Extreme busyness continues–I need to catch up on emails but haven’t had a chance…
- Don’t miss Heavenfield’s introduction to St. Adomnan. I do wonder a little how far I’d want to push the lawyer thing. What would seal the case for me (so to speak…) would be a clear presentation of how the three books of the Life of Columba fit into the categories of stasis theory—the “official” lawyerly way of arguing according to period texts like Cicero, the ps-Ciceronean Rhetorica ad Herennium, and Quintillian.
- LP’s got a new call! I’m happy for him—and worried at the same time. This will be a huge challenge both professionally and in juggling a growing family. Many prayers for Mrs. LP too!
- Continued prayers are requested for M’s job search, of course…
- bls has an article on a renewed push on Confession.
- NLM has some links that clarify the place of music in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass that are helpful for both students of the liturgy and current practicing church musicians.
- Great question from bls on Why Saturdays on the Ember Days. Wednesdays and Fridays were traditional fast days for Christians going back to the Didache. So why Saturdays? Good question… My most recent thought on the matter is that I read an expectation in the fifth through eighth centuries that Western Christians would be at mass on those days. My logic is based on what we see in the lectionaries—proper Gospels are ideally provided for Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. I say “ideally” because the manuscript evidence is mixed. Sometimes all three ferial days are provided, sometimes only the Wednesdays and Fridays. For instance here’s a page where the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany has a reading for Sunday (EBD V), Wednesday (FR IIII), Friday (FR V), and Saturday (FR VI) But the following two weeks only have readings for Wednesday and Friday. Very fascinating is this page from the same lectionary for the time after Pentecost where there are blank spaces for the ferial Gospels under the appointed Gospels for the Sunday. The scribe knows that these readings *ought* to be there—but he seems not to have the readings… There was a major push to fill all of this in that only hits English lectionaries in the tenth century or later (Lenker’s Type 3 alt.). I’m not sure what happens to these ferial readings after this point…
Caelius has a nice post up on the Golden Number and calculations for Easter and such.
Kalendar arithmetic (the art of the computus) was an important part of the liturgical arts back in the day. Isidore includes astronomy in Book 3 on Mathematics along with music and geometry but puts his section on the Paschal Cycle in Book 6 where he talks about the book and services of the Church. (Here’s a handy fully hyperlinked table of contents for the whole Etymologiae.) Bede wrote two books on time, De Temporibus and the later De Temporum Ratione (see the table of contents here), that teach calendar calculations. The second is the more complete treatment.
Furthermore, this was an important enough matter that the two great English translators of things ecclesiastical into the vernacular—Ælfric and Bryhtferth—both tackled the topic. Indeed, Bryhtferth’s Enchiridion is theoretically a work focused on the calendar and computus but he meanders through all sorts of areas to get there. Ælfric’s De Temporibus Anni is far more lucid, drawing primarily from Bede and supplementing with Isidore.
Where the rubber really hits the road, though are the tables like those that begin on folio 45v of the Leofric Missal… And, hey, as long as you’re poking around those parts of that manuscript, check out the Christ and Satan pictures too.
The Episcopal Cafe has been running a number of things on Pelagius recently on Speaking to the Soul. I have thus far refrained from making any comments on the subject. But today’s passage made me comment.
I’m intrigued by Celtic Christianity; I think it’s a fascinating topic. But so much of the material published as “Celtic Christianity” is a shallow artifice that skims a bit from some sources and grafts it onto a model that owes more to 1970’s Earth spirituality and modern liberal protestant theology than it does anything truly and historically Celtic. Furthermore, it participates in a similar sort of project that Elaine Pagel’s did with the Gnostic Gospels—accuse Christian orthodoxy of being the repressive patriarchal bad guy, take a few isolated items from some texts and spin them off in your own direction that may or may not have any correlation to the historical movement.
One of the favorite ways to do this is to lionize those condemned by orthodoxy. But there’s a problem here easily identified as a lack of clear sources. More often than not, we don’t have the actual texts of those condemned by the Church. As a result, recovering these people and their thought can only happen by looking at what their opponents said. So, to learn about Pelagius, you read Augustine and Jerome where they criticize him. But, if you’re not being rigorous, this is where the potential for all kinds of abuse crops up. The parts that you like, you proclaim genuine; the parts you don’t, you call slander… Furthermore, you indulge in mirror reading—(If the orthodox source argues X, my guy must have taught the exact opposite [anti-X])—but that’s not always (or even often) accurate. What really comes out is little data that provides the opportunity for a great amount of personal pontification safely stuck under an historical label.
I’m saying these are trends I’ve seen–I’m not accusing Newell (the guy being excerpted at the Cafe) of this, because I don’t know him or his work. He may well not be doing this–but I’d want to see his sources and methodologies instead of blanket accusations like the first one raised at today’s post.
Saying that Pelagius was condemned for suggesting that women should read Scripture sounds fishy to me for two reasons: 1) it completely matches modern liberal expectations of the “mean patriarchal orthodox Fathers” and 2) it contradicts actual evidence that we have of those same “mean patriarchal orthodox Fathers”…
To counteract some of the stuff out there, I recommend reading some real Celtic Christianity—which tends to be quite ascetic and apocalyptic in ways that discomfits moderns—and here’s a short taster: The Confession of Patrick, Patrick’s Letter to Coroticus, The Life of St Columba, and The Fifteen Tokens of Doomsday…
I’ve just discovered a great new(?) blog, East to West that will be of interest to some readers of this site. Its author is a PhD student at the University of Wales who writes on patristics, early medieval matters, and the like with an emphasis both on Anglo-Saxon England and the Eastern Church. His current set of posts is exploring the most natural link between the two which occures in the person of Theodore of Tarsus.
I’m always amused when people refer to Rite I as “Old English.” It’s really not…
If you want to hear one of the canticles in real honest-to-goodness Old English, check out an Old English version of the Benedicite (with a narrative frame) read by Prof. Michael Drout: Part 1 and Part 2. The full text is here if you’d like to read along.
The early medieval preachers did not consider personal human suffering redemptive; rather, they considered it to be mimetic of the Redeemer. Suffering was not redemptive, but it did create the conditions for the cultivation of virtue as exemplified in Romans 5:3-5: “And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope: And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.”
I now have posted eight plainsong masses that Fr. John-Julian arranged, setting the words of the Rite II BCP to medieval settings. Please feel free to not just reference these but to use them as well.
The graduals, sequence, and tracts mentioned on the title page coordinate with the old BCP calendar; with the change to the RCL they are now out of date. Replacements are in the works but will not be available for quite a while…
One hindrance to the use of the masses may be that they—like the other files on the page—are in square-note plainsong notation. While square-note is (and should be) considered normative for writing plainsong, it clearly requires a congregation familiar with it—and few these days are. If anyone has the software and capability to transcribe these masses into the modern form of stemless notation used in contemporary hymnals to write chant (like the material in the front service music section of the ‘82 Hymnal), please do so that these masses may be more broadly used and known.
As far as use goes, this material (and everything else here) falls under the Creative Commons license that appears on my side bar: you can use it and adapt it but must give attribution to Fr. John-Julian and the order, and you can’t sell the material or your adaptation (without contacting the author and making arrangements). Given the nature of the material, if you do use it I think it would be only fitting to include a prayer for the order in your Prayers of the People as well…
Take some time to appreciate Fr. Haller’s sermon for the Feast of St. Irenaeus yesterday.
In other news regarding St. Irenaeus’s day, I came across this text yesterday. It really does deserve a post but I can’t decide if it should be tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic, or polemical so I’ll just direct you to it without comment… 
