Category Archives: Medieval Stuff

American Sarum: Sunday Afternoon

Session 5: Dr. John Harper: Sonic Ceremonial

This session was amazing. I don’t have learning to appreciate fully everything that he said, but it has taken my understanding of late medieval liturgy up a level. (That’s not to say that you had to have a lot of prior learning to get anything out of it, just that he covered the whole spectrum. A shotgun blast of erudition!) I received a strong sense of how intellectual my knowledge of liturgy in this period is; I know books and books about books. What I don’t know nearly as well are the spaces in which the liturgies were conducted, the timing of the various parts and how both of these overlapped.

Cathedrals: Multiple and Overlapping Spaces

Using the plans of Hereford Cathedral, Dr. Harper identified the three principal worship spaces within a late medieval cathedral.

The heart of the cathedral’s worship life is the choir (quire) which contained the high altar. This section is located literally at the heart of the cathedral where the two transepts come together. This is where the main body of canons would gather to sing the Offices and would celebrate the Mass of the Day. (I believe the organ is located here, but I can’t swear to it.)

To the east is the Lady Chapel. In this area, a separately funded body of people are attending to the various services for Our Lady. Thus, there was daily a Matins, Lauds, Vespers, and Compline of the BVM, the Lady Mass, and, after Compline, the Antiphon/Anthem ceremony when choral arrangements of the Antiphons (Alma Mater Redemptoris, Salve Regina, etc.) would be sung.

To the west of the Choir is the Nave or the parish church. You don’t see it in the 1950’s plans I inked to, but there was a stone pulpitum (essentially a big stone rood screen that you could get on top of—readings would be done from its top) that separated the Choir from the Nave. The Nave was the parochial space. The parish priest led masses, baptisms, weddings, funerals, and the Friday Jesus Mass in this space. However—note the aisle in the plan… On Sundays and Holydays processions that went forth from both the Choir and the Lady Chapel would travel around this space as the various services overlapped and inter-related. And it’s this inter-relation of space that must be considered to understand the full impact of sound and action in late medieval liturgy. There could literally be three different services going on at the same time—on in each of the three main spaces—and variously interacting with one another sonically if not physically. Indeed, there are surviving complaints from canons that the noise from the parish masses was interfering with their choir services.

The organ would only play on Sundays and Holydays and, I believe, supported what was going on in the Choir. Hearing this piece of information made me realize that I have to reconsider the old Lent and Advent restrictions on organ playing—these never originally applied to parish settings, as far as I can tell, and chiefly impacted the Choir only!

Rochester Cathedral: Who does what when

Who

Rochester Cathedral (note the photo of the in-place pulpitum with the pipe ranks atop it and the railing where the reader would stand to read into the Choir but be seen and heard in the Nave) which has its Lady Chapel in the South Transept gives us a great opportunity to look at exactly how worship would have been late out in the period after Henry VIII’s break with Rome but before the institution of the Book of Common Prayer. This is English Sarum in its heyday. The reason why it’s such a terrific case is because Rochester had been staffed by a Benedictine priory. With the dissolution of the monasteries in 1540, it was re-founded as a secular cathedral by letters patent in June of 1541. Bishop Nicholas Heath drew up a set of injunctions in 1543 and statues in 1544 to regulate the life and worship of the new cathedral structure.

Here’s the breakdown of people we find in Heath’s directions:

  • Dean and Chapter (7 people)
    • Dean
    • 6 canons
  • Choral Body (23 people)
    • 6 minor canons (clergy)
    • 6 clerks (lay or clergy)
    • 1 Master of Choristers
    • 8 Choristers
    • Deacon and Subdeacon
  • Grammar School (22 people)
    • 2 Instructors of Grammar
    • 20 Grammar boys
  • Church servants and poor men (12 people)
    • 2 Vergers
    • 2 Bellringers/sweepers
    • 2 Porters
    • 6 Poor men
  • Household Servants (4 people)
    • 2 butlers
    • 2 cooks

When

These people were then correlated to a chart that displayed how these various groups were deployed across the day for Holydays and Workdays. (The chart is copyrighted or I’d post it.) There are five possible staffing groups that were deployed for various services based on the service and the rank of the day:

  • Choristers: these were the 8 singers and their Master of Choristers who also doubled as the organist
  • Priests and clerks: these were the 6 minor canons and the 6 clerks (I don’t know if the Chapter is included here as I don’t know how often they were around. I expect that the deacon and subdeacon were in this group as well.)
  • Full choir: Choristers + Priests and clerks
  • Full choir & Grammar school: Like it says, full choir + boys
  • Said: It’s on the chart but isn’t explicitly described. Clearly the minimum necessary here is a priest and a server.

From the chart it’s clear that the Choristers and Master of Choristers are the main body for the Lady Chapel and the Priests & Clerks inhabit the Choir on Workdays. The Choristers are used for the Jesus Mass in the parish church on Fridays. On Holydays, the Full Choir and the Grammar School come together for big blowout events.

What

Since this was a conference for musicians, the “what” in this case was the music. There were three basic kinds of music used:

  • Plainsong—sung unison
  • Improvised polyphony (organum)—plainsong with two parts added, one moving in open fifths above, the other moving below by a fourth IIRC
  • Composed polyphony (pricksong)—this is the composed polyphony for a set of voices (anywhere from 3 to a maximum of 12 (!!)) that we’re used to from Byrd and others

On a regular workday, the only people who would be singing polyphony at Rochester Cathedral according to Bp. Heath’s directions were the Choristers when they sang at Lady Mass 8 AM every morning but Saturday. (On non-festal Saturdays, the Lady Mass was the Mass of the Day and was sung by the Full Choir at the main Mass of the Day slot; the Lady Mass was only “said” at 8 AM in the Lady Chapel). On the Eves of all Doubles (including Saturdays as eves of Sunday), the Full Choir sang the Anthem of the BVM in composed Polyphony. The Grammar School joined with the Full Choir for the Anthem on Holydays.  Thus, in the 8 surviving major sources of liturgical polyphony from the period,

  • 29% of the pieces are for the Mass
  • 33% of the pieces are for the Office
  • 39% of the pieces are for the Anthem

When it comes to the Mass, very little of the Propers get embellished. Instead what receives the embellishing is the Ordinary of the Mass. Again, most singers will be familiar with this as the major mass pieces are the Ordinary: Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei. (Note, though, that in Sarum non-votive masses, the Kyrie was troped and thus was part of the Proper, not the Ordinary—hence no Kyries in most Byrd Masses; it’s because they’re Sarum…)

In the Offices, the main areas for polyphony were the final Respond of Matins and the Magnificat (not the Benedictus, note). Compline was sung separately from Vespers and tended to be more formal (more formal than what I’m not sure—my notes don’t say: possible answers could be “than Vespers” or “than continental sources”).

As a side note, note that music composed for the Lady Chapel is small-space music—it wasn’t intended to fill the whole space of the cathedral because it didn’t have to.

Dr. Harper then displayed a fascinating chart that I didn’t have anywhere near time to copy down. It displayed the correspondence between liturgical “height” of a feast and the number of voices liturgical music (usually Masses) for the feast contained. It was a very clear distribution of kalendrical importance expressed through song. Christmas received pieces for 8 voices on one end of the spectrum; All Saints, and Feasts of Confessors and Martyrs received 5 at the other.

One of his main points in the discussion of music on the eve of the Reformation is how much of it survived. Organs narrowly missed being banned by one vote (in Parliament, I believe) and Elizabeth saved the choirs. As we consider late Medieval liturgy/music and the transition into the early Anglican experiment, the retention of music must be kept in mind.

Experiencing a Sarum Liturgy

The second part of Dr. Harper’s presentation was watching a video of a reconstruction of a Sarum service for the reconciliation of penitents. He asked us when we watched it to be aware of its effect on us from a few different angles. First, what does it mean to participate in a liturgy in a language we don’t understand but of which we know the general gist? Second, what is the lived impact of certain uses that seem boring on the page—like the prolonged recitation of the penitential psalms in plainsong—but may be more powerful in the experience?

The service was done at St Teilo’s, a church which is part of a Welsh museum, and which the Harpers (John’s wife is also a formidable scholar of medieval music and liturgy) and other scholars are using to learn more about the lived experience of medieval liturgy. Here’s a pdf of a paper on how liturgists might learn from it and some pointers on how a Sarum Mass might be done in this particular church.

Here’s at least a portion of the service we watched uploaded to YouTube. Jeremy Davies, precentor at Salisbury is serving as the priest, Dr. Harper is the second server.

I’ll put the next session in another post given the current length here…

Editing Sarum: 19th Century Scholarship on Sarum Materials

Before we continue much further in the discussion of Sarum history, we need to take a quick survey of the texts themselves. The key issue, of course, is that most interested parties approach the Sarum materials not through the manuscripts but through the printed editions. Most of these were done in the latter half of the nineteenth century by British Anglican scholars with an agenda, but that doesn’t suggest that the scholarship is faulty—it simply means that we ought to be aware that the agenda exists. In this post we’ll consider the Latin texts. English-language editions are part of the later story which we’ll save till then…

Mass Texts (in order of publication)

  • F. H. Dickson, Missale ad usum insignis et praeclara ecclesia Sarum: Published in fascicles from 1861 through 1885, this was the first attempt to print the Latin text of the Sarum Missal. Perhaps ironically, it printed the latest representatives of the Sarum Use—Dickson used no manuscripts for his text, but instead relies upon the printed Sarum Missals (Pfaff notes 47 printings between 1487 and 1534 with an additional six during the Marian restoration). Thus, Dickson’s text represents the full-blown Sarum Use as it appeared just before the development of the Prayer Book.
  • W. G. Henderson, Processionale ad usum insignis ac praeclara ecclesia Sarum: From 1882, this is an edition of the processions and various texts associated with them that supplement the missal. Henderson edited these from several sources, most notably two printed editions: the first printed edition from 1508 and the second done in 1517. He says concerning that these two “appear to be clearly the most correct, and fortunately they are quite independent of each other” (Henderson, vi). I’m not sure here what “quite independent” means, not having perused the text, but it does give one pause! He’d also done some partial collations with later printed editions and with three manuscripts, a 14th century, and early 15th, and a late 15th. 
  • W. H. Frere, Graduale Sarisburiense: a Reproduction in Facsimile of a Manuscript of the Thirteenth Century [No download due to a 1966 reprint]: First published in 1894, this is a gradual rather than a missal but makes reference to the “missing” missal parts. Based on the evidence it becomes clear that it is a very early manuscript—between 1203 and 1220—and the missal with which it is partnered both pre-dates New Sarum and contains references to a pre-New Sarum customary.
  • W. H. Frere, The Use of Sarum: The Original Texts Edited from the Manuscripts (vol 1); The Use of Sarum: The Original Texts Edited from the Manuscripts (vol 2): The first volume came out in 1898, the second in 1901. When the term “Sarum” is generally used in liturgical circles, the reference cannot fail to include this book whether directly or indirectly. What Frere gives us in these two volumes is the Sarum “rules of the road.” This work is both important enough and complicated enough to be discussed below in broader detail.
  • J. W. Legg, Tracts on the Mass: Published in 1904 as volume 27 of the Henry Bradshaw Society, this book is a compilation of a number of ordinaries with ceremonial directions for Mass that Legg had collected. There are some French and Dominican materials here along with English texts. The key Sarum items include a 14th century Ordinary (from the Morris Missal), a list of manuscript Sarum Missals known at that time,  and—at the very end—the 13th century ordinary from the Crawford Missal. These will be discussed below especially in relation to Frere’s Use of Sarum.
  • J. W. Legg, The Sarum Missal, edited from Three Early Manuscripts: Published in 1916, this is the first collated edition based on the earliest manuscripts of the Sarum Missal. Legg’s base text is the Crawford Missal, the earliest complete Sarum manuscript. The other two are from just before and just after 1300. So, published thirty years later, this edition reflects the state of the Sarum missal some two hundred years before what is printed in Dickson. Nevertheless, the evidence it gives is past the period of “beginnings” and is after the establishment of the cathedral at New Sarum. It can’t tell us about the origins of the Sarum Rite, but does provide witness for its practice in the High Middle Ages.

First, note the dates on the missal publications: the historically later missals were printed first, the historically earlier ones were printed last. The latter point is perhaps the most important as it means that all of the compilation of the customaries and ordinaries were not done with ready reference to the earliest forms of the text. This may, in part, explain some of the confusion since there was indeed confusion…

Second,  Frere’s Use of Sarum is a key book that requires closer examination. Pfaff notes that it “is almost impenetrably difficult to use” (Pfaff, 373). [I’m glad he said this—I thought it was just me!] The two volumes contain four main texts which Frere entitles the Consuetudinary, the Customary, the Ordinal, and the Tonary. The Tonary is the simplest—it gives the psalm/canticle tones. The next three are more complicated. Frere explains the difference this way: “…the Ordinal defines the character, contents, and method of the Services while the consuetudinary defines the persons who are to conduct them; in other words, the Ordinal deals with the Rite, and the Consuetudinary with the Ceremonial” (Frere, II.vii). That’s clear enough. However, Frere attempts to describe the Customary as an intermediate term between the two:

The Customary seems to be based entirely on the Consuetudinary; . . . to this there are joined some further additions not drawn from the Consuetudinary, which may be taken either as ‘general rubrics’ and therefore supplementary to the Ordinal, or as additional liturgical customs and therefore supplementary to the Consuetudinary. The Customary is thus a link between the two. (Frere, I.xi-xii)

There are two problems here. The first is, according to Pfaff, the Consuetudinary and the Customary are properly differentiated by time and not by genre. The Customary is later than the Consuetudinary. The second, is that Frere has committed contextual damage with his arrangement: the base texts of both the Ordinal and the Consuetudinary come from the same manuscript. Here’s Pfaff to clear things up:

What is printed on pages 1-207 of [Frere’s] second volume as “Ordinale Sarum” is, with very considerable elisions, the Risby ordinal (BL Harley 1001) text—without folio references. In that manuscript folios 1-83 contain the office ordinal, 84-116 that for the mass, and 117-55 the consuetudinary (as described above). So in printing the first two sections of this manuscript in his volume II and the third in volume I Frere has split his main witness: one which, though apparently the earliest surviving of its kind, was in any case written in the early fourteenth century, several decades into the story we are trying to trace here, and belonging to a parish church in Suffolk, a long way from Salisbury. (Pfaff, 374)

So, at the end of the day, Pfaff dates the roots of the consuetudinary to the last period of Old Sarum, between 1173 and before 1220, but finds the Risby Ordinal to be from about a century later as it “represents practices codified for the new cathedral” (Pfaff, 376).  The point here isn’t to try and pick up the historical narrative again, rather it’s to show the complicated and convoluted state of the sources as we have received them and which we’re still in the process of trying to figure out despite more than a century of additional work since these first editions were made.

Now it’s time to turn to the “Ordinal” for a second (remember, the ordinal is how to fit the service books together, not the ceremonial) . We begin with Pfaff’s emphatic statement: “no manuscript witness to what can fairly be characterized as a Sarum ordinal dates from earlier than the fourteenth century” (Pfaff, 379). The two items in Legg’s Tracts on the Mass supplement what appears in Frere’s volume II and reveal some further differences in the evolution of the Rite. The most important is the fact that Legg’s ordinal from the Crawford Missal has some minor differences from what is preserved in the Risby text. Pfaff concludes from these that “it is plain that the missal with which the Risby rubrics correspond is of a strain somewhat independent of the three edited or collated by Legg” (Pfaff, 380). The pay-off is that, once again, the evidence and therefore the Sarum story is more complicated than it may first appear.

The next issue is that Frere prints only the “Old Ordinal” and not the “New Ordinal” on the grounds that the New Ordinal is the text incorporated into the later printed missals and, since they have been reproduced so many times, they are not worth collating and printing together. The real shame here is when we realize (by way of Pfaff’s comments, of course [414]) that the New Ordinal is the Ordinal text in the four sources from which Frere edited his “Customary”; the Customary and the New Ordinal are complimentary documents but we’re unable to view them that way in Frere’s text!

Office Texts

To clarify just how useful these printed editions are to bringing order to the wild world of Sarum breviaries, I’ll turn it over entirely to Pfaff:

With few exceptions, it is next to impossible to state exactly what the totality of the Sarum office is for any specific day. [While the structure is fairly stable, the rubrics, contents, and texts themselves show an increasing state of flux.] In short, anything like a critical edition, in the sense of one which establishes a base text and records variants from it, is with the breviaries that concern us almost a contradiction in terms. (Pfaff, 429).

With a situation like this, the need for something like Maydeston becomes that much more important since in his day the clergy were working from these manuscripts rather than printed versions.

So—to summarize as briefly as possible, the access to Sarum Mass materials are in a far better state than the Office. We have printed versions that shed light on both our earliest surviving (Legg) and latest (Dickson) missals. On the Office side, there is one major representative(Procter and Wordsworth) which is just that—representative—and which can not and should not be regarded as “The” Sarum Office but an example of “A” late Sarum Breviary.

On The Sarum Rite: Beginnings

Let me begin with a disclaimer… My area of study is, broadly, the lived interpretation of the New Testament as it appears in preaching, Christian formation, and liturgy. While I have an interest and a certain expertise in medieval liturgy, my major encounter with the sources has focused on English, pre-Conquest monastic liturgies with a special focus on the Office (and, naturally, later Anglican develo0pments). Most of the following discussion will be about the Sarum Rite/Use (we’ll tackle that “/” later) which is an English post-Conquest secular tradition, largely focused around the Mass. Thus, my tendency is to read the later sources through what I know of the earlier sources rather than the other way around.

Indeed, one of the things I’ve never fully understood about the Sarum Rite is where it came from and how it differs from the pre-Conquest missals that I’ve studied. That is, from the texts of the missals themselves (i.e., leaving aside the complicated questions of ceremonial), what emerges at Trent doesn’t seem all that different from a book like the Missal of Robert of Jumieges, the central exemplar of the Late Anglo-Saxon Benedictine Revival. Where do the differences appear that make “Sarum” distinctive from both its English precursors and its later continental parallels?

That’s precisely where Richard Pfaff starts in Chapter 10 of The Liturgy of Medieval England: A History which is entitled “Old Sarum: The beginnings of Sarum Use.” I’m not going to follow his argument closely for the sake of clarity, but here are some of the major take-aways that I found in this chapter.

First, it’s important to keep at the forefront of our minds that such a thing as the “Sarum Use” is a synthetic abstraction. We can’t imagine people all across Southern England using the same colors, ceremonial, practices, and liturgies in lock-step with one another. Economics, technology, and local circumstances make this impossible. That is, you can’t imagine that a little parish church had the same vestments, participants, and space that the cathedral at Salisbury did. A wealthy church would have more vestments and, presumably, more and newer books than a poorer one. Furthermore, churches dedicated to certain saints or containing certain relics would need different liturgies from others. Just because a Salisbury altar consecrated to a certain saint received a special liturgy wouldn’t mean that liturgy would be performed in another church without such an altar. So, what is “Sarum” is defined as a set of customs and characteristics that generally hold among a set of practices and books. And then there’s the factor of how these items change or don’t change over time which is an entirely other can of worms…

Second, (speaking of time) it’s important to recognize the effects of both time and liturgical space in attempting to wrap our heads around Sarum practice. Strictly and narrowly defined, “Sarum” refers to the books and practices of the Salisbury diocese as archetypically represented in the books and practices of the cathedral of said diocese. And that’s a moving target. In one of the main synthetic narratives of what Sarum is and isn’t is the suggestion that Sarum Use in its totality—books, rubrics, colors, vestments, what have you—was codified by one guy, Richard Poore, at one time, 1225, at one place, Salisbury Cathedral. Unfortunately, as Pfaff lays out, it doesn’t work like that; this simplistic narrative simply can’t account for the actual historical evidence.

There are some important factors in terms of time and place, however. Generally speaking, the Norman Conquest of England from 1066 on was a turning point. While Norman influence had been building in the second quarter of the eleventh century, William the Bastard brought a sea change in the way church establishment was done from the Late Anglo-Saxon ways. At the end of my period, the Benedictine Revival (970 and forward) had seen the transformation of cathedrals into monastic rather than secular foundations. So—all the clergy hanging around were monks rather than canons. With the Conquest there were literal “see” changes; diocesan centers were moved to different towns within their territory and Norman churchmen usually replaced the previous Anglo-Saxon incumbents.

(Think of state capitals on the eastern seaboard of the US—most of them are, now days—fairly minor cities within their states; population and business centers have shifted over the years. Same thing there. The centers of old Anglo-Saxon diocese didn’t meet the needs and geography of the new Norman realm so they were moved to fit the new landscape.)

Also, the Norman churchmen returned to the more normal pattern of having secular canons at cathedrals rather than monks.

Thus, the old Anglo-Saxon diocese had its cathedral at Sherborne with a monastic community. After the Conquest, the see was moved to Old Sarum around 1075 and established with canons. Then, the see was moved to its present location at Salisbury (New Sarum) in around 1225. What we consider Sarum was finalized in the new cathedral but was begun beforehand at Old Sarum.

Third, in terms of the change from the Anglo-Saxon materials into Sarum materials we can see three major influences. One is monastic. Despite the move away from Sherborne and the establishment of canons, there may be what Pfaff calls a “shadowy” monastic influence particularly in the ceremonial going by the testimony of English additions to a Old Sarum copy of the Romano-German Pontifical (the major ceremonial guide used by the early medieval church). The second is the establishment of canons themselves. A set number of priests meant something both for how many participants there could be in liturgy and how many altars the church could have. Last is the example of Leofric C. The Leofric Missal is one from my period which contains three distinctive parts, A, B, and C. A and B are earlier monastic Anglo-Saxon/Breton texts. Leofric C reflects the efforts of Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, and his updating of the book to reflect his secular situation. Something similar must have happened with the Sherborne/Old Sarum liturgies—we just have no evidence of what they started with and exactly what happened when.

What we can say is that distinctively Sarum saints and rubrics appear in the Sarum gradual from between 1200 and 1220, but the earliest surviving missal, the Crawford Missal) is from sometime around 1275 or so. Furthermore, the earliest reference to a Sarum customary also seems to predate both the foundation of Salisbury Cathedral and our oldest missal. Thus, Pfaff concludes the chapter with “this tentative, simple, and indeed obvious conclusion: that there existed a self-conscious Sarum liturgical tradition well before either the new cathedral at Salisbury was begun in 1220 or the ‘Old’ Sarum ordinal was drawn up” (Pfaff, 364).

Bits on the Night Office

A few thoughts on the Night Office, some from the previous post, others not.

On the Patristic Readings

Within the early medieval English system with which I’m most familiar, a regular ol’ weekday ferial Office usually had one nocturn. A nocturn is a hunk of psalms, then a reading broken up by 3 (secular) or 4 (monastic) responsaries. On a weekday, this single nocturn took its reading from Scripture, hearkening back to the Night Office lectionary of Ordo XIII or one of its derivations.

On Sundays and feast days, there were usually 3 nocturns. The first nocturn was often like a regular night, meaning that its reading came from Scripture. The second nocturn had a patristic reading that, in Paul the Deacon’s system at least, was referred to as a sermo and was a general seasonal text from a patristic source or a was a particular sermon about the feast being celebrated. Again, in Paul’s system, Leo and Maximus were often favorite sources (and some of the sermons traveling under the name of Maximus were actually by Caesarius of Arles). The third nocturn was an exposition of the appointed Gospel for the feast. Paul seems to have called this the omeilia or “homily.” [The distinctions we think Paul was trying to draw broke down fairly quickly and the terms “sermo” and “omelia” tended to be used in an interchangeable fashion by the 10th century.] Paul’s go-to guys for the omeilia were Gregory and Bede with some Jerome and Augustine thrown in where warranted (i.e., Augustine’s tractates on John and exposition of the Sermon on the Mount; Jerome from his commentary when a Matthew text popped up with no other texts from Gregory or Bede).

So—on special occasions, there were two patristic pieces in the Night Office, one focused on the season/event, the other on the appointed Gospel text.

Patristic Creep: Office to Mass

Perhaps the greatest conceptual shift in the study of early medieval preaching in the last half of the twentieth century was the recognition of the role of Night Office homiliaries (collections of sermons typically from patristic sources often but not always in liturgical order) within apparently Mass-focused preaching. Determining how patristic homiliaries functioned is tricky. Some, it’s clear, were used for the second and third nocturns of the Night Office. Some were clearly used for spiritual reading in lectio divina. Whether and how they were used at masses in the period is a complicated question with few easy or clear answers.

We can say three definite things about mass preaching in the Late Anglo-Saxon/Benedictine Revival period in England.

  1. There was an expectation that preaching was supposed to happen. English editions of the Rule of Chrodegang require that secular canons (so, priests at cathedrals) preach at least every other Sunday and on feast days. Furthermore, the Canons of Ps.-Egbert which Aelfric quotes in one of his letters on clerical duties states that clergy should preach every Sunday and on major feast days. Manuscript evidence supports these mandates (but says nothing about their fulfillment…) in that Aelfric’s two cycles of Catholic Homilies and supplemental sermons gave preachers texts to read on these occasions. Furthermore, Ursula Lenker’s work has proved to my satisfaction that the Old English Gospels were used by canons for sermon preparation.
  2. It’s clear that Aelfric uses patristic materials from the Night Office and specifically re-purposes them for proclamation at Mass. In a sense, I think the written sermons of Aelfric (in the vernacular) give us a sense of what most of the preachers did. That is, those who were bilingually competent took their homiliary from the Night Office into the pulpit with them and used the Latin as source material for a vernacular sermon, either translating on the fly, or trying to hit the major points in a loose paraphrase. The problem is that not all of the clergy at the time were that competent in Latin—a situation Aelfric bemoans on a regular basis and is the reason for his English homily collections.
  3. Sometimes the preaching had no relation to the Night Office (or the texts at all…). The mass of anonymous vernacular Old English homilies shows quite a bit of disparity. Some are exegetical with patristic sources. Some are composites where a preacher patched several things together. Some are basically direct translations of banned apocryphal works. (What, you think when your preacher starts working off The Shack that this is a new thing? Hardly…)

So—among preachers who cared about passing on orthodox Christian teaching, there was often quite a bit of carry-over between what the clergy and monks heard in the Night Office and what the laity heard at Mass. But that wasn’t necessarily the case and it might have been spotty.

On the Night Office Lectionary

I believe that Ordo XIII and its later evolution into breviaries has had and continues to have a significant impact on how we understand the readings for the Daily Office. In particular, I think we can identify four major characteristics of the “Ordo XIII pattern” that have significance for how we assess any modern Office lectionaries:

  1. Maximum Coverage. The goal of reading was to move systematically through the entire canon.
  2. Yearly Cycle. One of the defining features of the the early medieval pattern is that it demonstrated a clear intent to get through all of Scripture within the space of a single liturgical year. This is one of the points that Cranmer and other Office reformers have consistently gone back to.
  3. Liturgical Coherence. The books read tend to have a seasonal connection with the Church Year. Particular books are read at particular times because the text as a whole has a coherence and significance with the time.
  4. Blocks of Text. In the Night Office, you get a long stretch from a single book. There’s a continuity of narrative or, at least, text. Of the four main characteristics I identify, this is the one that tends to be honored the least in modern schemes. That is, while Cranmer legislated a narrative flow in taking sequential texts from OT, NT, and Gospel works, he divided them up at the start so that the readings were disjointed. So at each Office you read an OT reading, then an NT—the flow was broken up.

There’s no particular point I’m trying to make at the moment about these, I’m just identifying these four characteristics and holding them up for discussion.

Formation and the Ecclesia Anglicana

One of the perennial Anglo-Catholic hobbies  is constructing and maintaining an acceptable myth of origins. That is to say, if you are going to argue that there is a historical and theological validity to the use of certain catholic principles, doctrines, and ceremonies—but not others—within Anglican churches, you need to have some reason to hand that accounts for it.

One of the classic favorites is the notion of the Ecclesia Anglicana. This is the concept that English Christianity is just a bit different from Roman Catholic Christianity—always has been, always will be—and that the Anglican Churches are simply the current expression of this separate but equal way of being. As a result, adherents of this view claim a certain freedom by identifying the differences between Roman and English practice.

I’ve always quite liked this notion in a big-picture kind of way, but have had all sorts of problems with it on a historical level. It’s one thing to assert it with a side-order of nostalgic Victorian nationalism, it’s another entirely to document it in a convincing fashion in the historical and liturgical record.

It’s with this background (a love for the concept but a weighty skepticism concerning its historical realities) that I surprised myself last night while washing dishes by coming up with a potential liturgical-historical argument in favor of it…

If you’re going to argue a difference between “English” and “Roman,” liturgical and historical evidence supports an approach that sees “Western” as a super-category made up of a number of related theological and liturgical traditions one of which is “English” and one (actually several that fuse into one) which becomes dominant as “Roman.” Part of the question, then, is in the matter of definitions: what’s “English” and what’s “Roman” and how are these situated in relation to what’s “Western”?

Then, once that’s been teased out, what are the things that can be identified as granting a fundamental theological distinction between them? (Understanding liturgy in its proper place as the kinetic side of the theological coin…)

One way to crack the nut is to point to the formative aspects of the liturgy, and I’d approach it this way. The Sarum strand is identifiably and recognizably English in locale granted that its roots straddle both French and earlier English practice. When you compare Sarum sources against Continental Western texts and the materials designated “Roman” by the Council of Trent, one of the differences that you find is the Mass Gospel Lectionary. If I recall correctly (and this came to me while washing dishes, mind you, and I haven’t consulted my tomes yet), there are differences at least in Advent, Epiphany, and in post-Pentecost.

What makes this difference major and important is not the Mass, however—it’s the Office. The Mass Gospel Lectionary appears in the third nocturn of the Night Office and determines the patristic homily found therein. A different Mass Gospel lectionary suggests that the nocturn lessons may be different with the possible result that the Sarum-using folk were being formed by reading different patristic texts at different times and were being formed and normed differently than their “Roman” brethren. If you are trying to argue for a theological and practical difference between the Ecclesia Anglicana and the Roman Church especially defined by its Tridentine liturgy, one of the best ways to do it would be a thorough audit of the nocturn texts.

Come to think of it, I recall that in Advent, at least, the second nocturn readings don’t quite cohere either. I seem to recall a Maximus of Turin text where the Tridentine/Roman sources have the Jerome text on Isaiah quoted below. The significance there is that the Sarum source seems to be drawing on an older “Western” strand as the Maximus likely is a hold-over from Paul the Deacon, the official Night Office collection from the Carolingian period.

So—to make a sustained and historically verifiable argument for a theologically distinct Ecclesia Anglicana one possible route could be a thorough comparison of the Night Office texts between the English and Continental sources. What you’d have to find in order to make a strong case is greater coherence between Sarum, Hereford, and York sources (perhaps Hyde Abbey as well?) than what you find in Continental sources, particularly those that feed into the Tridentine Breviary. Then, if you could further isolate a difference in perspective—so, a preponderance of a particular father or set of fathers over others—between “English” and “Roman” breviaries, then I’d be willing to give more credence to the notion of a theologically distinct Ecclesia Anglicana that contains demonstrable theological and formational tendencies from its Continental counterparts.

Random Thoughts on Monastic Bishops

The kids are already on vacation and we go to join them tomorrow meaning that M and I got to run together this morning (I just did a light 10 then relaxed while she did another 8 miles…). In the process, I found myself pondering once again Sulpicius Severus and the transmission of the monastic tradition from East to West. In particular, I’m considering the shift of the ascetic ideal from, essentially, hermits to bishops.

Consider–the main texts of the monastic movement in its initial eastern flourishing were Athanasius’s Life of Antony and the various collections of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. These were then translated into Latin by Jerome & friends. Suplicius who, in an unguarded moment in the Dialogues, lets slip that he hopes to replace Jerome altogether writes the Life of Martin, the Dialogues, and the Epistles. He shifts the ideal away from the unlettered desert hermit and places it onto the noble Gaulish bishop. Likewise, among Jerome’s correspondents are a number of letters to bishops–like those to Paulinus of Nola who turns out to be a friend of Sulpicius as well.

I’m not making an argument at the moment, more lining up some evidence and seeing what patterns emerge. It is fair to say, though, that both Sulpicius and Jerome seem to assimilate monasticism into the western hierarchies more firmly than what we see in the first generations of monastic writings from the East.

Furthermore, I’m now suddenly intrigued by the Celtic bishops. Authentic classical “Celtic Christianity”–as we’ve discussed before–was far more similar to desert asceticism than other models, and one of its most recognizable features is that the bishops were usually abbots. Is this some kind of anomaly or is this the logical outcome of the strand of tradition that runs through Sulpicius Severus?

Still pondering…

Quick Note on Sarum Prime

I just got done glancing through the ordering for singing Prime in the Sarum rite.

Now I don’t claim to be an expert or anything, but I think it’s fair to say that I do have a certain familiarity with the liturgical year as observed in Medieval England. As remarked n this site before, there’s always been discussion among Anglo-Catholics concerning the truth of Cranmer’s allegations on the complexity of the Sarum system to the detriment of the Gospel. Let me just say that this morning, I’m on Cranmer’s side…

There are no less than 20 different melodies for the singing of the Prime hymn (with 4 additional variants in the doxologies). The directions for use tend to look like this:

Daily within the Octave and on the Octave Day of the Assumption and of the Nativity of S. Mary when the service is of the same Octave ; and on every Commemoration of S. Mary through the whole year, except from the Octave of the Epiphany until the Purification, this melody is sung.

Looking at this as a liturgist and a programmer considering how to place this rubric within a rule-based machine-comprehensible system, the heart quails…

Early Medieval Homiletics Reading List

Brandon was wondering…a bit ago now…about some guidance on reading for medieval homiletics.

Here are some of my thoughts on the matter. Now—I do come at this from an unusual direction. That is, a lot of the medievalists out there can be lumped into one of four camps: the English/Language-types, the History-types, the Art-types, or the Religion-types. Most of the recent work on Old English homiletics has come from the English-types. Thus, they come with a certain perspective with a certain knowledge base and certain expectations.

I don’t come from there.

As a Religion-type I approach the field and the subject matter from a rather different set of presuppositions and perspectives. No doubt, that will flavor my list both in terms of what I include and what I don’t.

The other thing I want to add is a note on the early medieval period itself. When viewed from the History-Of-Ideas perspective, the early medieval period looks rather bare and most surveys tend to skip from the patristics to the scholastics with nary a hitch. Needless to say this annoys me… If this is the case generally, it seems especially to be the case in terms of homiletics as you will find many references to that fact that no original thought was going on and that everyone was just copying the Fathers. It’s not that simple. The Early Medieval period is best understood as a period of synthesis and consolidation where thinkers individually and the Church corporately was sifting through the remains of both the Classical and Late Antique world in an attempt to salvage what they could and to systematize this host of fragments into meaningful and useful systems of thought. Ignoring this aspect of the period is analogous to dismissing mosaics as not being proper glasswork because it’s just a bunch of broken bits pushed together—and not even in the original order!

Enough ranting—here are my thoughts by category…

Overviews of the History of Preaching

Yngve Brilioth, A Brief History of Preaching, translated by Karl E. Mattson, (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1965). An old mainstay of the history of homiletics

Paul S. Wilson, A Concise History of Preaching, (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992). A more recent voice concerning homiletical history

Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). The new standard in terms of breadth, a work stamped with an idiosyncratic approach shaped by Reformed ideals.

These three are all histories of preaching written from the perspective of 20th century homiletics. There’s no point in reading these through—just find them in the library and spend some time skimming their medieval sections and jotting down some notes. Here you’ll see what modern homileticians think of the medieval tradition (when they think of it at all…). Notably, all of these are Protestant, the last especially so.

One which I haven’t seem but which seems to be the broadly liberal protestant answer to Old’s conservative protestant is O.C. Edwards, A History of Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon, 2004).

The only recent item I’ve seen out of Roman Catholic circles is a book which I think bears a very misleading title: C. Colt Anderson, Christian Eloquence: Contemporary Doctrinal Preaching (Mundelein, Ill.: Hillenbrand, 2005). This is written as a textbook for preaching classes and is a “Reform of the Reform” attempt to teach modern preachers how to preach in a medieval style. I’ve been contemplating writing a review of it for publication but haven’t found the right time or venue. In short, I think it sets forth a fascinating project and even a decent structure in the opening few chapters but fails to deliver. It doesn’t adequately carry through its own project, and it doesn’t address what I regard as the fundamental question in adapting medieval homiletical theory for the modern pulpit which is the connection between tradition, revelation, authenticity, and the ethics of using some else’s material.  In short, it could have been awesome…

Patristics

Secondary Sources

Johannes Quasten, Patrology, 4 vols. (Notre Dame: Christian Classics, reprint n.d.) This is the massive overview to patristic thought which should be your starting place for any question, issue, or query concerning the Church Fathers. Read it through once, then refer to it as needed. The bibliographic data is becoming dated but will reliably point you to the stand-by studies and critical editions.

Its single greatest failing for our purposes is that it ends with Leo the Great; no Gregory, no Bede.

Primary Sources

Augustine ET: Tractates on John, NPNF1.7; Sermon of the Mount, Selected Homilies on the Gospels, NPNF1.6. As far as sermons go, Augustine’s Tractates provided the major word on the Gospel of John. The work on the Sermon on the Mount was also influential. As for others, many of the Augustinian sermons floating around the early medieval world were not really by him (Caesarius of Arles’s work frequently traveled under Augustine’s name.

Maximus of Turin [Sermons, edited by Almut Mutzenbecher, CCSL 23 (Turhout: Brepols, 1999); ET: Sermons of St. Maximus of Turin, translated by Boniface Ramsey, Ancient Christian Writers 50 (Newman, 1989)

Leo the Great [Sermons, 4 vols. edited by René Dolle, Sources chrétiennes 22, 49, 74, 200, (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1949-1973); ET: Sermons, translated by Jane Freeland and Agnes Conway, Fathers of the Church 93 (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1995)] Selected sermons of Leo can also be found in the NPNF2.12. One of the greatest popes & preachers, Leo stands as a representative of the finest traditions of Late Antiquity.

Gregory the Great [Homiliae in evangelia, edited by Raymon Etiax, CCSL 141, (Turhout: Brepols, 1999); ET: Forty Gospel Homilies, translated by David Hurst, CS 123, (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1990)] Reformer and visionary, Gregory stands on the cusp between Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval as an influential liminal figure. Be warned, the English translation’s numbering of the homilies is idiosyncratic and should be cross-checked with the CCSL edition.

The Venerable Bede [Bede Venerabilis opera. Pars III: Opera homilectica; Pars IV: Opera rhythmica, edited by David Hurst and J. Fraipont, CCSL 122, (Turhout: Brepolis, 1955); ET: Homilies on the Gospels, 2 vols., translated by Lawrence T. Martin and David Hurst, CS 110-111, (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1989-1990)] The star of Northumbrian biblical scholarship, Bede represents the finest work of a scholar in dialogue with both Latin orthodoxy and the opening German mission fields.

This stuff here is the heartland of the early medieval homiliary traditions.

Early Homiletics

Augustine, On Christian Doctrine. Translated by D.W. Robertson, Jr. The Library of Liberal Arts. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1958. This is a classic—no doubt about it. But Augustine’s impact on early homiletical theory is entirely incomplete without also reading:

Augustine, On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed, NPNF1.3. This is where Martin of Braga, Pirmin, and Aelfric all get their fundamental template for missionary preaching. It deserves much more attention than it gets.

Gregory the Great, Pastoral Care, NPNF2.12. Not explicitly a preaching manual, but Gregory does talk quite a bit about preaching and about shaping the preaching to the audience.

Miller, Prosser, Benson, Readings in Medieval Rhetoric, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973) This is a great collection of primary sources and summaries of primary sources. It includes the complete text of Bede’s De Schematibus et Tropis in English along with a number of other helpful texts.

There were no more preaching manuals until the rise of the scholastics. Alan of Lille comes next in sequence but it’s crucially important to notice the gap.

Why were there no preaching manuals between the patristic to the scholastic period? It’s not just because people were copying… Rather, it was because the medievals were still in touch enough with classical rhetoric to understand that preaching/rhetoric was composed of three things: talent, training, and imitation. And that last is key. If you want to know the great preaching manuals of the early medieval world, you must go back to the sermons of Gregory and Augustine and study their method. Then look at the sermons of Bede, Aelfric, and Haymo to see how they deploy this method. It’s in the comparison between these sets of authors that you’ll truly understand how early medieval homiletics was shaped.

Liturgy

Perhaps the single greatest difference between my approach and that of most of the English-types is that I understand the sermon to be a discursive element within the liturgy. Preaching in the early medieval period cannot be separated from the liturgy. Even if there is nothing ostensibly liturgical about it, the liturgy still remains the primary frame of reference.

I’ll not deluge you here, but recommend only three works: one an ancient commentary, one a modern, and one an invaluable reference. Start with:

John Harper, The Forms and Orders of the Western Liturgy From the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). This provides the essential overview. Once you’ve got these pieces in place, you’re ready to tackle:

Isidore of Seville, De Ecclesiasticis Officiis, translated by Thomas Knoebel, Ancient Christian Writers (Newman Press, 2008). After this have on hand for reference:

Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, translated by William Storey and Niels Rasmussen (Portland: Pastoral Press, 1986)

The Homiliary Tradition

Dust off your French.

H. Barré, Les homéliares carolingiens de l’école d’Auxerre, Studi e Testi 225 (Rome: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana 1962)

Reginald Grégoire, Homéliaires liturgiques médiévaux: analyse des manuscrits, (Bibl degli studi medievali 12; Spoleto, 1980) This one is crucial for understanding the contents of the great homiliaries and how they relate to one another (or don’t). If you want to know what was in the homiliaries, this is the place to go.

Anglo-Saxon Homiletics

Mary Clayton, “Homiliaries and Preaching in Anglo-Saxon England,” Peritia 4 (1985), 207-42. This has got to be your starting point. It’s the best overview I know and most of the later articles are working along lines Clayton lays down here.

Cyril Smetana, “Ælfric and the Early Medieval Homiliary,” Traditio 15 (1959), 163-204. and also…

Cyril Smetana, “Paul the Deacon’s Patristic Anthology” in The Old English Homily & its Backgrounds, Ed. Paul E. Szarmach and Bernard F. Huppé.  (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1978), 75-97. Without a doubt, Smetana is your go-to guy for Paul the Deacon.

Joyce Hill, “Ælfric and Smaragdus,” Anglo-Saxon England 21 (1992), 203-237. I won’t list all of Joyce Hill’s items here because there are some I don’t have to hand. Read whatever you can from her!

Milton McC. Gatch, Preaching and Theology in Anglo-Saxon England: Ælfric and Wulfstan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. Mac is an Episcopal priest and fundamentally gets the connection between preaching and liturgy—the only recent author I know of to do so.

I’ll admit to not having read Aaron’s latest volume (The Old English Homily: Precedent, Practice, and Appropriation, ed. Aaron J. Kleist (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007)) so hopefully some material in there will prove me wrong.

So—these are the directions that I would point you in, Brandon (and others). There’s clearly a lot here. The best plan, as always, is to spend the most time mastering the primary sources; secondary opinions can be added in later. Fr. Adam and others, please feel free to fill in and around what I haven’t said here!

Some Observations on the Dialogues of Suplicius Severus

The Dialogues of Sulpicius Severus are a fairly little-known work by one of the more obscure Western Fathers. Nevertheless, he forms an important part of the flow of information and theology of the early monastic movement from East to West. When we think Gaulish monastic father figures these days, John Cassian springs to mind; however, Sulpicius Severus played a complementary role.

More needs to be said about Sulpicius than what I will say now, but a few items must be mentioned to give a proper context for these notes.

First, while Cassian used the dialogue form for the purpose of teaching ascetical practice, spirituality, and theology, Sulpicius preferred to describe lives and events that focused upon proofs rather than techniques. That is, his works tended to be stories about Martin of Tours (his main work being the principal Life of St Martin) and other monks but while Cassian used stories to identify practices or to make an ascetic point, Sulpicius preferred tales of the miraculous to confirm the efficacy of the monastic way of life. (If I had to offer one theory as to why modern students of Christian spirituality know Cassian and not Sulpicius it would be  the modern disdain for miraculous elements that strain the bounds of credibility.  Sulpicius tends not to strain the bounds of credibility, rather he blows past them at a tremendous speed…)

Second, Sulpicius stood in conscious literary relationship with Jerome. This deserves an examination in its own right—there are some very interesting passages in the Dialogues that wrestle with Jerome as a teacher and author where Sulpicius both attempts to cast himself in direct relationship with Jerome but also attempts to supplant him literarily.  In any event, Sulpicius was very much a student of Jerome’s writings and if Sulpicius tended to the miraculous, it was a technique he learned from Jerome and his three monastic lives: the Life of Paul, the Life of Hilarion, and the first monastic novella, the Life of Malchus the Captive Monk.

In the literature from the desert there are a number of fairly common topoi that serve as miraculous confirmation of ascetic practices. These include clairvoyance, miraculous healings, ascetics appearing in dreams, vivid encounters with demons, vivid encounters with angels, supernatural feeding, ascetics exhibiting angelic properties, and honor shown to holy men by wild and vicious creatures. Jerome especially picks up the last in his two more imaginative lives, the Life of Paul and the Life of Malchus. In the Life of Paul, Antony is given directions to Paul’s cave first by a centaur (VP 7), then by a satyr (VP 8), and finally by a wolf whom he sees entering Paul’s dwelling (VP 9). During their conversation, a raven brings them bread (VP 10). Likewise, in the Life of Malchus, the centerpiece of the dramatic escape of Malchus and his chaste wife comes when they take refuge in a desert cave that turns out to be a lions’ den and their pursuers are killed by the fierce beasts but the chaste couple are left unharmed.

So—these are the literary models from which Sulpicius is drawing. The whole point of the Dialogues is similar to that of Cassian’s Conferences, namely, how can the life and piety of the Eastern monks be translated into religious life in the West? Sulpicius seeks to establish that this translation has successfully occurred in the preeminent person of Martin of Tours. Indeed, Martin has so successfully accomplished this feat that his signs and wonders surpass those of the Eastern monks.

To make his point, he casts a first-person narrative where a far-traveling friend, Postumianus, returns from a voyage East and regales Sulpicius and his companion “the Gaul” with tales of the Eastern monks. This occurs in the first book of the Dialogues; the second and third books are the rejoinder where Sulpicius, the Gaul and a host of other eyewitnesses describe tales of Martin of Tours and his mighty miracles.

Stepping back from the particulars, Sulpicius seems to be working with a particular problem of place and social location. The lure of the desert is bound up with the solitary life, the pure life. Even the Eastern monastics who lived in communities were living away from the rest of sinful humanity. How, then, could Martin have the same kind of holiness without the physical remove from society? Furthermore, one of the wonders of the Egyptian monks in these early days was their refusal to distinguish between persons based on their status. A bishop would receive the same reception as a peasant; rulers and prelates came to them in the desert. In the West, it was Martin who was traveling to see the royal and the powerful. How could these be explained without compromise?

Sulpicius begins by focusing his first book on three miraculous topoi in particular: supernatural feeding, ascetics with angelic properties and the reception of ascetics by vicious beasts. I’m going to suggest that he selects these for a very particular reason and that in doing so, he is communicating one of the theologies at the root of the early Eastern monastic movement: the return to Eden. That is, the solitary monk through the ascetic process can conditionally recover elements of the Edenic state where, like Adam, he dwells in constant communion with God, enjoys an angelic state of being, the little food he requires is supplied without toil by nature itself, and he lives in harmony with the wild beasts.

As the character Postumanius narrates his trip through Egypt, we see this theme playing out in a number of ways. Section 1.13 gives us a solitary who, through the help of an ox and a well has created a garden paradise in the desert:

There was also a garden there full of a variety of vegetables. This, too, was contrary to what might have been expected in the desert where, all things being dry and burnt up by the fierce rays of the sun produce not even the slenderest root of any plant. But the labor which in common with his ox, the monk performed, as well as his own special industry, produced such a happy state of things to the holy man; for the frequent irrigation in which he engaged imparted such a fertility to the sand that we saw the vegetables in his garden flourishing and coming to maturity in a wonderful manner. On these, then, the ox lived as well as its master; and from the abundance thus supplied, the holy man provided us also with a dinner.

Further, even the desert provides this holy man with the fruits he needs complete with a requisite vicious beast:

Then after dinner, when the evening was coming on, our host invites us to a palm-tree, the fruit of which he was accustomed to use, and which was at a distance of about two miles. For that is the only kind of tree found in the desert, and even these are rare, though they do occur. I am not sure whether this is owing to the wise foresight of former ages, or whether the soil naturally produces them. It may indeed be that God, knowing beforehand that the desert was one day to be inhabited by the saints, prepared these things for his servants. For those who settle within these solitudes live for the most part on the fruit of such trees, since no other kinds of plants thrive in these quarters. Well, when we came up to that tree to which the kindness of our host conducted us, we there met with a lion; and on seeing it, both my guide and myself began to tremble; but the holy man went up to it without delay, while we, though in great terror, followed him. As if commanded by God, the beast modestly withdrew and stood gazing at us, while our friend, the monk, plucked some fruit hanging within easy reach on the lower branches. And, on his holding out his hand filled with dates, the monster ran up to him and received them as readily as any domestic animal could have done; and having eaten them, it departed. We, beholding these things, and being still under the influence of fear, could not but perceive how great was the power of faith in his case, and how weak it was in ourselves.

The lion not only does not eat the ascetic but has returned to the vegetarian state of the garden.

Similarly, section 1.14 gives us a she-wolf who eats bread from an ascetic’s hand and who apologizes in canine form when she takes two biscuits one night instead of her accustomed one. In 1.15 a lioness beseeches healing from an ascetic for her five cubs born blind. He heals them and she brings him the skin of a rare animal as a cloak as thanks. In 1.16, an ascetic new to the desert ate poisonous roots which put him in torment. Accordingly, an ibex came and taught him which roots were safe and which were dangerous.

Section 1.17 makes a deliberate connection with the two great (literary) monastic exemplars, Antony and Paul. Within this same section, connected as it were to these figures, is the preeminent Edenic anchorite:

I saw the Red Sea and the ridges of Mount Sinai, the top of which almost touches heaven, and cannot, by any human effort, be reached. An anchorite was said to live somewhere within its recesses: and I sought long and much to see him, but was unable to do so. He had for nearly fifty years been removed from all human fellowship, and used no clothes, but was covered with bristles growing on his own body, while, by Divine gift, he knew not of his own nakedness. As often as any pious men desired to visit him, making hastily for the pathless wilderness, he shunned all meeting with his kind. To one man only, about five years before my visit, he was said to have granted an interview; and I believe that man obtained the favor through the power of his faith. Amid much talk which the two had together, the recluse is said to have replied to the question why he shunned so assiduously all human beings, that the man who was frequently visited by mortals like himself, could not often be visited by angels. From this, not without reason, the report had spread, and was accepted by multitudes, that that holy man enjoyed angelic fellowship.

Like (the pre-Eve) Adam, the anchorite was entirely solitary, he held converse with angels and, like both prelapsarian humans, was naked yet not ashamed.  While Postumanius goes on to describe some marvels in a monastery, he then goes on to recount ascetics who failed. Though he continues on for several more sections, it becomes evident that the nameless ascetic of Sinai is the pinnacle of the Eastern monastic exemplars.

After Postumanius finishes, the Gaul begins to hold forth on Martin. The central thesis of the Dialogues is laid out in 1.24 thusly:

Indeed, Postumianus, replied I [Sulpicius], while I was listening attentively, all this time, to you talking about the excellences of the saints, in my secret thoughts I had my mind turned to my friend Martin, observing on the best of grounds that all those things which different individuals had done separately, were easily and entirely accomplished by that one man alone. For, although you certainly related lofty deeds, I really heard nothing from your lips (may I say it, without offense to these holy men), in which Martin was inferior to any one of them. And while I hold that the excellence of no one of these is ever to be compared with the merits of that man, still this point ought to be attended to, that it is unfair he should be compared, on the same terms, with the recluses of the desert, or even with the anchorites. For they, at freedom from every hindrance, with heaven only and the angels as witnesses, were clearly instructed to perform admirable deeds; he, on the other hand, in the midst of crowds and intercourse with human beings— among quarrelsome clerics, and among furious bishops, while he was harassed with almost daily scandals on all sides, nevertheless stood absolutely firm with unconquerable virtue against all these things, and performed such wonders as not even those accomplished of whom we have heard that they are, or at one time were, in the wilderness.

The holiness of the Eastern ascetics cannot only be matched but entirely surpassed. While their virtues and miracles were spread amongst many men, all of these virtues and miracles can be found in Martin himself. By extension, therefore, if Martin can surpass the Eastern ascetics, there is no good reason why western ascetics (especially through the intercessions of Martin) cannot thereby equal or surpass them as well.

I’ll not go through Dialogues books 2 and 3 in detail here but will make some pointed observations in regard to the foregoing section. Two items in particular seem to occupy the attention of Sulpicius. First, can the active life of a bishop be as virtuous as the monastic life? Second, Can the more active life impart virtues and benefits that the solitary life cannot?

In regard to the first, Sulpicius makes acknowledgment that the purely contemplative life is more perfect. He is, after all, an ascetic writing for ascetics. This point is made most specifically in section 2.4 in the words of the Gaul:

I have often noticed this, Sulpitius, that Martin was accustomed to say to you, that such an abundance of power was by no means granted him while he was a bishop, as he remembered to have possessed before he obtained that office. Now, if this be true, or rather since it is true, we may imagine how great those things were which, while still a monk, he accomplished, and which, without any witness, he effected apart by himself; since we have seen that, while a bishop, he performed so great wonders before the eyes of all. Many, no doubt, of his former achievements were known to the world, and could not be hid, but those are said to have been innumerable which, while he avoided boastfulness, he kept concealed and did not allow to come to the knowledge of mankind; for, inasmuch as he transcended the capabilities of mere man, in a consciousness of his own eminence, and trampling upon worldly glory, he was content simply to have heaven as a witness of his deeds. That this is true we can judge even from these things which are well known to us, and could not be hid; since e.g. before he became a bishop he restored two dead men to life, facts of which your book has treated pretty fully, but, while he was bishop, he raised up only one, a point which I am surprised you have not noticed.

Thus, Martin the monk raised two people from the dead while Martin the bishop restored only one. (This is Sulpicius’s idea of “less power” when it comes to extolling his patron!)

What I’d like to focus on, though is the second point. Martin orders around some domestic animals—a possessed cow in 2.9 (compare the possessed camel in the Life of Hilarion)—but Sulpicius makes a deliberate transfer of the “domesticating” power of ascesis.

Martin does not dwell in the deserts; he is in the cities. As a result, his power isn’t over the savage animals of the wastes but over the nobility. While desert ascetics have the power to tame creatures, Martin is given power over kings and queens. Furthermore, while the desert ascetics can only save themselves and their comrades from beasts, Martin’s effect upon the nobility has the potential for much wider social change.

The Gaul presents an extended  narrative that lays the foundation for this. First, he shows the hostility against which Martin contended:

Well, just about the time when he first became a bishop, a necessity arose for his visiting the imperial court. Valentinian, the elder, then was at the head of affairs. When he came to know that Martin was asking for things which he did not incline to grant, he ordered him to be kept from entering the doors of the palace. Besides his own unkind and haughty temper, his wife Arriana had urged him to this course, and had wholly alienated him from the holy man, so that he should not show him the regard which was due to him. (2.5)

Mere royalty, however, are no match for Martin:

Martin, accordingly, when he had once and again endeavored to procure an interview with the haughty prince, had recourse to his well-known weapons— he clothes himself in sackcloth, scatters ashes upon his person, abstains from food and drink, and gives himself, night and day, to continuous prayer. On the seventh day, an angel appeared to him, and tells him to go with confidence to the palace, for that the royal doors, although closed against him, would open of their own accord, and that the haughty spirit of the emperor would be softened. Martin, therefore, being encouraged by the address of the angel who thus appeared to him, and trusting to his assistance, went to the palace. The doors stood open, and no one opposed his entrance; so that, going in, he came at last into the presence of the king, without any one seeking to hinder him. The king, however, seeing him at a distance as he approached, and gnashing his teeth that he had been admitted, did not, by any means, condescend to rise up as Martin advanced, until fire covered the royal seat, and until the flames seized on a part of the royal person. In this way the haughty monarch is driven from his throne, and, much against his will, rises up to receive Martin. He even gave many embraces to the man whom he had formerly determined to despise, and, coming to a better frame of mind, he confessed that he perceived the exercise of Divine power; without waiting even to listen to the requests of Martin, he granted all he desired before being asked. Afterwards the king often invited the holy man both to conferences and entertainments; and, in the end, when he was about to depart, offered him many presents, which, however, the blessed man, jealously maintaining his own poverty, totally refused, as he did on all similar occasions.

But that’s not all… Section 2.6 describes in servile detail how the queen, wife of Maximus, used to serve Martin hand and foot:

[Maximus] frequently sent for Martin, received him into the palace, and treated him with honor; his whole speech with him was concerning things present, things to come, the glory of the faithful, and the immortality of the saints; while, in the meantime, the queen hung upon the lips of Martin, and not inferior to her mentioned in the Gospel, washed the feet of the holy man with tears and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Martin, though no woman had hitherto touched him, could not escape her assiduity, or rather her servile attentions. She did not think of the wealth of the kingdom, the dignity of the empire, the crown, or the purple; only stretched upon the ground, she could not be torn away from the feet of Martin. At last she begs of her husband (saying that both of them should constrain Martin to agree) that all other attendants should be removed from the holy man, and that she alone should wait upon him at meals.

And it goes on like that for a while. The point Sulpicius is making is that Martin has totally domesticated one of the most dangerous creature in his environment, a woman who was royalty. Some of the ascetics of the desert would not so much as look at a women (see Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, 1.4-9) let alone allow themselves to be touched by one. Sulpicius uses this opportunity for scandal to reveal Martin’s greater power than the ascetics. Not only can he be safely touched by a woman, he is able to use it for godly ends. When Postumanius expresses wonder at a woman touching Martin, the Gaul responds:

Why do you not notice, as grammarians are wont to teach us, the place, the time, and the person? For only set before your eyes the picture of one kept in the palace of the emperor importuned by prayers, constrained by the faith of the queen, and bound by the necessities of the time, to do his utmost that he might set free those shut up in prison, might restore those who had been sent into exile, and might recover goods that had been taken away—of how much importance do you think that these things should have appeared to a bishop, so as to lead him, in order to the accomplishment of them all, to abate not a little of the rigor of his general scheme of life? (2.7)

Implicit is the revelation of Martin’s greater power. Due to his power over the king and queen, he is able to have profound effects upon the actions and policy of those in government.

The theme of the domestication of beasts is set forth explicitly in the description of Martin’s dealings with a nobleman named Avtianus, described in Book 3:

You knew the too barbarous and, beyond measure, bloody ferocity of Avitianus, a former courtier. He enters the city of the Turones with a furious spirit, while rows of people, laden with chains, followed him with melancholy looks, orders various kinds of punishments to be got ready for slaying them; and to the grave amazement of the city, he arranges them for the sad work on the following day. When this became known to Martin, he set out all alone, a little before midnight, for the palace of that beast (ad praetorium bestiae). (3.4)

Martin torments Avitianus in his sleep, he awakes, finds Martin there, and sets all of his prisoners free, departing from the city. Avitianus comes up later in the book as well:

But to return to Avitianus: while at every other place, and in all other cities, he displayed marks of horrible cruelty, at Tours alone he did no harm. Yes, that beast (illa bestia), which was nourished by human blood, and by the slaughter of unfortunate creatures, showed himself meek and peaceable in the presence of the blessed man. I remember that Martin one day came to him, and having entered his private apartment, he saw a demon of marvelous size sitting behind his back. Blowing upon him from a distance (if I may, as a matter of necessity, make use of a word which is hardly Latin , Avitianus thought that he was blowing at him, and exclaimed, ‘Why, you holy man, do you treat me thus?’ But then Martin said, ‘It is not at you, but at him who, in all his terribleness, leans over your neck.’ The devil gave way, and left his familiar seat; and it is well known that, ever after that day, Avitianus was milder, whether because he now understood that he had always been doing the will of the devil sitting by him, or because the unclean spirit, driven from his seat by Martin, was deprived of the power of attacking him; while the servant was ashamed of his master, and the master did not force on his servant.

Here the topos is made explicit. The beast is tamed by the holy man.

Thus, in Sulpicius’s writings about Martin, he both envisions and responds to the role of the holy ascetic in Western culture explicitly different from the Eastern model. In the East, the monk inhabits the deserts. He is a solitary. In his solitude, he can recapture the peace of Eden. In the West, though, the holy ascetic is no less a man of prayer, but is one who acts upon the whole social structure by means of his relations at the top. Through the moderating influence of holiness upon the nobles, a “peaceable kingdom” may be achieved.

In a sense, Suplicius tries to pull off quite a number of things here, some of which should probably give us pause. Not only does he translate Eastern piety into Western culture but in doing so, he reverses the monastic approach to the Constantinian state of the Church. While the monks reacted by retreating from it, Sulpicius fully embraces it. Martin by no means holds himself apart but actively engages the machinery of the state at its highest levels, using his influence to moderate the vicious state of the State.