Today, January 1, is the first obit, Year's Mind, of Betsie Livingstone. She died in a care home in Iffley.
Betsie was one of the most considerable people I have known. Not that I had the privilege of knowing her intimately for most of the decades of her long life. I first 'knew' her from a very respectful distance: during my visits to the Patristics Room in Bodley, she would be occupying a table set aside for her, swathed in old-style galley-proofs of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, with Bodleian attendants bringing her books she had ordered up. We did not know each other; awe ... on my part ... was our relationship.
Elizabeth Anne Livingstone was, at first, a research asistant of Dr F L Cross, Student of Christ Church, originator ... editor ... compiler ... of the ODCC from 1939. I don't know how he came to discern her genius: she once said to me that he did not formally offer her the role "until I had shown that I could do something"; i.e. had got her First. She soon became the research assistant. As he wrote, "No problem that arose could be allowed to rest until it had been pursued to its limits, whether by research, correspondence, or personal interviews, and in somecases by all three means ... The drafting of the bibliographies is almost wholly due to the same collaborator. There are relatively fewof the books or articles cited which Miss Livingstone has not handled, or, where this has proved impossible, pursued to an unimpeachable source; and, it need hardly be said, there are a vast number of others which, though examined, have been passed by unrecorded, either through the exigencies of space or their want of permanent interest. This task has involved the consultation of what must be almost, if not quite, a record number of books in public libraries ..."
Betsie, like not a few of the English professional classes of her generation, was born (1929) in India. She matriculated in 1948 at St Anne's College, when it was still "St Anne's Society" and when its senior members were products of the days when it had been the "Society of Oxford Home Students" with origins back in 1879. The bookplates in the older volumes of its Library included words, I think, something like Societas Mulierum Oxonii Privatim Studentium! She became Artium Magistra in 1955. She, and my Wife (St Anne's, matriculated 1960), were able to exchange and compare reminiscences of that very distinguished institution! It is, of course, no longer single-sex ... the young men, I fear, think it amusing to refer to it as Stans.
She was also the begetter and organiser of the Oxford Patristic Conferences (and of the later Oxford New Testament Conferences), which brought scholars from all over the world to exchange brief papers ... which, naturally (but however did she find the time?), provided her with the labour of handling the publication of very large amounts of very diverse material. I recall the first day of one such conference: Bodley had just introduced a requirement that you had to show a card in order to be admitted. The Quadrangle, inevitably, was thronged on the first morning with foreign scholars who, vainly, had hoped to Verify the References in their Papers before having to read them!
Some readers of this blog may be interested in one tiny detail: Michael Moreton's paper Blepete eis tas Anatolas first appeared in those volumes, demonstrating that, contrary to the superstitions of the 1960s, Christians in the early centuries had faced East in order to worship.
To be concluded.
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That early Christians prayed towards the East had surely been affirmed already by Erik (Heis Theos) Peterson: La Croce e la preghiera verso Oriente, in: Ephemerides liturgicae 59 (1945) 52-68.
Liturgical scholars in Germany were coming to an awareness by the 1920s "that early Christians prayed towards the East," and elsewhere in the 1950s, but others did not, such as Dom Gregory Dix (d. 1952) or Pius Parsch (d. 1954), or did a bit later (as seems to have been the case of Louis Bouyer). The "animators" of various "liturgical institutes" in Western Europe, such as Fr. Johannes Wagner of the German Liturgical Institute in Trier (and his colleague Fr. Balthasar Fischer) as well as Fr. Pierre-Marie Gy, OP, of the French National Pastoral Liturgy Center do not seem to have paid any attention to the scholarly conclusions emerging on this subject, however, although Frs. Fischer, Gy, and Wagner were certainly scholarly, since it was those who were shaped in their notions through these (and other such) institutes who promoted and led the rush to "Mass facing the people" in the immediate aftermath of Vatican II. A close perusal of the great book of the German Catholic liturgical scholar, Fr. Josef Jungmann, SJ (d. 1975), Missarum Sollemnia: The Mass of the Roman Rite (2 v., New York 1950) and of his later writings, indicates that he was aware of the tenuous evidence for "Mass facing the people" in early Christianity, but he never, so far as I am aware, criticized its pushing aside the older practice in the aftermath of the Council.
In my own case it was as a result of reading Fr. Moreton's paper in the University Library of Cambridge University in 1983 - holding now in my hands the offprint of that article which Fr. Moretion subsequently sent me in September 1983 - that I was completely, and totally, disabused of the semi-scholarly imposture (but, alas, espoused even by Dom Gregory Dix in his Shape of the Liturgy) that in "the Early Church," in that matter, as in so many others, a happy hunting ground for liturgical faddists, it was the custom of the celebrant of the Eucharist to face the congregation over the altar-table, instead of facing eis Anatolas. I had already come across Cyril Pocknee's The Christian Altar (1962), which made me aware that what I had been taught on that subject by the Jesuits as an undergraduate was not as dogmatically and historically certain as they had taught it to be, but Fr. Moreton's article (and others I have read over the ensuing forty years) clinched the matter. It also led to a correspondence with Fr.. Moreton (1 June 1917 - 26 September 2014; cuius animae propitietur Deus) which led on to several pleasant visits to the Moretons in Exeter over the ensuing twenty-five years.
Cf.: https://www.marquette.edu/mupress/Gy.shtml
Don't you just get terribly depressed when people post photographs of historic churches on Facebook and ALMOST ALL OF THEM have had their holy tables brought forward so their presbyters can officiate from behind them? (Kindred infelicities are the presence of a cross on an altar with no candlesticks to balance it, and missal strands left on altars out of service time. Cushions are OK, however.)
Fr Gy's Dominican confrere Fergus Kerr, in his survey of twentieth-century Catholic theology, adduces several pages of evidence for the strength of the case for ad orientem celebration before concluding ruefully that it nevertheless is unlikely to happen because the reductionist theology of the liturgy as family meal, community gathering, team meeting etc had become so entrenched in the pews. I mention that in part because Fr Kerr, although enormously learned, is the most eirenic of scholars and not a partisan controversialist.
He was always something of a 'heretic' on the liturgy, however: he published an interesting piece in 1971, contra mundum, on the case for impersonality on the part of the celebrant. His distinguished Dominican forebear Bede Jarrett made a similar point in the 1920s when he remarked that it didn't much matter who the celebrant was as long as he observed the rite faithfully.
One of my undergraduate mentors (whose formal appointment was in classics and history) had fond memories of Miss Livingston as a host and for publishing his work on the patristic and NT series.
Thank you Dr. Tighe for your illuminating explication.
I first came across Peterson's article while sitting in the Lower Reading Room of Bodley in about 1977 trying to demonstrate (to my own satisfaction if no one else's) that Constantine's famous Vision of the Cross in the Sky was not a conversion experience (though it no doubt made a serious impression on him) but a Type of the Sign of the Son of Man.
Not the least of Dr. Livingstone's virtues was the kindly way she spotted young scholars in the Lower Reading Room and recruited them to write entries for the ODCC. That is how full coverage of all the Seven Churches of Asia made its way into later editions of the book - I seem to recall Laodicea and Philadephia, and perhaps others, were missing from earlier editions. May she rest in peace.
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