Dix ... some new light (2)

 Dix was amused at 'liberal' reactions to his book. The 'liberals', indeed, as they love to do, had erected, on scant or no evidence, their own hypotheses designed to destroy or undermine Catholic Truth ... and, when contradicted by Dix with his rational and evidential arguments, they whinged and ranted as if the honour of their own mothers, if they had any, had been impugned. As a popular character in one English sitcom is wont to explain, referring to the professional use of the bayonette,"they don't like it up 'em". 

(Incidentally, Liberals haven't changed ... not even the tiniest bit ... they still don't ... er ... .)

Thus, one such critic had written to Dix "In spite of the scientific and critical approach, this is nothing else but 'The Case for the Mass'". Dix replied to him "I thought he must have meant 'Because of ...'".

Another, "with a good deal of objurgation, denounced my 'attempt to exclude the whole liberal thesis about eucharistic origins from further consideration'".

Dix gleefully commented "to judge by the exasperation of some of its exponents, I have at all events done it [the liberal thesis] a good deal of damage, even though I have deliberately made use of its own weapons to do so". 

Dix, like S John Henry Newman, loved the Argumentum ad hominem (in its proper, Lockean, sense; id est, Use a man's own assertions or concessions wherewith to hang him.) And that, in a sense, is what he is up to here. For your amusement, I will conclude with another example: how Dix dealt with Anglican Bishops who became terribly excited when their clergy used the Mass of the Presanctified on Good Friday.

He would begin by promising faithfully that, on no account, I do assure your Lordship would he use on Good Friday the Counter-Reformation Peruvian Jesuit Devotion of the Three Hours. 

This was in fact widely in use in Anglican churches, including many Cathedrals. But it was not part of the officially authorised liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer. So a bishop who condemned the Mass of the Presanctified on the grounds that it was without legal basis in the Church of England, would have dodgy questions to answer about the Good Friday Three Hours Devotion of which he approved and which he probably sponsored in his own Cathedral. The truth of the matter, of course, is that Anglican bishops, poor poppets, thought of the Mass of the Presanctified as Popish, while the Three Hours Devotion (with its readings, addresses, and hymns) seemed to them prod-friendly and 'safe'.

'Safe' it may have been, but it was indeed Counter-Reformation, Jesuit, and, worst ...  foreign (dago, indeed). The Mass of the Presanctified was, indeed, 'Popish'; but it was also 'Primitive'.

[It is a shame that even literate people nowadays use the phrase Argumentum ad hominem to mean 'a nasty and personal attack'. 

Because it is always a shame when people use Latin phrases in order to sound Clever and without having the faintest idea what they mean.]

A little more Dixion in three or four days' time.

Dix ... some new light (1)

We all know what is meant by "the Academic World" ... or do we? A sometimes overlooked area of academic importance and excellence is provided by booksellers who are, themselves, knowledgable and scholarly; and who understand what is passing through their hands. When I was an undergraduate, The Newman Bookshop, down St Aldates on the west side just by the chaplaincy, was a source of much fascination to me ... especially the Room at the Back. Kallistos Ware, incidentally, tells me that he was able to put together there a complete set of the dear old Eastern Churches Quarterly. I still treasure and enjoy a proof copy of Knox's In Three Tongues. The genius loci, Mr K Todd, told me to take it for free, but I insisted on giving him ten shillings.

Mr Todd has long since shut up shop; but, just a little way further South (at OX1 1RA), St Philip's Books is, perhaps, even more fascinating. The proprietor, Mr Christopher Zealley, is as generous in sharing his considerable expertise as he is amiable. And he recently drew my attention to a copy of Dom Gregory Dix's The Shape of the Liturgy. 

Yes ... this must be one of the commonest books on clerical bookshelves ... so, as you are undoubtedly thinking, it is hardly surprising that yet another copy should have made its way into Mr Zealley's hands. 

But this is a copy sent out for review; and it has within it a letter from Dom Gregory himself to the reviewer.

I will not spoil the pleasurable anticipation of whoever might purchase the book with the accompanying letter, by blurting everything out here. But, with Mr Zealley's kind permission, I can share with you one or two  interesting details.

Dix wrote from Nashdom on 30 iii 1945 to thank Fr Conrad Pepler O.P. for his "very generous and kindly" review of Shape. He refers ... this will seem curious to us ... to his own "left-wing attitude". What this appears to mean by 'left-wing' is that Dix had written in a "scientific and critical" way; he later uses the words "my 'radicalism'". In other words, Dix did not crudely assert Catholic truth and demand assent; he argued everything through from the evidence, stage by stage, without presuppositions and prejudices.

When Dix wrote, he had in his sights the 'liberal notion', then very fashionable, that the Eucharist was invented by S Paul ... or somebody else ... as a Hellenistic-style Mystery Cult. Dix wrote, he tells Fr Pepler, "to substantiate the entirely Jewish (and unitary) origin of the rite, in the last supper and nowhere else".

To be continued on Sunday.

 

S John, S Thomas

What a great day, in the Trad Calendar for England! But these two martyrdoms seem to me in many ways to signal the cultural end of the Faith S Augustine had brought from Rome to Canterbury.

John and Thomas, I think, were two of the commonest names in late Mediaeval England. S John's popularity may relate to the Wool trade (Ecce Agnus Dei ...) and was certainly helped by the massively powerful Merchant Tailors' Company, whose patron he was.

'Thomas' reflects, surely, the cult of our Blissful Martyr. 'Becket' may have been a word for the Cornish Chough ... which would be why Cardinal Thomas Wolsey put a couple onto his (very Tudorly messy) shield. He turned out to have nailed his colours to a very dangerous mast!

May Ss John and Thomas pray for the Holy Father, that he may regain physical health, and may resume the Petrine Ministry of safeguarding the Faith handed down through the Apostles, the Deposit of Faith.

Dr Kwasniewski

I am sure that, being human, there must be times when Dr Kwasniewski is wrong. But I have not, so far, noticed any examples of my a priori assumption.

And I agreed with his fine recent piece about the counter-Reformation propers of Saints in the Missale Romanum (1962). As well as possessing their own richness and strengths, they are indeed part of the organic, evolving, Tradition which the Church has brought down to us ... perhaps rather like a glacier carrying with it geological specimens from the variety of different milieux through which it has passed and from which it has enriched itself. 

When people remark that very many of the formulae in the post-Conciliar liturgy do have origins in the ancient Roman Sacramentaries, my response is that the processes of selection, adaptation, and elimination employed in the 1960s have left a rather culturally monochrome piece of liturgy ... redolent, embarrassingly, of ... the 1960s! The old rite is, culturally, much more of a pluriform miscellany. This is one of its many glories.

I would add one or two comments.

(1) One reason why I favour the New Look which the CDF is currently giving to the 1962 Missal is that it allows a greater degree of selection. I would like this to go further: I would like to be allowed, on weekdays, more often to be allowed to get out green vestments and to use the ancient, deliciously Roman, Sunday propers (perhaps with the Sarum alternative readings on Wednesdays).

(2) As Dr K points out, Counter-Reformation Confessor Bishops feature large in the 1962 Calendar. Fair enough. We are our history. Dioceses push their great bishops; religious orders push their Founders. But Byzantine Calendars (the Ukrainian version hangs a few feet from my desk) exhibits a different ethos: there seem to be so many more Martyrs; some very ancient; others, the New Martyrs.

The old Roman martyrs are, of course, still there in 1962. But they are submerged beneath the later stratum of Grand Bishops. Happily, the new CDF rules often enable us to dig them out and to use their old propers (but one could soon grow tired of the Pius XII Mass Si diligis...). And, of course, the last century has provided us Latins with our own generous crop of neomartyres.

(3) One particular detail. The Mass for S Pius X (1954) has psalm-texts from the Bea psalter. I used to think that this was another valuable example of the coexistence of the Latin Church and her Liturgy down the ages with a rich variety of different fashions. I used to imagine a small child, a thousand years from now, asking her Father: "Papa, why does the psalmus in the Introitus of S Pius X begin Gratias ... rather than Misericordias Domini ...?" And I imagined her Father answering: "Well, my dear, once upon a time there was a man called Cardinal Bea ..." etc..

But, last year, I typed out the pre-Bea texts ... and got out my glue-pot ...

Num peccavi?

S Elizabeth

 Here we go ... another of these Saints (quite a lot of them women) with Proper hymns in the Breviary. And, inevitably, the give-away information in the lections of their connexion with Urban VIII.

What I want to know is:

Did Papa Barberini canonise them and then decide to write the hymns ... or did he canonise them because he wanted to write the hymns? 

Did any of his hymns survive into the Liturgy of the Hours?

Thomasery

What a week! On Monday, Blessed Thomas Belton, and his Companions, martyred at Oxford under Elizabeth Tudor. On Friday next, S Thomas More, totius Angliae Cancellarius. How edifying that some people still hate him enough to write books and to produce TV series vilifying him. A true Note of Sanctity!

And today is the Feast of the Translation of S Thomas (Becket) the Martyr. He was the Titular Patron of my last Anglican job, the little church near the Oxford Railway Station, the first in England to restore the use of Mass vestments. Because S Thomas's main Festival is tucked away in the chilly days of the Christmas Octave, my predecessors used to have great celebrations on and around his July Festival. Oodles of Masses ... multiple Confession times ... distinguished visiting preachers thoughout the Octave ...

The most magnificent days were in the 1930s, when S Thomas's was still a slum parish. War and redevelopment later dispersed the old working class congregation, eliminated the brewery, the pubs, the brothels ... now, rebuilt, its property prices .... Then, the incumbent was Dr Trevor Jalland, whose Bampton Lectures before the Univerity forced literate Anglicans to think seriously about the papacy.

They brought him back to S Thomas's for burial; the Requiem was sung by Prebendary Michael Moreton. He disquieted the 'establishment' congregation by using the Roman Canon, explaining later in his gravelly voice, that "Jalland was a Patristics Scholar and I was determined that he should have a Patristic Eucharistic Prayer". Those, of course, were the times when Anglican bishops were striving throughout their dioceses to put down that vilest of all vile phenomena, the Tridentine Mass!

Makes you think ...

S Leo I, on whom Jalland was an expert, would have approved. I should have said, did approve .

Congregations do remember their clergy. In Jalland's case, what the parish Oral Tradition recalled was an incident one Good Friday morning at the Mass of the Presanctified. A server was out of position ... in a nannosecond of irritation Jalland, er, knocked him down ...

Fathers: when we demit our cures and people remark that we shall "be remembered", I've a terrible feeling that it is for things like this that we shall be most remembered.

A Memorable Centenary ... let us keep the Faith

At the first Anglo-Catholic Priests' Convention in Oxford in July, 1921, the Principal of Chad's, Durham, delivered the lecture on the Ars celebrandi. His name was Stephen Moulsdale; a Sligo man, he was one of those Irish 'Anglican' Catholics who flit so marvellously across the pages of our history. 

He said:
Let us remind ourselves that the grand possession of Western Christendom, this great prayer, the Canon of the Mass, this noble Consecration prayer, for at least 1300 years, intact and immutable, formed the basis of the Western Rite. Without exaggeration we may describe it as the oldest liturgical prayer in Christendom. Through all the middle ages our English Rite followed it. It is free from anything that implies any mediaeval developments of eucharistic doctrine. It stands unaltered in the Roman Mass of today. It is our inalienable heritage as priests of the Church Catholic in the West.

A hundred years later, most ordinary  Latin Catholic churches have abandoned it. Those that use it in celebrations of the Ordinary Form use a version in which, at its most sacred heart, the text has been messed around with. And from Bergoglian Rome come rumours of new liturgy wars.

Surely, this is the time when all who see themsaelves as Catholic should be sure that they use the Canon and only the Canon; that they use it without the daft tinkerings of the 1960s.

If we desire to wave banners in the streets, perhaps those noble words

INTACT AND IMMUTABLE

or

OUR INALIENABLE HERITAGE

... words proclaimed by an Anglican a century ago ... are worthy to be adopted and waved around.

PF

At Mass this morning, I prayed for our Holy Father Pope Francis. As, I hope, did you.

On June 24, I published a piece explaining that the essence of PF's heresy is his claim that, just as Jesus supplanted Moses as Teacher, so he, PF, Voice of the Holy Spirit, is now supplanting Jesus as Teacher. (I first made this point, with copious supporting evidence, at Gardone in 2017, in a lecture now published in Defending the Faith Against Present Heresies, Arouca Press.)

Thanks to Professor Tighe, I have read a fine piece by John Zmirak in The Stream, advancing precisely the same analysis, and pointing out the relevance of the condemnation of the heretic Marcion to the Bergoglianite errors.

Zmirak neatly points out that the Bergoglianite assertion amounts to modifying the Sermon on the Mount so that its claim mutates into You have heard that X was said by Jesus. But I say unto you, Non-X.

Like Zmirak, I regard the belief of many, that PF is the Antichrist, as wrong to the point of being ridiculous.

I pray that the Gemelli will prove to have sorted out the Papal Colon ... and that le bon Dieu will sort out the heresy and blasphemy questions.

 

CONCELEBRATION

The Archbishop of Dijon has, apparently, revealed that PF intends to enjoin Concelebration upon all presbyters of the Roman Rite.

I had better be honest here.

(1) About three years ago, I concelebrated the Novus Ordo with a fine young priest who was being hounded out of his parish by bigotted 'liberals'. I did it as a sign of my solidarity with him, and I have no regrets. 

(2) Every year, pandemics permitting, I concelebrate the Chrism Mass, and do so with immense joy. If anybody wants to know why, I will reprint a series of articles on the History of Concelebration, which I wrote a few years ago.

Right. When you've calmed down, I will continue. 

I think it is a mistake to let crafty and manipulative liberals back us into a corner on this issue. 

Here are some observations.

In the Traditional Roman Rite, no presbyter can be ordained without concelebrating the Ordination Mass with the ordaining Bishop. If diocesan bishops were to ordain traditional ordinands, doing so in the Old Rite, then the 'test issue' of Concelebration as a sign of Unity would have been met.

Would it not be a an admirable sign of unity for clergy who favour the Novus Ordo, from time to time, to be ordained at a Traditional ordination?

If Traditional clergy take part in the Chrism Mass, sitting in choro, how is this not a manifestation of ecclesial unity? I regard the Renewal of Vows as unnecessary and, frankly, not a little bit silly, but would it be a matter of principle for traditional clergy to refuse to join in this rite?

Bishop Tissier, in his scrupulous biography of the Great Archbishop, refers to photographic evidence that Marcel Lefebvre did concelebrate at least once (and versus populum). Was this a terrible apostasy?

If a bishop ... even an Archbishop of Dijon ... were to celebrate a Solemn Pontifical High Mass in the Old Rite, with traddy priests deaconing, subdeaconing, serving, administering Holy Communion, would this not be a sign of ecclesial unity? Why is concelebration the only acceptable such sign of unity? How can the Archbishop of Dijon claim that concelebration is essentially required by the very nature of the Church, when, for centuries, Roman Rite clergy, once their own ordination was over, never concelebrated again? Does the Archbishop really believe that the Catholic Church did not exist until the 1970s?

In 1965, when the old Missal and the old Pontifical were still in use, Rome authorised a new rite of Concelebration and ordered it to be added to the (1962) Missal and the old Pontifical. Presumably, this was the Rite which Archbishop Lefebvre celebrated about nine months after Rome had authorised it. It was more traddy than the rite of Concelebration now in use. Would Traddy clergy be prepared to take part in it? Would Trendy clergy be prepared to take part in it? 

If traddy laity occasionally saw, in their own diocese, trendy clergy being forced to take part in traddy Pontifical Liturgy with the Bishop, might they not be more open to the idea that it really was 'unity' that the Bishop was keen on, and not just the humiliation of Tradition?

I shall not enable comments which simply express a dislike of Concelebration, or which argue that Concelebration deprives the Church of the fruits of many Masses. That is not what this post is about.

It is about not letting ourselves be fooled and wrong-footed by crafty men with dubious motives.

Doctor Diggle's Dictionary (4)

I wonder if the new Cambridge Lexicon of Classical Greek, the Diggle "f**k and s**t and unVictorian" dictionary, might have a broad cultural ambition. (Conspiracy Theory Trigger Warning.) Might it be part of a sinister policy of linguistic indoctrination? Is it intended to offer a paradigm for how, in Cambridge Combination Rooms, one should address visiting foreign savants? "Welcome to Cambridge, Dr Beineinstein! If you need to have a pre-prandial s**t, it's just down that passage on the left."

Or are things the other way round? Perhaps the would-be visiting academic is himself supposed to become fluent in Tabspeak before his arrival: "Welcome to Cambridge, Dr Beineinstein!"  "I urgently need q***k f**k."  "Ah ... our Chaplain Reverend Mandy offers counselling in Relationship Issues ..."  "She give me q***k ... ?"  "Um I'm sure that up to a point um ... permit me to introduce you um ..." .

But enough of crude fantasy.

On the Internet, Dr Diggle generously offers a specimen page or two of his lexicon. The letter Mu.

Mu.

Yes; I did exactly what you would have done. 

I looked up malakos.

In I Corinthians ... a book I have taught several times as an examination set text ... great fun to teach ... we find (I Cor 6:9) one of those extensive and Highly Inclusive lists of categories of people who will not have the Beatific Vision forced upon them. One of these categories is malakoi. Literally, 'softs'. Both Vulgates translate molles. AV and Knox effeminates. NRSV and NIV male prostitutes. JB catamites. NKJ homosexuals. RSV and REB lump it together with the next word, arsenokoitai, and render them both together by sexual perverts. GNB narrows that down: homosexual perverts. 

Nobody seems to have thought of translating it rent-boys. And ... amusing, isn't it ... yes, I heard you giggling ... Tee Hee, as the ladies among you are probably saying ... amusing how many of those translations are nowadays extremely politically incorrect. Indeed, they are, frankly, not lexicographically correct, either, and could justly be considered offensive. Just for this one moment, I'm not joking.

So, full of eager anticipation, I turned to Diggle, sub voce malakos, expecting to find something as down-to-earth, as raw, as shocking, as unVictorian, and as robustly vernacular as s**t and f**k. The sort of thing Grauniad readers, those boors of Politically Correctitude, would get their teeth into. Poofs, perhaps. Or pansies. You know the sort of verbum nefandum I mean.

'Fraid not. This is what I find: "(pejor.) soft, weak, effete ... effeminate, unmanly ..." 

Time, I fear, to return to fantasy.

Imagine the following scene: some Tab footie spectators are shouting crude and unacceptable abuse at a visiting footie team. The non-classicists among them, a nasty lot, are probably howling "Pansies!" "Woofters!" vel similia. I hope the Proctors get them, if Cambridge still has Proctors. If anyone ever deserved to be progged ... I wonder if any reader of this blog is old enough to have been progged ...

But from Dictionary Corner, dear decent Dr Diggle and his docile disciples, lexicons in hand, will be decorously declaiming "Effete!" "Unmanly!".

Writing about so distinguished a scholar, I will not end without the sincerest congratulations and my very best wishes. Cautissime, Domine, caces! Faustissime futuas! Barbam fuge!

Dixi.

Doctor Diggle's Dictionary (3)

As I have remarked, Diggle has chosen rather to sneer at earlier Greek lexicons. The standard work of reference has hitherto been "Liddell and Scott", where the "Liddell" summons memories of the Alice whom Lewis Caroll discovered in Wonderland. Sometimes we demonstrate our snooty superiority by calling it LSJ, because a Jones had a hand in later editions. Currently, it is in its 9th edition, and has a Supplement.

It is very big. 

So, in the days when English education was still comparatively undebauched, an "Abridged" version was produced, "intended chiefly for use in Schools". It is small enough to be held in just one hand!!! It is what I have eight inches from my elbow as I write this. My copy is embossed with the Arms of my School, which presented it to me as a school prize in 1955, when I was in the Classical Third and still wore short trousers. Frankly, not only schoolboys and undergaduates but even greater men and women than these find many of their simpler hourly needs satisfied by "Baby L and S". Rarely more than once a day, do I need to struggle into The Other Room and manhandle "Big L and S" off the shelves. (If you are purchasing a second hand Greek Lexicon, LS in the 8th edition has something to be said for it: my fabulously clever Oz Mods Tutor, Margaret Eileen Hubbard, tipped me the wink that it contains Byzantine information which was eliminated from the LSJ 9th Edition; I was fortunate enough to find a copy in Thornton's.)

Therefore, because the Big one was very big and the Baby one was smallish, the Oxford University Press produced an "Intermediate" LS. 

That ... Intermediate L&S ... is the volume which Dr Diggle and his fellow Tabs say they are replacing with their proudly-presented "s**t and f**k and definitely not Victorian" Lexicon.

I am uncertan how plausibly this volume will serve the needs of the docti. It is one of those highly irritating works of reference which are incarnated in two volumes ... not very handy. It gives some information about Greek authors, but no references.

However much s**t and f**k represent necessary or even enjoyable human activities, having to drag two biggish volumes around with you so as accurately to identify them seems to me a high price to pay. The good news is that is priced at around £65, which, nowadays, for a newly set-up academic publication, suggests to me the presence of a subsidy. 

S**tting and f**king should not necessarily be expensive activities, but in these decadent days cost can be a consideration. I've no idea what price the Intermediate LS now goes for.

One final part to follow.

Visitation Hymns; the gradual elimination of our Lady Mediatrix of all Graces

Readers will be aware that today, July 2, is the authentic Festival of the Visitation of our Lady in the Latin Church. And that in the post-Conciliar period  it was discovered that "Certain Necessity" rrquired it to be moved back to May 31. This mean that the Feast of our Lady Mediatrix of All Graces was displaced ... as I explained on May 31.

The Coetus charged with revising the provision of hymns in the Breviary was led by Dom Anselmo Lentini. He was a man of considerable erudition and a fine Latinist. He duly set about reconsidering the hymns allotted to the Visitation.

For Vespers, he suggested De sacro tabernaculo, written by our own beloved Cardinal Adam Easton, who, after a career including teaching at Oxford, survived torture by Urban VI through being rescued by the King of England. Pope Urban had objected to being sent a Filial Correction from some of his cardinals. All very natural. Plus ca change ...

For the Office of Readings, Dom Anselmo suggested some stanzas from the 100-stanza fifteenth century "Golden Jubilee", rightly describing the hymn as "most beautiful, and perfect". You can hear it being sung on the video by hundreds of SSPX priests and seminarians as they precede H E Bishop Fellay into the Concrete Submarine at Lourdes for Pontifical High Mass, with the  haunting refrain O Maria. The first line is Salve Mater Misericordiae. 

Interestingly, Lentini comments "Notice that in this feast [he means on May 31] the Blessed Virgin is venerated by the people as Mother of Graces".

He also, alternatively, suggested Veni praecelsa Domina (twelfth century); this had been criticised (e.g., by Gueranger) because of phrases like Veni Salvatrix saeculi. Insisting that this phrase can be said in a Catholic sense, Lentini nevertheless emended it "to avoid all offense" to Veni iuvamen saeculi.

For Lauds, Lentini offered a hymn of his own composition in the Sapphic metre, Concito gressu petis alta montis. It included the words populi ... te credunt Domini favorum/ esse ministram.

In other words, Lentini was doing his best in 1968 to preserve the theme of our Lady as Mediatrix of Graces in the hymns he suggested for May 31.

In the next edition of his draft Hymnarium, Cardinal Easton's hymn disappeared. Anglophobia!!! In came a ?Sixteenth century hymn Veniens mater inclita which at least included a stanza inviting Mary to lift up her eyes and see the believing peoples.

And, when the Liturgia Horarum was itself published, Salve Mater Misericordiae, most sadly, had been removed. Lentini's own composition Concito gressu survived, with its phrase Domini favorum ... ministram. So did Veni praecelsa and Veniens mater inclita.

Not, in my view, an attractive story. But I feel most sorry for Dom Anselmo and his associates. They were learned; they worked very hard; and nobody had quite remembered to tell them that the Enemy and the entire Low Command had already decided to ensure that the clergy would no longer know Latin. And that the Divine Office was to be carefully impoverished.