Since today is the first day of the great O antiphons of Advent, I happened to look at the Wikipedia article about them, and read the following statement in the introductory paragraph: “They likely date to sixth-century Italy, when Boethius refers to the text in The Consolation of Philosophy.” I particularly noticed this because there was recently a discussion about this very topic, the date of composition of the O’s, in a Facebook group about the Divine Office which I moderate.
I followed the footnote linked to that statement on Wikipedia, and discovered something very interesting. The source of this claim that they date to the sixth century is an article by J. Allen Cabaniss (1911-97), who taught history at the Univ. of Mississippi, published in Speculum, the Univ. of Chicago’s journal of medieval studies, in July of 1947. (“A note on the date of the great Advent antiphons”; vol. 22, no. 3; pp. 440-2). The author purported to identify a passage of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (III, 12) as a citation of the first O antiphon, O Sapientia.Here is the relevant statement from Cabaniss’ article; the emphases in bold are his, the translations in parentheses are mine.
“ ‘Est igitur summum, inquit [Philosophia], bonum quod regit cuncta fortiter, suaviterque disponit.’ (It is therefore, says [Philosophy], the highest good, which rules mightily over all things, and sweetly orders them.)
Compare with this the text of O Sapientia following: ‘O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem, fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia: Veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.’ (O Wisdom, that comest from the mouth of the Most High, that reachest from one end to another, mightily and sweetly ordering all things, come and teach us the way of prudence.)”
Boethius died in 524, so this would mean that the O’s must have already existed in his time. A little research on Google books reveals that this claim about their dating has been repeated as an established fact by a great many authors since then. One could also reasonably extrapolate that they are even older, and might well go back to the 5th century, as some authors have in fact done.
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| The first page of a later 14th-century manuscript of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, showing him as a teacher of philosophy above, and in prison below. |
With all due respect to the late Dr Cabaniss, this is very weak sauce for a variety of reasons. We cannot even trace Advent itself as a liturgical season of the Roman Rite back to the early 6th century. Among the sermons of Pope St Leo I (440-61), there are nine “on the fast of the tenth month”, i.e. the December Ember days (the first of which is also today this year). None of these refers to the period as a time of preparation for the upcoming feast of Christ’s birth. The so-called Leonine Sacramentary, a collection of Masses used in Rome in the mid-to-later 6th century, has none for Advent. (I emphasize that this is not a dispositive point, since the collection is so irregular.) Our earliest patristic references to Advent in Rome are the sermons which Pope St Gregory the Great (590-604) preached on the Gospels of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Sundays, and our earliest liturgical sources are the list of epistles in the Wurzburg lectionary, ca. 650, and the Masses in the Old Gelasian Sacramentary, ca. 700.
I now make a digression, as a way of steel-manning Cabaniss’ argument for him, with his own words. In another article which he wrote about the O’s nearly 30 years later, he contended that they were not in fact written for Advent at all, which would make the preceding point moot. But the only evidence for this which he adduces is an episode from the life of the great scholar of the Carolingian era, Alcuin of York, which he explains as follows, citing the text of his biography in the Patrologia Latina vol. C, 104D – 105B.
“In his last months he prayed that his death would occur on the feast of Pentecost. He therefore directed the brothers to sing at vespers after he died, ‘O Clavis David,’ as the antiphon on the Magnificat. Falling ill on Ascension day (9 May), 804, he was unable to speak until 17 May. On that day he rallied and sang the antiphon with some other verses before he relapsed. His pious wish was fulfilled when he died in the early hours of Pentecost (19 May.)”
This is, to put it very mildly, an astonishing misreading of the text. What it really says is that Alcuin himself, knowing that he would die fairly soon, and wishing for it happen on Pentecost, sang the fourth of the O antiphons, which the anonymous author cites in full. “O key of David and scepter of the house of Israel, who openest and no man shutteth, shuttest and no man openeth, come and lead the prisoners from the prison house, that sit in darkness and the shadow of death.” This would make it his prayer for a good death and safe passage to “the place of refreshment, light and peace.”
But the very next paragraph says that he celebrated Lent “most worthily”, as he had been wont to do, and then fell ill “while the solemnity of the Resurrection was going on.” (The context makes it clear that this means Eastertide, not Easter week.) Which is say, Alcuin sang the antiphon O clavis David as a prayer for a happy death when it occurred in its regular place in the liturgical year, in Advent. The author makes note of this fact because Alcuin then sang it again, himself, on the third day before he died. Nothing about the text suggests in any way that he was asking anyone else to sing it for him; a fortiori, nothing about it suggests that there was any kind of custom of singing the O’s whenever the person in charge of the liturgy decided.
The article from which this comes was published in July of 1975 in The Jewish Quarterly Review (“A Jewish Provenience of the Advent Antiphons?”; new series, vol. 66, no. 1, pp. 39-56), and makes the bizarre proposal that the O antiphons were “developed in a Messianist community probably, but by no means certainly, Christian (my emphasis), which was either natively Semitic (Judaic) or, if Gentile, strongly Judaized.” His argument for this is a model of specious reasoning, namely, that nothing about these texts explicitly refers to either the Trinity or Jesus by name, and they contain lots of references to the Old Testament. This, as if it were not the whole point of Advent to proclaim that the one who is prophesied in the Old Testament is revealed in His Incarnation and birth, and then makes known to us the worship of the Holy Trinity.
But what makes this even more bizarre is that Cabaniss himself had recognized in his 1947 article that the words of the first O antiphon, “mightily and sweetly ordering all things”, are an unmistakable reference to Wisdom 8, 1. “Attingit ergo a fine usque ad finem fortiter, et disponit omnia suaviter. – Therefore She (i.e. Wisdom) reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly.” This is a very improbable choice of citation for a putatively Jewish author, who would not regard the deuterocanonical book of Wisdom as Scripture.
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| A icon of Holy Wisdom, 1860 |
The main thrust of his argument, then, is that Boethius very often refers to Scripture in the Consolation, but never quotes it directly. “It would be remarkable if this were the only exact citation from the Bible in a book so definitely influenced by Scriptural teaching and filled with so many opportunities for appropriate quotation. I therefore believe that Boethius’ words are a reminiscence of the Great Antiphon and only indirectly from the Bible by way of the antiphon.”
I believe that Cabaniss went wrong in 1947 at least in part, perhaps, because he did not have what has become an essential tool for the study of Scriptural citations in Patristic writings. This would be the exhaustive critical edition of the “Vetus Latina” (Old Latin), the collective name for the Latin versions of the Bible which are not in the Vulgate, and which for the most part predate St Jerome. The apposite volume on the book of Wisdom was published in eight different fascicles from 1977 to 1985. (Verlag Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau)
These volumes provide the Old Latin version of the Scriptural text, with a critical apparatus documenting the variations in the different manuscripts, and then a second apparatus of quotations of the relevant verses, whether direct or indirect, in ancient Christian writings. On most pages, the first part takes up about 20% of the space, and the two apparatuses take up about 40% each.
Had he been able to consult it, Cabaniss would have seen that Wisdom 8, 1 is cited by so many Christian authors, almost all of whom predate Boethius, that the citations take up the equivalent of about 2½ pages of very small type. The first Latin adverb, “fortiter”, is in the citation apparatus more than 70 times. Any verse which is cited so often would certainly be well-known to an author as widely read as Boethius, and there is no reason to suppose that he might not have gotten it into his head, as it were, from its frequent use in other authors, rather than from the antiphon specifically. In other words, this constitutes no proof whatsoever that the antiphon existed in Boethius’ time, and the whole argument for dating the O’s to the sixth century falls apart.
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| O Sapientia and the beginning of O Adonai in a Dominican antiphonary ca. 1300. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Musique, RES-1531) |
Finally, for no reason I can discern, Cabaniss seems to take it for granted that if similar words appear in the liturgical text and the Consolation, then the latter must be citing it from the former. But laying all other considerations aside, there is no reason why the influence should not have gone the other way, and the composer of the antiphon been inspired by Boethius.
