Ashmolean Museum

Well, it's open after its major refit and rebuild. Goodness only knows how many extra galleries. Except that it isn't really open, because two of my favourite galleries, the Roman and the Casts Galleries, aren't yet ready. And I've got a nasty suspicion that the great majority of the Greek vases is now hidden away in storage.

And what a disappointment, for the country's oldest museum to be so dumbed down. What a disgrace that a collection belonging to one of the world's greatest learned communities should manifest persistent illiteracy. When I am shown an ivory ?Viking crosier head, I expect to see more on the label than a Primary-School-style invitation to fantasise on the carved animals. It's like that now. Except that actually finding any labels at all for a lot of exhibits is terribly difficult. And if you do find a label for any exhibit which has a Eucharistic connection, you will find the Eucharist referred to as 'Holy Communion'. This is very unlikely to do more than confuse the unchurched reader, who may not readily understand why a picture of a Monstrance holding a wafer for 'Holy Communion' was painted over by Protestants. He will have been told either too little or too much. And I suspect he is plain misinformed when told that the design cut from the top of an amnos is from bread used in 'Holy Communion'. If that amnos was consecrated, it was presumably cut up and immersed in the chalice, not given to a tourist.

The same illiteracy extends to sexual matters. A Greek vase showing one of those common scenes described by the late President of Corpus, our own dear Sir Kenneth Dover, as "intercrural intercourse" is explained to Jo Public in terms of a Pedophile and a Victim, thus ignoring the historical and social nature in its own context of the exchange portrayed in favour of irrelevant modern stereotyping. (It was just near there that we were swept aside by an angry mother who was explaining to a tiny girl, who looked all of two-and-a-half, that "Women had no public role in ancient Greece". Honest: those were her exact words. For so many people Antiquity is indeed a very strange country.)

It's yer whiggery everywhere; Butterfield never lived. History is shoved into your face according to the preconceptions of a certain school who imposed their patterns on it after it had all happened. Take the "Oxford" gallery. Most of the wall on one side is a time-chart. And on that we learn about the Foundation of Duke Humphrey's Library ... but not that the Protestants gutted it and burned all the books. About how Henry Tudor founded Christ Church ... but not about the destruction of the five grandest buildings in medieval Oxford: Oseney and Rewley Abbeys and the Houses of the Black and Grey and White Friars. About Cranmer and Ridley and Latymer being burned, but not about how Oxford's brightest and best under Elizabeth Tudor had to slip away to foreign seminaries and upon their returns were horribly executed (at least the modern memorial in the University Church decently lists indiscriminately all those who died in the Reformation turmoils).

I could go on. Ashmole has the best Minoan collections outside Greece, because of the contributions of Sir Arthur Evans (the excavator of Cnossos). The old gallery was arranged by Evans himself. You might have thought that his arrangement could have been reproduced, as being a significant cultural construct in its own right.

The best room is probably the ground floor gallery with the Arundel marbles ... more or less as they were before the interior decorators struck. My hero Menander is still there.

Go to the Pitt Rivers if you want to see a sensitively restored museum.

Fun with Dr Dawkins

A contingent argument follows ... if the pope's itinerary does, as rumours have suggested, include Oxford and the giving of a lecture there, and if it were suggested that representatives of the University took a formal role in welcoming him to the apices somniantes, the prospect might make Dr Dawkins the Barmy Biologist superbly, delightfully, hopping mad.

Fingers crossed and pray hard.

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He is fantastic, isn't he? But ... rather like characters in Dickens ... just that bit too exotically overdrawn for plausibility? Any suggestions as to other authors who might have invented him, or story-lines which he might have graced? Or ways of enjoying him even more?

Tablets all round

A kind friend has shown me three old Tablet articles on the Apostolic Constitution. Gracious, what bile! And not, apparently, any old nonsense about the 'Enlightenment' ideal of giving a balanced space to opposing opinions.

I was intrigued by the name Nicholas Lash. It rang a bell. When I was a young priest in Buckinghamshire, back in the 1960s, a notion got around that I was a bright and clever and up-and-coming young C of E priest. "There's a RC just like you just down the road", people said. "Two such bright young priests should meet up". This bloke's name was, I am pretty sure, Fr Nicholas Lash. Could he be the same one? We never did meet.

Since Lash doesn't seem to have a "Revd" attached to him, there must be a story here. Is he what we used to call, in the happier and more innocent days of the Irish Church, a 'spoiled priest' - i.e. one who had run off with a woman?

If so, our stories contrast. I, mindful that Holy Order was a diriment impediment to matrimony, took care more Byzantino to get married six weeks before the Diaconate. I'm still married and I'm still a priest, thanks be to God for his grace. He, on the other hand ...

But perhaps it's not the same person at all.

Unique?

On Christmass Day here in S Thomas's, there was one Latin Mass in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, and one Syrian Liturgy in the Mallalam language. No a whisker anywhere of the English language, or of Common Worship, or of the Novus Ordo. We were an entirely Enlightenment-free and Protestantism-free zone.

I wager there's no other Anglican church in the whole wide world that can better that.

I wonder about cross-fertilisation. Can anybody make a suggestion about how we could incorporate use of the flabella with which we are now equipped into the Roman Rite?

The author of the best suggestion gets made an Honorary Fellow of this blog. Unfriendly suggestions about where I can stick the flabella will be deleted.

Climate Change and the Holy Rosary

Heard some fool on the wireless saying that Climate Change is totally obvious; "You only have to look out of the kitchen window to see it". I promptly looked out onto a frozen scene and entered upon a discussion with Pam about whether it was sensible for her to set off for Sussex. Not that I'm a Global Warming Denier or anything as wickled as that. I just wish I could See a bit more of what, in obedience to the scientific Magisterium, I devoutly Believe in - after all, this is S Thomas's Day - without being able to See. Or feel.

Comments on a recent post rightly point out that the earlier history of the Mysteries of the Rosary was quite flexible and fluid*. Very true. What I think was a little unfortunate about the Mysteries of Light was
(1) there should be 150 Aves, not 200, because the Rosay is (and in medieval texts is usually referred to as) Our Lady's Psalter; and
(2) JP2's initiative complicated the traditional distribution of the Rosary over the days of the week.

Nevertheless, I do say them from time to time ...'for a change' ...

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*On appropriate days I say this five: Immaculate Conception; Nativity; Presentation; Espousals; Annunciation of our Lady; or these of S John Baptist: Annunciation to Zachary; Visitation of our Lady; Nativity of S John; Baptism of Christ; Decollation. (I think it is not entirely happy that in much of the Western Church the ancient and ecumenical devotion to S John Baptist has been de facto replaced by that to S Joseph ... not that I have anything against him ... )

Neo-Vulgate

I am sorry to have confused readers with this slang term. I think people have found Novavulgata a bit of a tonguetwister, especially when drunk.

The Psalter in the Neovulgate (now appearing in editions of the Liturgia Horarum) is certainly not the very wayward Pius XII translation. So within two generations we have had three psalters in public (Latin) worship: Vulgate, Pius XII, Neovulgate. (I expect some learned person will remind us of the even-older Latin Psalter.) I call this scandalous. How can a text settle into one's being and feed one's spirituality if Clever People are endlesssly "correcting" it?

The rabbis, wise chaps, know better than to muck around with the Massoretic texts. I am told that the Byzantine churches have resolved to try to prove their credentials in terms of "modern" scholarship by redoing the Septuagint. Barmy. Why can't they learn from our (Western) mistakes?

If I were an Orthodox, such a move would drive me to become an Old Believer or else - more probably - to ask Rome to grant an Old-Septuagint Ordinariate.

Vespers

O virgo virginum the Antiphon at the Mag in the office of the Expectation. So I have used the antiphon which Sarum and other medieval dialects added to the series of Roman "O" antiphons. (O Adonai , of course, I said in the commemoration of the feria.)

Blackfen and the Ordinariate

Fr Hermeneutic has a couple of pictures on his blog of how he will have Blackfen church Reordered if the Lottery delivers for him. My only criticism would be that both look rococo rather than, as Father suggests, baroque. It was as a boy wandering round such churches in Bavaria and the Tyrol that I realised what Christianity is really all about.

Father Tim does have very Anglican Catholic instincts. Anglicanorum coetibus should be amended so that he and his church qualify for admission to an Ordinariate, with or without his reordination.

Some good quality comments ...

on my posts of earlier today.

I think threadwise I do better than Fr Zed ...

The Supreme Court ...

... which has recently replaced the appellate jurisdiction of the House of Lords, has just published a decision (5:4) denying the right of an Orthodox Jewish school to regulate its admissions policy according to rabbinical definitions of Jewishness.

I'm not a lawyer, but this seems to me worrying. When the secular state intrudes into the self-definitions of religious groups, it is tet another step towards the dictatorship of secularism. And dangerous to all of us.

John of Salisbury

An interesting post today ... oops, I must get out of the habit of thinking of the VIS as the Holy Father's personal blogspot ... about S Thomas a Becket's buddy, John of Salisbury.

The more I think about it, the more convinved I am that S Thomas's in Oxford is the obvious focus for the papal visit to England. We are well set up for whether he wants to celebrate the Extraordinary Form in Latin or our Cranmer-language rather conservative Novus Ordo. BTW, I wish they'd hurry up and publish the schedules. I want to book my holidays.

Sorry

Dear me ... I have just deleted a comment because it talked about 'intention' in a way that clearly indicated that the reader had not read a careful post on precisely this, which appeared on December 10. Yes; I know that nobody is under any obligation whatsoever to read every word I write - so, sorry, K. But just imagine what it is like to try to build something up cumulatively over a few days and then ...