24 February 2016

King Ethelbert of Kent

Continues ...
 I should add that Jesse Billett gives critical editions of three unregarded liturgical fragments, relegated to 'Appendix' status but all of them important and with each detail treated with scrupulous attention. I have not checked through the tables which are a prominent feature of the book and which make it easier to follow his discussion, but, in what I have looked at, I have not noticed errors.

This is an age in which Anglicanism, for reasons detailed as long ago as 1987 by Gary Bennett in his Crockford's Preface, has lost all the varied sustaining and combining features which, as recently as my youth, still gave it mutual coherence. I think Professor Billett has proved that the ecclesial community which produced fine Patristic scholarship in the nineteenth century and superb liturgical scholarship in the twentieth is still capable of producing scholars who provoke our admiration and enlighten our understanding.

The Roman liturgical Tradition does lie at the heart of our common Western experience, and to understand it, in depth and with clarity, is to understand what B Paul VI and Archbishop Michael Ramsey combined to call "the common ancient traditions"; and is thus, in the deepest possible way, to Do Ecumenism. That is why I characterise a book crammed with detailed footnotes and painstaking references and illuminating the daily and hourly life of prayer of the secular and religious English clergy of the period from 597-c1000 as a work of profoundly ecumenical significance. And I feel that we in the Ordinariates, in particular, should take this sort of scholarship immensely seriously. Such books; such studies; such interests; such writers; are part of the Bridge which the Ordinariates are meant, in God's Providence, to be. We shall be less than we should be if we do not ourselves sustain this Bridge.

I think there is a particular question which may in judgement be put to those of us who belong to Benedict XVI's Ordinariates: And what did you do to keep the Bridge open for those still on the other side?
Concluded.

3 comments:

B flat said...

I think Professor Billett has proved that the ecclesial community which produced fine Patristic scholarship in the nineteenth century and superb liturgical scholarship in the twentieth is still capable of producing scholars who provoke our admiration and enlighten our understanding.

And he is not the only one!

Pluribus annis, domne!

Ben Whitworth said...

It is a very splendid book in every respect. As to errors in the tables, I did spot one tiny lapse in the list of Psalms at monastic Compline (the first of the Psalms should be Ps. 4); and in the whole of the rest of the book I think I noticed one other typo: a misplaced punctuation mark, or suchlike. What I thought was a third error was my own mistake; I was confusing the two French liturgical historians named respectively Gy and Guy. Considering that Professor Billett not only wrote the book but typeset it himself, I think this thoroughness (which matches the thoroughness of his research) is heroic.

And when one considers that the book I am currently reading, retailing at £60 from one of our leading academic publishers, gives every impression of never having been proofread at all ...

Stan Metheny said...

A superb book in so many respects. Thank you, Father, for recommending it for purchase. For me, it was a most worthwhile and enjoyable read.