There are still some places left for anyone interested in attending the conference which will take place on June 25-26 in London, on “Deification and Sacraments: Perspectives East and West.” My good friend Fr Andrew Marlborough, who is an occasional contributor to the NLM writing about sacred art, is one of the organizers of what promises to be a great event, with a spectacular lineup of great speakers. (Two that caught my eye are Dr Matthew Levering and Fr Uwe Michael Lang.)
To register, go to the St Mary’s University Online Store here, or scan the QR code below.
It is a well-known fact that the first letters of the seven titles with which the O antiphons begin, when read in reverse order, form an acrostic, ERO CRAS, Latin for “tomorrow I shall be.” The order in which they are sung, however, is not purely casual, nor arranged solely for the sake of the acrostic; it also forms a catechesis on the history of salvation in Christ. They also contain certain allusions to the liturgical texts of Christmas Day, which are made with great subtlety, in a manner very typical of Advent.
“O Sapientia” refers to the eternal pre-existence of the Word, and His role in creation, an idea of which the Church Fathers often speak. St Paul calls Christ “the wisdom of God” in 1 Corinthians 1, 24; the antiphon says that Wisdom “came forth from the mouth of the Most High”, i.e. it is spoken, like the Word. St Hilary of Poitier writes in his book On the Trinity, 3, 21, commenting on the figure of Wisdom who speaks in Proverbs 8, “There is with God Wisdom, begotten before the worlds; and not only present with Him, but setting in order, for it was with Him, setting them in order. Mark this work of setting in order, or arranging. The Father, by His commands, is the Cause; the Son, by His execution of the things commanded, sets in order.”
An icon of Holy Wisdom, ca. 1670. The figure of Wisdom is painted red in accordance with a well-known, although now archaic, feature of the Slavic languages, that the word “ krasni” means both “red” and “beautiful.”
The words of this antiphon “fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia – mightily and sweetly ordering all things” are taken from Wisdom 8, 1, the conclusion of a passage (7, 21 – 8, 2) in which the author lists the attributes of Wisdom: “the worker of all things … holy, one, … having all power, overseeing all things, and containing all spirits … more active than all active things: and reacheth everywhere by reason of her purity. … a certain pure emanation of the glory of the almighty God … the brightness of eternal light, and the unspotted mirror of God’s majesty, and the image of his goodness.” Catholic Biblical commentaries rightly note that these words are similar to the beginning of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which describes the Son of God as the “brightness of His glory, and the figure of His substance, and upholding all things by the word of His power.” This latter passage (Hebrews 1, 1-12) is the Epistle of the third Mass of Christmas, the one which speaks particularly of the eternal birth of the Son from the Father; the Gospel with which is it paired, the Prologue of St John, tells us of the Word whose Incarnation is revealed in the Nativity.
“O Adonai” speaks of Christ as the one who appeared to Moses in the burning bush, and gave him the Law on Mount Sinai; “Adonai”, Hebrew for “My Lord”, is the word which Jews, when reading the Bible, say in place of the Divine Name YHWH that was revealed to Moses in Exodus 3. The prayer to “come to redeem us with arm extended” refers to God’s own words when speaking to Moses in Exodus 6, 6, “I am the Lord who will bring you out from the work-prison of the Egyptians, and will deliver you from bondage: and redeem you with a high arm, and great judgments,” as well as the canticle which Moses sings after the crossing of the Red Sea, “Let fear and dread fall upon them, (i.e. upon the Egyptians) in the greatness of thy arm.” (Exod. 15, 16)
Moses and the Burning Bush, by Nicholas Froment, 1476, in the Cathedrale Saint Sauveur in Aix-en-Provence. The artist is here inspired by one of the Lauds antiphons of the feast of the Circumcision: “The bush which Moses saw unburnt, we acknowledge as Thy praiseworthy virginity; Mother of God, intercede for us.” This also refers to the Law of Moses, in obedience to which Christ was circumcised on the eighth day after His birth.
“O Radix Jesse” quotes two chapters of the prophet Isaiah (11 and 52) which are cited by St Paul in Romans 15, although the citations are not exactly the same. (After the Psalms, Isaiah is the Old Testament book most often quoted in the New.) This antiphon and its predecessor demonstrate that in the Old Testament, both the Law and the Prophets bear witness to the coming of Christ, just as Moses and Elijah appeared to either side of Him at the Transfiguration, the former as the representative of the Law, the latter of the Prophets. The Lord Himself taught this to His disciples: “These are the words which I spoke to you, while I was yet with you, that all things must needs be fulfilled, which are written in the Law of Moses, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning me.” (Luke 24, 44) St Leo the Great, in a homily on the Transfiguration (51, 4; PL 54, 331B), says that in the preaching of the Word, “the pages of the two covenants agree with each other; and the splendor of the present glory shows manifestly and clearly Him whom the signs that went before Him had promised under the veil of mysteries.”
The O antiphons do not explicitly mention the Incarnation, to which the whole season of Advent is dedicated; nor do they anticipate the birth of Christ, which is celebrated at Christmas. Likewise, it would also be out of keeping with the joyful nature of the season to work in any explicit reference to Christ’s passion and death; instead, these are spoken of obliquely in the fourth and fifth antiphons.
“O Clavis David – o key of David” and the term that follows, “scepter of the house of Israel” refer to the Angel Gabriel’s words to the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation, that Her Son would be given the seat of David, and rule in the house of Jacob, whose other name is Israel. (Genesis 32, 28) Where the antiphon prays that Christ may come “to lead out the prisoner from the house of the prison, and him that sitteth in the darkness and the shadow of death”, the prisoner is Adam, the forefather of the human race, and by inference, all the just who died before the death and resurrection of Christ had opened the gates of heaven, and thus remained “in darkness and the shadow of death.” Note in the image below how Christ at the Harrowing of Hell is shown holding the Cross, which is suggestive of a key in its form. Behind, the locks and bars of the Limbo of the Fathers are broken. Of course, the Harrowing of Hell is necessarily preceding by the passion and death of Christ, which in turn are necessarily preceded by the Incarnation. This text also looks forward to the reading of Isaiah 9, 1-6 at Christmas Matins: “The people that walked in darkness, have seen a great light: to them that dwelt in the region of the shadow of death, light is risen.”
“O Oriens” is about the Resurrection, since “Oriens” means “the rising one.” This antiphon describes Christ as “the splendor of eternal light, the sun of justice”, which is to say, the Light and Sun that shall see no setting. Here the Church professes its hope in the future resurrection, by speaking of the “eternal light” on December 21, the day of the winter solstice and the shortest hours of daylight. It is surely not a coincidence that this is also the shortest of the O antiphons. The object of the prayer at the antiphon’s end is repeated from yesterday, but now in the plural: “come and shine upon those who sit in the darkness, and the shadow of death.” This indicates that the fruits of Christ’s passion and resurrection are to be shared with the whole of the human race in each of its members.
“O Rex gentium”, therefore, refers to the Ascension, Pentecost, and the establishment of the Church. On the feast of the Ascension, the first words of the Magnificat antiphon at Second Vespers are “O Rex gloriae”, sung in the same mode and with the same notes as the beginning of the O antiphons. These are the only two antiphons of the ancient corpus in general use throughout the Roman Rite that begin with the words “O Rex”. The word “gloriae – of glory” is substituted by “gentium – of the nations” to symbolize the nations that come into the Church, beginning with the Apostles’ preaching to nations of diverse languages at Pentecost.
Christ is then called “desideratus earum – the one desired by (the nations)”, words taken from the prophecy of Haggai 2, 8, in which God says that He will fill His house, i.e. the Church, with glory when He stirs up all nations. He is also called “lapis angularis – the corner stone”, in reference to the corner stone rejected by the builders in Psalm 117, and also to the Lauds hymn for the Dedication of a Church, “Angularis fundamentum – Christ is sent as the corner stone and foundation.”
On the morning of December 23rd, the Church sings the canticle Benedictus with the antiphon “Behold, all things are completed which were said through the Angel about the Virgin Mary.” This being so, the last O antiphon, “O Emmanuel”, addresses Christ with the name meaning “God is with us”, the name of the child whose coming was prophesied by Isaiah when he foretold that “a Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son.” This also looks forward to the reading of Isaiah 9 at Christmas Matins, “For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given.”
There follow the titles “our King and lawgiver, the expectation of the nations, and the Savior thereof.” The words “God with us, our King and Lawgiver” refer to Christ’s abiding presence in the Church and in the world, as He said to His disciples on meeting them after the Resurrection: “All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.” (Matt. 28, 20) In the previous antiphon, the word “desideratus – the desired (of the nations)” is a past participle, indicating that the longing of the nations for the first coming of Christ has been fulfilled. Here He is “the expectation of the nations”, the Latin word “expectatio” indicating an ongoing action, as we await the Second Coming of Christ, who “shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom shall have no end.” This returns us to a theme which has been present from the very beginning of Advent, which recalls both the First Coming of Christ in the fullness of time, and His Second Coming at the end of the world.
Onec again, we are grateful to Mr Robert Keim for sharing some of his writing with us, this time in a two part article on the subject of the liturgical use of bells. Mr Keim is a secular brother of the London Oratory of St. Philip Neri, a linguist, and a literary scholar specializing in the poetic and dramatic literature of the English Renaissance. A longtime student of the arts and spirituality of sacred liturgy, he teaches university courses in rhetoric and is pursuing research into the devotional, scriptural, and liturgical culture of medieval England.
One of my most cherished experiences during the liturgical year is made possible by a rather unhistorical mingling of rites. I typically entrust my Lenten journey to the plaintive beauty and deprivation of the Roman liturgy. But after enduring six weeks of penance and ritual austerity, my soul is thirsty for paschal joys, and I prefer to seek them in the effusive Easter Sunday celebrations of the Byzantine rite. Honestly, though, one hardly needs to seek them, for they are all but inescapable at certain moments—for instance, when the priest, vested in the brilliant white of the Resurrection, walks among the faithful and reminds them again and again that “Christ is risen.” His voice is exultant and insistent, and his words are accompanied by the gladsome song of thurible bells.
It is a noble object indeed that can simultaneously delight three of the five senses: an Eastern rite censer, which adds the pleasures of sound to those of sight and smell, has twelve bells that symbolize the twelve apostles. (Some Eastern censers have a thirteenth bell that makes no sound—it represents Judas.)
As anyone knows who regularly attends the Roman Mass or the Byzantine Divine Liturgy, bells are prominent features of Catholic worship throughout the liturgical year. Christians of centuries past would also be thoroughly familiar with their continual use as signals—signum, in fact, was one of the medieval Latin words for a church bell—that announced hours of prayer and worship from morning till evening. However, bells also have a special connection with the Easter season, and give us an opportunity to contemplate the Resurrection of our dear Lord through the material realities of sacred liturgy.
The Golden Bells of the Old Testament
Bells of various types have been favored instruments in Christian liturgical life for well over a thousand years. This relationship, which is unique among world religions, began in the early days of the Hebraic covenant, but remained rather dormant until the early medieval period.
The Hebrew scriptures contain two words for bells. One of these, metsillah, appears only once (in Zechariah 14, 20) and probably denoted instruments that we would identify as cymbals rather than bells. The other word, paʿamon, is also uncommon, but it appears in a passage of far greater significance:
And thou shalt make the tunic of the ephod all of violet.... And beneath at the feet of the same tunic, round about, thou shalt make as it were pomegranates, of violet, and purple, and scarlet twice dyed, with little bells set between: so that there shall be a golden bell and a pomegranate, and again another golden bell and a pomegranate. And Aaron shall be vested with it in the office of his ministry, that the sound may be heard, when he goeth in and cometh out of the sanctuary, in the sight of the Lord, and that he may not die. (Exodus 28, 31, 33–35)
Truly, the God of Israel scrupled not to let His chosen people glimpse the divine realities of heaven through the sensual realities of earth. And Aaron must have been a formidable minister indeed as he approached the altar of sacrifice arrayed in exotic garments, splendid colors, precious metal, stone engravings, and the gleaming bells that turned his very movements into a song of protection against the overwhelming holiness of God’s sanctuary.
An eleventh-century mosaic of the high priest Aaron. The censer alludes to an event, recounted in the Book of Numbers, when Aaron’s intercession, aided by the appeasing aroma of incense, saved the fractious Israelites from divine chastisement: “he offered the incense: and standing between the dead and the living, he prayed for the people, and the plague ceased.” The narrative is rich with the possibilities of allegorical and prefigurative interpretations. [1]
Hearing the Harmony of the Cosmos
Ancient Jewish commentators assigned various interpretations to the bells of the high priest. Among these was a view shared by Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus, who both understood the golden bells as a liturgical manifestation of harmony in God’s Creation. Philo, for example, savors the visual poetry of the high priest’s vestments, which were “ornamented with golden pomegranates, and bells, and wreaths of flowers; ... a most beautiful and skillful work ... of hyacinth color, and purple, and fine linen, and scarlet, gold thread being entwined and embroidered in it.” He observes that the flowers symbolize earth, the pomegranates symbolize water, and “the bells are the emblem of the concord and harmony that exist between these things” – for only in the union of earth and water does the natural world bring forth abundant life.
The harmonious sound of bells, then, evokes the primordial harmony of the cosmos, which Our Lord both restored and sublimated through His victory—on Easter Sunday, the “eighth day” of consummate re-Creation—over sin and death. Philo’s imagery of flower, earth, fruit, and water also has strong sacramental resonance; we are reminded of the waters of Baptism, the chrism of Confirmation (made from olive oil and aromatic balsam), the natural fecundity of matrimony, and the supernatural fecundity of the wheat and grapes that become our divine nourishment. Thus, we might imagine the complex yet unified tonality of altar bells as signifying the deep spiritual unity of the Sacraments.
This thirteenth-century illumination depicts King David, the archetypal religious musician, playing a set of bells. The text is from Psalm 80: “Exultate deo adiutori nr̄o: iubilate deo iacob. Sumite psalmum et date tīpanum: psalterium iocundū cum cythara” (“Exult ye to God our helper: sing aloud to the God of Jacob. Take ye up a psalm and give the timbrel: the pleasing lute with the lyre”).
Hearing the Harmony of the Church
The liturgical bells of the Old Covenant also prefigure the harmony that, as a distinctive feature of Christ’s mystical body [2], is the fruit of His Resurrection and the subsequent outpourings of divine grace. Aaron’s bells were woven into his robe, and the psalmist surrounds this robe with themes of brotherly love, sanctification, renewal, and everlasting life:
Lo, how good and pleasant it is, for friends to dwell together: like precious oil upon the head, flowing down upon the beard: Aaron’s beard, that cometh down to the edge of his robe; like dew of Khermón, that cometh down upon the hills of Syón; for there the Lord ordained a blessing: life, to ages and forever. (Psalm 132)
Golden bells, being both luminous and sonorous, reach what may be their poetic apogee when we see them as symbols of the saints in heaven, who live in perfect charity, shine with divine splendor, and offer to Almighty God an unceasing sacrifice of ineffably harmonious song. As Aaron’s priestly garment was made specially rich and sacred by the presence of bells, so is the mystical body of the eternal High Priest singularly adorned with the gleaming, ever-praising souls of the blessed in heaven. The ringing of the altar bells and the tolling of the church bell remind us that we are called to join them some day.
Dante and Beatrice were in the Sixth Heaven when “all those living lights, ever more luminous, began to sing”—heavenly music that il sommo Poeta described as the chiming of angelic bells (Paradiso, canto 20).
The Bells of Christendom
Bells never attained further prominence in Judaic liturgy. Their historical moment would arrive along with the gradually developing liturgical life of Christian civilization, and in the next article part of this article, we will look more deeply into the paschal theology of bells.
NOTES:
[1] “And when there arose a sedition, and the tumult increased, Moses and Aaron fled to the tabernacle of the covenant. And when they were gone into it, the cloud covered it, and the glory of the Lord appeared. And the Lord said to Moses: Get you out from the midst of this multitude, this moment will I destroy them. And as they were lying on the ground, Moses said to Aaron: Take the censer, and putting fire in it from the altar, put incense upon it, and go quickly to the people to pray for them: for already wrath is gone out from the Lord, and the plague rageth. When Aaron had done this, and had run to the midst of the multitude which the burning fire was now destroying, he offered the incense: and standing between the dead and the living, he prayed for the people, and the plague ceased” (Numbers 16, 42-48, Challoner-Douay-Rheims translation).
[2] “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.” (John 13 35)
The very first Scriptural reading of Holy Week, Exodus 15, 27 – 16, 7, the epistle which forms part of the blessing of the palms, lays out the program for the week to come, and unites all of the main ceremonies of the Triduum with Palm Sunday.
“In those days, the children of Israel came into Elim, where there were twelve fountains of water, and seventy palm trees: and they encamped by the waters. cap. 16 And they set forward from Elim, and all the multitude of the children of Israel came into the desert … after they came out of the land of Egypt, and … murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness, (saying) ‘… Why have you brought us into this desert, that you might destroy all the multitude with famine?’ And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Behold I will rain bread from heaven for you; let the people go forth, and gather what is sufficient for every day, … But the sixth day let them prepare to bring in, and let it be double that which they were wont to gather every day.’ And Moses and Aaron said to the children of Israel, ‘In the evening you shall know that the Lord hath brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, and in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord.’ ” (Vespere scietis quod Dominus eduxerit vos de terra Aegypti, et mane videbitis gloriam Domini.)
The Gathering of the Manna, from a Flemish book of Hours, end of the 15th century. (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, CLM 28345; CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
The reading begins with a mention of palms, in reference to the rite of Palm Sunday. The fickleness of the Israelites, who have just crossed the Red Sea in the previous chapter, and now murmur against God’s prophet and priest, the very ones who led them out of Egypt, represents the fickleness of those who were in Jerusalem at the time of the Lord’s triumphal entry, crying out “Hosanna,” and five days later, gathered before Pilate and cried out, “Crucify him!” The gathering of twice as much manna on the day before the Sabbath refers to the consecration of two Hosts on Maundy Thursday, one of the Mass, and one which is reserved for the Mass of the Presanctified on the following day. [1]
The words of Moses and Aaron towards the end of the reading, “Vespere scietis – In the evening you shall know”, refer to the Gospel of the Easter vigil, Matthew 28, 1-7, which begins with the words “Vespere autem Sabbati – on the eve of the Sabbath.” The words “et mane videbitis gloriam Domini – and in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord” look forward to the second verse of the Gospel of Easter morning, Mark 16, 1-7, “Et valde mane una sabbatorum – And very early in the morning, the first day of the week.”
A stained-glass window of the Prophet Hosea with three other prophets, holding banderoles with two verses from his book: “On the third day he will raise us” (6, 3), and “O death, where is thy sting?”, St Paul’s citation in 1 Corinthians 15, 55 of the Septuagint translation. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by GO69, CC BY-SA 4.0)
This theme, of the evening and the morning, also appears at two other crucial moments in the readings of Holy Week, both also the first Scriptural readings within their respective ceremonies. The first prophecy of the Mass of the Presanctified on Good Friday, Hosea 6, 1-6, also refers to the Resurrection of Christ in the morning: “In their tribulation, in the morning they shall rise to me… He will revive us after two days: on the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight. We shall know, and we shall follow, that we may know the Lord, as the daybreak is his going forth prepared.” Likewise, the first prophecy of the Easter vigil, Genesis 1, 1 – 2, 2, contains six repetitions of the formula, “and there was evening, and there was morning.” It is also reflected in the Passion narratives, all four of which are divided into an evening and a morning. [2]
The vigil Mass of Holy Saturday is not a first Mass of Easter, an anticipation of the Resurrection, and was never celebrated as such in the Roman Rite. It is rather a vigil in the true sense of the word, “a keeping watch.” At that point in the celebration of the liturgy, we know, as Hosea says we shall, that Christ has risen, but we do not yet see Him in His glory. This is symbolized by the incomplete character of the Mass, which has no introit, Creed, offertory, or Agnus Dei, while the communio is not a Mass antiphon in the proper sense, but a very short form of Vespers.
The Magnificat antiphon of Vespers at the end of the Easter vigil, also sung with the Nunc dimittis at Compline, as it is here: Aña Véspere autem sábbati * quae lucescit in prima sábbati, venit María Magdaléne, et áltera María, vidére sepulcrum, allelúja. (And in the evening of the sabbath, when it began to dawn towards the first day of the week, Mary Magdalen and the other Mary came to see the sepulcher, alleluia.)
In the Gospels of both Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, the Risen Lord is mentioned, but does not appear in person. However, with the restoration of the Introit after two days on which it was not sung, on the third day, He speaks directly and in person: “I have risen, and am still with thee.” It is at this Mass, on the morning of Easter, that the fullness of solemnity is restored to the liturgy, and the glory of the Lord is indeed seen. As the prophecy of Hosea continues, “And we will follow, that we may know the Lord: like the daybreak is his going forth”, that is, His going forth from the tomb.
Liturgical scholars have long been wont to describe the unique character of the Easter vigil Mass in reference to something called Baumstarck’s Law, named for the scholar who identified it, the German Anton Baumstarck (1872-1948). This supposed law can be summed up very simply by saying, “The more solemn days change last”, meaning that when a new feature of the liturgy is instituted, people don’t add it to the more important days, or hesitate to do so, because they remember that “we’ve always done it THIS way”, and don’t want to change it. Therefore, the absence of the features named above from the Mass of the Easter vigil is effectively dismissed as a mere archaism, undoubtedly ancient, but per se meaningless. (This is also often applied to the Tenebrae offices, in reference to the absence of the invitatory, hymns, doxology etc.)
It is revealing, and typical of both Germans and the era in which Baumstarck lived, that the phenomenon which he identified is called a “law,” a term which places it in the category of forces like those described by the “laws” of physics: implacable, unavoidable, and above all, impersonal. But changes to the liturgy result from decisions, not forces, and decisions are made by people, not by forces. And this in turn is why Baumstarck’s Law (which has plenty of perfectly legitimate applications) would better be called Baumstarck’s Principle – an explanation of some aspects of liturgical change, but decidedly not of all.
Thus we find the Bl. Ildephonse Schuster, e.g., writing as follows of the Easter vigil Mass in The Sacramentary (vol. 2, p. 308): “Holy Saturday still preserves, almost unaltered, the primitive type of the morning Mass which, during the first three centuries, closed the vigil of preparation for the Sunday.” Likewise Josef Jungmann in Missarum Solemnia (p. 394): “The absence of the
Communion song on Holy Saturday recalls the time before the introduction of the chant.” [3]
But to treat this (and many analogous customs) as nothing more than an archaism is fundamentally absurd. Even granting for the sake of argument that the introit, offertory and communio were added later to the Mass, as we know the Creed and Agnus Dei were, nonetheless, someone made a deliberate and conscious decision to NOT add them to two specific days of the year: Good Friday and Holy Saturday. [4] As the prophet says, “He will revive us after two days: on the third day he will raise us up.” [5]
[1] For the Church Fathers, the manna was understood as a clear prefiguration of the Eucharist. St Cyprian, Epistle to Magnus (PL 3, 1150A): “We see the mystery of this equality (among all believers) celebrated in Exodus, when the manna flowed down from heaven, and as a prefiguration of the things to come, showed the nourishment of the bread of heaven and the food of Christ when He would come.”
– St Ambrose, De Sacramentis (PL 16, 444B), immediately after explaining the words of Consecration: “It was indeed a great and venerable thing, that the manna rained down upon the Jews from heaven: but understand this. What is greater, the manna from heaven, or the body of Christ? The body of Christ, to be sure, who is the maker of heaven. And then, he that ate the manna, died: who shall eat this Body, it shall be unto him the forgiveness of sins, and he shall not die forever.”
– Ambrosiaster, Commentary on the Epistles of St Paul (PL XVII, 234A-B): “ ‘And they all did eat the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink; and they drank of the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.’ (1 Cor. 10, 3-4) He calls the manna and water (Exod. 16, 15; 17, 6) ‘spiritual’... having in themselves a figure of the future mystery, which we now receive in commemoration of Christ the Lord.”
[2] Many liturgical traditions follow this division by reading the Passion narratives partly on Holy Thursday and partly on Good Friday, beginning the Gospels of the latter at the point where the Evangelist mentions the morning: Matthew 27, 1; Mark 15, 1; Luke 22, 66, and John 18, 28.
[3] With all due respect, especially to the memory of the Bl. Schuster, the liturgical scholars of their era failed to see that their reasoning on this and so many other points was purely circular. “The Easter vigil preserves an archaic form of the Mass… and how do we know that this is an archaic form of the Mass? Because it is preserved at the Easter vigil...”
[4] Not at all surprisingly, analogous customs are also found in other rites. The Ambrosian Easter vigil Mass has no antiphons at all, apart from a brief psalmellus (the equivalent of the gradual) between the first reading and the epistle, and the Alleluia between the epistle and gospel. The Creed and Gloria are both omitted, and the Ambrosian Mass has neither the Kyrie nor the Agnus Dei, so the only part of the Ordinary which is said is the Sanctus. In the Byzantine Rite, the Vesperal Divine Liturgy of Holy Saturday is also not treated as a first liturgy of Easter; the Gospel is the whole of Matthew 28, which does include the visible appearance of the Risen Christ to the woman at the tomb, and to the disciples on the mountain of Galilee, but the tropar which characterizes the liturgy of Easter and the whole Paschal season is not yet sung. “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling death by death, and to those in the tombs giving life.”
[5] As I mentioned earlier this week, the Roman Mass of Holy Thursday also did not originally have an Introit, but this was in function of the total absence of a foremass, and hence, of a lack of anywhere to put it.
The term “Mass of the Presanctified” is not actually used anywhere in the Missal itself for the ceremony of Good Friday, but is commonly found in Holy Week books printed for the convenience of the clergy during the busiest week of the year. Although it is in that sense perhaps purely informal, it nevertheless gives an accurate sense of what the rite actually does and means. To the largest degree possible, this rite imitates the rite of the Mass, to signify that what it commemorates, the Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, was anticipated at the Last Supper, and is intimately and essentially connected with it.
The celebrant wears black vestments as for a Requiem. The deacon and subdeacon, however, wear black folded chasubles, the traditional vestments of penitential seasons, which are not used at a Requiem; indeed, black folded chasubles are only used at this service. (Where they are not available, the deacon and subdeacon serve in albs and maniples, the deacon with a stole.) On these days, the Church wishes us to experience the Paschal mystery, not as a mere commemoration, but as something through which we ourselves live, accompanying the Savior. Good Friday is a day of deepest mourning, one that excludes the use of the vestments of joy, the dalmatic and tunicle, which at a Requiem speak of the hope of the Resurrection. On Good Friday, this hope is not in any way anticipated; we ourselves feel the desolation which Christ’s disciples experienced, the better to come to the joy of the Resurrection on Easter.
The Mass of the Catechumens has an extra reading, sung by a reader in surplice. It is followed by a tract, and then a prayer, which is introduced by “Oremus” sung by the priest, “Flectamus genua” by the deacon, and “Levate” by the subdeacon. These are done as they normally would be at a solemn Ember-day Mass. The subdeacon sings the second reading with the same ceremonies as at a solemn Mass, followed by a second tract. The Passion of St John is sung with the same ceremonies as those of Matthew, Mark and Luke on the previous days of Holy Week. The last part is sung like the Gospel at a Requiem, by the deacon of the Mass, without candles or incense; as at solemn Mass in penitential seasons, he replaces his folded chasuble with the broad stole.
The solemn prayers are said at the Missal on the Epistle side. After each invocation, “Oremus. Flectamus genua. Levate” are said as above by the major ministers, followed by the collects. The adoration of the Cross has no analog in the Mass, and was originally a separate ceremony; at this point, the priest and subdeacon remove their chasubles, putting them on again once they have kissed the Cross.
For the final part of the ceremony, the Blessed Sacrament is brought back from the Altar of Repose to the church’s principal altar, with a solemn procession done in reverse order from the procession of the day before. This ritual of the double procession emphasizes in the clearest way possible the connection between the Lord’s Supper and His Sacrifice upon the Cross.
At the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, the celebrant consecrates two large Hosts, one for the Mass itself, the other for the rite of the following day. One of the most beautiful aspects of the Holy Thursday ritual is the special way in which this second Host is prepared, before the celebrant’s communion. It is placed in a chalice, not in a pyx or ciborium, and then covered with a soft pall, a paten turned upside down, and a thin white chalice veil, which is then tied with a ribbon around the node of the chalice. The Host thus enclosed in the chalice is left on the corporal, until the end of the Mass, when it is brought to the Altar of Repose.
This custom of enclosing the Body of the Lord in a chalice is a sign of His Passion, which He Himself describes as a “chalice” when He goes to pray in the garden. (Matthew 26, 39-42 and Luke 22, 42.) It also serves to indicate the link between the first Mass, the Lord’s Supper, and the Sacrifice of the Cross, which takes place on the following day; the instruments of the Sacrifice of the Mass, the chalice, pall, paten and veil, are used on both days.
The Sacrament altar at the church of San Marello al Corso in Rome, Holy Thursday, 2015.
On Good Friday, therefore, after the adoration of the Cross, the priest, with all of the major and minor ministers and attending clergy, goes by the shortest way to the Altar of Repose, where he kneels down along with the deacon and subdeacon. The deacon then rises, opens the tabernacle, genuflects, and brings the chalice with the Host inside forward so that it can be clearly seen, without removing it from the tabernacle, and returns to the side of the priest. The three major ministers rise, and the priest imposes incense in two thuribles; with one of these, he incenses the Blessed Sacrament as at Benediction. He then dons the humeral veil, while the deacon goes up to the altar, and brings him the chalice with the Host inside.
All of the acolytes and attending clergy form a procession, and return to the main sanctuary of the church, while the choir sings the hymn Vexilla Regis. Immediately before the priest, who holds the chalice under the humeral veil, two acolytes take turns incensing the Blessed Sacrament.
When they arrive before the main altar, the deacon receives the Sacrament from the priest, takes It up to the altar, and unties the ribbon which holds the veil on the chalice. He then arranges the veil, without removing it from the chalice, in the same way that a chalice is set upon the altar for the celebration of Mass: another clear sign of the connection between the Mass and the death of Christ upon the Cross. The priest incenses the Sacrament once again, and the “Rite of the Presanctified” properly so-called begins.
The major ministers go up to the altar and genuflect. The deacon removes the chalice veil, paten and soft pall, then holds the paten with two hands over the corporal. The priest takes the chalice, and allows the Host to slide from it onto the paten, then puts it down. He receives the paten from the deacon and places the Host upon the corporal. The deacon puts wine in the chalice, and the subdeacon a drop of water, as at Mass. The deacon gives the chalice to the priest, who places it in the middle of the corporal, and covers it with the pall. All of the Offertory prayers and gestures are omitted.
As at the Offertory of Mass, the thurifer comes to the priest, who imposes incense without blessing it, and, accompanied in the usual way by the deacon and subdeacon, incenses the Host and chalice, Cross and altar as at a Solemn Mass, genuflecting whenever he passes before the Sacrament. (Neither he nor anyone else is incensed.) Then he washes his hands, as at a normal Mass, but saying nothing.
Returning to the middle of the altar, with the deacon and subdeacon in line behind him, the priest says the Offertory prayer “In spiritu humilitatis”; he then kisses the altar, turns to the people and says “Orate fratres”. The response “Suscipiat” is not said, and the priest does not complete the usual turn in a circle. As the rubrics of the Missal say, he “omits the rest”, (Secret, Preface, Sanctus and Canon), and passes directly to “Oremus. Praeceptis salutaribus.” and the Lord’s Prayer, sung in the ferial tone. He then sings the embolism “Libera nos” out loud, also in the ferial tone, omitting all of the gestures which normally accompany it.
The deacon and subdeacon kneel on either side of the priest, slightly back from where he stands; as the priest solemnly elevates the Host, they lift his chasuble, and in place of the bell, the “crepitaculum” or noisemaker is sounded. The deacon and subdeacon rise, and the deacon uncovers the chalice. The priest performs the Fraction of the Host, saying nothing and omitting the signs of the Cross. Bowing over the altar, he says the prayer “Perceptio corporis tui”; following the usual rite of Mass, he communicates with the Sacred Host. He then consumes the chalice with the wine and the Particle in it, omitting the usual rites.
All of this follows, step by step, the rite of the Offertory of the Mass, and the prayers of the celebrant’s communion after the Canon. Obviously, all of those elements which refer specifically to the celebration of the Eucharistic sacrifice are omitted, along with the Canon itself. (The fraction, however, is done after the Embolism, not during, since the latter is sung aloud.) Here we have another clear sign of the sacrificial nature of the death of Christ. The rubrics of the Missal underline this principal that the rite is modeled on the rite of Mass; everything in them is described in reference to the practice of the normal celebration of Mass.
The priest purifies the chalice and his fingers; the subdeacon then restacks the chalice, and the deacon removes the broad stole and vests again in the folded chasuble, again, all as at a solemn Mass. Since it is a longstanding custom of the Church that only the celebrant receives communion on this day, at this point the liturgy is effectively completed and the priest, the major and minor ministers, and the attending clergy return to the sacristy in silence.
This brings us to the second major point of the ceremony, the silence of the congregation, and the relative silence of the ceremony as a whole. The parts that are said aloud consist almost entirely of the words of Scripture and the prayers, sung by the clergy, and the choir’s parts.
This is the only day of the year on which no part of the Ordinary of the Mass is used, these being the parts most easily sung by the people. The first two lessons are sung without title or “Deo gratias” at the end. The prayer is introduced by a formula that does not require the congregation to answer “Et cum spiritu tuo.” “Gloria tibi, Domine”, and “Laus tibi, Christe” are not said at the Passion. At the solemn prayers, the only word not sung by the major ministers is “Amen.”
At the presentation of the Cross, the major ministers sing “Behold the wood of the Cross, on which hung the salvation of the world”, to which the choir answers “Come, let us adore;” this and the Vexilla regis are really the only parts of the ceremony that some portion of the people will likely be able to sing along with. The two tracts and the Improperia are certainly too complex for popular participation, and during the latter, the people are coming forth to kiss the Cross. To sum up, therefore, the only words which the majority of the congregation will certainly be able to sing are “Amen” and “Sed libera nos a malo.”
The first tract of the ceremony is taken from the song of the Prophet Habakkuk (the whole of his third chapter), according to the Old Latin translation of the Septuagint: “O Lord, I heard Thy report, and was afraid: I considered thy works, and was amazed.” These echo the famous prophecy of Isaiah known as that of the Suffering Servant (chapter 53), “Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” The tract continues with the words, “thou shalt be known between two living creatures”; the “two living creatures” were first understood by St Augustine as the two thieves crucified alongside the Lord.
The silence of the congregation expresses this fear and amazement, as we behold the Lord and Creator of the world hung on the Cross, as the sun itself withdraws and the earth trembles at His death, and the tract continues “when my soul is troubled, Thou wilt in wrath remember mercy.” The Byzantine liturgy elaborates upon this point continually, as for example at the first hymn at Vespers of Good Friday; “All creation was changed by fear, when it saw Thee, o Christ, hanging upon the Cross; the sun was darkened, and the foundations of the earth were shaken. All things suffered with Him that created all things; o Lord, who did willingly suffer for us, glory to Thee!”
The final point to note is the fact that Communion is not distributed to the faithful at this ceremony. The “communion” which is received that day is the kissing of the Cross, for which the faithful come forth to the area of the sanctuary as they did the previous day at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. Their participation in the Paschal mystery is vividly represented by following as closely as possible those members of the Church who lived it first, the disciples of Christ, who also received Communion on Holy Thursday. Good Friday is likewise lived as the disciples lived it, as a day of lamentation, without the grace of Communion, but with the grace of staying close by the Cross, like the Virgin and St John. This relatively late practice of the Roman Rite is in harmony with the broader tradition of the historical Christian rites. To this day, the Ambrosian rite maintains the custom of having no ritual involving the Eucharist on Good Friday at all; likewise, the Byzantine Rite has the kissing of the shroud of Christ, but no sort of Eucharistic ritual.
It is of signal importance to note here that the ritual of the Presanctified also represents this by having a fraction rite which is, so to speak, incomplete, because the particle is dropped into unconsecrated wine. At a normal Mass, the Fraction rite, the reunion of Christ’s Body with the Blood shed for our redemption, represents the Resurrection; on Good Friday, the Resurrection is not made manifest, because the Body is broken, but not reunited with the Blood.
It is also worth noting in this regard that the rubrics of the Missal of St Pius V, and subsequent decrees of the S.R.C. in regard to the ceremony, assume that the same Cross, which comes from the main altar, is kissed by the clergy and all of the faithful. Likewise, the S.R.C. strongly prohibited all attempts at having any kind of Eucharistic adoration or procession on Good Friday, where such customs had arisen as a matter of popular piety.
Alexander Schmemann (1921–83) was a highly influential Russian Orthodox priest and author who left a major mark on the renewal of Byzantine liturgical and sacramental theology, and on the thinking of some Roman Catholic liturgists as well. He was famous (infamous?) for his intense attacks on Western theology, which he believed to be thoroughly contaminated with a rationalism and a reductionism inimical to mystery. (It should not be forgotten that he also rather sharply criticized many aspects of modern Eastern Orthodoxy.) It would be tempting for traditionalists to give ear to these arguments because, if they are correct, they would seem to demonstrate a broader liturgical crisis in the West that is rooted in a false Thomistic distinction, which, over the centuries, changed how Christians understood and received the sacraments and liturgy.
My goal in this new series of articles is to summarize his major objections (part 1) and then respond to them in a way that is both sympathetic to whatever is legitimate in his concerns, and sharply critical of his misunderstanding (at times extreme) of Western theology (parts 2 and subsequent).
One of Schmemann’s most important books, For the Life of the World, expounds how the Church is a sacrament/epiphany of Christ, and how the Church is her liturgy. After meditating on the Church’s liturgy as the work of Christ extended in time, Fr. Schmemann addresses secularism, which he defines as “above all a negation of worship” (p. 146), because its core doctrine is a negation of “the sacramentality of man and world. A secularist views the world as containing within itself its meaning and the principles of knowledge and action” (p. 147). He then cites the Lateran council of 1215 and St. Thomas Aquinas as watershed moments in the origin of secularism as a post-Patristic and anti-Patristic way of conceiving the world and its relation to God.
Here is a key passage:
At the end of the twelfth century a Latin theologian, Berengarius of Tours, was condemned for his teaching on the Eucharist. He maintained that because the presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements is “mystical” or “symbolic,” it is not real. The Lateran Council which condemned him … simply reversed the formula. It proclaimed that since Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is real, it is not “mystical.” What is truly decisive here is precisely the disconnection and the opposition of the two terms verum and mystice, the acceptance, on both sides, that they are mutually exclusive. (p. 152)
Aquinas, starting from this point, introduced the dichotomy characteristic of secularism:
And since then, Christian thought, in scholasticism and beyond it, never ceased to oppose these terms … it is indeed implied already in Thomism, with its basic epistemological distinction between causa prima and causae secundae. Here is the real cause of secularism, which is ultimately nothing else but the affirmation of the world’s autonomy, of its self-sufficiency in terms of reason, knowledge, and action. The downfall of Christian symbolism led to the dichotomy of the “natural” and “supernatural” as the only framework of Christian thought and experience. (p. 153)
(Note that Schmemann, in effect, is summarizing DeLubac’s argument in Surnaturel.) It follows that, Aquinas—the theologian par excellence of the Latin West—has, according to Schmemann, a different metaphysics or ontology than the Church Fathers do.
Later on, Fr. Schmemann explains further by explicating the relationship between sacrament and liturgy. He explains that the Church Fathers related these two in an ontologically different manner than Aquinas and Scholasticism:
In the early Church, in the writings of the Fathers, sacraments, inasmuch as they are given any systematic interpretation, are always explained in the context of their actual liturgical celebration, the explanation being, in fact, an exegesis of the liturgy itself in all its ritual complexity and concreteness. The medieval De Sacramentis, however, tends from its very inception to isolate the “sacrament” from liturgical context, to find and to define in terms as precise as possible its essence i.e., that which distinguishes it from the “non-sacrament.” Sacrament in a way begins to be opposed to liturgy. It has, of course, ritual expression, its “signum” which belongs to its essence, but this sign is viewed now as ontologically different from all other signs, symbols, and rites of the Church. And because of this difference, the precise sacramental sign alone is considered, to the exclusion of all other “liturgy,” the proper object of theological attention. One can for example read and reread the elaborate treatment given in St. Thomas’ Summa to sacraments without yet knowing much about their liturgical celebration. (p. 163)
Again:
St. Maximus the Confessor, the sacramental theologian par excellence of the patristic age, calls the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist symbols (“symbola”), images (“apeikonismata”), and mysteries (“mysteria”). “Symbolical” here is not only not opposed to “real,” but embodies it as its very expression and mode of manifestation. Historians of theology, in their ardent desire to maintain the myth of theological continuity and orderly “evolution,” here again find their explanation in the “imprecision” of patristic terminology. They do not seem to realize that the Fathers’ use of “symbolon” (and related terms) is not “vague” or “imprecise” but simply different from that of the later theologians, and that the subsequent transformation of these terms constitutes indeed the source of one of the greatest theological tragedies. (p. 165)
And driving home his argument:
In the early tradition . . . the relationship between the sign in the symbol (A) and that which it “signifies” (B) is neither a merely semantic one (A means B), nor causal (A is the cause of B), nor representative (A represents B). We called this relationship an epiphany. “A is B” means that the whole of A expresses, communicates, reveals, manifests, the “reality” of B (although not necessarily the whole of it) without, however, losing its own ontological reality, without being dissolved in another “res.” But it was precisely this relationship between the A and the B, between the sign and the signified, that was changed. Because of the reduction of knowledge to rational or discursive knowledge, there appears between A and B a hiatus. The symbol may still be a means of knowledge but, as all knowledge, it is knowledge about and not knowledge of. It can be a revelation about the “res,” but not the epiphany of the “res” itself. A can mean B, or represent it, or even, in certain instances, be the “cause” of its presence; but A is no longer viewed as the very means of “participation” in B. Knowledge and participation are now two different realities, two different orders. (p. 168)
It is this kind of reasoning that leads Fr. Schmemann to conclude: “The doctrine of transubstantiation, in its Tridentine form, is truly the collapse, or rather the suicide, of sacramental theology” (p. 170). One may certainly sympathize with this line of argument, inasmuch as we see conventional Thomists teaching about sacraments in isolation or abstraction from liturgy and exaggerating the principle of magisterial authority to the denigration and effective cancelation of tradition.
Next week, I will begin my response by answering this question: Did the Lateran Council give a bad and unpatristic definition of “real” as opposed to “mystical”?
Fr. Franck Quoëx, a priest of the diocese of Vaduz, Lichtenstein, Savoyard by birth, was one of the foremost liturgists of our times. I had the great honor of serving alongside him at the traditional Masses in Rome for several years, and some of the most beautiful rites I have ever seen were put together and guided by his phenomenal expertise. He had and deserved a reputation throughout Europe as a highly talented Master of Ceremonies; many have remarked that if the Pope should ever decide to do the ancient Papal Mass again, Fr. Quoëx would have been one of the few people who could have arranged it properly. In 2001, he received a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical University of St Thomas (also known as the Angelicum) in Rome, defending a thesis entitled “Le Rite et le Royaume: Culte et histoire du salut selon Thomas d’Aquin” (Rite and Kingdom: The Exterior Acts of Cult [or Worship] and Salvation History according to Saint Thomas Aquinas). He was subsequently professor of liturgy at the FSSP seminary in Wigratzbad, Germany, and continued to write and research on a variety of liturgical topics.
In May of 2006, Abbé Quoëx was diagnosed with cancer, which took his life less than nine months later. In the final days of his illness, when he had become too weak to celebrate Mass, he would have friends sit at his bedside and read the Mass to him. He passed away at the age of thirty-nine, on January 2, the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, and is buried in the cemetery of Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had been serving the faithful of the traditional Mass community.
We are very pleased to share the news that several articles which he wrote, based on the work which he did in his doctoral thesis, have now been gathered into one volume, and translated into English by Zachary Thomas, under the title “Liturgical Theology in Thomas Aquinas: Sacrifice and Salvation History.” It is now available for pre-order, and is scheduled to be published in hardcover on October 27. (Mr Thomas is one of the writers of the excellent blog Canticum Salomonis, whose work we have shared on NLM many times.)
The description on Amazon: “In this volume, Fr. Quoëx responds to Joseph Ratzinger’s call for a renewed appreciation of liturgical rite. A student of Pierre Gy, OP, he brings to this study of Aquinas’ liturgical theology a rare combination of expert knowledge of liturgical sources and history and the best of modern historical-critical research guided by sound theological judgment. Fr Quoëx frames his study with an overview of the problem of rite in modern theological-anthropological discourse, before turning to Aquinas’ theory of worship in the treatise on the virtue of religion. He then explores Aquinas’ doctrine on the cultic dimensions of the Eucharist and other sacraments in his sacramental theology more broadly, finishing with a close study of the mass commentary of the Tertia Pars.
Although there has been increasing attention to Thomas’ treatment of religion as a virtue, none have approached him from an anthropological angle with a focus on the nature of liturgical rite, or fully exploited the perspectives of liturgical scholarship to shed light on sacramental theology. Quoëx’s work, as the work of a Thomist, liturgist, and medievalist well versed in medieval liturgical development and in the genre of often-allegorical liturgical commentary, opens up this crucial but neglected facet of Aquinas’ theological synthesis. Few books have been published on Aquinas’ liturgical theology. Now that interest in Aquinas’ virtue theory and sacramental theology is growing rapidly, Quoëx’s studies are an invitation to further reflection on the topic of Aquinas's liturgical theology with its manifold ramifications for and connections with other theological topics in his Summa, including his theological anthropology, his soteriology, his treatment of the Old and New Laws, and his account of the virtue of religion in connection with the other virtues.”
I asked Mr Thomas to say something about how the project came about, and he wrote, “One problem that has vexed me since my graduate days is how to discuss the liturgical question with modern people who, even if religious, even if Catholic, have no understanding of what a liturgical rite, or a public sacrifice, is. Every page of the Bible or the Iliad impresses one with the fact that it was weirdly natural for an ancient person, say, whose city had been delivered from a plague, or who wanted to crave a divine favor, to drag an animal up to a temple, slaughter it, and invite his friends to a feast. Public cult was the nexus that held together the ancient city states of Greece and the Kingdom of Israel, as it was for all of Christian history until the modern period. The Sacrifice of Christ and the symbolic rites that surrounded its repetition simply made sense to these people.
Given that the Eucharist is the source and summit of Christian life, and the liturgy that font from which we derive the Christian spirit, it is imperative for Catholics to recover an intimate familiarity and emotional connection to what Aquinas calls the ‘rites of the Christian religion.’ We have to recover, for ourselves, and for our societies, the naturalness of liturgical rite.
Fr. Quoëx’s thesis lends us a helping hand. He explains what Aquinas has to say about religious worship and everything related to it – sacrifices, vows, consecrations, sacred places and persons, the Sunday obligation, etc. He shows us how public worship is a part of the virtue of religion, an auxiliary part of the virtue of justice. It is the way that human beings, both as individuals and as ‘cultic societies,’ express the debt of gratitude and submission they owe to their Creator. Further, Aquinas explains the role of solemnity, of holy things and holy places, in exciting our devotion and directing our attention to the worship of the Father. They are not ‘accidentals’, but an intrinsic part of the way that we worship as beings composed of body and soul. Finally, Fr. Quoëx expounds Aquinas’ views on the symbolism of the liturgical rite, the way the rite can be ‘read,’ like Sacred Scripture, on multiple spiritual levels of interpretation.
The translator hopes this volume will contribute to the recovery of liturgical rite that Ratzinger called for in Spirit of the Liturgy. It also contributes to the growing literature on the public role of religion, expressed recently for example in Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley’s It is Right and Just.”
The feast of the Transfiguration was adopted into the Roman Rite from the Byzantine in the reign of Pope Callixtus III (1455-58), in thanksgiving for the Christian victory against the Turks at the siege of Belgrade on August 6th, 1456. Coming only three years after the fall of Constantinople, this victory signaled an important halt to the Turkish invasion of Europe; in fact, the common custom of ringing church bells at noon began as a reminder to pray for the defense of this bulwark of Christendom.
The nature of the Byzantine Divine Office is such that it would be impossible to construct an Office in the traditional Roman form by merely translating the Byzantine texts. Offices and Masses for new feasts could either be composed ex novo, or reused from older sources, or both. In the pre-Tridentine period, there was no uniformity in this regard, and a variety of liturgical texts were used on the Transfiguration. At Augsburg in Germany, the Office was simply that of the Holy Trinity, with different Matins lessons and a different collect, while the Mass propers were borrowed from the season of Christmas and Epiphany, again with proper prayers and lessons. There were also various proper Offices in circulation; the one found in the Roman Breviary of St Pius V was used by the Franciscans before Trent, but changed in several respects for the Tridentine edition.
One such change was the addition of the doxology for the feast of the Epiphany: “Glory to Thee, o Lord, who didst appear today, etc.” (A new doxology was created in Pope Urban VIII’s reform of the hymns, but the older one was retained by the Benedictines, Dominicans and others.) This is noteworthy because at the Mass of the Transfiguration, the preface is that of Christmas, not Epiphany. But the connection between the “new” feast and the manifestations of the Lord celebrated by older liturgical feasts is expressed most clearly in the third nocturn of Matins, where the psalms and their antiphons were clearly not chosen merely for accidental references to “glory” and “light”, but as a deliberate echo of these same older feasts.
The first psalm (seventh of Matins as a whole) is Psalm 88, which is used at Matins on only one other feast day, namely Christmas. The antiphon reflects the common tradition, not stated in the Gospels themselves or in the Second Epistle of St Peter, that Mt Tabor in Galilee was the “high mountain” on which the Transfiguration took place. “Tabor and Hermon shall rejoice in thy name: Thy arm is with might.” This reflects the fact that at Christmas we celebrate the manifestation of God’s humanity, whereas at the Transfiguration, we celebrate the manifestation of Christ’s divinity.
The second psalm, 96, is said with the same antiphon as on the feasts of Apostles, “Light is risen to the just, and joy to the right of heart,” but with two “alleluias” removed. This refers to the fact that in addition to Moses and Elijah, who represent the Law and the Prophets of the Old Testament, three preeminent Apostles, Peter, James and John, were chosen as witnesses of the Transfiguration. This psalm is also sung on the Epiphany, and it is certainly not a coincidence that each of the three nocturns of the Transfiguration has a psalm from the Epiphany: 28 in the first, 86 in the second, and 96 in the third.
The third psalm, 103, is also sung on only one other feast day, Pentecost. As a group, together, therefore, these psalms indicate that the mystery of God’s Incarnation, which is revealed privately at Christmas and Epiphany, to Israel in the shepherds, and to the gentiles in the Magi, is now revealed privately to the Apostles, who will preach it publicly to the world once the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost.
The Church traditionally marks the public manifestation of Christ with the feast of His Baptism, which in the Roman Rite is celebrated as the Octave of the Epiphany, and in the Byzantine is the main object of Epiphany itself. The Apostles, however, were chosen after the Baptism. We must note therefore, that the same words of the Father at the Baptism, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” (Matt. 3, 17) are repeated at the Transfiguration, with the addition of a special commission to the Apostles “Hear ye him!”
Just as the Creeds of the Apostles and Nicaea focus on the events of the beginning and end of Christ’s earthly life, (“born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate”), so does the liturgical year. We do not keep feasts as such to mark events of Christ’s public ministry like the many miraculous healings or the multiplications of the loaves and fishes, although many of these stories are read in the Sunday Gospels. The Transfiguration is uniquely chosen among these events to be celebrated with a particular feast, because it marks the point at which both the Incarnation and its purpose, the Passion and Resurrection, are revealed to the Apostles, who in the fullness of time will reveal them to the rest of the world.
The Church of the Transfiguration on Mt Tabor (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Zairon.)
Longtime readers of NLM will be aware of the numerous times we have revisited the famous “Benedictine-Jesuit” debate over the liturgy (see here and here, for two examples). I have discovered more material worth sharing along these lines.
I am grateful to a long-time correspondent for pointing me to this fascinating section of Robert Speaight’s 1966 biography of Eric Gill (taken from pp. 98–102). More recent biographies of Gill have, of course, brought to light some very unedifying and unsavory facts about his life, but anyone who reads this will see why I am sharing it with NLM readers. It’s a passage deeply relevant to a complete apologia for the old Mass, which is so much a fruit—indeed the choicest fruit—of the pre-Reformation approach to God.
“Eric’s intuition, which never conflicted with his logic, suggested that the rise of capitalism at the time of the Reformation—he would have agreed with Tawney, of course, in connecting the one with the other—had been reflected by a change in spirituality to match the change in economics.
“He put, therefore, a number of questions to a monk of the Parkminster Charterhouse, where a way of life and prayer had been established long before the Reformation was thought of. Was there, he inquired, any marked change of direction observable in writers on mysticism and the contemplative life since the Reformation?
“The answer (given in writing) was that of course such a change was discernible, and it was due principally to the Jesuits who were the spearhead of the Church in a period of crisis. The Jesuits had divided the spiritual life into two distinct compartments—one for ordinary folk who were to content themselves with discursive meditation to a set plan, the other for extraordinary folk who might be led by God by extraordinary ways about which the less said the better. This ideal had been enjoined on all members of the Society, and with certain exceptions—notably Pere Grou in modern times—it had been invariably followed.
“The monk summarized the difference as ‘the difference between the individual handiwork of a craftsman, who really made his own tools and used them in producing the articles of his craft, often enough from his own designs, and the modern, uniform, correct to an inch-in-fractions article as turned out by machinery from a factory.’…
“This, it hardly needs to be emphasized, was grist to Eric’s mill. He went on to ask whether the difference was fundamental, or whether it was no more than a difference of approach. The monk replied that the difference was indeed fundamental, and that it stemmed from the ancient Thomist and Molinist debate concerning predestination and free-will—the Thomist laying greater stress on God’s action aiding and attracting the soul, the Molinist emphasizing human liberty and responsibility in the pursuit of holiness. Hence the ‘minutely introspective character’ of post-Reformation spirituality ‘with its multiplied methods of self-examination, particular examination of predominant faults, and discursive meditation.’ The Molinist method might be described as exercising the powers of the soul in such a way as to draw down the Spirit of God upon us; the older method as waiting in peace for the Spirit of God to draw us up to Him. The first method, pushed to an extreme, would lead to a sterile activism, the second to an enervating quietism. But there was no doubt which method had prevailed during the later centuries of the Church…
“He next went on to ask whether there was an analogy between men shaking hands as a sign of friendship and the soul coming to God. The monk reminded him that the shaking of hands was not a necessary sign of friendship—it might signify no more than casual acquaintance—but if the question implied that ‘spiritual exercises’ had once been the fruit of Union rather than a preparation for it, then—if one wanted to revert to older methods—it would be legitimate to dispense with them until one had achieved union with God.
“He put the matter in the form of a parable.
“John Smith’s earliest recollection was of a certain sunshiny day when he was taken to a Coronation Fete in the local park; he remembered something of the tea and the buns; but the tangible memory of it all was a ‘Coronation Mug’ with bright-hued portraits of their Majesties in all the glory of Coronation garb. He was fascinated by it; and the dream of childhood was to go to London to see the King in his golden crown.
“As he grew older, a good deal of the glamour wore off his day-dreams, but a curious and out-of-date reverence for kingship as such kept its place in his youthful mind. So, when he reached the age of discretion, he ‘sold all he had’ and left his father’s house and set out for London. As he was a perfect stranger there he sought counsel of one Ignatius Farm, who had been recommended to him as knowing all about everything in London. Presently to him he unfolded his wondrous plans. He wanted to get to know the King in person; no more and no less; to get inside Buckingham Palace; to become, perhaps, one of the royal family.
“Now Ignatius Farm, who dwelt near a mews [the Jesuit Church in Farm Street, London, adjoins a mews] thought that he had met that kind of case before. ‘My dear good fellow,’ he said, ‘do please be practical; that sort of thing may have been all very well for the Middle Ages; but all that is past and gone now. If you really have such reverence for the person and office of the King, and wish to know everything about him, read the Court Circular, which tells you of his movements; but better still, if you wish to serve him, join the army, where you may have a chance of doing something of practical use in his service.’
“Poor John Smith was disheartened. He crossed Green Park and looked wistfully at the windows of the Palace. It seemed so easy to get in. Just then a dear old gentleman, evidently of Italian origin (indeed his name proved to be Benedict Cassino) spoke to him and asked him what he was doing there. After John had told him all his hopes and fears, the old man said: ‘Cheer up; of course you can get inside, even if it is only as a fourth-class royal shoeblack. But you must catch his Majesty’s eye.’ ‘How can I do that?’ said John. ‘It is a long task for many; it just depends. But you will have to stand here all day long, admiring the beauties of the Victoria Memorial and the front of the Palace. The King will come out, and you must take off your hat and bow; that’s all. He may notice you the first day, or it may be weeks, yes, years, before he will turn your way. But he will if you only stand here long enough.’
“Thus it was that John Smith began his long vigil before the Palace. The very first day, out came his Majesty punctually at eleven o’clock and on foot. Off went John’s hat, and his back was bent nearly double. True, the King did not look like the pictures; it is true that the morning coat was immaculate and that the gloss on the hat was as if it had been japaned; but what was that to an ermine-turned scarlet cloak and a golden crown? But never mind, it was HE! And it looked to John, who was standing quite alone, as if he acknowledged his salute! There was something to go on with.
“It were tiresome (as it was to John) to follow him all the weeks he was there but he never failed; always he was there when the King came out and always he showed the same respectful salute. It must be said that one day, tiring of waiting, he went forward a few paces to speak to his Majesty but he had scarcely moved when two well-dressed gentlemen came from nowhere, as he afterwards said (it is possible they were from Scotland Yard) and told him to be off.
“But skipping the rest, THE day at last arrived. Out came the King just as usual, John bowed and lifted his hat just as usual, and then the unusual thing occurred. His Majesty stopped in his walk, and coming up to John, said: ‘Good day, John Smith,’ as he held out his hand and shook John warmly by the hand. ‘I have watched you these many months and have at last found someone whom I can trust as a faithful servant. I want you to come right away now, into the Palace; there is a very small job waiting for you and it shall be the beginning of great things if you are equally faithful inside as you were outside.’
“All the world knows how John Smith rose from one position to another until at length, after an incredible series of events, he was made heir to the Kingdom! And he used to say ‘it was all that waiting, waiting outside in the rain, the wind and the heat and with the jeers of the by-passers, and contrary to the advice of so many who told me to get at “something useful”, that brought me to where I am now on the steps of the throne.
“It was a fallacy, the monk concluded, to imagine that the ancient spiritual writers did not employ methods of spiritual exercise; but they did not tabulate, dissect, and discuss—‘just as a composer, who presents his symphony for the first time, does not distribute amongst the audience copies of his themes; he gives the result.’ The time-honoured advice to men who wanted to preach was equally applicable to men who wanted to pray: ‘Begin low, and go slow, rise high and take fire.’ But also ‘aim high.’
“Union is the normal term of the spiritual life [continued the Carthusian] but many are held back by the fancy that Union necessarily means Rapts, Revelations and Ecstasy, and alas! still more fail because they will not wait long enough in front of the Palace waiting for the King to take them by the hand.”
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