There Was No “Original Liturgical War”: A Response to Dmitri Solzhenitsyn

Communion of the Apostles

The following article was published at Crisis Magazine on October 7, 2026, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the editor Eric Sammons.

In an article published at The Catholic Thing on September 18, 2026, Dmitri Solzhenitsyn endeavors to summarize for readers what he calls “The Original ‘Liturgy Wars’: Between East and West.” His basic argument is that wars over liturgy are nothing new—in fact, the first battlefield was between East and West, inasmuch as the Western church slowly drifted away from the original template still preserved to this day in the Eastern churches. The way he tells the story makes it almost sound plausible.

The argument he puts forth rests on an underlying double premise: first, there was a primitive common liturgical repository from which all the different traditions differently evolved; second, this repository was Greek or Byzantine.

However, no serious liturgical scholar holds either of these positions any more.

As to the first, Paul Bradshaw and others have demontrated that the opposite is true: at the beginning there seems to be considerable diversity, and over time there tends to be convergence and assimilation, as different rites either borrow from each other or replace one another. Ritual practice tends to assimilate itself to that of the great Sees (see Gregory DiPippo’s discussion of this trend in his lecture “Unity in Diversity”). In the West, that great See would, of course, be Rome; in the East, it would not be Byzantium initially, but Jerusalem and Antioch, with Constantinople acquiring dominance after the seventh century.

Solzhenitsyn gives the impression that we have a well-documented commonality between Old Rome and New Rome in liturgical matters, from which one of them (namely Old Rome) diverged; thus, he writes: “All of this established the Roman rite as distinct from the Byzantine,” as if they had begun aligned and then diverged. That is not the case; there is no evidence whatsoever for it. After all, if “by the end of the seventh century, East and West had diverging prayers, hymns, cadences, and even iconography,” what are we to make of the “diverging prayers” etc. within the East itself—since Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, and Byzantium all prayed differently? The notion that the Byzantine liturgy has a normative antiquity or a peculiar fidelity to apostolic origins is an assumption without foundation.

That brings me to the second premise. Solzhenitsyn gives the impression that “the East” means or is equivalent to Byzantine or Constantinopolitan. Not only does it not mean this, but in the earliest period of Christian liturgy Byzantium is very much less important than Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, whose traditions are older and were more influential for a time. Armenia and Georgia had already adopted the liturgy of Jerusalem at the time when Byzantium/Constantinople/New Rome was first declared a patriarchate. Those older rites already wielded considerable prestige. And yet, we see—as could be expected—a great diversity and vitality of different traditions. The paucity of information and the diversity of traditions in the early centuries make it singularly difficult to pin down where something first occurred, or who influenced whom.

Solzhenitsyn claims: “During the later 300s the Greek liturgy was uniquely refined: garments like the sticharion (a kind of long tunic), hymnography like the short troparia, and sophisticated vessels were a much more prominent feature of Byzantine rites than of the simpler Latin rites.”

By “the Greek liturgy,” presumably he means “the Byzantine.” The problem with such sweeping claims is that we know little to nothing about the Byzantine liturgy of the fourth century. There is precious little documentation of it or citation from it available. There is, for example, no equivalent to St. Ambrose of Milan’s citation of the Roman Canon in the De Sacramentis, written around 387, which strongly points to the Roman Canon already being a familiar anaphora by that time.

The claim about the sticharion cannot be substantiated and is anachronistic. It is well known that clerical attire in the early centuries had not yet evolved into a distinct type of clothing set apart from secular clothing; rather, the clergy wore the best garments available when performing the rites, and due to the innate conservatism of the religious instinct, the sacristy wardrobe remained fixed in style while secular clothing changed out in the world. In any case, it was not long before Western vestments displayed the same stunning beauty as their contemporaneous Eastern counterparts.

Hymns such as the troparia had indeed already emerged as a literary genre by the late 300s, when Byzantium was still a suffragan of Herakleia, not a patriarchate. The Latin hymns of St. Ambrose, long admired for their mellifluous poetry and lofty theological conceptions, were written at just the same time, and soon entered the Western liturgy.

As for “sophisticated vessels,” it is rather difficult to understand what the phrase even means. As soon as we have records of liturgical vessels in the West, we see they are ornate and valuable, which is why the pagan Romans tried to steal them. For example, the Gesta apud Zenophilum/Acta purgationis Felicis, centered on the church at Cirta in North Africa and dated to 303, records an inventory of items taken in a raid, including 2 gold chalices, 6 silver chalices, 6 silver cruets, a small silver basin, 2 large chandeliers, 7 small bronze lamps and their holders, 11 bronze lamps with chains, 38 curtains, substantial quantities of clothing, a silver chest, and a lamp that had been concealed in the library.

The gravest error in Solzhenitsyn’s article is his reporting, with approval, the opinion of some Eastern sources that the Roman liturgy originally had a “descending” epiklesis—that is, an invocation of the Holy Spirit to bring about the conversion of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ—that had somehow dropped out of or been removed from the Roman rite. He cites (approvingly?) Orthodox patriarchs who in 1848 accused the Roman Church of “rejecting” from the Canon “the very ancient and Apostolic invocation of the Consecrating Spirit” and thus “miserably mutilating the Sacrifice in its most essential part.” (A less extreme exponent of the view that the Roman Rite once had this kind of epiklesis would be Adrian Fortescue, the inaccuracy of whose views has been discussed elsewhere.)

In reality, the Roman rite never had such an epiklesis because its unique anaphora predates the Macedonian controversy over the divinity of the Holy Spirit, which afflicted only the East and is the reason why the Byzantine rite inserted an epiklesis that the Roman rite never needed. The Roman theology of consecation is different, and, tellingly, older. If anything, it is the Byzantine epiklesis, as a later insertion, that requires explanation. (I will not enter here into the Roman rite’s “ascending” epiklesis, the Supplices te rogamus, which is not relevant to the point at hand, nor into the Veni, Sanctificator prayer of the Offertory, which alludes to the Holy Spirit but does not have the function of an epiklesis as we are now discussing it.)

Continuing his brief for Latin deviation from or corruption of a putatively pure and uniform “Greek” original, Solzhenitsyn claims that leavened bread was used by everyone from the beginning but the West drifted later on into the practice of unleavened bread, and, similarly, that the marriage of priests was normative but the West later enforced clerical celibacy. He seems unaware that a long history of scholarly debate exists on these questions.

On the topic of the type of bread used, our information is too scant to permit a determination of when unleavened bread began to be used in the West. The West may have used unleavened bread in imitation of what Christ did at the Passover; for all we know, both types may have been in use at the same time in different places. The fact that we know unleavened bread to be widespread by the Carolingian period does not mean it was invented in that period. On the topic of celibacy, Solzhenitsyn oversimplifies the historical record. For a different telling of the history, I recommend Alphonso Stickler’s The Case for Clerical Celibacy: Its Historical Development and Theological Foundations, Christian Cochini’s Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy, and the first chapter of Gary Selin’s Priestly Celibacy: Theological Foundations.

Sadly, it would appear that Solzhenitsyn has permitted himself to be formed and persuaded by classic tropes of Eastern Orthodox apologetics, which tend to grant a fictitious primacy to the Byzantine East, instead of taking seriously the far more complex and diversified picture that scholarship paints of the early Christian centuries. Moreover, Eastern writers in general neglect to pay attention to the historical evidence of slow organic development within their own liturgical (and theological) tradition. The “Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom,” whatever connections it had with the saint after whom it is named, took many centuries to develop to its present completed state; it did not descend fully formed from the heavenly Jerusalem.

I would not wish to be seen as solely negative. The article’s strongest point is its near-admission that the modern rite of Paul VI or Novus Ordo marks an unprecedented rupture from both the Roman tradition itself and from the entire world of historic apostolic rites, both Eastern and Western—a claim I defend at length in my book The Once and Future Roman Rite (2022), a portion of which is available in the article “The Byzantine Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and the Novus Ordo—Two Brothers and a Stranger.” The melancholy words of Cleenewerck would be difficult to dispute: “The liturgical metamorphosis of the Roman Catholic Church... widened the gulf” between East and West.

On the Roman Mass, Don’t Take Your Cue from Fortescue

Separated by over 100 years, with the advantage going to Fiedrowicz

This article is a combined effort of Gregory’s and mine. - PAK

Undoubtedly Adrian Fortescue is a fascinating figure, rather eccentric in some ways (see Aidan Nichols’ biography) – a biting critic of Pius X, e.g., whom he called “an Italian lunatic” – but it must be borne in mind that his liturgical scholarship is somewhat out of date, and actually wrong in certain respects. It is thus a source of near daily frustration to find well-intentioned people online citing his book The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy from 1912 as if it were the final word on the topic, when in fact there are much better resources that have appeared in the last 114 (!) years.

The internet promised to give everyone access to all information, but interestingly, I have noticed that it actually tends in a different direction: it encourages access to what is old because it’s in the public domain, and thus promotes an odd kind of time-trapped referentiality, at least in areas where genuine progress has occurred. Recent books are copyrighted and have to be bought and studied; they can’t be downloaded and searched quite as readily, so they are neglected or not even recognized. Our cutting-edge technology has, in fact, made us lazy regurgitators of low-hanging information.
 

Image courtesy of Corpus Christi Watershed

Fortescue’s gravest error – and the one that would cause the greatest mischief later – is an assumption he shares with many other scholars of his time: namely, that the “original” text and order of the Roman Canon was wildly disturbed over the course of time by any number of omissions, transpositions, rewrites, etc. deliberate or accidental. This simply flies in the face of everything that is attested in all the ancient manuscripts of the Canon, which are astonishingly consistent from one to another, and fundamentally very similar to what we find in the Gelasian Sacramentary, and thenceforth in all pertinent liturgical books of the Roman Rite.

Behind that lies the equally false and equally pernicious assumption that in ancient times, the various major churches (not just Rome) routinely trashed their older, and hence “more authentic” tradition in favor of novelties, feeding into the narrative that this is a routine occurrence and a normal procedure. It is certainly not.

Then, we have the problem that scholars assumed that X, Y, or Z thing which is attested in all the pertinent liturgical books as far back as we have them nevertheless does not represent the “original” (and hence “more authentic”) tradition. They will then be only too delighted to reconstruct that “original” and hence “more authentic” tradition on the basis of various theories. So, e.g., since the Eastern rites make a great deal of the pneumatic epiclesis, but the Roman Rite doesn’t have one, the Roman Rite must “originally” have had one and somehow lost it at some point.

(The late, great, and much-missed Fr John Hunwicke wrote a fine series on that specific topic; you can find all the links in “Reforming the Canon of the Mass: Some Considerations from Fr Hunwicke.”)

In a similar vein, we have the assumption that the Roman Mass must have had two readings before the Gospel, because some of the Eastern rites do (that is false, and there is no evidence for it), and similar extrapolations from the false premise that all rites are descended from a single early and primitive rite; therefore, what one has and another doesn’t must have “fallen out of” the other.

So the whole section in Fortescue on the “liturgical uniformity” of the first three centuries basically needs to be torn out and discarded; it is the opposite of the truth. The historical trajectory is that liturgies begin very varied and diverse, and over time, gradually assimilate to the forms of the nearest dominant see.

He accepts the error, very common in his time, that the Leonine Sacramentary is a sacramentary. It isn’t; it’s a private compilation of libelli Missarum, the Masses composed by the priests of the churches of Rome. Basically, everything they thought they knew about the so-called Apostolic Constitutions in the early twentieth century is wrong.

St. Hippolytus

Anything he says anywhere about “Hippolytus” has to be dismissed if he says it in reference to Rome. The whole Hippolytus construct completely collapsed when Margarita Guarducci presented a key piece of evidence at a conference held in Rome in 1974 that demonstrated the falsity of everything patristic scholars had built up over him before then. Even a figure as progressivist as Fr. John Baldovin candidly admits that there is nothing to the Hippolytus legend on the basis of which the Second Eucharistic Prayer was cobbled together.

When it comes to evidence drawn from the Fathers, one has to check and see if the sermon that is being quoted is authentic. This is an especially big problem with St. Augustine. If a sermon of his witnesses to a particular reading in the Mozarabic liturgy, one needs to check if the sermon was actually written by him, or passed off under his name after that reading had been fixed in the Mozarabic tradition.

Having said all this, I am not arguing that Fortescue’s book on the liturgy is without value; I am simply saying that one must consult more recent and better studies, such as Fr. Uwe Michael Lang’s 2022 book from Cambridge University Press, The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform, which covers in superb academic detail all that is known about the development of the Roman rite from antiquity to the Tridentine reform (i.e., AD 33 to 1570). (The original hardcover was very pricey but a paperback edition has finally come out.) Fr. Lang also published A Short History of the Roman Mass in 2024. These works, in their own quiet way, do more to sweep away the misconceptions held by modern liturgical reformers than Fortescue, who never lived to see the awful things done by liturgists after him.

A very accessible one-volume work that accomplishes less in historical detail than Lang, but more in terms of an overall assessment of the “rightness” of the traditional Roman Rite against its attempted replacement, is Patristic scholar Dr. Michael Fiedrowicz’s The Traditional Mass: History, Form, and Theology of the Classical Roman Rite, published in English translation in 2020 by Angelico Press. This is the book I always recommend to people who are looking for a scholarly introduction.

(It bears mentioning that Fortescue’s book The Orthodox Eastern Church, which has been reprinted in a newly typeset edition, remains one of the finest historical, patristic, and ecclesiological investigations of the vexed relationship between Eastern and Western Christianity, and has much to contribute to the newly volcanic apologetics world that has sprouted up online. Unlike his book on the Roman Mass, The Orthodox Eastern Church is out of date only in a charming way, namely, its description of the early 20th-century Orthodox churches, countries, and peoples, which have changed a lot since then.)

Fortescue’s Major Work on Eastern Orthodoxy Republished in a New Edition

As booklovers know from repeated experience, acquiring a long out-of-print classic can be a chore. Old copies, if they are not prohibitively expensive, are often beaten up and malodorous; and newer “reprint” companies seem to take no pains either with their facsimiles or with their OCR’d products.

I was therefore delighted when Peter Day-Milne, one of the best writers at Adoremus (see his archive of articles here), suggested to me that it was high time to bring out a newly typeset edition of Adrian Fortescue’s superb work The Orthodox Eastern Church. This is now available from Os Justi Press (here) and from every Amazon site in the world (paperback, hardcover, ebook). (Just a word of warning: there are several crummy editions of this work in various forms, so if you want to find the new Os Justi edition in particular, use the above links, visit the OJP site, or search by ISBNs, which you will find below.)

First published in 1907 and revised in 1911, The Orthodox Eastern Church quickly established itself as a classic in the field, thanks to Fr. Fortescue’s masterful grasp of the doctrinal disputes that divide East and West, his narration of the intricate historical factors that played an outsized role, and his identification of attitudes and conditionings that block the reunion of the Churches so ardently desired by all Christians of good will.

At a time when rose-colored portraits of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are flourishing thanks to tribalist internet apologetics, Fortescue—not sparing East or West in his portrait of their disintegration—offers us a more realistic account of what happened. Fortescue’s is not the last word on this topic, by any means; but his analysis remains compelling, and his lively wit gives pleasure to readers. The first hundred pages of the work contain so many testimonies of the Church Fathers to the necessity for union with the bishop of Rome, and the remainder of the work so many illustrations of Eastern misgovernance and error, that any modern-day Roman Catholic tempted to swim the Bosphorus in search of greener fields will quickly be cured of his temptation.

NLM readers in particular will enjoy the author’s erudite (and often quite entertaining) descriptions of Eastern liturgical rites, chants, vestments, implements, and clerical titles.

This newly typeset edition does aesthetic justice to the quality of the content. Peter Day-Milne, in particular, outdid himself by reviewing every line of the page proofs, ensuring that the many words and phrases in Greek were exactly right, and revamping all internal references and the index to ensure accuracy. The ebook, based on the printed edition, reflects this quality as well. All the original illustrations are present, such as these:

 

Here is the table of contents together with a sample page: 

Endorsements of this new edition:

Fr. Aidan Nichols, author of The Latin Clerk (a biography of Fortescue) and Rome and the Eastern Churches:

“Adrian Fortescue brought to the subject of this book not only a wealth of knowledge but an unusual combination of attitudes: waspish wit along with deep religious feeling. The present-day reader will find here colourful vignettes of the churches of the Orthodox world before the massive changes of twentieth-century politics transformed them utterly. But they will also have the benefit of a broad historical panorama, an in-depth encounter with some theological dividing issues, and an account of the liturgical life which—typical of the man—waxes eloquent on such matters as music and vesture. Though there is fun here, there is also deadly seriousness. Fortescue knew the weaknesses, as well as the strengths, of the Latin church of his day. He saw the wisdom of Unionist endeavours, if also, alas, the improbability of their success.”

Erick Ybarra, author of The Papacy: Revisiting the Debate Between Catholics and Orthodox:

“At a time when the powers of this age are working within the bounds of the visible Church to attack her foundations to the core, more and more Catholics are reconsidering their belief in the truth claims of the Catholic Church and are inquiring into Eastern Orthodoxy. Many have taken up the task of investigating Byzantine claims against Catholicism; yet how many have traveled far-distant lands, learned Oriental languages, spent their entire lives studying the Eastern Churches? Fr. Fortescue did just these things, making him a scholar on whom we can rely. For Catholics curiously gazing to the East, Fortescue’s The Orthodox Eastern Church will be a welcome accompaniment.”

Joshua Charles, President of Eternal Christendom:

“The republication of this classic work by a great scholar comes at an auspicious time. As some are allured by the East under the pretext of problems in the West, Fr. Fortescue’s book will provide a learned, joyful, and direct reminder of inconvenient facts. As much as there is to admire among our separated brethren in the East, this book is a reminder of why we embrace the Catholic communion of our shared Fathers, and urge them to return to the same—without prejudice to the liturgy, spirituality, and theological culture that is their legitimate boast.”

If you are looking for an invigorating study of the Eastern Orthodox, this is a book not to be missed.

Adrian Fortescue, Ph.D., D.D. The Orthodox Eastern Church. Based on the third edition from 1911, with a new Publisher's Note. xx + 427 pp. Os Justi Press, 2024. ISBN 978-1-960711-92-2 (paperback); ISBN 978-1-960711-93-9 (hardcover); ISBN 978-1-960711-94-6 (ebook).

The Errors of Fr. Fortescue’s “The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy” (Part 2)

In the previous article in this series, I discussed the influence of evolutionary theory on the intellectual climate of the 19th century, in reference to the liturgical writings of Fr Adrian Fortescue. Of course, I did not say that solely because he lived in a period in which certain ideas held sway, we can be sure that the forma mentis of that period must have influenced him and his writings on the liturgy. Correlation is not causation. Therefore, I propose in this article to give two examples which I think convincingly demonstrate that he was influenced by the dominant evolutionary mindset of his time. I have chosen these two partly because they pertain to matters in which historically erroneous scholarship was particularly important in the post-Conciliar reform, and partly because these errors are now generally recognized to be in fact errors.

Fr Fortescue in cope among the servers at his church, St Hugh’s, in Letchworth, England. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

The first is the matter of the epiclesis, to which he devotes a special appendix. He correctly notes that that it is “not primitive”, unattested before the mid-4th century (St Cyril of Jerusalem). He also notes that although its standard position is immediately after the consecration, there are many examples of prayers that similarly invoke the Holy Spirit in other places in various liturgies: in the Coptic liturgy of St Mark at the beginning, in the ancient rite of Jerusalem, at the Great Entrance, etc. He furthermore points out that some secrets of the so-called Leonine Sacramentary are “true Invocations”. (E.g. the secret of the 30th “daily Mass” placed in the month of July: “Send, o Lord, we ask, the Holy Spirit, that He may make these our present gifts Thy sacrament, and purify our hearts to receive it.” [1])

However, he runs his ship aground when he tackles the question of the formal epiclesis in the Roman Rite. “It is, I think, certain that the Roman rite too once had an Epiklesis of the Holy Ghost. Apart from the fact that otherwise it would be unique in Christendom, we have direct evidence of it.” Note that his first argument is that the Roman Rite must have had an epiclesis, because it would be unique among Christian rites if it didn’t. This can only be justified by broadly, perhaps even unconsciously, accepting the notion that all liturgies start from a common source, that which he describes in his first chapter as the substantial liturgical uniformity of the early Church. But in point of fact, every rite has features unique to itself, and one of the most distinctive features of the Roman is that it is the only one that has only one Eucharistic prayer. This being the case, it is easy to suppose that that Eucharistic prayer should itself have unique characteristics, such as, for example, the absence of a formal epiclesis.

He then adduces what he calls “direct evidence” of it in the Roman Rite, two citations of Pope St Gelasius I (492-96). The first of these says that “the sacraments of the body and blood of the Lord pass over into the divine substance, the Holy Spirit working this.” Fortescue understates the case when he writes that this one is “perhaps less certain” as evidence of the epiclesis. There is no reason to assume that this refers to a prayer at all, much less one that was part of the Canon.

The second is closer to the mark (although also not without significant problems), and of it he says that it “leaves surely no doubt that Gelasius knew the Epiklesis. ‘How shall the heavenly Spirit, being invoked, come to the consecration of the divine mystery, if the priest who prays him to be present is condemned as being full of evil deeds?’ (literally, “criminous actions”) We may then surely conclude that in the Vth century Rome had an Invocation of the Holy Ghost.”

An illuminated folio of a sacramentary made ca. 870 for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Bald, grandson of Charlemagne, which shows him between the putative papal authors of the two version of the Roman Sacramentary, Ss Gelasius I and Gregory the Great. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

This is cited to a collection of “Authentic Letters of the Roman Pontiffs” made by a German scholar, A. Thiel [2], which includes the Latin version of this text, and the footnote acknowledges that it is a fragment. But since so much is being hung on this one, very thin thread, this would have been the place to mention a few other pertinent facts. The first is that the full fragment consists of only one other sentence before this. “The sacrosanct religion which holds the Catholic discipline, demands for itself such great reverence that no one may dare to come to it without a pure conscience.” [3] The full context is lacking, and the connection between the two sentences is not wholly clear.

Far more importantly, this fragment is preserved as part of a collection of disciplinary canons. However, there is a considerable amount of such material that passes under Gelasius’ name, but is not authentically his. The introductory note under which this same text appears in Migne’s Patrologia Latina (LIX 141 B) states that there is no Pope apart from Ss Leo the Great and Gregory the Great under whose name there circulate more such decrees, but the editor makes it clear that he does not intend to take a position on the authenticity of any given one of them by including them with Gelasius’ works.

Furthermore, this statement is prima facie dangerously close to the Donatist heresy which St Augustine so strenuously opposed, and which the See of Rome also thoroughly rejected. [4] The so-called Gelasian Decree, which is not his, but is certainly Roman and not much later than his time, condemns Donatus by name. We may therefore reasonably surmise that the canon may not be authentically Gelasian, and hence, not a witness to the liturgy of Rome at all.

But even if it is from Gelasius, Fortescue himself has stated earlier in the same appendix of his book that invocations of the Holy Spirit are found in various parts of the liturgy in different rites. There is nothing about the wording of this canon which positively requires that the prayer that the Spirit be present come immediately after the Consecration, and cannot refer rather to some other part of the consecratory rite, e.g., some kind of private prayer of preparation. [5]

The appendix on the epiclesis concludes with a supposition that it was then removed from the Roman Canon “because of the growing Western insistence on the words of institution as the Consecration form”, and therefore a later invocation of the Holy Spirit seemed “unnecessary and misleading.” The most obvious problem with this statement is that it has never seemed so to the Eastern churches, which have the epiclesis after the words of institution. Fortescue cites various Fathers who emphasize the importance of the words of institution, but he cites nothing to indicate that anyone between Gelasius and Gregory the Great thought that their importance was compromised by the presence of the putative epiclesis. (It is Gregory to whom the removal of the epiclesis was often attributed in Fortescue’s own time, as he notes.)

The relevant portion of the Canon in the Gellone Sacramentary, ca 780 AD. 

But most importantly, this theory flies in the face of all the witnesses to the actual text of the Roman Canon, none of which has any evidence of the supposedly lost epiclesis. The theory therefore requires us to believe that when someone, presumably a Pope, decided to remove the epiclesis from the Canon, it somehow managed to disappear from every single manuscript of the Canon in exactly the same way, leaving no trace of itself, no trace of the decree that expunged it, and no trace of the ideas leading up to the decree.

Of course, I am far from the first person to observe these difficulties with the theory, which is why it is now generally abandoned. Fr Hunwicke cites the late Fr Robert Taft SJ to this effect: “The decidedly Christological stamp of the old Roman Canon is a sign of great antiquity. This eucharistic prayer, obviously formulated before the impact of the late fourth century pneumatological resolution at Constantinople I (381 AD) reflects a primitive euchological theology much older than almost any extant eastern anaphora… The old Roman Canon of the Mass has a weak pneumatology not because it is defective but because it is old, so old that it was composed before the divine personhood of the Holy Spirit became a problem to be resolved.”

The second question is that of the Old Testament reading before the Epistle which supposedly dropped out of the Roman Rite. Fortescue covers this topic in the sixth chapter of his first part, on “The Lessons.”

He begins with St Justin Martyr’s First Apology, noting that he says nothing about either the number or order of the readings. “(T)hese were then reduced to three, Prophetia, Epistola, Evangelium. … Since the VIIth century there have been normally only two, the prophetic lesson having dropped out.” (p. 257) Speaking of the original order of things, he says, “The Gradual was sung after the Prophecy, the Alleluia before the Gospel.” (p. 267)

The reason why I attribute this hypothesis to a forma mentis molded by evolutionary theory is that in Fortescue’s time, many scholars believed that the Ambrosian Rite was an archaic form of the Roman Rite. Fortescue himself certainly knew this, since he cites the work of the two principal proponents of this idea, Ceriani and Magistretti. And the Ambrosian is the only rite that actually attests to the putative original Roman order of readings and chants: Prophecy, Gradual, Epistle, Alleluia, Gospel.

But elsewhere, Fortescue explicitly rejects Ceriani and Magistretti’s idea, stating that “The Gallican, Ambrosian and Mozarabic liturgies are really independent, with no more connection with Rome than there is always between any Christian services.” This means that for him, the Ambrosian Rite is not itself the missing link that connects Justin Martyr to the earliest Roman lectionaries. These two ideas together can only make sense, on the author’s own terms, if he is taking for granted that an original common form (the “substantial liturgical uniformity” of the early Church posited by his first chapter) began to evolve, stopping at an intermediate stage in Milan, but continuing to evolve at Rome.

Once again, the problem with this is simply that there is no evidence in any liturgical book of the Roman Rite, or in the writings of any Roman Church Father, that any of this ever happened. Fortescue and others posit a similar evolution for the Byzantine Rite, with a similar lack of either patristic or liturgical evidence. While it is prima facie difficult to believe that such a feature could totally vanish from the rite of one patriarchal see, leaving no trace of itself behind, it is absurd to posit that this could happen in two such rites. This theory is therefore now also largely abandoned.

To sum up, then: in both cases, Fortescue is assuming gradual changes that lead from an earlier common form to later diversified ones, even though he has no evidence of the intermediate stage that the theory itself requires (the “missing links”), and cannot really demonstrate any motive or agent for the putative change. This is exactly the problem that evolutionary theory has been wrestling with in the field of biology since the days of Darwin.

NOTES:

[1] In Mohlberg’s critical edition, 578: “Mitte, Domine, quaesumus, Spiritum Sanctum, qui et haec munera praesentia nostra tuum nobis efficiat sacramentum, et ad hoc percipiendum nostra corda purificet.”

[2] Epistolae Romanorum Pontificum genuinae (Braunsberg, 1868)

[3] “Sacrosancta religio, quæ catholicam tenet disciplinam, tantam sibi reverentiam vindicat, ut ad eam quilibet nisi pura conscientia non audeat pervenire.”

[4] In Gratian’s Decretalia, the great collection of canons which formed the basis of medieval ecclesiastical law from the 11th century on, this canon appears under the header, “Non adest Spiritus sanctus sacramentis, que per criminosos ministrantur – the Holy Spirit is not present to sacraments which are administered by the criminous.”

[5] There is a further difficulty that the Latin text of this canon has the word “et” added after “priest”: “the priest, and he who prays (the Spirit) to be present.” Prima facie, this means that someone other than the priest prays for the Spirit to be present, a problem which Fr Fortescue solves by treating the “et” as a mistaken addition.

The Errors of Fr. Fortescue’s “The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy” (Part 1)

Our readers are, I trust, familiar with the English Catholic priest and scholar Fr Adrian Fortescue (1874-1923). The republication of his “Ceremonies of the Roman Rite”, edited for modern use by Dom Alcuin Reid, is one of the many good signs of the burgeoning interest in the traditional Roman Rite, and has served us very well over these last many years. This is more than a little ironic, since Fr Fortescue hated the book, which he wrote because he needed money, and of which he once said that he would rather dig ditches for a living than undertake a revision of it.

Fr Adrian Fortescue in 1924. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Lately, however, one of his other books, “The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy”, is becoming prominent again, not for a good reason, and in service to some rather bad theology. I have seen, and others have pointed out to me, articles and talks in which people have cited it as “proof” for some of the erroneous historical ideas that underlie the post-Conciliar reform. My purpose here, therefore, is to clarify some of the larger mistakes that mar the book and others like it. [1]

Let me say first of all that no one should be surprised at this, and no one has cause to feel or feign indignation that an upstart such as myself should impugn the work of a scholar such as him. The book is over a hundred years old. It would be bizarre if nothing about it stood in need of correction, and the history of the liturgy is NOT somehow the one field of scholarship in which no progress has been made for over a century. No one today would credibly cite a commentary on the Bible published in 1912 as if it were the final word on the subject, and nothing of importance had been learned about the Scriptures since then. There is no reason to do so in the field of liturgical scholarship, or any other field related to theology.

And here is a story from the field of Biblical studies which illustrates the problem very nicely. Since 1780, Oxford University has held a lecture series on Christian theology, named for the man who endowed it, a canon of Salisbury cathedral called John Bampton. In the later 19th century, one of the questions that greatly interested Biblical scholars was that of the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, and the Bampton lectures of 1890 were devoted in part to refuting the theory of a German (of course) named Ludwig Noack, who attributed it to Judas Iscariot. We can easily smile at the absurdity of such a thing, we are right to do so. But we should also note that at the time, it was taken seriously enough to be addressed in one of the most prestigious lectures offered by one of the most important universities in Europe.

Frontispiece of the first edition; a second was issued in 1914.

Secondly, I wish to make it clear that I do not, of course, attribute to Fr Fortescue any conscious dishonesty. There have been plenty of liturgical scholars, and people who write about the liturgy, who can be excused of the charge of deliberate lying only by assuming that before they set out to deceive others, they took great pains to deceive themselves. [2] Fortescue is certainly not one of them.

His fault, if it is even just to call it that, lies rather in a failure of the imagination. He simply does not realize how much of what he says relies on presuppositions common to his era, which he has not critically examined. This is a common enough problem among scholars of all eras, and he was far from the only one to suffer from it and apply it to the liturgy in his own time. This then brings me to the biggest flaw in his work, the basis of the many others.

Evolutionary Theory – Linguistic, Biological and Liturgical

I am very much indebted for the observations which follow to an old friend and colleague, Dr Eric Hewett.

It has always been obvious that the Romance languages derive from the same parent language, in no small part because the parent language continued to be used in church and school in the places where they were spoken. Scholars could therefore easily see that (just to give one simple example) even words as disparate as the Italian “occhi”, French “yeux”, and Spanish “ojos” all come from plural forms of the Latin word “oculus.” But once Europeans encountered the ancient languages of India, starting in the 16th century, they began to realize that relationships between languages could be traced back in time much further than the oldest Latin texts, and much more broadly. They were thus able to demonstrate connections between Sanskrit, the ancient sacred language of Hinduism, Greek, Latin, the Germanic, Celtic and Slavic families, and many others. Together, these languages are now known as the Indo-European linguistic family.

And thus, they were also able to show the common roots of words that might seem to have nothing to do with each other. One of the best-known examples is the Latin word “centum – one hundred” (originally pronounced “kentum”), which is a first cousin, so to speak, of both the Greek “hekaton” and the Sanskrit “shatam.” Latin “quinque – five” is related to Sanskrit “pancha”, whence the Hindi “panch”, and from that, “punch”, originally a drink mixed with five ingredients which the English learned to make in India. [3]

By the 18th century, scholars in several parts of Europe were able to propose various reconstructions of the Indo-European family’s proto-language, even though no written records of it are preserved. In England, the first and most influential of these was published by Sir William Jones in 1788. But of course, once the basic theory had been outlined, there was a natural temptation to turn it into a linguistic “theory of everything.” A good amount of effort was wasted on looking for connections that did not exist, and sometimes, ones that do exist were missed. Jones himself, for example, included in his version of the theory languages that are not Indo-European, such as Egyptian, and excluded others that are, such as the Slavic family.

A portrait of Sir William Jones. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Since his time, his work and that of other scholars in the field have been refined in many ways, and expanded by new discoveries. (The written remains of a whole new branch of the family, comprising the now extinct Tocharian languages, were only discovered in western China in the early 20th century.) More importantly, the theory’s scope and limits have been better defined; linguists recognize that there are things it does not include and others which it cannot explain. It is not a “theory of everything.”

My friend Dr Hewett believes that the success of this theory of linguistic evolution created a certain forma mentis that had an enormous influence on the thought of the nineteenth century. Once it had been proposed, proved (in broad terms, not in every detail), and then, in the English-speaking world, popularized by Jones, it established an intellectual climate that tended to see evolution from a common root as the explanation of all relationships between varied forms (or species) within a genre (or genus).

In the field of biology, the adoption of this forma mentis conditioned people to accept the theory of Charles Darwin, which as currently articulated, posits any number of relationships between biological forms as seemingly improbable as that between “centum” and “shatam.” (We are told, for example, that whales descend from a creature called indohyus, which was about the size of a raccoon, and shaped something like a cross between a deer and a mouse.) Furthermore, the controversies over Darwin’s Descent of Man drove its proponents to turn it into a “theory of everything” that explains the existence of ALL biological forms. It is on this basis that the more parodically arrogant “new atheists” confidently declare that Darwinian evolutionary theory has made belief in God not merely unnecessary, but impossible. [4]

A whale
(Image from Wikimedia Commons by Nobu Tamura, CC BY 3.0)

In the liturgical field, this brings us to the first major error of Fr Fortescue’s book. His first chapter, “The Eucharist in the first three centuries”, is dedicated to the basic thesis that there was a substantial liturgical uniformity in the very early Church; the header of the fifth section is, “Liturgical Uniformity in the first three centuries.” He does not realize that he is propounding a liturgical “theory of everything”, and assuming without proof that all the minute fragments of evidence which we have of the liturgical practice of the earliest centuries, disparate in time and place, belong to the same liturgy. (This is also analogous to what some proponents of biological evolutionary theory do, those whom Chesterton lampooned for giving us intimate details of the eating and mating habits of the long-dead former owners of minute bone fragments.)

And thus, he can even arrive at the proposition that when St Justin Martyr speaks of “a word of prayer and thanksgiving”, “It seems most reasonable to understand it of the whole prayer of Consecration, the whole Anaphora which consecrates the gifts, which in the opinion of the Fathers of Justin’s time was handed down entire by our Lord and His Apostles.” In evolutionary terms, this is the “original” form from which all the other forms of the genre, i.e. other liturgies, would eventually evolve. In reality, this theory is the error from which other errors would later, as it were, evolve.

I conclude this first part with just one example of how he goes about doing this. In the second section, “The Liturgy in the Apostolic Fathers”, he adduces from the epistle of Pope St Clement (34, 6) “an allusion to the Sanctus, an element of nearly all liturgies: ‘The Scripture says: “Ten thousand times ten thousand waited on him, and a thousand thousands served him and cried, ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord of hosts, every creature is full of thy glory.’ ” In other words, he is assuming that Clement is quoting something that is already known to his readers from the liturgy. This makes sense within the evolutionary model which he takes for granted, because the Sanctus is “an element of nearly all liturgies.” But there is no reason to assume this. We know full well that this letter was widely read in the early Church, and regarded in some places as if it were part of Scripture; it is just as reasonable to posit that someone was inspired to insert the Sanctus into the liturgy by reading this passage of Clement, and that the custom was then widely imitated by others. The Sanctus, after all must come from somewhere: why not from here?

NOTES:

[1] Part of the reason why Fortescue’s book has garnered a lot of interest of late is also that in the 1980s, it fell into the public domain in the United States. It is therefore available on the internet for free, and widely diffused. It has also been photostatically reprinted, a fact which I mention because not that long ago, I saw an article that cited it to “Loreto Publications, 2012”, without mentioning that that edition is a photostatic reprint of the original book of 1912, thus obscuring how old the book, and the information contained therein, really are.

[2] I wish I could take credit for this bon mot, but it comes from Sir Peter Medawar’s brilliant, savage review of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man.

[3] It is possible to adduce literally thousands of other examples. I here gave “centum / shatam” because it has long been used as a classic example of one of the major early divisions within the Indo-European family.

[4] From another brilliant, savage review: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.” (Terry Eagleton reviewing The God Delusion, London Review of Books, Oct. 2006)

A New Ceremonial Book for the Old Holy Week

Pax inter Spinas, the publishing house of the Monastère St Benoît in Brignoles, France, has just announced the upcoming publication of a ceremonial book specifically for the traditional rites of Holy Week as they were before the reform of 1955, as well as the vigil of Pentecost. It will include the relevant portions of the last edition of Fortescue-O’Connell before the reform (1953), edited by Dom Alcuin Reid in such a way that the single volume contains everything necessary to do Holy Week. The final publication price will depends on the amount of interest in the book, its final size after typesetting, etc., but it will certainly be a worthy edition, hardback with a marker ribbon, designed to last much reference over many Holy Weeks. To register interest, and to receive full publication details and a special pre-publication discount offer, please email the publisher by September at: editionspaxinterspinas@monasterebrignoles.org

Special Offer on Books from Sacra Liturgia

Bloomsbury Publishing has a special offer available on some useful and interesting books from Sacra Liturgia, including the most recently published proceedings of the Sacra Liturgia Conference, and the updated Ceremonies of the Roman Rite. To get 35% off of these volumes, enter the code LITURGY35 at the checkout on www.bloomsbury.com. This offer is valid globally, and includes print and eBooks; it expires on September 30th. The volumes are:

–  The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described, by Adrian Fortescue and J.B. O’Connell, updated by Dom Alcuin Reid

–  The T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy

–  Liturgy in the Twenty-First Century (Proceedings of the Sacra Liturgia Conference held in New York City in 2015)

–  Authentic Liturgical Renewal in Contemporary Perspective (Proceedings of the Sacra Liturgia Conference held in London in 2016)

Fortescue, a man of hidden talents

Perhaps best known as the author of The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described, the Reverend Doctor Adrian Fortescue needs little introduction. Fortescue, as his famous book is more simply known, is required reading for any Master of Ceremonies and has been through a multitude of reprints since its original publication in 1917. This remarkable man also wrote a similar book for organists, and I was privileged to be shown the one and only manuscript copy:

The Liber Organi is an incredibly beautiful hand-written book which Fortescue wrote to provide the organist at his church, St Hugh’s in Letchworth, with everything needed to accompany the liturgies. The inside front cover contains a photograph of the church taken in 1916 and the inside back cover contains the author's dedication 'in perpetuity' to St Hugh's:

The neatness is breathtaking and the overall sense of care which has been taken almost defies belief; the handwriting is beautiful as is the engraving of the music, some of it copied from other sources, but much of it Fortescue’s own harmonisations of the Gregorian Chants. There are also alternative melodies taken from hymnody:

His liturgical sense and attention to detail come across particularly in the short organ interludes he has composed in the Vespers section to modulate seamlessly from the key of one antiphon to the next:

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