William Shakespeare, Liturgist

The liturgical rearrangement—or in Peter Kwasniewski’s somewhat more colorful description, the liturgical bloodbath—that recently occurred in Tyler, Texas, has affected me on multiple levels. It affected me personally, because I have a family connection there. It affected me as a member of my local church, because I also live in a place where the Latin Mass seems to be rather unpopular among the diocesan leadership. It affected me as a member of the universal Church, because I love sacred Tradition and have for many years been devoted to the ancient eucharistic rite of western Christendom, which so fully and so poetically reifies that Tradition.

And there is yet another level, one which is not so widely shared as the first three I mentioned, and which perhaps has sent the emotional weight most directly into my heart. It has affected me—has wounded me—as someone who studies and teaches and writes about the dramatic literature of the English Renaissance. It has wounded me as someone who recently stood in front of a classroom full of college students, English majors among them, and spoke at length about Othello. This is a play in which the relentless manipulation of reality leads to appalling destruction. It is a play in which cunning words breed death.

As is my wont when lecturing on such topics, I searched for avenues of passion and beauty and timeless significance that might convince the next generation of parents and artists and scholars that this play—written over four hundred years ago, in language that is often unfamiliar and unclear to them—is still worth their time, is still worth reading and studying and talking about, is still worth pondering and admiring and loving. Imagine how strange, how disorienting, how deeply disturbing it would be if the president of the university walked into my classroom and calmly declared that Shakespeare would no longer be taught. “We have new plays now,” he explains, “and some people consider them simpler, and more relevant, and less likely to offend or exclude, and therefore Shakespeare is abrogated—for the sake of unity. We must all study the new plays now.”

“But Mr. President,” I protest “there are a great many students and faculty members who enjoy and value Shakespeare, and some have even discovered a transformative richness in his works.”

“Of course, yes, we would never—er, well, we will not now completely exclude those who believe themselves to have a preference for old things. An unused room in the basement of Ebenezer Hall will be made available once per month for Shakespeare studies. It seats nine people.”

“But Mr. President, Shakespeare is the most revered author in the history of the English language—and perhaps the most revered playwright in all the world! His works are the beating heart of the English literary experience. They are utterly irreplaceable!”

“And yet they are, as of today, replaced. And lower your voice, please—what are you, some kind of anarchist? Do I not have the authority to decide what will and will not be taught in my university?”

“But Mr. President, the university’s collection of scholarship on Shakespeare is a small library unto itself. Brilliant researchers and scholars of the past and present wrote these books, which help us to understand not only Shakespeare’s plays and poems but drama itself, poetry itself, literature itself—life itself!”

“Those books will not, in the foreseeable future, be disposed of. But you’ll have no need to assign them and no need to consult them. If they then gather dust and end up in storage, that merely confirms their irrelevance.”

“With all due respect, Sir, your logic there seems slightly—”

“Your compliance in these matters is greatly appreciated. It is the duty of the university to guard our intellectual traditions from the threat of disunity.”

“Mr. President, this classroom was united from the first day of the semester until you opened that door.”

“The stagnant unity of the past is not the same as the dynamic unity of the future.”

“But the dynamic unity of the future is, for me, no future at all. I teach Shakespeare. I read and study and esteem and cherish Shakespeare. You have destroyed my professional life, and you have broken my heart.”

“You will learn to cherish the new playwrights. Class is dismissed.”

If you are not able to imagine this scene, don’t worry. There’s really no need to imagine the unimaginable. Something like this would never happen, in a university.

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Dr. Harold Bloom—professor at Yale, preeminent twentieth-century literary scholar, prolific author—was not the most progressive of academics, but he was a thoroughly modern man. He concluded that Shakespeare “wrote the best poetry and the best prose in English, or perhaps in any Western language,” and he saw Shakespeare’s plays as

the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. They abide beyond the end of the mind’s reach.

Bloom is but one voice among many in a chorus of praise that has been heard for centuries and continues to this day. Indeed, the monumental excellence of Shakespearean drama has become a commonplace in our culture; it is woven so thoroughly into the very fabric of modern existence that one might know nothing about Shakespeare and yet live a life that is profoundly enriched by his art.

But surely, multifaceted cultural brilliance of this magnitude doesn’t simply appear in a young Englishman’s restless and uniquely rhetorical mind. Only God creates ex nihilo. What were the antecedents? The residual dramatic energies? The formative influences? Let us not oversimplify; there were many. My intention here is to discuss only one, though it is one which you perhaps have not heard of, and which may be more significant than some would like to admit.

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Though it saddens me greatly to say it, few have seen a Shakespeare play performed in anything approaching an ideal theatrical environment. Early modern theaters looked something like this:

The reconstructed Globe in London gives us an even better idea:

The style is known as a “thrust stage,” whereby the performance area projects out into the audience. The action on the stage can be seen from the front and from the sides. The arrangement is vaguely reminiscent of a traditional sanctuary, wouldn’t you say?

And though it again saddens me to say it, few people, historically speaking, have seen a Shakespeare production that sought to fully and faithfully reproduce the sensory and psychological experience of an Elizabethan theater—and we must remember, as the Shakespearean scholar Sir Stanley Wells pointed out, that Shakespeare was, “supremely, a man of the theater..., a man immersed in the life of that theater and committed to its values.” We learn from Coleridge that in a theater of Shakespeare’s time, “the circumstances of acting were altogether different from ours; it was much more of recitation”; thus, “the idea of the poet was always present.” What we call acting today is often a rather boisterous and busy affair; for Shakespeare, acting was fundamentally recitation, poetry, oratory. There was little need for extravagant scenery; ornamentation was achieved through language and music, with some help from what must have been exceedingly fine costumes and elegantly coordinated movements. The overall aesthetic was one of visual gravity and decorative simplicity offset by consummate verbal artistry; the mind was drawn, thereby, to the essence of the thing.

Can you imagine this? Does it not somehow resemble, in your mind’s eye, a traditional liturgical service? If it does, we need not be surprised: the medieval drama of sacred liturgy led, in the best possible way, to the early modern drama of the theater. That is to say, it led to Shakespeare.

Allow me to share three remarkable statements made by Dr. O. B. Hardison, who was writing not, I emphasize, as an apologist for the Latin Mass. He was writing as a mainstream scholar, and a highly distinguished one at that—an author, an esteemed educator, a professor at Georgetown, and a director of the Folger Shakespeare Library:

In the ninth century the boundary ... between religious ritual (the services of the Church) and drama did not exist. Religious ritual was the drama of the early Middle Ages and had been ever since the decline of the classical theater.

Modern Western drama is the product of a Christian, not a pagan, culture. Its forms, its conventions, and its characteristic tonalities are shaped by this fact. To study early medieval drama is to study the way in which these forms, conventions, and tonalities came into being.

Just as the Mass is a sacred drama encompassing all history and embodying in its structure the central pattern of Christian life on which all Christian drama must draw, the celebration of the Mass contains all elements necessary to secular performances. The Mass is the general case—for Christian culture, the archetype. Individual dramas are shaped in its mold.

I wrote in an earlier NLM article that “traditional Christian liturgy was the heart of Europe’s artistic genius.” We have here yet another example of this, and it is an example that should resonate throughout the artistic consciousness of the entire Christian world. Shakespeare was a playwright, a dramaturgical poet, a “man of the theater”; and the theater was a secularized descendant of the Church’s sacred liturgy—her medieval liturgy.

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I have introduced a complex subject and cannot explore it with adequate length or nuance in this one essay. We will need to return to this topic in the future. Nevertheless, I hope I have at least provided some thought-provoking context for the following statement: marginalization or prohibition of the classical Roman liturgical rites is a grievous threat to human culture, not least because it is a threat to liturgical forms and experiences that served as archetypical precursors to early modern English theater—and from early modern English theater emerged some of humanity’s most compelling, cherished, influential, enlightening, and artistically virtuosic works of literature.

Cardinal Ratzinger said, quite boldly, that “the only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.” It is unthinkable that we should deprive future generations of the liturgical rites that for so many centuries breathed the breath of life into Christian art. The modernized rites, though currently favored by the ecclesial hierarchy, have demonstrated no comparable ability to inspire great artists, sublimate poetic sensibilities, and elicit artistic masterpieces; given their apparent effects over the past sixty years, we have no justification for assuming that they ever will.

The artistic, and therefore spiritual, crisis in Western Civilization has no simple solution, but a first and crucial step in this solution is simple: Let the Roman Church return full freedom to her ancient and everlasting Mass, which was described by the French playwright Paul Claudel—and perhaps would have been described in like terms by the English playwright William Shakespeare—as “the most profound and grandiose poetry, enhanced by the most august gestures ever confided to human beings.”

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For thrice-weekly discussions of art, history, language, literature, Christian spirituality, and traditional Western liturgy, all seen through the lens of medieval culture, you can subscribe for free to my Substack publication: Via Mediaevalis.

Traditional Art Cannot be Revolutionary: Modern Churches and Traditional Parishes - Guest Article by Mr Joseph Bremer

We are happy to share this article by Mr Joseph Bremer, a PhD student at the London-based King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, studying western iconography, and specializing in the art and architecture of the Romanesque period. He also currently teaches theology and history at Holy Family Cathedral School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

There seems to be no artistic spirit of our age. Future generations of Church historians will have a profoundly unenviable task ahead; for we can examine a 6th century mosaic covered domed cross church and definitively call it ‘Byzantine,’ a 12th century thick walled stone basilica and recognize it as ‘Romanesque,’ or identify a 17th century sprawling marble-clad church as definitively ‘Baroque.’ One could even travel back 30 years and identify our large monochrome iconoclastic churches as definitively modern, but that simply doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Many Catholic churches currently in use were constructed in the now-outdated styles that dominated the late 20th and early 21st centuries; and it is no secret that most practicing Catholics now find this commitment to post-modern art and architecture deeply problematic. We still inhabit the bones of these modern spaces, but the Church’s architectural turn in the late 20th century is now considered by many priests and parishioners to be a mistake. Our future church historians will have to make sense of a well-meaning, albeit disparate traditional patchwork independent of any overarching style or meaning as we try to patch modern churches with what bits of tradition we can.

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles

This is especially true in America, where the Church eagerly married itself to the spirit of the age, but the last few decades has seen her, at least aesthetically, widowed. Our artistic inheritance is the fruit of jaded and betrayed post-modern optimism, and now these modern churches have been all but rejected by the very youth they were designed to appease. A new generation of young, eminently conservative, and overwhelmingly well-meaning priests have been assigned to these modern churches, with a strong will to traditionalize them, but the walls and artwork of our churches preach a theology altogether rejected by many of her parishioners and most of her priests. The pulpit is at war with the building it inhabits, and we are all left wondering ‘what now?’

It is an all too familiar question in our day and age: What is a traditionally minded parish, or at the very least a parish that rejects the maxims of artistic postmodernism, able to do if they inherited the all too familiar 70’s square?

Many parishes understandably see the need to construct an entirely new space. One such example is St. Philip the Apostle Church in Lewisville, Texas; a congregation not known for being exceptionally traditional.

The Old St. Philip the Apostle Sanctuary, construction completed in 1977

The parish, over the course of many years, was able to raise the money for a brand new neo-Gothic church in Flower-Mound, the interior of which is currently incomplete and pictured below.

As beautiful and preferable as the building of a new church is for most parishes, this is rarely an option. The recent agglomeration of small local parishes into larger urban ones makes this very difficult. The late 20th century shortage of priests coupled with a declining percentage of mass attendance meant dioceses in the 1970s and 1980s shut down many small local parishes, and built very large, very central and very modern churches in their place. Building a new large church is a monumental expense most parishes simply can’t afford; and it doesn’t help that construction, labor, and land costs are at an all time high with no sign of decline in the near future.

So can a parish traditionalize a space designed to be antithetical to tradition? This question must be necessarily answered on a church by church basis, but let's first examine what is currently being done. An example I am intimately familiar with is the Church of the Incarnation, a parish located at the University of Dallas which serves as a stark archetype for the difficulties and pitfalls of traditionalizing modern spaces. The University of Dallas teaches us three important lessons in the traditionalization of modern churches: the importance of continuity, of artistic telos, and of recognizing the realities of your space.

The church was designed and built by architects Duane and Jane Landry in 1985 in the spirit of most modern churches, with an express emphasis on the community rather than the liturgy. Its circular form was derived from Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome, but the processional aisle was deliberately placed so that it wasn’t the focal point of the very large narthex. (A cheeky former chaplain reserved the URL www.bigbrowncircle.com for the church’s website) The altar is pushed forward to the center to emphasize communal participation. It is also situated on a North-South axis, and there is no entrance to the church except for from the East. Its paneled walls prevent any other liturgical art but a crucifix. The sanctuary naturally feeds into the narthex, but the narthex rather awkwardly blocks entry into the sanctuary. The sanctuary simply doesn’t feel like the focal point of the church. It is awkward to enter and almost entirely barren.

The blueprint of the Church of the Incarnation 

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Fra Filippo Lippi’s Coronation of the Virgin

Today marks the anniversary of the death in 1469 of the painter Fra Filippo Lippi, at the age of 63. He was born in Florence in 1406; two years later, his mother died while giving birth to his brother Giovanni. The boys were at first entrusted to an aunt, but she, being too poor to raise them properly, placed them in the city’s Carmelite priory in 1414. Filippo eventually joined the order and became a priest when he was still very young, perhaps less than 20. (“Fra” is the abbreviation of the Italian word “fratello – brother”, commonly used as a title for religious priests, as “don” is for seculars.) But he was clearly not well suited for the religious life, and after about seven years, left the monastery, although he was not released from his vows. (Irregularities of this kind were tolerated far too much before the Tridentine reform.)

The Madonna and Child with Two Angels, ca. 1460-65, by Fra Filippo Lippi. It is generally held that Lucrezia Buti, the mother of his children (as mentioned below), served as the model for the Virgin Mary. 

The sort of tour guides who spend more time telling anecdotes about artists than explaining their art have a lot to work with in the person of Fra Filippo. Most famously (or infamously), when he was fifty, and working in the city of Prato, about 12 miles to the north-west of Florence, he began a relationship with a Dominican novice nearly 30 years his junior, Lucrezia Buti, who bore him two children. The elder, a boy named for his father, is traditionally distinguished from him by the diminutive “Filippino”, and became a highly successful painter in his own right, after apprenticing first in his father’s workshop, and then with one of his father’s former students, Sandro Botticelli.

A self-portrait of Fra Filippo’s son Filippino, part of a painting which he added to the Brancacci Chapel in the 1480s, fifty years after Massaccio’s works there were first admired by his father.  

When the elder Filippo was still at the priory, the painter Masaccio was hired to fresco one of its side chapels, owned by a family named Brancacci. The Florentine art historian Giorgio Vasari recounts that Lippi, who had shown no aptitude at all for any kind of study, was so taken by Masaccio’s work that he took up drawing and painting himself. He quickly became good enough at this that he was able to embark on a career as an artist, in which he was very successful. However, his personal and professional conduct were so irregular that he was routinely broke, and therefore unable to consistently maintain a workshop, as an artist of his talent normally would, and as many less talented than he managed to do in those days of Florence’s great artistic flourishing.

The Tribute Money (the episode recounted in Matthew 17, 23-26), 1425, by Masaccio, one of the original paintings in the Brancacci chapel which inspired Filippo Lippi.

In 1439, he landed a very lucrative commission from a canon of the church of San Lorenzo named Francesco Maringhi. This priest was also the procurator of a Benedictine nunnery at a church dedicated to St Ambrose, for which the commission was made. The principal subject is the Coronation of the Virgin, a popular theme for women’s religious houses, and the painting is sometimes known as the Maringhi Coronation. Fra Filippo was also given enough money in advance to hire assistants to make and gild an elaborate frame, although this is now lost, along with all but one of the predella panels. (The frame seen here is modern.)

By this period, the Florentines had largely transformed the classic form of the late medieval polyptych, with Saints depicted each within their own discrete section of the frame, by removing the dividers to create a single continuous scene. Fra Filippo’s Coronation follows a trend set by earlier works such as The Coronation of the Virgin and The Adoration of the Magi by Lorenzo Monaco, and another, very famous depiction of the latter by Gentile da Fabriano.

Polyptych of the Coronation of the Virgin, ca. 1410, by the Sienese painter Andrea di Bartolo (1360/70 - 1428), a work which would have been considered very old fashioned by the artist’s Florentine contemporaries.

The Coronation of the Virgin, 1414, by the Florentine painter known as Lorenzo Monaco (Lawrence the monk), since he was a member of the Camaldolese Order; ca. 1370 - ca. 1425. Notice the opening of the space between the panels, contrasted with Andrea di Bartolo’s retention of the divisions between the sections.

The Adoration of the Magi, 1423, by Gentile da Fabriano

Gentile was an exponent of the International Gothic, a style which revels in rich decoration, and of which the altarpiece shown above is considered one of the finest examples. Filippo, on the other hand, was a typical Florentine, and concentrated his efforts on the solidity and perspective of his figures. This is done especially by greatly varying the shades of the colors within their robes. To give just one example, note how many different blues there are in the robes of God the Father and the Virgin Mary in the upper center.

Different shades of blue are also used to make a rather oddly striped heaven in the background of the lateral sections. This is often described as a reference to the seven heavenly spheres, but there are eleven bands on the left side, and twelve on the right. I suspect that they may rather be a reference to the original striped habit of the Carmelite Order to which Fra Filippo belonged.

I chose this altarpiece as a good example of Fra Filippo’s work partly because yesterday was the feast of the Most Holy Rosary. Of course, no such feast existed in his time, and indeed, the rosary itself was still an emergent custom, but by a happy coincidence, this painting contains not just the last Glorious Mystery, its principal subject, but also the first Joyful one, the Annunciation, in the two small round panels mounted into the frame. This was obviously a very popular subject everywhere, and was worked into countless altarpieces in different ways. For many Tuscans, including the Florentines, the Annunciation also held a special significance, since it was not just a major feast and a break in the austerity of Lent, but also the civil New Year’s Day. (This custom remained in use in Florence, and what later became the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, until 1749.)

I also have another reason to write about this painting today. Several years ago, while looking at it in the Uffizi Museum in Florence where it is now kept, I noticed something interesting about the other Saints included in it: there is one prominent figure for each of the months from June to December. St John the Baptist (June 24), who is a major patron of Florence, is at the extreme right; St Mary Magdalene (July 22) is the women in red in the lower middle, directly beneath the Virgin’s feet. (Although it is not very clearly visible, she is holding a jar of ointment under a veil.) St Lawrence (August 10), whose grill is almost invisible, is to the right of her, and of course, the Assumption is also celebrated in August.

The man mostly blocking the view of Lawrence is St Eustachius, who is celebrated on September 20th together with his wife Theopista (the woman staring out at the viewer) and their sons Agapitus and Theopistus: one of the altars of the church for which the painting was commissioned was dedicated to them. The bishop in green next to Mary Magdalene is St Martin (November 11), while St Ambrose (December 7), the titular saint of the church, is depicted at the lower left in Advent violet.

Assuming this arrangement to be deliberate, October is thus far unaccounted for. One might expect St Francis, whose feast is on the 4th, to make an appearance, especially in Tuscany, where his order was very popular and influential, and a significant contributor to the region’s artistic culture. But he is not present.

After my visit to the Uffizi, I happened to pass a used bookstore, where I found a mid-19th century copy of the breviary supplement for the archdiocese of Florence, which solved the mystery. In it, I discovered that today is the feast of a virgin martyr called Reparata, whose legendary acts say that she was beheaded during the persecution of Decius (250-51 AD) at Caesarea Maritima, a port city on the coast of what is now the northern part of Israel. Parts of her relics were translated to various places in Italy, including Florence, and she was the titular Saint of the city’s previous cathedral. (Extensive remains of this older structure were discovered under the floor of the new church during excavations conducted from 1965-74.)

The woman to the left of Theopista, wearing green and looking down, is usually described by art history books, if she is mentioned at all, as one of the several “Saints without identifiable attribute” in this painting. It seems likely to me that she must St Reparata, who would complete the series of the months. The woman to the left of her, also without attribute, might therefore be St Pelagia, who shares Reparata’s feast day, and was venerated in many parts of Italy, including Milan, where she was formerly a co-titular of the cathedral.

There are possibly further mysteries to this painting yet to be explored; for example, there does not seem to be any convincing explanation for the presence of Job to the left of St Martin. Suffice it to note for now that the figure on the right kneeling behind John the Baptist, with the banderole that reads “Is(te) perfecit opus – this man completed the work”, was formerly assumed to be Lippi himself, but is now generally thought to be the commissioner. The figure more likely to be the artist’s self-portrait is the man in the white habit looking out at the viewer on the lower left. And perhaps it is not too much to speculate that the other Carmelite next to him, who seems rapt in his vision of God and the Virgin in heaven, indicates Filippo’s awareness of his failure in his first and greater calling, as he himself stares out at the world instead.

Saint Michael, Sacred Liturgy, and the Restoration of Beauty

I have the good fortune of being obligated, for professional reasons, to regularly spend quality time with a wide variety of (digitized) medieval manuscripts. One result of this enlightening research is an appreciation for the diversity of artistic styles in pre-Renaissance Western culture. Sometimes we may find ourselves thinking in terms of an oversimplified dichotomy between highly iconographic modes in the East and a mildly symbolic proto-naturalism in the West. In reality, pre-modern religious paintings in East and West form a diverse continuum of artistic techniques, and a few outstanding artifacts can help us to reflect upon this.

One would be the Lindisfarne Gospels, with its enigmatic fusion of styles and astonishing decorations:

Another is the book of biblical scenes painted by William de Brailes, an English illuminator active during the thirteenth century. The example below, which depicts the Israelites worshipping the golden calf, has strongly iconographic features.

The Codex Calixtinus, dating to the mid-twelfth century and associated with both western France and northern Spain, is highly stylized and difficult to categorize:

Also from Spain, perhaps Segovia or Burgos, is the Hours of Infante Don Alfonso of Castile. The foliate ornamentation and grisaille-with-gold tonality in this book are deeply pleasing to me; there is an intriguing sense of mysticism in the serene faces and expressionistic scenes, along with a strong note of surreality in the surrounding details.

However, when it comes to reimagining artistic dichotomies, nothing quite compares to a twelfth-century masterpiece known as the Stammheim Missal. The illuminations in this manuscript—almost sui generis in style, and apparently the work of one extraordinarily talented monk—combine vibrant colors, curvilinear forms, strong geometries, simplified human figures, fascinating visual poetry, and profound visual theology into yet more compelling evidence that traditional Christian liturgy was the heart of Europe’s artistic genius.

The personification of Wisdom beneath God the Creator.

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The Stammheim Missal emerged from that fundamental engine of medieval learning and creativity: the Benedictine scriptorium. It was made in the twelfth century at Hildesheim Abbey, in north-central Germany, and eventually found its way to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles; reproductions can be found on the Getty’s website. Despite the fact that it was produced over eight hundred years ago, all the pages are intact, the colors haven’t faded, and the precious metals still shine. Rarely do I see such vivid proof that skilled craftsmen working with authentic, natural materials can produce artifacts of astounding quality and longevity, even in the total absence of advanced technology.

David with companion musicians.

The Michaeliskirche—the abbey church of Hildesheim—is a superb Romanesque structure. It was dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel on his feast day, September 29th, in the year 1022, and rededicated to him on the same day nine years later, when construction was complete. When I reflect on the life expectancy of modern buildings and institutions, the longevity is almost breathtaking. The church you see below was built one thousand years ago.

St. Michael’s Church in Hildesheim, Germany. Photo by Heinz-Josef Lücking.

In the culture that produced the monastery that produced the Stammheim Missal, the feast of St. Michael the Archangel was a high holy day and a rich folkloric celebration. It was also, of course, a very special day for the monks of Hildesheim, who were careful to colorfully accentuate the celebration of their patron in the missal’s September calendar page:

And the historiated initial that introduces St. Michael’s feast day is a captivating and mysterious interplay of stolid rectangles, absorbing curves, bold colors, mischievous beasts, and diversely occupied humans.

As Gregory DiPippo explained in an NLM article published on this same day two years ago, this feast is of venerable antiquity and is not restricted exclusively to St. Michael:

The traditional title of today’s feast is “The Dedication of St Michael the Archangel,” a term already found ca. 650 A.D. in the lectionary of Wurzburg, the oldest of the Roman Rite that survives, and in the ancient sacramentaries....
Despite the fact that the feast’s title refers specifically only to St Michael, September 29th is really the feast of all the Angels, as stated repeatedly in the texts of both the Office and Mass.

That Michael shares his feast with other angels subtracts nothing from the honor that we give to him on this day. Rather, it reinforces his exalted role in salvation history and Christian spirituality, for his celestial renown was gained not as a champion in single combat but as the victorious commander of the angelic host. And indeed, this is precisely how the Stammheim illuminator portrayed him in the portrait that precedes the prayers for his feast:

You can further explore the historical context and theological resonance of this remarkable image in an article that I co-authored with my Substack colleague Amelia Sims McKee. It includes vibrant, wonderfully detailed images of the painting, and I hope that it might serve as an enjoyable and profitable meditation for this great feast, nowadays sadly understated, of the prince of the heavenly armies.

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Dr. Ena Giurescu Heller, former professor of art history and specialist in medieval art, makes a crucial observation about artwork produced in the Middle Ages. She suggests that the modern “understanding of and response to medieval religious art is completely different (antithetical, really) to the response of its contemporaries.” Medieval Christians were surrounded by church buildings, stained-glass narratives, frescoes, statues, vessels, vestments, and illuminations that, despite their aesthetic magnificence,

were neither objects of any veneration (least of all aesthetic), nor ends unto themselves. They were tools—tools for the liturgy, and ... tools for transporting their beholders to the divine realm they symbolize and serve.

Furthermore, these tools for the liturgy were also inspired by the liturgy, which preceded them and which even in the absence of sumptuous visual or musical artwork was artistic in the most fundamental and transcendent sense of the word.

I say again: traditional Christian liturgy was the heart of Europe’s artistic genius. The artistic consciousness of Western civilization has suffered from long, dismal years of cardiac arrest. And yet, as the psalmist says, in the sight of God all these years are “as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.” For three days and three nights the heart of Our Lord was still. The resurrection will come, and in the meantime, let us pray that St. Michael press onward in his campaign against the Church’s ancient Enemy. We know, as Milton did, who the victor will be:

Now Night her course began and over Heaven
Inducing darkness grateful truce imposed
And silence on the odious din of war.
Under her cloudy covert both retired,
Victor and vanquished: On the foughten field
Michaël and his angels prevalent
Encamping, placed in guard their watches round,
Cherubic waving fires. On th’ other part,
Satan with his rebellious disappeared.

Symbols of the Four Evangelists

In Jewish tradition, the vision which the Prophet Ezekiel has in the first chapter of his book is called by the Hebrew word “merkabah – a chariot”, even though this word does not occur in the text itself. The ancient rabbis placed the study and interpretation of this chapter, which is difficult to understand in any language, under a special restriction; St Jerome knew of this, as he writes in the prologue of his commentary on Ezekiel:

I shall undertake (a commentary on) the prophet Ezekiel, whose difficulty the Hebrew tradition proves. For among them, unless one has completed the age of priestly ministry, that is, his thirtieth year, he is not permitted to read the beginning of Genesis, nor the Song of Songs, nor the beginning or end of this book…

The Talmud therefore mentions that when one rabbi once offered to explain the passage to another, the latter replied “I am not old enough.”

The Vision of Ezekiel, by Raphael, 1518

The Christian tradition that the four animals which Ezekiel sees in the midst of the “chariot” are prophetic symbols of the four Evangelists is first recorded in the writings of St Irenaeus of Lyon towards the end of the second century. The order in which he explains them, however, is different from that which is now commonly received. In his treatise “Against the Heresies” (3.11.8), he is concerned to prove that there are only four Gospels which authentically witness to the life of Christ, as opposed to the many Gospels of the Gnostics whom he seeks to refute; and moreover, that these four were prophesied in the Old Testament. He therefore explains the four-faced cherubim which Ezekiel sees in his tenth chapter by the words of Psalm 79, “Thou that sittest upon the Cherubim, be made manifest.” “…the Word, the maker of all, He that sitteth upon the cherubim, and contains all things, He who was manifested to men, has given us the Gospel under four aspects, but bound together by one Spirit.”

He then takes the lion as the symbol of St John, representing the power of the Word in the creation and ruling of the world; the ox, an animal of priestly sacrifice, as the symbol of Luke, who begins his Gospel with the priest Zachariah; the man as the symbol of St Matthew, who begins with Christ’s human genealogy; and the eagle as the symbol of Mark, who begins “with the prophetical spirit coming down from on high to men, saying, ‘The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as it is written in Esaias the prophet,’ … and on this account he made a compendious and cursory narrative, for such is the prophetical character.”

St Augustine accepted this symbolic explanation of these animals, but proposes what he calls “a more reasonable application of the figures” than that made by St Irenaeus and others, without critiquing anyone by name. In his book On the Harmony of the Gospels (1.6.9), he refers the lion, the king of the beasts, to Matthew, who speaks about Christ’s royal descent from King David, and tells us that the Magi called Him “the King of the Jews.” The man is referred to Mark, “who handles the things which the man Christ did”, and the ox to Luke for the same reason as Irenaeus. Since the first three animals “have their course upon this earth, (i.e., they walk and do not fly) … in like manner, those three evangelists occupy themselves chiefly with the things which Christ did in the flesh … Whereas John … soars like an eagle above the clouds of human infirmity, and gazes upon the light of the unchangeable truth (i.e. the divinity of Christ) with those keenest and steadiest eyes of the heart.” This last part refers to a common belief in the ancient world that eagles could look directly at the sun.

Folio 27v of the Books of Kells, ca. 800, showing the Symbols of the Four Evangelists.

It is to St Jerome that we owe the formation of this tradition as we now hold it, in which the man, lion, ox and eagle, are the symbols respectively of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In the prologue of his commentary on the Gospel of St Matthew, he writes that

The book of Ezekiel also proves that these four Gospels were foretold long before, in which the first vision is formed thus: “And in the midst thereof the likeness of four living creatures: and the countenance thereof, the face of a man, and the face of a lion, and the face of an ox, and the face of an eagle.” The first face of the man signifies Matthew, who began to write as of a man, “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” The second is Mark, in which the voice of a lion roaring in the desert is heard, “A voice of one crying in the desert: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.” The third is that of the ox, who prefigures the Evangelist Luke, who took his beginning from the priest Zachariah. The fourth is the Evangelist John, who taking the wings of an eagle, and hastening to higher matters, treats of the Word of God.

This order is repeated exactly, and for the same reasons, by St Gregory the Great at the beginning of his fourth homily on Ezekiel. Jerome then confirms the prophetic meaning of the vision by reference to the appearance of the same four animals in the fourth chapter of the Apocalypse, that “are full of eyes, and rested not day and night, saying: ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, who was, and who is, and who is to come.’ ” The animals in the chariot in Ezekiel 1, and the cherubim in chapter ten are both described as “full of eyes.” He goes to make the same point first made by Irenaeus: “By all these things, it is clearly shown that only the four Gospels ought to be received, and all the ditties of the apocrypha ought to be sung by the heretics, who are dead, rather than by the living men of the Church.”

Detail of the St John Altarpiece by Hans Memling, 1474-79, showing the vision of St John in Apocalypse 4.

Part of Ezekiel’s vision, 1, 10-14, is read as the Epistle at the Masses of Ss Matthew and Mark, but not those of Ss Luke or John. (It has been removed from the lectionary of the post-Conciliar rite.) In the Tridentine Breviary, Ezekiel, 1, 1-12 is read at Matins of Ss Matthew, Mark and Luke, and the whole of Apocalypse 4 is read on the Octave of St John. This is the limit of the liturgical use of these passages on the feasts of the Evangelists. In its habitual conservatism, the Roman Breviary has proper readings for the Evangelists at Matins, but uses the common office of Apostles for everything else; St John has a mostly proper Office, but the other three do not. None of the proper musical texts (antiphons, hymns, responsories) of St John’s office or the common of Apostles cites either of these passages.

There does exist, however, a more complete proper office of the Evangelists, which is found in the Breviaries of the Dominican, Carmelite and Premonstratensian Orders, and most medieval Uses. It has nine responsories, all of which quote the visions of Ezekiel, although these were not received by the Dominicans. It also includes these three major antiphons, for the Magnificat of both Vespers and for the Benedictus at Lauds, which refer explicitly to the tradition of the four animals as symbols of the Evangelists.

Ad Magn. Aña Ecce ego Joannes vidi ostium apertum in caelo; et ecce sedes posita erat in eo, et in medio sedis et in circuitu ejus quattuor animalia plena oculis ante et retro: et dabant gloriam et honorem et benedictionem sedenti super thronum, viventi in saecula saeculorum.
At the Magnificat of First Vespers Behold, I, John, saw a door was opened in heaven, and behold there was a throne set in heaven, and in the midst of the throne, and round about it were four living creatures, full of eyes before and behind; and they gave glory, and honor, and blessing to him that sitteth on the throne, who liveth for ever and ever.

Ad Bened. Aña In medio et in circuitu sedis Dei quattuor animalia senas alas habentia, oculis undique plena, non cessant nocte ac die dicere: Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dominus Deus omnipotens, qui erat et qui est, et qui venturus est.
At the Benedictus In the midst and round about the throne of God, four living creatures, having wings, full of eyes on all sides, rest not day and night, saying: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, who was, and who is, and who is to come.

Ad Magn. Aña Tua sunt haec, Christe, opera, qui sanctos tuos ita glorificas, ut etiam dignitatis gratiam in eis futuram praeire miraculis facias: tu insignes Evangelii praedicatores animalium caelestium admirabili figura praesignasti: his namque caeleste munus collatum gloriosis indiciis es dignatus ostendere: hinc laus, hinc gloria tibi resonet in saecula.
At the Magnificat of Second Vespers These are Thy works, o Christ, who so glorify Thy Saints, that Thou also cause the grace of dignity that will be in them to be first preceded by miracles. Thou marked beforehand the wondrous preachers of the Gospel by the marvelous figure of the heavenly animals; for by these glorious signs, Thou deigned to show the heavenly gift given to them; hence let praise, hence glory resound to Thee forever.

The Communion of St Jerome by Domenichino

It is to be expected that the Renaissance would greatly admire the figure of St Jerome, second only to St Augustine as the most prolific writer among the Latin Fathers. Augustine himself describes Jerome as “learned in the Greek and Latin tongues, and furthermore in Hebrew,” and says that he had “read all those before him, or nearly all, who had written anything about the Church’s teaching in both parts of the world,” i.e., among the Greek or Latin writers. (Contra Julianum 1, 34) The scholars of the Renaissance prided themselves on their rediscovery of the classical world, and their return to the original sources of Greco-Roman culture. By learning Hebrew and producing a new and better Latin translation of the Bible, that which we now call the Vulgate, St Jerome had done what they themselves were doing, but with the very Word of God itself.

In the 15th century, which produced a great many images of St Jerome, he is often shown as a scholar in his study, sitting at a desk and surrounded by books. Since he had revised the Latin version of the Gospels at the behest of Pope St Damasus I, and served for a time as his secretary, he is traditionally depicted as a cardinal, which the contemporary Pope’s secretary would normally be. There are few episodes of what one might describe as a legendary character attached to him, but a famous one is the Christian version of the Androcles and the lion story, that while he was living in his monastery in Bethlehem, he removed a thorn from the paw of a lion, which henceforth became his pet. A lion is therefore usually shown in the study along with the Saint.

St Jerome in His Study, by Jan van Eyck, 1442 

A contrary trend, however, shows St Jerome as an ascetic and penitent, praying in the desert, as he did indeed spend much of his life as a monk in the deserts of the Holy Land. As evidenced by many of his writings, but especially by his fierce polemics against the errors of his times, Jerome was not the kind of man to do anything by halves; the apprehension of his character gave rise to the tradition by which he is shown beating his own breast with a rock as an act of penance. Pope Benedict XIV (1740-58) is said to have remarked on such a representation of the Saint, who also quarreled violently with several of his friends (including Augustine), “If it is true, that would be the only way you got into heaven.” The figure of Jerome the Ascetic corrects a tendency common among the learned men of the Renaissance, (Erasmus is a classic example), to disdain the Christian ideals of detachment and renunciation, a disdain which all too often degenerates into further disdain for “the ignorant”, and one’s fellow man generally.

St Jerome in the Wilderness, by Jacopo del Sellaio, later 15th century

Before the middle of the 16th-century, these two manners of representing St Jerome appear side by side, each with roughly the same frequency. In the Counter-Reformation, however, Jerome the Ascetic and Penitent comes to dominate almost completely. One of the most famous such paintings of the Roman Counter-Reformation is that of Domenico Zampieri, a painter from Bologna generally known by the nickname “Domenichino – Little Dominic.” After coming to Rome in 1602 at the age of twenty, and making a name for himself first as a student of Annibale Carracci, and then with various projects of his own, he was commissioned in 1614 to do his first altarpiece, for the church of San Girolamo della Carità, once the home of St Philip Neri. (“Girolamo” is Italian for “Jerome”.)

One of his contemporaries, Gian Pietro Bellori, described Domenichino’s Communion of St Jerome as follows: “Who could ever speak worthily and at great enough length of such a stupendous work, if one observes its drawing and expression? These are the parts that are unanimously considered the merits of Domenichino, over and above all other painters of this century.” He also reported that Nicholas Poussin, a much-esteemed French painter of the era who worked most of his life in Rome, “was ravished by its beauty, and used to set it beside Raphael’s Transfiguration… as the two greatest paintings that lend glory to the brush.” (Paintings in the Vatican, ed. Carlo Pietrangeli, p. 474) Another contemporary, Giovanni Lanfranco, famously accused Domenichino of plagiarizing the work from Agostino Caracci, a brother of his teacher, but he was fiercely defended from this imputation by Bellori and Poussin among others.

The Communion of St Jerome, by Domenico Zampieri, 1614; now in the Painting Gallery of the Vatican Museums 

St Jerome was a figure at once important and difficult for the Protestant reformation. He was the only Father of the Church to whose authority the early Protestants could appeal in their rejection of the Deuterocanonical books of the Bible, (he is cited to this effect in the Articles of the Church of England), even though he himself did not hold his position against them consistently. John Calvin famously stated about St Augustine, “totus noster est – he belongs entirely to us”, (a typically gross exaggeration), and as noted above, Augustine praised Jerome as the most learned man of their age. But Jerome was also a fierce defender of many things rejected by the Protestants: devotion to the Saints and the cult of relics, the Papacy, asceticism and monasticism, celibacy and virginity.

In Domenichino’s painting, therefore, an exemplary work of the Counter-Reformation, Jerome the Ascetic comes entirely to the fore, and there is no trace of Jerome the Scholar. His open robes reveal the body of an elderly man emaciated by years of fasts and long vigils. The robes themselves are cardinalitial red, representing the highest institutions of governance in the Church. A woman kneeling down beside Jerome kisses his hand, venerating him as a Saint. He himself gazes in adoration at the Host of the Viaticum which he is about to receive; Domenichino emphasizes its importance by making the background immediately around it very dark, and having several of the lines in the painting converge upon it. The priest who administers the Host is holding it in the traditional Catholic manner, between his canonical digits, and under a paten.

The Catholicity, i.e., the universality, of the true Church founded by Christ is highlighted by the fact that the priest is assisted by a deacon in a Roman dalmatic (note the tassels on the back), and another wearing the crossed horarion and cuffs (called “epimanikia”) of the Byzantine tradition. St Jerome spent about 35 years of his life in Bethlehem, and died there on this day in the year 419; in his time, the city had Christian communities of both Latin and Greek speakers, especially after the sack of Rome in 410, when many Romans fled to the East. The Counter-Reformation often sought to proclaim, as it does here, the unified witness of East and West, the Latin Fathers and the Greek, against the theological innovations of the 16th century.

Finally, we may note the Angels in the upper right hand corner, watching the scene and ready to welcome the dying Saint into their company. They are shown as smiling children, the emissaries of a loving and benevolent God, unlike the deeply unpleasant deity of Calvin. They will soon bring St Jerome before the Lord, who will receive him with the words sung at the Benedictus in the Office of Confessors, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”