Headlam and the Wendy House (2) UPDATE

Obliged to keep an appointment with 'Nazi' Headlam, Dix turned up punctually. He was not surprised that the Bishop was not yet at leisure to receive him. Anglican bishops (I'm sure Catholic bishops are quite different) generally keep you waiting. This is a very old and effective Management trick to make the point that your time is of no value whatsoever, while the Bishop is extremely grand and important.  Into the room in which Dom Gregory had been parked there wandered a small and very sad girl, sobbing inconsolably. After a while, Dix asked her who she was. She broke off to tell him that she was the bishop's granddaughter, and then returned to her grief. After another interval, Dix enquired why she was crying. "It's my Wendy House", he was informed. (Wendy Houses are toy houses for children to play in, scaled down to less than adult proportions.) With bachelor reticence, Dix hesitated to invade with gross masculine insensitivity these maidenly mysteries ... until the renewed sobs drove him in exasperation to seek more precise information. "Well", said the tiny, "We were playing together in the nursery and I persuaded grandpapa to crawl into my Wendy House. It wasn't really big enough for him, but in the end I got him wedged inside. Then I shut ... ". Here the distraught female resorted again to heart-rending sobs. Dix pressed upon her the cleaner of his two monastic handkerchiefs, and tactfully asked her to develop her narrative. "Well, I shut the door and then I locked it and then I went for a ride on my pony and there was nobody else in the nursery wing of the Palace so nobody heard him shouting for three hours and then when they got him out he was stiff and hoarse and all he could say was Now I've got to go and see that bloody monk ... "

Recounting this story afterwards to an admiring circle of friends, Dix - who, one is compelled to confess, did rather like to 'play' his audiences - paused to stuff some more tobacco into his pipe. Right on cue, one of his hearers pressed him: "So what, Father, did you do?".

"I patted her on the head and told her what a good girl she was and gave her half a crown."

UPDATE An eagle-eyed correspondent tells me that Headlam had no offspring, and suggests that the young woman was a great-niece.

Simon Bailey's 1995 biography of Dix perpetuates the same mistake that I did.

Headlam and the Wendy House (1)

I wasn't around during the Thirties, but the anecdotally-driven impression I get is that European culture was divided. There were those who believed in stark, virile, Nordic culture, combined with 'race' and 'blood' imperatives. This involved Improving the Race by Eugenic methods which included sterilisation, abortion, and 'euthanasia', and the supersession or even elimination of lesser races. And there were those who strongly opposed these deadly superstitions. Nazism, of course, grabbed these ideas and ran with them, but they had been around in Northern Europe and North America long before the advent of Nazism. With varying levels of extremism, such ideas found within the churches a degree of support. German Protestantism split; those who would not run with the Zeitgeist formed a 'Confessing' Church which repudiated the mainstream and more conformist parts of German Protestantism.

Englishmen who were inclined to Satire, had enormous scope. I have forgotten who it was who observed that Aryans were as tall as Goebels, as slim as Goering, as blond as Hitler. Mgr R A Knox saw the ridiculous side of the Nordic, Teutonic, fashion; so did G K Chesterton ... and Dom Gregory Dix lost the friendship of 'Nipper' Williams by mocking it throughout the 1930s in the Anglican Benedictine journal Laudate.

One of Dix's least favourite bishops was Headlam of Gloucester. Headlam was a disdainful upper-class Wykehamist; he saw things from an 'Establishment', 'Management' standpoint. So he profoundly disliked the 'Confessing' Church for their anti-government approach. He had made himself interested in 'Church Unity'; so he disapproved of the split in German Protestantism caused (as he saw it) by the opponents of Hitlerism. As late as 1938, he was criticising those who insisted upon an incompatibility between Christianity and National Socialism. Dix, with his contempt for Nordophilia, his suspicion of 'ecumenical' initiatives which amounted to pan-Protestantism, and his radical, magnificent antipathy to grand people who took themselves seriously, couldn't have been more different from Headlam.

No, not at all hilarious so far. I'll get on to the Wendy House soon. I thought you would like to have some background.

Calendars ... Days of the Duty to have a Double Laugh REFRAMED

(1) April Fools' Day and the Gregorian Pascha don't often coincide so as to demand of us the duty of a duplex risus. Last time: 1956. The next time is rather sooner: 2029.

About the Risus Paschalis, see Ratzinger, Images of Hope.

Qui crucifixus erat Deus, ecce per omnia regnat! Salve festa Dies!! (S Venantius Fortunatus, echoing Publius Ovidius Naso.)



(2) Why did I like Vincent Nichols' Times piece on Holy Saturday? Because we are in an age when people pussyfoot around with "Some Christians believe" and "According to legend" and so on, thus allowing the 'Enlightenment' to put a great gulf between us and a simple assertion of the Tradition. But, happily, Nichols just told it straight and, I thought, put things rather well.

As for his piece on the BBC on Friday, about Scalfarigate, I felt distinctly sorry for him. All over Christendom, priests and bishops and not least cardinals have long been preparing for their great duty of sanctifying God's people through the Triduum ... and then you get dragged into Broadcasting House on Good Friday morning to be interrogated by that condescending bore John Humphrys because PF, in his enormous but enormously inscrutable wisdom, has yet again given some crook called scalfari the opportunity to attribute to PF some words which immediately throw the Media into a ferment and are considered to require official denial.

RISUS PASCHALIS DIESQUE PRIMA APRILIS ANNI MMXVIII SALUTIS

Last Friday, it chanced that I was lunching with a couple of friends in the Gay Hussar, at the top end of Greek Street, when I felt that strange sensation of recognising a member of the party at the next table. As I was finishing the Hot Cherry Soup, the penny dropped. It was Jacob Rees Mogg, MP. He was tucking heartily into the Smoked Swan's Breast on Scholet, which is always a safe bet. Accidentally, our glances met; and in a couple of moments, our two groups were chatting amicably. You know how such things happen. Jacob explained that one reason for his presence was to give the restaurant, as custom prescribes, a copy of a book he had just published. I should explain to transpontine readers that in the Gay Hussar, traditionally the eatery of choice for those of a particular political tendency, one contributes a copy of one's own publications to the already large collection of the literary endeavours of other members of The Party over the decades.

Conversation settled into Jacob's memories of his old School. Seeing that we were all clerics deservedly enjoying a leisurely day off, he mentioned Fr Alexander Sherbrooke, Rector of the Catholic Parish Church round the corner. "Just within these four walls" he said, "let me tell you something I've heard about when Fr Alexander and Archbishop Nichols were at School together ... ".

"Hang on" said an Ordinariate priest sitting to my left, "I didn't know Nichols was at Eton". Jacob glanced quickly round to check that no stranger was eavesdropping. "No," he said. "They managed to keep it out of his Wikipedia entry. Wrong image. But he was, and he was in the same House as Fr Alexander. More than that, he was Fr Alexander's fag. Rather a cheeky fag, in fact."

I mused silently on how elegantly, just as an Etonian would, the Archbishop had handled the Scalfarigate question on the Beeb that morning, and the waiter refilled our glasses (I suspect he hoped we might soon be gone, because it was past 3 o'clock). When he had left our tables, Jacob continued "I don't think he's ever really forgiven him." "Forgiven him? What on earth for?" we all cried. "Well", said Jacob, "I think the reason is ... well ... to be blunt ... I think Fr Alexander caned Vincent quite a lot, especially whenever he got lippy ... that's why the Cardinal's so cautious nowadays in everything he says ..."

Ah, School days, happy days, the happiest of our lives! Yes? Quanta et qualia fuerunt illa Sabbata ...

Did you know that the good old Anglo-Catholic Hymn I'll sing a song to Mary, the Mother of my God ... goes beautifully to the tune of the Eton Boating Song? I got that idea from the late Fr Melrose of S Giles, Reading. I bet it rejoices the heart of Eton's devout and Royal Founder St Henry VIII.

Num risistis? Eheu!

A very holy and happy Easter to all readers except Mr Scalfari. Hi there, Tucho!

vivit traditio

in hodiernis temporibus vincentius s r e cardinalis nonulla bona pulchra orthodoxa e traditione et sumit et adornat.

SABBATHS

Why, instead of calling Mass on (many) Saturdays 'Our Lady on Saturday', why do we not say Our Lady on Sabbath? The Latin for Saturday is still Sabbatum; and that word still does mean Sabbath. Why can we not call today the Great and Holy Sabbath? We should steer clear of the Protestant notion that Sunday is the Sabbath: it is not; it the Dies Dominica, the Lord's Day, the great celebration of the Creation and Resurrection. Saturday is still the Sabbath; while S Paul's warnings against identifying ourselves with the Old People who define their group by 'sabbatizing' (instead of being with the New Easter People) do remain valid, it is also true that, as Pius XI said, we are all spiritually Semites, and the Sabbath remains worthy of great respect even if not of being a sign of our exclusive group-definition. And how better to respect it than by the Western tradition, going back at least to the Carolingian reforms and the time of Alcuin the Englishman, of using the Sabbath to mark the Great Daughter of Sion, the highest of creatures, our blessed Lady. The statutes of all our medieval cathedrals provided most amply for this, and it even survives the post-Conciliar reforms as an option.

Typologically, The Sabbath Rest reminds us that today, on the Greatest and Holiest Sabbath, God the Word rested from his labours before his new deed of creation on the Eighth Day; and Mary's own eschatological rest prefigures the Sabbath Rest to which God's pilgrim people is journeying (Hebrews 4:1-11).

Good Friday

I made a resolution to steer clear of 'Church Politics', that is to say, controversial matters, during Holy Week. It is not easy under this pontificate, because there are such daily provocations. My resolution slipped yesterday afternoon. I think that was a misjudgement.

Now, I wake up on Good Friday morning to the secular media breaking a 'story' that PF has said that Hell does not exist.

I am not interested in explanations and denials and all about Scalfari. The fact is that the Media are spreading this. This is what people will remember.

That is the incontrovertible fact.

Today is Good Friday.

Is there no more worthy 'story' that PF, with his status, his charisma, his media advisers, his conviction that he is the voice of the Holy Spirit, could have thrust into the public domain  ... on Good Friday morning?

The Evil One immediately put into my mind the phrase "This is a maniac out of control". I know it was the Evil One because I cannot see into PF's heart. And, if I could, it would not be for me to judge him. Get thee behind me, Satan. I mean this with all my heart.

But there is an objective term referring, not to silly fevered over-reactions on my part or yours, but to reality in a real world.

Skandalon.

I shall not enable any comments. I suggest that you and I go away and pray and, during the Liturgy, make a special intention for PF; that he may be the pope whom the Sacred Heart of Jesus means him to be.

Cranmer and the Five Wounds (2)

My teaching of Augustan verse, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, was transformed two or three decades ago by a book about Augustus and his imagery, written by a German with the improbable name of Zanker (I leave it to you to imagine what the students changed that into). We all suddenly realised that the ideology of the literature was exactly that of the visible monuments. And not only that of Actian Apollo; the theme and iconography of Augustus's temple of Mars the Avenger relates directly to the ideology of Octavian as the Avenger of Caesar; the Antitype of Aeneas's Type, who avenged Pallas. (When the New Testament writers and the Fathers adopted 'Typology' as the grammatical basis of their thinking, they were using a tool which was part of the fabric of intellectual life, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman.)

Some time ago, I found myself wondering if we liturgists sometimes need to learn a similar lesson about the relationship between artifact and text. Pam and I had walked to South Leigh church near Witney, where a superb painting of the Doom is preserved. On one side, kings, bishops, and laypeople rise from their tombs at the Resurrection of the Dead, to be dragged into the mouth of Hell by ferocious demons. On the other side, the blessed rise from their graves to their eternal bliss. And above the blessed is written Venite Benedicti ... : "Come ye blessed into the kingdom of the Father". And all this was painted on the walls round the place where the Rood would have stood: Christ on the Cross; Christ, the blood streaming from his Five Wounds - those Five Wounds which were so central to English Catholic devotion in the later Middle Ages.

Poor Cranmer must, in his Catholic days, have celebrated Masses galore of the Five Wounds. My reason for asserting this is found in his 1549 First Book of Common Prayer. That is nothing like as Protestant as his next one; or rather, it is; but in 1549 Cranmer was trying to take people along with him, so his heresies are carefully concealed beneath a spurious facade of a Hermeneutic of Continuity. It looks more Catholic. And in his version of the Canon of the Mass, after the end of the Memento etiam, he interpolates the passage I referred to a couple of days ago: " ... that, at the day of the general resurrection, we and all they which be of the mystical body of thy Son, may altogether be set at thy right hand, and hear that his most joyful voice: Come unto me, ye that be blessed of my Father and possess the kingdom ...". This echoes, very closely, the end of the Collect of the Sarum Votive Mass of the Five Wounds: " ... ut in die judicii ad dexteram tuam statuti, a te audire mereamur illam vocem dulcissimam, Venite benedicti in regnum Patris mei ...". My readers will not need to be reminded that it was to be the banner of the Five wounds which would be carried at the head of the Catholic rebellions against Tudor religious policy.

The priests who said their countless votives of the Five Wounds, and the numberless laity who, if they could afford it, left the legacies for those Masses to be celebrated pro requie, had been accustomed to gazing at such pictures all their lives. It was part of the image-fed furniture of their minds.

Two or three years after 1549, in his second Prayer Book, Cranmer eliminated this section from his Communion Office. By then, in very many churches, the Roods had been taken down and the paintings of the Doom had been whitewashed over. It all, sadly, fits. A religious culture in which people were expected to appropriate their Tradition by mainly visual means had been replaced by a novel system in which their aural receptivity was privileged.

In my view, the transition from the Medieval to the Modern can be thought to have begun at the point of the invention of printing and to have been consummated at that of the destruction of Catholic iconography.

Holes; digging

According to a plausible and circumstantial account in Onepeterfive, Lettergate continues to throw up further ramifications.

One no longer expects these people to tell the truth. As Amoris has made clear, the only duty with regard to any of the Commandments (these do still include Thou shalt not bear false witness), is to treat it as a beautiful ideal pleasantly hedged with qualifications.

But someone ought to explain to them that the following two principles can have quite a sting in their  tails, however much any "Apostolic Exhortation" may attempt to qualify them:

(1) Oh what a tangled web we weave: when once we practise to deceive.

(2) It is generally best, when in a hole, to stop digging. 

POST SCRIPTUM

According to the Media, PF plans, this evening, to perform his annual ritual gesture of disdain for Law by washing the feet of Moslems and a Buddhist.  

Eucharistic Hebrews

I have never studied Hebrews deeply; by which I mean that I never had the opportunity of teaching it as a text for A-level ... that's the best way I know of really getting into a text; examining it daily with ones students for an entire year. But I was aware that sharp critical eyes have wondered why a Letter about the Sacrifice of Christ nowhere mentions the Eucharist. But, some time ago the text of Hebrews 13:10 hit me in the eye. "We have a place of Sacrifice [thusiasterion*] from which those who serve [latreuousin] the Tabernacle have no right to eat". Which clearly implies that 'we' do eat of a Thusiasterion which we do 'have'. [S Ignatius used thusiasterion in a Eucharistic sense.]

There is an always-thought-provoking Methodist scholar called Margaret Barker who sees Hebrews as an exposition of the Eucharist as the New Temple; she points to 12:22-24 as a summary of its theology as the synaxis of the Christians with the whole Company of Heaven.

CUT to the sands of Egypt. Where great mounds of ancient rubbish have yielded scraps of papyrus which have been preserved by the dryness of the desert. Thousands of these, excavated more than a century ago, are in the cellars of the Ashmolean Museum here among the Dreaming Spires. And they give us a fresh insight into everyday life in the Greco-Roman world. They include a large number of invitations to the deipnon of a God at his Temple, making it clear that the feast following the sacrifice was, in ancient religion, an integral part of the sacrifice itself. This is why Temples very commonly had, as part of their complex, kitchens and dining rooms. And it is also the reason why S Paul is so concerned (see I Corinthians ... which I have taught) about his converts' dining and eating habits. The religious and the social mingled so closely that it could be very easy to find oneself inadvertently committing idolatry by what one ate, and where.

It is clear to me that Hebrews 13:10 refers in passing to just this connection. The Lord's Table is one with the Altar on High where the Lord eternally pleads his Sacrifice. We eat from this Altar of Sacrifice at the Eucharist. But the non-believing Jews still (as the Author of Hebrews writes his Letter) frequent the sacrifices which the Lord abolished in the combined events of the Cleansing of the Temple, the Last Supper, and Calvary. And they, he points out, logically have no right to eat of his Thusiasterion, which is to say, of "our" Eucharist.

Cranmer and the Five Wounds (1)

When Western England erupted in rebellion in 1549, outraged at the alien religion being imposed upon them, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was very short with them. His answer to their pleas was less than honest; as Gregory Dix observed, "This is a beautiful clean and sinewy piece of English Prose, but there are some things in it which are grotesquely ... misstated. Cranmer in scholarly controversy ... was prepared to reveal a juster knowledge ... with which he apparently did not think it necessary to confuse simple men who might not know of these things for themselves". Yet those Western Rebels carried before them the Banner of the Five Wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ; and the Sarum Mass of the Five Wounds was something which most late medieval English clergy probably knew off by heart. It was a very popular Votive often ordered to be said for the departed in late Medieval wills; it was associated in the minds of many with the corporate duty of prayer for the Church Expectant. Cranmer, dear old Zwinglian that he was, clearly still had the cadences of that Mass resonating in his mind. And conceivably he thought he could offer it as an element of familiarity to those whom he hoped gently to wean from popery.

How do I know? When Cranmer came to compose his 1549 Prayer Book, he included in his 'Eucharistic Prayer' extensive echoes of the Collect of that Mass (mostly in the prayer for the departed at the end of the intercessory section).

I offer below, mainly to demonstrate how inferior an English stylist I am to Cranmer, a translation of that Collect: The parts in ordinary type are by me; those in heavy type are collected from Cranmer's 'Eucharistic Prayer'.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, who descendedst from heaven to earth from the bosom of the Father, and on the wood of the cross didst endure five wounds; and didst pour out thy precious bloud for the remission of our sinnes: we beseche thee; that, at the day of the judgement*, we may altogether be set at his right hand, and merit to heare that his most sweet* voyce: Come o ye that be blessed into the kingdom of my father.

The rest of the Mass is not very different from the Friday Votive in the Vetus Ordo Missal, Humiliavit (with the psalmus of the Introit Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo).

If you spent a few weeks doing a church crawl in the West Country you would find all this iconographically represented; in one church Misericordias domini in aeternum cantabo carved onto a choir stall; in another Venite benedicti in regnum Patris mei painted as part of a Doom on the tympanum behind the Rood; carved bench ends in church after church, and fragments of medieval glass, with the Five Wounds represented upon them.

Or, if you want to be more adventurous, go North and look at a fragment surviving, beautifully carved on the very eve of the Reformation, from the Norman Cathedral at Kirkwall in the Orkneys, showing the wounded hands and feet with the Crown of Thorns circling the pierced Heart of the Redeemer in the centre. The Arma Christi, indeed. Here we have the very essence (in its insistence upon Redemption through the Sacrifice of Christ) of that late Medieval Catholicism which Eamon Duffy demonstrated was so healthy and so virile until poor Cranmer and his friends put an end to it.
______________________________________________________________________________
*For 'judgement' Cranmer substituted generall resurreccion; for 'sweet' he wrote ioyfull.

Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo

During my very happy six years in Devon, I discovered gradually quite a lot about an earlier, late fifteenth century, Rector, Patrick Haliburton. It was surprising how details slotted into place. He turned out to be a Scot. Why a Scot in Devon? Well, because he was presented to the living by a Scottish noble, the Earl of Douglas. How did Douglas come to do that? Because the Black Douglases, having tested their strength against King James II of Scots, lost out; and the Earl fled south to England. The English government, anxious to foment trouble north of the Border, made much of him and gave him an heiress for wife, the daughter of the Duke of Exeter. By right of whom Haliburton was presented to the living of Lifton.

And - gracious - Haliburton was a hitherto unknown Archdeacon of Totnes. How did I discover that? By looking, in the library of All Souls' College in this University, at a book he had owned, which had, inked onto the cover, his style and dignity. And towards the end of his life, he went to Jerusalem on pigrimage. How do we know that? Because an inventory of the ornaments of Exeter Cathedral lists a sudary [humeral veil] which he had brought back with him; and the Chapter records reveal a significant gap in his residence a couple of years before he died. And his family were minor nobility from Southern Scotland; he had their coat of arms put into the church windows. Not they it is there now; but a cavalier called Richard Symonds, who was with King Charles in 1644 when King and army stayed at Lifton, recorded it. Not that Haliburton was a senior member of his family. Because he had his own version of the arms carved onto a choir stall (not that it is there now; it languishes in a dark corner of Launceston museum - no, Joshua, not the Launceston in Tasmania). And, to the family arms, the Rector added, for difference, a number of additional charges taken from the arms of Douglas - indicating either a feudal alliance or a family relationship.

And, also carved onto the choir stall, I read a highly abbreviated verse from the psalms: Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantabo.
Why those words? I will reveal all ...