon examination, that union depends for its invalidity upon another marriage 30 years before that having been valid? How will the Church judge these matters when Western Society has lived for two ... then three ... four ... generations of endemic Divorce, and those whose evidence would be necessary for a tribunal to adjudicate, are long-since dead?
There is no doubt that we are living in a world in which mores and their presuppositions have changed so very radically that the safe assumptions of half a century ago no longer apply. I am not sure that we are still in a position of being able merely to apply inherited rule-of-thumb.
For a variety of reasons, I have after some thought resolved not to enable comments on this post. I take this opportunity of apologising for my discourtesy to those who took the time to write to me, by not having made this decision earlier.
2 December 2014
catholiclectionary.blogspot ...
... is a blog which provides masses of useful precise information about the Prayers as well as the readings of the OF. Most recently, the Postcommunions. So if you wanted to do a survey of what percentage of the OF postcommunions survived from S Pius V's book; what percentage come from the ancient Roman Sacramentaries but not from S Pius V; how many have ancient origins but have been corrected (and with what motives); what might have been the motives for dumping the prayers provided by S Pius V; and which are brilliant compositions de novo by the wonderboys of the 1960s ... this is where to go for your raw materials.
Why not go for it? It would be very jolly to have the evidence wherewith to answer the following question
"Would the body of postcommunion collects in the Novus Ordo support a claim that the revisers followed the prescription of Sacrosanctum Concilium that there must be no innovations unless the good of the church genuinely and certainly requires them?"
Why not go for it? It would be very jolly to have the evidence wherewith to answer the following question
"Would the body of postcommunion collects in the Novus Ordo support a claim that the revisers followed the prescription of Sacrosanctum Concilium that there must be no innovations unless the good of the church genuinely and certainly requires them?"
Good News about the Holy Spirit
Two Catholic Bishops have declared that those within their jurisdictions who approach clergy of the SSPX and ask for the Sacraments, excommunicate themselves. But the Society has not withdrawn from its dialogue with the Vatican.
The Franciscans of the Immaculate have been subjected to an onslaught of relentless malevolence. But there have been no signs among them of a schismatic spirit.
A Cardinal publicly advanced proposals with regard to Adultery and the reception of the Sacrament of the Altar, and claimed the agreement of the Roman Pontiff himself. But other Cardinals fearlessly published a defence of the Church's doctrine and discipline.
An Episcopal Synod was the setting for the publication of an improper document, and for an attempt to prevent Christ's People from knowing what their Bishops were doing and saying. But Cardinals and Bishops, publicly and in the sight of the Roman Pontiff, refused these provocations.
Northern European prelates aggressively advocate an accommodation with the errors of the Zeitgeist. But the African churches proclaim the Gospel.
The ecclesial scene seems to some to be dark and joyless and fearful. It is said that the stench of the smoke of Satan is in the Temple itself, and there are rumours that the Evil One is more actively abroad. But, despite the worst that he can do, there is indisputable evidence, daily, of the light and strengthening of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete.
Accende lumen sensibus, [Our senses with thy light inflame,
infunde amorem cordibus, our hearts to heavenly love reclaim;
infirma nostri corporis our bodies' poor infirmity
virtute firmans perpeti. with strength perpetual fortify.
Hostem repellas longius Our mortal foe afar repel,
pacemque dones protinus, grant us henceforth in peace to dwell;
ductore sic te praevio and so to us, with thee for guide,
vitemus omne noxium. no ill shall come, no harm betide.]
Those of us in sacerdotal Orders remember the singing of this hymn at our Ordinations. We know that, through the years or decades since that day, the Spirit ... fons vivus, ignis, caritas, et spiritalis unctio ... has never denied us the virtus we have needed, when we have needed it. Nor does he now. Thanks be to God.
The Franciscans of the Immaculate have been subjected to an onslaught of relentless malevolence. But there have been no signs among them of a schismatic spirit.
A Cardinal publicly advanced proposals with regard to Adultery and the reception of the Sacrament of the Altar, and claimed the agreement of the Roman Pontiff himself. But other Cardinals fearlessly published a defence of the Church's doctrine and discipline.
An Episcopal Synod was the setting for the publication of an improper document, and for an attempt to prevent Christ's People from knowing what their Bishops were doing and saying. But Cardinals and Bishops, publicly and in the sight of the Roman Pontiff, refused these provocations.
Northern European prelates aggressively advocate an accommodation with the errors of the Zeitgeist. But the African churches proclaim the Gospel.
The ecclesial scene seems to some to be dark and joyless and fearful. It is said that the stench of the smoke of Satan is in the Temple itself, and there are rumours that the Evil One is more actively abroad. But, despite the worst that he can do, there is indisputable evidence, daily, of the light and strengthening of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete.
Accende lumen sensibus, [Our senses with thy light inflame,
infunde amorem cordibus, our hearts to heavenly love reclaim;
infirma nostri corporis our bodies' poor infirmity
virtute firmans perpeti. with strength perpetual fortify.
Hostem repellas longius Our mortal foe afar repel,
pacemque dones protinus, grant us henceforth in peace to dwell;
ductore sic te praevio and so to us, with thee for guide,
vitemus omne noxium. no ill shall come, no harm betide.]
Those of us in sacerdotal Orders remember the singing of this hymn at our Ordinations. We know that, through the years or decades since that day, the Spirit ... fons vivus, ignis, caritas, et spiritalis unctio ... has never denied us the virtus we have needed, when we have needed it. Nor does he now. Thanks be to God.
1 December 2014
Come and save us!
Here is an extract from a very fine Advent homily given by Pope Benedict XVI in 2008:
"The cry of hope of Advent expresses all the gravity of our condition, our extreme need for salvation. Which is to say that we await the Lord not as some beautiful decoration to a world already saved, but as the only way of liberation from mortal danger."
What is so noteworthy about this is that it represents a turning away from the semi-Pelagianism which characterises the post-Conciliar selection of Advent Sunday collects; Benedict instead turns back to the authentic tones of the Sunday collects which they replaced. Three of these (and notice also the Ember Masses) did a moderately unusual thing in the Roman Corpus of collects: they began with an imperative verb for their first word. This, in turn, was taken from psalm 79/80: 'Excita potentiam tuam et veni ut salvos facias nos'(Coverdale: Stir up thy strength and come and help us); a cry from Israel to her God to come and save His vineyard; a psalm full of a sense of dereliction and of pressing supplication. This urgent prayer became the starting point of three of the Advent Sunday collects in the old rite (as well as of the Collect of the Sunday Next Before Advent). Here is the translation which the good old English Missal gives for the collect of Advent I:
Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy power and come: that by thy protection we may be found worthy to be set free from the dangers of our sins which beset us; and to be saved by thy deliverance.
Compare this with (my translation) the OF collect:
Grant, we beseech thee, almighty God, this will unto thy faithful people, that, running with good works to meet thy Christ as he comes, they may be set at his right hand and be worthy to hold fast the kingdom of heaven.
There is absolutely nothing heretical or even ill-judged in itself about this; it appears in the Gelasian Sacramentary as a postcommunion. And the Stir up prayer has, indeed, survived into the OF as a ferial collect on (just one) weekday. But in the old days, Stir up was heard by all the worshipping community because it was a Sunday collect; moreover, it was repeated on every vacant feria throughout its week.
Lorenzo Bianchi says this about the newer selection of Sunday Collects in the post-Conciliar Missal: 'A Pelagian turn of thought becomes apparent: which does not show itself in a failure to speak about grace, but in the way it is separated from a realistic consideration of the human condition; and the manner in which the grace of Jesus Christ is made into an optional extra: just an unnecessary ornament ... [in the Advent Sundays and Christmas collects of] the new Missal ... sin does not appear, or even expressions explicitly linked with this concept ... [instead] we find phrases which, making no mention of the fragility of the human condition, tend to bring to the fore the aspect of man's commitment'. In the old Stir up series of collects, Bianchi goes on, 'a far more continual and pressing use of the imperative is found ... in place of these imperatives, in Paul VI's Missal the final or consecutive subjunctive prevails. Thus, even on the level of syntax, we pass from the cry of petition, from a dynamic of pure petition, to a basically descriptive phraseology'.
"The cry of hope of Advent expresses all the gravity of our condition, our extreme need for salvation. Which is to say that we await the Lord not as some beautiful decoration to a world already saved, but as the only way of liberation from mortal danger."
What is so noteworthy about this is that it represents a turning away from the semi-Pelagianism which characterises the post-Conciliar selection of Advent Sunday collects; Benedict instead turns back to the authentic tones of the Sunday collects which they replaced. Three of these (and notice also the Ember Masses) did a moderately unusual thing in the Roman Corpus of collects: they began with an imperative verb for their first word. This, in turn, was taken from psalm 79/80: 'Excita potentiam tuam et veni ut salvos facias nos'(Coverdale: Stir up thy strength and come and help us); a cry from Israel to her God to come and save His vineyard; a psalm full of a sense of dereliction and of pressing supplication. This urgent prayer became the starting point of three of the Advent Sunday collects in the old rite (as well as of the Collect of the Sunday Next Before Advent). Here is the translation which the good old English Missal gives for the collect of Advent I:
Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy power and come: that by thy protection we may be found worthy to be set free from the dangers of our sins which beset us; and to be saved by thy deliverance.
Compare this with (my translation) the OF collect:
Grant, we beseech thee, almighty God, this will unto thy faithful people, that, running with good works to meet thy Christ as he comes, they may be set at his right hand and be worthy to hold fast the kingdom of heaven.
There is absolutely nothing heretical or even ill-judged in itself about this; it appears in the Gelasian Sacramentary as a postcommunion. And the Stir up prayer has, indeed, survived into the OF as a ferial collect on (just one) weekday. But in the old days, Stir up was heard by all the worshipping community because it was a Sunday collect; moreover, it was repeated on every vacant feria throughout its week.
Lorenzo Bianchi says this about the newer selection of Sunday Collects in the post-Conciliar Missal: 'A Pelagian turn of thought becomes apparent: which does not show itself in a failure to speak about grace, but in the way it is separated from a realistic consideration of the human condition; and the manner in which the grace of Jesus Christ is made into an optional extra: just an unnecessary ornament ... [in the Advent Sundays and Christmas collects of] the new Missal ... sin does not appear, or even expressions explicitly linked with this concept ... [instead] we find phrases which, making no mention of the fragility of the human condition, tend to bring to the fore the aspect of man's commitment'. In the old Stir up series of collects, Bianchi goes on, 'a far more continual and pressing use of the imperative is found ... in place of these imperatives, in Paul VI's Missal the final or consecutive subjunctive prevails. Thus, even on the level of syntax, we pass from the cry of petition, from a dynamic of pure petition, to a basically descriptive phraseology'.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
