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.

If Shakespeare Survived the Adapters, the Old Mass Will Survive the Reformers

The digital grapevine is astir with forebodings. I am told that the eucharistic liturgy of my ancestors—not the Protestants who settled in Pennsylvania, that is, but rather the von Keims of medieval Germany—is once again ritus non gratus at the Vatican.

Actually, the rite threatened with imposed obsolescence is not exactly that of my ancestors. Liturgical forms, like the living beings who enact and behold them, tend to change and grow in response to their environment, even after they have reached maturity. Tradition is not stagnation, after all, and the act of “handing down” implies both a giver, in the past, and a recipient, in the future. In fact, a certain Professor Grillo, of whom I know very little, explains that tradition is the future: “la tradizione non è passato, ma futuro.”

I agree that tradition is not the past, or at least not merely the past, but I do not see how it can be equated with the future. The professor no doubt recognizes how impossible this maxim is given the etymology and standard denotations of the word “tradition,” so I will assume that his language here is operating on an alternative plane of meaning—and I don’t fault him for that. I teach rhetoric, the sister of poetry, and therefore spend a great deal of time on alternative planes of meaning.

And it is precisely because I spend so much time wandering the poetic uplands of life that I do fault Professor Grillo, not for the style of his discourse, but for the apparent objective of his discourse—namely, the disappearance of the Roman-Frankish Mass of western Christendom from the lived reality of the modern Church. Such an objective is incomprehensible to me, for this Mass is not merely a means to a sacrificial or sacramental end. It is a work of art that transcends every other cultural achievement in European history. This Mass is poetry in the fullest sense of the word—a poetic masterpiece, in fact, encompassing and sublimating every facet of the artistic experience, and appealing to every facet of the human experience. What society treats their artistic heritage this way? Who even in the secular world—a world of convulsive re-evaluations and tenacious presentism, a world where nothing is sacred and where the very concept of sacrality is questioned—who even in that world espouses the wholesale suppression of an artistic corpus so magnificent and influential and historically momentous as the liturgical rites of western Christianity?

Let us at least be consistent. If we are to bury the Old Mass under the shifting sands of the Pauline rite, let us also bury Shakespeare and everything he wrote. We have plenty of new plays, including some written in the 1960s, and these are better anyway: shorter, more colloquial, more “relevant” to modernity, and of course, much easier to understand—all that archaic language and iambic pentameter and rhetorical artistry is passé de mode and just makes Shakespeare’s plays even less like a television show.

At least Shakespeare didn’t have the gall to write in a dead language like Latin—well, actually, Latin words and phrases do occur regularly in his plays, and one of these is among his most famous: Et tu, Brute? Dante condemned Brutus to the lowest circle of Hell, because he betrayed Julius Caesar, his benefactor and his lord. Two others were there with him. One was Cassius, also a leading figure in the betrayal and assassination of Caesar. The other was Judas Iscariot.

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Shakespeare’s works are still known, admired, and loved all over the world. And despite the widespread penchant for non-historical costuming and a few other experimental tendencies, modern scholars and readers and theater-goers are interested above all in the “authentic” Shakespeare, that is, in the plays as he originally wrote them. This was not always the case.

Shakespeare died in 1616. In 1642, the Puritans ordered all of the theaters in London to close. The prohibition was lifted in 1660, which marks the beginning of the historical period known as the Restoration. Newly reopened theaters needed something to perform, and since playwrights had little reason to compose new plays during the puritanical clampdown, the works of Shakespeare and other pre-1642 playwrights were revived.

However, Shakespeare’s style had already gone out of fashion—oh “cruel fate / And giddy Fortune’s furious fickle wheel, / That goddess blind, / That stands upon the rolling restless stone” (Henry V, III, 6). Since something very serious was at stake (namely, profits), the theaters called in the Reformers. The result was that “Shakespeare” plays performed in the Restoration and in the eighteenth century were commonly rewritten to satisfy a new generation of audiences. Some infamous examples include King Lear with a happy ending and a patchwork mutilation of As You Like It entitled Love in a Forest.

King Lear in the Storm, by Benjamin West (d. 1820).

But Shakespeare survived the adapters. The reason is simple: superlative poetry endures. This was known even in the early first century, when the Roman poet Ovid was writing the Metamorphoses:

And now a great work I have completed,
which not the ire of Jove, nor fire,
nor sword or devouring old age can unmake.
Whenever it will, let that day—
which only over this body hath power—
let that day bring an end for me
to life’s uncertain span.
In my better part, however, I, immortal,
shall be borne above the stars on high,
and my name shall never die.
Wherever Roman power to conquered lands extends,
by the mouth of the people I shall be read
and—if any prophecies of poets have truth—
I shall live in fame, till all ages end. (Book XV, lines 871–79)

The poet was right. Ovid is long dead, but his literary creations are still studied and admired to this day.

The precise status of poetic works, even the finest works ever created, will rise and fall as the great waves of fashion and ideology and innovation crash upon the shore of human society. Nevertheless, poetry has proven remarkably resilient. Like the divine Word from which its power ultimately flows, artistic language captivates, enchants, and purifies the hearts of men, in every age and in every land. I speak here of language in all its forms: verse, music, narrative, oratory, supplication, clothing, iconography, symbolic gesture, ritualistic movement, and yes, even silence. The “Latin” Mass speaks many languages, and not one of them is dead.

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The Metamorphoses survived the fall of the Roman Empire. Shakespeare survived the Puritans and the Age of Adaptations. And the Old Mass will survive the current pontificate. A poetic lamp so brilliant and edifying and passionate as the traditional Roman liturgy cannot be hidden under the bushel basket of papal directives, for the simple reason that it will set those directives aflame before the ink is dry. The Old Mass will endure, because it is a sanctifying, Truth-telling masterpiece wrought by God and man during the Church’s most fervent and fruitful centuries, and because ordinary Catholics all over the world thirst for its ancient, elevating, life-changing poetry.

If I live to see the day when the liturgy of my fathers is once again loved and honored by the popes and prelates of the Church, I’ll have an excellent reason to recall a few more of Shakespeare’s Latin words, this time spoken by King Henry V after his miraculous victory at Agincourt:

Come, go we in procession to the village,
And be it death proclaimèd through our host
To boast of this or take that praise from God
Which is His only.
...
Do we all holy rites.
Let there be sung Non nobis, and Te Deum,
The dead with charity enclosed in clay,
And then to Calais, and to England then,
Where ne’er from France arrived more happy men.

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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.

“The Old Leaven” of Catholic Truth, Part 2: Eucharist as Sacrifice in the Language of Medieval England

In the first part of this article, I discussed the relationship between eucharistic belief and eucharistic language, taking modern Catholicism and Reformation England as examples of belief and language deteriorating together. The counterexample I provided was medieval England, where devotion to the Real Presence was robust and had been nourished for centuries not only by the strong, poetic Latin of the liturgy but also by various English expressions that helped the faithful to understand and love the Blessed Sacrament.

As I mentioned in Part One, the term “eucharist” was not a part of English-language vocabulary until the fourteenth century. In the second part of this article, we’ll consider the words and phrases that Englishmen of the early and high Middle Ages used when they were speaking, writing, and thinking about the Holy Eucharist.[1]

The Mass of Saint Gregory, a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer (d. 1528) depicting a eucharistic miracle whose legendary account was popular among English Catholics in the late Middle Ages.

“Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d”

The most standard item of eucharistic vocabulary in Old and Middle English is also one of the most unfamiliar in modern English: housel (pronounced “HOW-zuhl” and also spelled husel, housul, howsell, etc.). This word was used as a noun meaning primarily “the Eucharist” and as a verb meaning “to administer the Eucharist to.”

Actually, countless speakers and students of modern English have seen this word, but they may not have noticed it or understood its meaning. It appears in Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, when the ghost of Prince Hamlet’s father describes his murder at the hands of “that adulterate beast” Claudius. The ghost laments that he was

Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatch’d;
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d;
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.
O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!

King Hamlet relates, with admirable horror, that the murder deprived him of a good Christian death, since he died “unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d,” that is, without receiving the Eucharist, unprepared (without confessing his sins), and unanointed (without receiving extreme unction).

Hamlet (with companions) and the Ghost, by Henry Fuseli (d. 1825).

The deeper psychological and emotional effects of a word are greatly influenced by the word’s etymology and its range of meanings. In the case of “housel,” the term’s origin and multiple meanings convey powerful truths about the nature of the Blessed Sacrament. It is related to Germanic words meaning “sacrifice” or “offering,” and in Old English it was used, though perhaps infrequently, to mean “sacrifice” in a non-eucharistic sense. Over time, “housel” became more closely associated with the Holy Eucharist, but not in a restrictive way: in addition to denoting the sacred species, it referred to receiving Communion and celebrating the eucharistic sacrifice.

Thus, the notion of sacrifice is encoded within the very word “housel,” which binds the Eucharist as spiritual nourishment to religious sacrifice in general and, more specifically, to the sacred liturgical sacrifice through which this nourishment is produced. A term that memorably conveys this association would be beneficial in any age and in our own would perhaps have an especially salutary effect.

The Body of God

There is a striking tendency in medieval English to use “God,” without any qualifying words, as a name for Christ. Here are a few examples:

“The old fiend led them astray with lying wiles, ... so that they crucified God himself” (Cynewulf, Elene; ninth century)

“Therein was closed a nail great / That was driven through God’s feet” (Short English Metrical Chronicle; fourteenth century)

“Here must God take out Adam” (stage direction, referring to Christ, in a cycle play for the Harrowing of Hell; late fourteenth century)

This usage is now officially deemed “obsolete,” and indeed, it clashes quite strongly with the speech patterns of modern English, despite being theologically sound. I find its forceful simplicity refreshing, and one could hardly find a more concise way to affirm the hypostatic union.

Medieval eucharistic terminology displaying this same tendency includes God’s flesh, the flesh and blood of God’s body, and Godes lichama, this last meaning in modern English “God’s body” or, perhaps more accurately, “God’s living body.” These titles are surely due for a revival. I for one would benefit from more frequently contemplating the Blessed Sacrament not only as corpus Christi but as corpus Dei, that is, as the sacrificial flesh of my dear Savior but also as the eternal and glorious Body of God—uncreated Light, infinite Love, and the very Principle of all that exists.

Detail of The Last Supper, by Giorgio Vasari (d. 1574).

Journey Bread

The idea of Holy Communion as preparation for death was far more pronounced in medieval England than it is today:

The reception of communion was not the primary mode of lay encounter with the Host. Everyone received at Easter, and one’s final communion, the viaticum or “journey money” given on the deathbed, was crucially important to medieval people.... For most people, most of the time the Host was something to be seen, not to be consumed.[2]

Infrequent Communion was the norm in this society, even for some religious. The clergy who attended the eleventh-century Council of Aenham expected the laity to receive three times per year, and the Laws of Cnut, issued around the same time and drafted by Archbishop Wulfstan, likewise mentioned thrice-yearly Communion. The thirteenth-century document Ancrene Wisse (i.e., Anchoresses’ Guide) states that anchoresses, like lay brothers, should receive only fifteen times per year, since “me let leasse of þe þing þet me haueð ofte” (“one values less the thing which one has often”).[3]

A page from the law code of King Cnut. Cotton MS Nero A I, f. 16r, courtesy of the British Library. I find this script captivating.

For ordinary Catholics of medieval England, the Eucharist was not consumed as a daily (or weekly, or maybe even monthly) Bread, and it naturally acquired greater prominence as viaticum—sanctifying Bread for that final and supremely important voyage toward the setting sun of earthly life. Thus, one of the Old English titles for the Blessed Sacrament was wegneste, meaning “provision for the journey” or, more literally, “way food.”

Fear, Love, and Adoration

The collection of terms given above is not exhaustive. Indeed, no exhaustive list could be compiled, for Old English manuscripts are few, and the eucharistic devotion of the Anglo-Saxons, a fervent and poetic people, was vast. I’ll conclude with the words of Thomas Bridgett, an English scholar and priest of the nineteenth century who converted to Catholicism after refusing to take the oath of royal supremacy:

For more than a thousand years the races that successively peopled [Great Britain] regarded the celebration of this Sacrament as the central rite of their religion, the principal means of divine worship, the principal channel of divine grace. The Holy Eucharist was the great mystery of faith, the object not only of fear and of love, but also of supreme adoration.[4]

NOTES

1. Much of the information in this article is built upon the doctoral research, completed in 1932, of Sister Mary Joseph Cravens.

2. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580, p. 95.

3. The author also stipulates the days on which the anchoresses will communicate: “(i) Mid-winter Dei, (ii) Tweofte Dei [Twelfth Day, i.e., Epiphany], (iii) Condelmeasse Dei, (iiii) a Sunnedei mid-weibitweonen [midway between] thet ant Easter, other Ure Leafdi Dei [or Our Lady’s Day, i.e., the Annunciation], yef he is neh the Sunnedei, forthe hehnesse, (v) Easter Dei, (vi) the thridde Sunnedei th’refter [the third Sunday after Easter], (vii) Hali Thursdei, (viii) Witsunne Dei, (ix) Midsumer Dei, (x) Seinte Marie Dei Magdaleine, (xi) the Assumptiun, (xii) the Nativite, (xiii) Seinte Mihales Dei, (xiii) Alle Halhene Dei [All Saints’ Day], (xv), Seint Andrews Dei.” See Ancrene Wisse: Part Eight, edited by Robert Hasenfratz.

4. Thomas Bridgett, History of the Holy Eucharist in Great Britain, Volume 1, p. 1.

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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.

A Tale of Two Lectionaries: Qualitative versus Quantitative Measures

In recent years, I have been drawn into research on the revised lectionary, which is often hailed as one of the great gains of the liturgical reform. The fullest presentation of my findings is published in the proceedings of Sacra Liturgia 2015, Liturgy in the Twenty-First Century (pp. 287-320), but additional considerations are found in a chapter of my book Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis, the Foreword to Matthew Hazell’s book Index Lectionum, the essay I contributed to a forthcoming volume from Emmaus Road[1], my article on the glaring omission of 1 Cor 11:27–29 from the revised lectionary, and my article on the purging of Psalms in the Liturgy of the Hours. It must be admitted that as one delves more deeply into the subject, one finds ever more disturbing things.

In his thought-provoking book Work of Human Hands, Rev. Anthony Cekada claims that the new lectionary “contains more Scripture but less of its actual message.”[2] At first sight, this claim may seem incredible. After all, does not the massive increase in passages read aloud automatically mean that more of the message of God’s word must be present?

It is, however, easy to illustrate the truth of what Fr. Cekada is saying by means of a comparison.

Let us say that an erudite publisher wishes to bring out a collection of “classic Shakespeare texts” and stipulates that the book must be relatively compact. A capable editor, thoroughly familiar with the plays, would range through the Bard’s tragedies, comedies, histories, and romances, selecting famous speeches and favorite characters as well as an occasional lesser-known odd, dark, curious, or lyrical passage. Even though only a small percentage of the whole content will end up included, the resulting florilegium will nevertheless be truly representative of the whole, flavored with all aspects of the Bard’s genius.

Now, imagine another publisher, more up-to-date in his views (and therefore more narrow-minded), who agrees that Shakespeare is, after all, an author to reckon with — but only in those aspects of his work that are acceptable to modern readers, since today’s men and women do not like to be reminded of sin, death, judgment, hell, and other unpleasant things. This publisher also feels that the tragic element has been rather overdone, so he wishes to have excerpts from the comedies, histories, and romances, but nothing from the tragedies. And because typesetting and printing have become so easy and affordable, he decides that he can bring out a multi-volume set. This publisher hires an editor whom he instructs to do all of the above. He must include a far greater quantity of Shakespeare, but he must avoid the “difficult” parts. The work is executed and three shiny volumes roll off the presses.

The notice for Thomas Bowdler's The Family Shakspeare of 1807

Would we not say, in all honesty, that no matter what percentage of Shakespeare finds its way into the latter set of volumes, they are not, in fact, representative of the whole, owing to the politically correct (and thus arbitrary and subjective) editorial policy? Would we not say that the other publisher’s single volume, though much more compact, can better lay claim to being a synopsis of Shakespeare?

Yes, this is exactly what we would say.

This hypothetical example manifests a universal truth: one must first embrace the whole as whole before one can fairly select parts as parts. In other words, to know what parts are important, and to know how they may be used when taken out of their larger context, demands an appreciation of the whole and a sensitivity to the relative weight and function of the parts.

A racial example will make this clear. If one believes that all races are equal, one can reasonably pick out a few individuals for military or government positions and leave the rest behind, without incurring the charge of racial prejudice. That a few got picked, and perhaps only those of a certain race, would not be a matter of prejudice but of practical necessity: there are only so many positions to be filled, and the best men are to be chosen. The best pick, at any given time, will not necessarily include a range of races; that is a matter of divine providence. If, in contrast, one believed that only men of a certain race were human or virtuous, one’s subsequent choice of individuals from that race alone, passing over of individuals from other races, would be problematic.

It is just like this with the lectionaries. The historic lectionaries of the Western tradition contain relatively few passages, but these passages are well chosen for their latreutic and educative functions. They carry a tremendous “punch.” No prejudice against difficult, demanding, or politically incorrect passages guided the redaction. Your traditional lectionary, as small as it is, gives you the rough with the smooth, every type of passage from clear to obscure, consoling to disturbing, pacific to violent. Just like in our hypothetical Shakespeare book.

It is true: the old lectionary lacks some of the favorite stories of the Bible. But since its purpose was never merely to instruct, much less to entertain, and since it contains clear passages on all of the major subjects of doctrine and morality, its incompleteness in this regard is no defect on any reasonable account; such omissions are in no way crippling to its liturgical function. Moreover, there is no reason that a limited number of additional readings could not have been judiciously added to the existing structure, in keeping with Sacrosanctum Concilium 35 and 51. For as we know, organic development of the liturgy occurs most often by means of addition, not subtraction or ex nihilo innovation.

What was done by the Prometheans, instead, was to scrap the existing millennium-old lectionary and start literally from scratch, with two false guiding principles: (1) the purpose of the lectionary is to present as much instructional content to the people as possible; (2) this instructional content should avoid anything that is “too difficult for modern man.” The first principle indicates a faulty liturgical theology; the second, a faulty theology of biblical inspiration and inerrancy. Together they amount to a rejection of the most fundamental principle of all, namely, that liturgical tradition is to be received with veneration and passed on without diminution or corruption.

Hence, the new lectionary is vitiated in its principles and, whatever its benefits may happen to be, as a whole it cannot be seen as a genuine lectionary in the sense in which venerable Christian tradition has produced lectionaries. It is rather a committee product that God, in His mercy, has permitted to be not entirely without fruit. The sooner we recognize this fact, the sooner we can repent of our rashness and return to our traditional lectionary, which emerges from unfiltered Christian faith and piety.

In conclusion, it is quite possible for a lectionary to have more of Scripture quantitatively but less of Scripture qualitatively. The traditional Roman lectionary gives to the people more of the total message of Scripture, even though it has a lower word-count, while the new lectionary gives to the people less of the total message, in spite of its vastly higher word-count.

NOTES
[1] As we await this publication, the talk is available at my Academia.edu page.
[2] There is much to admire in Fr. Cekada’s research, as Msgr. Andrew Wadsworth said in his review of it in Usus Antiquior.  But, as with Msgr. Wadsworth, I cannot share many of the book’s conclusions.