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Remember Thy compassion, o Lord, and Thy mercy, that are from of old; lest ever our enemies be lord over us; deliver us, o God of Israel, from all our distress. Ps. 24. To Thee, o Lord, have I lifted up my soul; o my God, I trust in Thee, let me not be put to shame. Glory be ... As it was... Remember Thy compassion... (A very nice recording of the Introit of the Second Sunday of Lent, more moderno, i.e., without ‘Gloria Patri’.)
Reminíscere miseratiónum tuárum, Dómine, et misericordiae tuae, quae a sáeculo sunt: ne umquam dominentur nobis inimíci nostri: líbera nos, Deus Israël, ex ómnibus angustiis nostris. Ps. 24 Ad te, Dómine, levávi ánimam meam: Deus meus, in te confído, non erubescam. Gloria Patri. Sicut erat. Reminíscere.
Those who follow the traditional Divine Office and Mass closely will notice in them an unusual feature this weekend. In the Mass, the same Gospel, St Matthew’s account of the Transfiguration (17, 1-9), is read both today, the Ember Saturday, and tomorrow. In the Divine Office, there are only four antiphons taken from this Gospel, where the other Sundays have six; on Sunday, the antiphons of the Benedictus and Magnificat are repeated from Saturday, and the same antiphon is said at both Prime and Terce, which happens nowhere else. At the Sunday Mass, all of the Gregorian propers except for the Tract are repeated from the Mass of Ember Wednesday.
The traditional explanation for this given by Dom Guéranger (The Liturgical Year, vol. 4. p. 183 of the 1st English ed.), the Bl. Schuster (The Sacramentary, vol. 2, p. 73 of the English ed.) and others is as follows. In many ancient liturgical books, the Masses of the Ember Saturdays are titled “duodecim lectionum – of the twelve readings” or something similar. This was understood to mean that there were originally ten readings from the Old Testament, rather than the five which we have now, plus the Epistle and Gospel. (Mario Righetti, Manuale di Storia Liturgica, vol. 3, p. 232) According to a custom attested in several ancient sources, the readings at the papal Mass were each done twice, once in Latin, and again in Greek; a form of this custom is still to this day kept from time to time. (A friend of mine who is a priest of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church served as the Greek deacon at two Masses celebrated by St John Paul II.)
The chanting of a Gospel in Church Slavonic at a Mass celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Croatia in June 2011.
This would mean an effective total of twenty-four readings. These were also the traditional days for ordinations in Rome, which were held at St Peter’s Basilica. The combination of twenty-four readings and seven ordination rites within a single Mass would have made for an extraordinarily long service that lasted through the length of the night. Therefore, the Mass of the Ember Saturday effectively became the Mass of Sunday morning.
What was taken to be further confirmation of this is found in several ancient liturgical books of various kinds, in which the Second Sunday of Lent is marked with the rubric “Dominica vacat – the Sunday is empty”, i.e., had no Mass of its own. The liturgical texts for this Sunday would therefore have their current arrangement because it was only given its own Mass and Office later. According to this theory, the custom of saying the Saturday Mass with so many readings and the ordinations was specifically Roman; when other places received the Roman Rite, they did not observe this same lengthy service through the night, and having confined the Ember Saturday to Saturday itself, could not leave the Sunday without a Mass.
This would also explain why in many Uses of the Roman Rite, the Mass of the Second Sunday of Lent differs in one detail or another from that of the Missal of St Pius V. To this very day, for example, the Dominican Missal has two Tracts on this Sunday, rather than a Gradual and Tract. Many medieval liturgical books also attest to a different Gospel on the Sunday; at Sarum, that of the Canaanite woman was read (Matthew 15, 21-28), preceded by a unique Tract taken from the Gospel itself, rather than from a Psalm. (This Gospel is read in the Roman Rite on the previous Thursday.)
Folio 29r of the Gellone Sacramentary, ca. 780 AD., with the rubric “Dominica vacat”, followed immediately by the words “II Domi(nica) in Quadra(gesima) – the Second Sunday in Lent.” (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Latin 12048)
For several reasons, I believe this explanation to be incorrect on every point.
First of all, there is a strong antecedent improbability (I do not say an absolute impossibility) to the very idea of doing such a lengthy service at all under any circumstances. The median date for the Ember Saturday of Lent is March 3rd; in Rome, the sun sets on that date just after 6 p.m., and rises the next morning at 6:40 a.m. Assuming the liturgy started after None, in accordance with the well-attested ancient custom of the Church, this would make for a ceremony about 17-18 hours long. (I do not grant the absurd and unattested possibility of a liturgy designed with breaks for food, sleep, and visits to the bathroom in mind.) This is made all the more improbable by the fact that the main celebrant, the Pope, would usually be elderly, and in the days of the Church’s more serious Lenten fasting discipline, would have to do this on an empty stomach.
Secondly, there is not a single liturgical source that attests to the supposed twelve different readings on any of the Ember Saturdays. The Wurzburg lectionary, the oldest of the Roman Rite (ca. 650 AD), has four Old Testament readings in Lent and after Pentecost (without the reading from Daniel 3 that is now common to all four Ember Saturdays), plus an Epistle and a Gospel; “twelve readings” would therefore refer to the custom of doing each of these six readings twice, in Latin and in Greek. This source also has six Old Testament readings at the Ember Saturday of September, and five in Advent, indicating that there was originally some flexibility to this rite. But in every subsequent lectionary, every Mass of an Ember Saturday has five Old Testament readings, plus an Epistle and a Gospel. The term “twelve readings” would therefore have been understood to refer to the six before the Gospel, each done twice.
Furthermore, all of the ancient lectionaries, including Wurzburg, also have the two different epistles for the Ember Saturday and the following Sunday (1 Thess. 5, 14-23 on the former, chapter 4, 1-7 of the same epistle on the later), in the same order, and in the same place. If the Mass of Ember Saturday was in fact the Mass of the following Sunday, celebrated in the early hours after the ceremony had lasted through the night, what need would there be of this second epistle?
Folios 27v and 28r of the 9th century Lectionary of Alcuin, with the Epistles of the Ember Saturday and Second Sunday of Lent. (Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. Latin 9452)
Third, even doing all seven of the readings twice would not have made the liturgy so inordinately long that it would last through the night. The Roman Rite is almost always more succinct in its presentation and use of Scripture than any other historical Christian rite, and the Ember Saturdays are no exception to this; the longest of them in terms of the Scriptural readings is that of September, in which they amount to 51 verses, just under 900 words. Likewise (and this is a far more significant point), the ordination rituals which are attested in the oldest liturgical books of the Roman Rite are very much shorter and less complicated than the ones we know today, which began to take something more like their current (EF) form in the mid-10th century. The Ember day Masses also have no Gloria and no Creed, and were instituted before either the Offertory prayers or the Agnus Dei were added to the Mass.
Fourth, and I think most decisively, the ancient sacramentaries of the Roman Rite ALL have separate Masses for the Second Sunday of Lent. The very oldest, the Old Gelasian Sacramentary, simply titles it “the Second Sunday in Lent”, but many others include the rubric “Dominica vacat” in the title. This is noteworthy because the Old Gelasian and certain other manuscripts like the Wurzburg lectionary attest to the very ancient arrangement by which the Thursdays of Lent had no Mass at all, but these Thursdays do not have a rubric “feria quinta vacat”; there is simply nothing at all between Wednesday and Friday. Clearly, there was a distinction between a day with NO Mass and a day that “vacat”.
To this it may be objected that these manuscripts are of the Roman Rite, but are not from Rome; they were all copied out in Merovingian or Carolingian Gaul. We may therefore legitimately surmise that what they attest to on the Ember Saturdays represents an adaptation of the Roman custom, dropping the liturgy that lasts through the night. To this I answer that all these manuscripts preserve many things that are Roman, but were clearly not of any use outside of Rome, or at any rate, not useful in Gaul. For example, the Wurzburg lectionary lists all the Roman stational churches, and the Old Gelasian Sacramentary gives the text of the Creed in Greek for the day when the catechumens had to show that they had learned it. In the absence of any source attesting the custom of twelve separate readings, and any source that specifically states that the liturgy was done over the night and into the morning, we have no reason to believe that these Gallic manuscripts have in fact changed the Roman custom in this regard. Quite the contrary, the general tendency in the history of the liturgy is the opposite; places which receive a liturgical tradition from somewhere else tend to be MORE conservative in maintaining its oldest forms, while it continues to evolve in its place of origin.
What, then, did the rubric “Dominica vacat” actually mean? It seems clear that originally, it must have simply meant a day without a Lenten station. Although the Mass of Ember Saturday was not as monstrously long as proposed by the scenario given above, it was still, of course, lengthy, and likely very taxing to the elderly celebrant, who would have had to travel with his court across the city from the ancient papal residence at the Lateran to get to the Ember Saturday station at St Peter’s Basilica, and then back. The Popes therefore gave themselves a well-deserved day of rest by staying home on the Second Sunday of Lent, before resuming the regular observance of the stations on the following afternoon.
A modern drawing of the old St Peter’s Basilica.
We know from certain features of the ancient liturgical books that there was not an absolute uniformity of practice even within Rome itself, and it can also hardly be supposed that every person in Rome would attend the Papal Mass at St Peter’s. Therefore, the parishes would have had their own separate Masses on Sunday morning, and this would explain why the Gospel (but again, not the Epistle) was repeated from the previous day. The people who attended Mass in the parishes on the Sunday would thus hear the important story of the Transfiguration, which did not get its own feast day until the 15th century, and was read nowhere else in the liturgy.
This would also explain the discrepancies between the Gregorian propers of the Mass of the Second Sunday as it appears in various Uses of the Roman Rite. In Rome, the cantors would know their own tradition well enough to know which Mass they sang on the day with no propers of its own. When people outside of Rome received their copies of the Roman liturgical books, the Second Sunday of Lent was marked as “Dominica vacat”, so they filled in the gaps in their chant book and lectionary as they saw fit. But even here, the variation is limited to a very narrow range; already by the 10th century, it had become the established custom to repeat the Mass of the previous Ember Wednesday.
If the repetition of the Gospel of the Transfiguration was instituted in Rome for the benefit of those who had not been present at the previous day’s station, it seems likely that the custom of repeating the chants of Ember Wednesday on the Second Sunday of Lent also originated in Rome. The two Masses are connected by the fact that the two Epistles of that Wednesday are about the forty day fasts of Moses and Elijah respectively, who appear in the Gospel of the Sunday as witnesses to the Transfiguration. This custom also does not fit at all with the idea that the Mass of Ember Saturday was said on Sunday morning; if this had ever been the case, one would reasonably expect that the Mass chants of the Saturday would be used on the Sunday.
Finally, in regards to the Divine Office, the oldest Roman Office antiphonary does in fact have on Ember Saturday six antiphons taken from the Gospel of the Transfiguration, three of which are repeated on Sunday. The current arrangement by which two of these have dropped out of use appears to be an historical accident of no significance.
In the Byzantine Rite, the Divine Liturgy is not celebrated on the weekdays of Lent, but only on Saturdays and Sundays; an exception is made for the feast of the Annunciation. Therefore, at the Divine Liturgy on Sundays, extra loaves of bread are consecrated, and reserved for the rest of the week. On Wednesdays and Fridays, a service known as the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts is held, in which Vespers is mixed with a Communion Rite. (It is also held on the first three days of Holy Week, and may be done on other occasions, but twice a week is the standard practice.)
The first part of this ceremony follows the regular order of Vespers fairly closely, and the second part imitates the Great Entrance and the Communion rite of the Divine Liturgy. After the opening Psalm (103) and the Litany of Peace, the Gradual Psalms are chanted by a reader in three blocks, while a portion of the Presanctified Gifts is removed from the tabernacle, incensed, and carried from the altar to the table of the preparation. This is followed by a general incensation of the church, as the hymns of the day are sung with the daily Psalms of Vespers (140, 141, 129 and 116), the entrance procession with the thurible, and the hymn Phos Hilaron. Two readings are given from the Old Testament (Genesis and Proverbs in Lent, Exodus and Job in Holy Week), after which, the priest stands in front of the altar and incenses it continually, while the choir sings verses of Psalm 140, with the refrain “Let my prayer rise before Thee like incense, the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice.” (The first part of this refrain is also NLM’s motto.)
Here is a very nice version in Church Slavonic, a modern composition by Fr Ruslan Hrekh, a priest of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, sung by clergy of the eparchy of Lviv.
And a Greek version sung by monks of the Simonos Petra monastery on Mt Athos.
Can you guess where and how this vestment is used? I have two hints to offer: 1. It belongs to the current liturgical season. 2. It is not being used in an Eastern rite. (Apologies, but no better image of it is available.)
The Answer: As I suspected would be the case, this proved to be a stumper. This vestment is a kind of stole which is used in the cathedral of Milan, but not at the Mass. On the weekdays of Lent and Holy Week, there is a service after Terce, which consists of two readings from the Old Testament with a responsory after the first, and a prayer borrowed from the Rogation days after the second. The readings are done by deacons who don this long white fascia in the manner shown above, over the rochet, and then put the dalmatic on over it, whereas at the Mass, the deacon places the stole outside the dalmatic.
Originally, the deacons did not wear a dalmatic for this service, but a vestment which the ancient ordines of the Ambrosian Rite call an “alba rubea”, which little means a “red alb”. It has long since fallen out of use, and no pictures of one exist, but one may guess from the name that it was shaped like an alb, but red instead of white. The information in this post was provided, of course, by our expert in all things Ambrosian, Nicola de’ Grandi.
Congratulations to Fr Mateusz Kania, a priest of the diocese of Warsaw, who got this almost right, mentioning that it was used in Holy Week. (Father left his comment on Peter K’s Facebook page.) The Best Wildly Incorrect Answer goes to Mark for guessing that it is some kind of rationale, a vestment which is worn only by the bishops of four dioceses in the world. Special mention to a few people who guessed it was a Byzantine subdeacon’s stole, which it does indeed resemble, even though I specifically gave the hint that it was not from an Eastern Rite. The Best Humorous Answer goes to Mark Ingoglio, for his idea that it is a harness by which misbehaving clerics can be yanked out of the sanctuary with a rope - not a terrible idea, really...
Like the vestment, the readings at this service after Terce, which are done as part of the preparation rites of the catechumens for their baptism at Easter, are a very old part of the Ambrosian Rite. They were inherited from the ancient liturgy of Jerusalem, and are still preserved in other rites as well. In Lent, the first is taken from Genesis, and the second from Proverbs; in the same period, readings from these books are done at Vespers in the Byzantine Rite, while the Mozarabic Divine Office has readings from both of these books in the first two weeks of Lent. In Holy Week, the Ambrosian Rite has readings from Job and Tobias in their place, where the Byzantine Rite has Exodus and Job. Here is the rubric which mentions this service in the Ambrosian breviary.
And the special tones in which the readings were sung.
Can you guess where and how this vestment is used? I have two hints to offer: 1. It belongs to the current liturgical season. 2. It is not being used in an Eastern rite. (Apologies, but no better image of it is available.)
Please leave your answers in the combox, and feel free to add any details or explanations you think pertinent. It has been a while since our last quiz, so as a reminder, to keep it more interesting, please leave your answer before reading the other comments. Special awards are given for Best Wildly Incorrect Answer and Best Humorous Answer as well. Using Google image search is cheating – I may never know, but God will. (I tried it myself, and didn’t come up with anything pertinent. Grok also failed.) The answer will be given in a separate post tomorrow.
It is reported that some merchants, having just arrived at Rome on a certain day, exposed many things for sale in the marketplace, and an abundance of people resorted thither to buy. Gregory himself went with the rest, and, among other things, some boys were set to sale, their bodies white, their countenances beautiful, and their hair very fine. Having viewed them, he asked, as is said, from what country or nation they were brought, and was told, from the island of Britain, whose inhabitants were of such personal appearance. He again inquired whether those islanders were Christians, or still involved in the errors of paganism, and was informed that they were pagans. Then, with a deep sigh from the bottom of his heart, “Alas! what a pity,” said he, “that the author of darkness is possessed of men of such fair countenances; and that being remarkable for such graceful aspects, their minds should be void of inward grace.” He therefore again asked, what was the name of that nation, and was answered that they were called Angles. “Right,” said he, “for they have an Angelic face, and it becomes such to be co-heirs with the Angels in heaven. What is the name,” he continued, “of the province from which they are brought?” It was replied, that the natives of that province were called Deiri. “Truly are they De ira,” said he, “withdrawn from wrath, and called to the mercy of Christ. How is the king of that province called?” They told him his name was Ælla: and he, alluding to the name said, “Allelujah, the praise of God the Creator must be sung in those parts.”
An inlaid stone panel in the chapel of Ss Gregory the Great and Augustine of Canterbury in Westminster Cathedral, London, depicting the story told here by St Bede.
Then repairing to the bishop of the Roman Apostolic see (for he was not himself then become Pope), he entreated him to send some ministers of the word into Britain to the nation of the English, by whom it might be converted to Christ; declaring himself ready to undertake that work, by the assistance of God, if the Apostolic Pope should think fit to have it so done. Which not being then able to perform, because, though the Pope was willing to grant his request, yet the citizens of Rome could not be brought to consent that so noble, so renowned, and so learned a man should depart the city; as soon as he was himself made Pope, he perfected the long-desired work, sending other preachers, but himself by his prayers and exhortations assisting the preaching, that it might be successful. This account, as we have received it from the ancients, we have thought fit to insert in our Ecclesiastical History. (From St Bede the Venerable’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, book 2, chapter 1)
Here are some pictures which I took of the same chapel in Westminster Cathedral which I took when visited London with the Schola Sainte-Cecile in August of 2019. On the wall facing the panel shown above, an image of the same workmanship, depicting the Judgment of Solomon. (It is not clear to me why this particular subject was chosen here; if any of our readers knows, perhaps he could leave a note in the combox.)
On the ceilings, mosaic of Saints important to the history of Catholic England: Ss Wilfrid, Archbishop of York (633 ca. - 710), St Benedict, and St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (634 ca. - 687). St Benedict was of course never in England, but is included because of the particular importance of monks in the evangelization of the country, and its religious life in general before the Reformation. At the time of the suppression of the monasteries, half of the cathedrals in the country were staffed by monks, rather than canons.
On the opposite side, St Oswald (604 ca. - 642), King of Northumbria from 634 to his death, an early promoter of Christianity in England; St Bede the Venerable (672-735); and St Edmund the Martyr (841ca. - 870), King of East Anglia from 855 until his death in one of the Danish invasions that plagued England in that era.
On the arch looking into the baptistery, which is right next to this chapel, St John the Baptist and St Augustine, a combination which refers to the role of the latter in evangelizing England, the famous mission on which he was sent by Pope Gregory. The Breviary lessons on his feast day, May 28th, state that “Once on Christmas, when he had imparted baptism to 10,000 persons and more in the river at York...”
This kneeler was carved by a furniture maker named Robert Thompson, who used to work a little mouse into almost every one of his pieces. This was made at Ampleforth Abbey and donated to this chapel, where is stands in front of the grave of Basil Cardinal Hume (1923-99), Archbishop of Westminster, who had previously been abbot of Ampleforth.
For the feast of St. Gregory the Great, there’s more good news on the Gregorian chant front!
Pope Saint Pius X’s reform of the Roman Office not only represented an upheaval in the psalter, it also unaccountably changed many of the antiphons of the ferial cursus, replacing them with novel compositions even when the traditional ones could have continued to be used. One laments, for instance, the disappearance of the antiphons Fidelia for psalm 110, In mandatis for psalm 111, and Nos qui vivimus for psalm 113 at Sunday Vespers, which was only allowed to keep two of its ancient antiphons, and of the antiphon Quoniam in aeternum which so excellently fits the recitation of psalm 135 at Thursday Vespers.
The joyful repetitions of the cry ‘alleluia’ at the minor hours on Sundays, and at Lauds during Eastertide—especially the exuberant nine-fold alleluia for the Laudate psalms—seem to have struck the reformers as unbearable, and those antiphons were replaced with new ones which incorporated psalm verses for which the alleluias serve as parentheses.
These mutations ensured that the Roman antiphonal produced by Solesmes and approved by the Vatican in 1912 cannot be used to sing the ancient Office, even if one were to disregard the new arrangement of the psalms.
The editors of Canticum Salomonisare glad therefore to announce the publication of the pars diurna of the traditional Psalterium Romanum, complete with musical notation for all the old antiphons, responsories, and pre-Urban VIII hymns.
This volume contains the entire ferial Office for Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline, including the seasonal antiphons, responsories, and hymns for Advent, Lent, Passiontide, and Eastertide. It also includes the collects for Sundays per annum, making it a self-sufficient resource for singing the ferial office on most days. On the other hand, the proper antiphons for Saturdays and Sundays and for penitential ferias are not included, since they were untouched by Pius X’s reforms and recourse can thus be had to the Solesmes books.
Some particulars:
The musical notation has been taken principally from the second volume of the new Antiphonale monasticum, published in 2006, which follows better principles of restoration than earlier editions; the episemas, however, have been included, and some antiphon restitutions are new.
The hymns have been taken from the 1934 Antiphonale monasticum; they are musically identical to those printed in the 1983 Liber hymnarius.
A Toni communes section includes the ‘archaic’ C and D tones found in the 2006 antiphonal for those who wish to employ them, but the standard tones are also given for the antiphons assigned these rather paleontological ones.
Those who desire to follow the widespread medieval custom of singing mediants over Hebrew or monosyllabic words in a manner reflecting their oxytone pronunciation can also find the requisite instructions in that section.
The 1912 antiphonal suggests saying the ferial preces at Lauds and Vespers recto tono, but anyone who prefers to sing them will find the music for the Pater noster chanted by the hebdomadary in the Toni communes as well, taken from the 1934 Antiphonale monasticum.
Printed with red for the rubrics and black for the remaining text.
We pray that this unique volume will aid the devotion of Catholics who wish to pray the Roman ferial Psalter as it was known to centuries of saints, and contribute to the authentic and informed liturgical restoration so felicitously underway across the Catholic world.
On Sunday, I illustrated an excerpt from Durandus with an image taken from a decorated Bible produced in the mid-ninth century, commonly known as the First Bible of Charles the Bald, who received it as a gift from one Vivien, count of Tours; it is also known as the Vivian Bible. (In French, ‘Vivien’, from Latin ‘Vivianus’ or ‘Bibianus’, is a man’s name, the female equivalent being ‘Vivienne.’ There is a Second Bible named for Charles, which has almost no decoration in it.) It was produced in 845-46 in the scriptorium of the abbey of St Martin in Tours; Count Vivien was also the lay abbot of this famous institution, in keeping with an abuse which was very common in that era. The bible was presented to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Bald (born 823; reigned 843-77), partly as a way of thanking him for certain privileges which he conferred upon the abbey, as is mentioned in the last of the three dedication poems included within it. Here are pictures of all of the illustrated folios, and a sample of the other decorative elements, which are not very many. This is actually the very first item in the catalog of Latin manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
This folio decorated with gold letters on a purple background, which would have been incredibly expensive to produce, is the first dedicatory poem.
Only a handful of pages are illustrated like this one found near the beginning of the codex, in a style which is deliberately modeled after images found in ancient Roman manuscripts. The upper band shows St Jerome leaving Rome for the Holy Land on the left; on the right, he is sitting down with a rabbi whom he is paying to teach him Hebrew. In the middle band, Jerome works on his great project of translating the Hebrew Bible into Latin, in the company of his scribes; note the presence of several women on the left, among whom would be St Paula and her daughter Eustochium, friends from Rome who helped him a great deal. On the bottom, Jerome hands out copies of his translations.
Medieval Bibles normally include a fair amount of prefatory material of various kinds; here, two sheets are dedicated to one of Jerome’s letters, written to a priest friend named Paulinus, about his translation work.
The beginning of Jerome’s own preface to the book of Genesis, with the sun, the moon, and the signs of the zodiac worked into the large letter P.
The chapter and verse system which we currently use for Bibles was not invented until the 13th century; here we see a list of the chapters of Genesis according to a different system which has 82, rather than the modern 50. Genesis is the only book of the Old Testament for which the chapters are listed within an elaborate framework like this.
I just learned about an interesting documentary which was published two months ago on the YouTube channel of the French-language Catholic television outlet KTO TV, about a Benedictine monastery of the Roman Rite on Mt Athos. (Closed captions are available in English.) When the Athonite peninsula was first settled as a monastic community in the later 10th century, the Italian city of Amalfi, (located on the gulf of Salerno, to the south-east of Naples), was a powerful maritime republic, with merchant ships traveling all over the Mediterranean. The Latin monastery was founded out of Amalfi, and therefore called Amalphion by the Greeks. The investigation in this video begins with documents from the archives of Athos which were photographed in the later 19th century by the French military; the photographs are now kept at the Collège de France, a research institute in Paris. The earliest reference to Amalphion is a document which was approved and signed by the very founder of the Athos community, St Athanasius the Athonite (ca. 920-1005), which means that a Latin presence was was part of the life of the Holy Mountain from the beginning.
Scholars have long been aware of the fact that the Great Schism, the supposed definitive break between East and West in 1054, was not as abrupt or total as later historiography imagined, and Amalphion continued to exist well past it; as one of the Greek monks interviewed here says, the schism was “neither immediate nor absolute.” But the monastery did decline, in no small part because Amalfi (which is very small) declined before the growing power of Venice, the power which led to the Sack of Constantinople in 1204, the event which did bring about the definitive rupture between Byzantium and Rome. The last references to Amalphion in the Athos archives (also shown here) is in a document of 1287, by which time it was in ruins and abandoned, and its land had been turned over to the monastery known as the Great Lavra, the first on Athos. The documentary shows the only structure which remains, a tower which was turned into a defensive work against Ottoman incursions on the peninsula.
The researcher travels to the Georgian monastery on Athos, Iviron, to investigate its connection to the monks of the West. We also see a lot of really nice shots of daily life on Athos, including some (fairly brief) footage of the liturgy, and the natural beauty of the peninsula, which is impressive.
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