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.

Breviary FYI

The breviary is having a rocky couple of days. This is the first year-transition since the new date calculation system has been installed and the inevitable errors are occurring, in part due to the odd way the BCP does the days between Christmas and the first Sunday after Epiphany.

We currently have readings but no collect; I’m working on getting it back…

Things seem to be functioning now.

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).

Home Again, Home Again…

Hi y’all, I’m back from Christmas vacations to the in-laws, then a few day in Williamsburg with the family. I have a fair amount of email to be attended to, correspondence returned, changes to be made to the breviary and,—hopefully—topics commented upon here. Of course, duties at home and work compete with the online list so we’ll see how much I get to…

In particular, in this run up to the American Sarum conference, I’m hoping to do some posts to consolidate my thoughts prior to the conference. One of the gracious gifts from my in-laws was Richard Pfaff’s The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History. I’ve read through the chapters on the Sarum materials and am hoping to get something written up concerning his take on the promise and problems of Sarum. I also received a Kindle from my beloved M and, given my extremely limited computer time so far, have been wrestling with the issue of how to get my collection of liturgical PDFs converted into a format that the Kindle can read most effectively. In particular, I’m at work on the 7th edition of Blessed Percy’s Parson’s Handbook in advance of the conference.

So, I hope you all are having a Merry Christmas season and a wonderful Feast of the Holy Name!

 

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.

Cafe Post and Jerome’s Ascetic Writing

I have a new piece up at the Cafe. I wrote it while in the midst of researching and writing a conference paper that I gave a few weeks ago at the instigation of Larry who then had the nerve not to show up… My retaliation was to promptly not save the file with its final pages (whoops!) which, Larry, is why I never sent it along.

In any case, here’s the first half of the paper that prompted that reflection. My topic was doing a comparison of two texts, Aelfric of Eynsham’s Letter to Sigeweard and Jerome’s Letter 53 to Paulinus of Nola; this part contains the first half on Jerome. The second half was the part on Aelfric which I’ll need to somehow reconstruct…

Both Ælfric of Eynsham and Saint Jerome are known for their biblical work. Jerome who died in 420 is, of course, best known as the translator and editor of the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Scriptures that would serve the church as the authoritative version of the Bible through the medieval period. Too, the commentaries from Jerome’s pen—whether his own work or translations and adaptations of Origen—further confirmed his place as one of the greatest interpreters of the Patristic period.

Likewise, Ælfric of Eynsham is responsible for turning large swathes of Scripture into English usually in the form of paraphrase rather than direct translation, and his many exegetical homilies and other general works kept alive the orthodox interpretation of Scripture, standing firm on its patristic roots, in the otherwise chaotic environment of the Old English homilies.

So—both of these authors are known for their command of Scripture. Both of them are known for their interpretation of Scripture and, it turns out, both of them wrote letters that serve as comprehensive introductions to the biblical canon. But here’s the kicker—in neither case were these written primarily as interpretive works. Instead, they were written as letters of ascetic instruction to nobility. The books of the Bible and the fundamental structures of Scripture are presented for a purpose: for the sake of instruction in the Christian life which, for Jerome and Ælfric is, fundamentally, the ascetic life.

Let’s turn to Jerome first.

The standard collection of Jerome’s letters contains a round 150, including a few at the end that are either suspect or spurious. Of these, 21 are specifically letters of ascetic instruction. The majority of these are written to an extended family with whom Jerome has carried on an extensive correspondence on a whole host of matters; the Paula and Eustochium to whom many of Jerome’s letters were addressed were members of this family. Based on the relationships that Jerome had with them, we can subdivide these 21 ascetical letters into two further categories.

Seventeen of these are treatises, exhortations to the ascetic life. In fact, Jerome explicitly refers to them as such and, towards the end of Letter 130 which he wrote to Demetrias in 414, he makes the following comments: “It is about thirty years since I published a treatise on the preservation of virginity in which I felt constrained to oppose certain vices and to lay bare the wiles of the devil for the instruction of the virgin to whom it was addressed. . . . I have also written short exhortations to several virgins and widows, and in these smaller works I have gathered together all that there is to be said on the subject.” (And there’s Jerome’s characteristic modesty there at the end…) For the most part the various letters treat a number of set topics: he talks about how one should and shouldn’t dress, what level of fasting is appropriate. How you should conduct yourself around people of the opposite sex, what sort of companions and servants you ought to have, the importance of disposing of your property, and the nature of the life of prayer and study to which you are called.

I’ll highlight three as being particularly exceptional and indeed, Jerome himself in his correspondence refers several times to the first two. The first is letter 22 to Eustochium. He calls her the “first virgin of noble birth in Rome” and whether that’s a historical reality or a rhetorical flourish it’s hard to tell—knowing Jerome, I’d guess the latter myself. In any case this is a very thorough letter describing what the life of virginity is supposed to look like and includes the famous passage where he dreams that Christ accuses him of being a Ciceronian rather than a Christian. In any case, this is the text that he refers as “the treatise on the preservation of virginity” in the quote I just read.

The second is letter 52 to Nepotian written in 394 on the life of the clergy. Again, Jerome saw this letter as his grand statement on clerical life and refers to it in his correspondence, refer other clergy and bishops back to this text.

The third is letter 107 to Laeta who was the daughter-in-law of Paula and sister-in-law of Eustochium. Laeta had decided to raise her daughter, also named Paula, as a consecrated virgin and asks Jerome for his advice on how to do this. He responds with this letter in 403 which lays out a whole plan of education and a course of conduct for little Paula. For an author who’s frequently judged as being misogynistic, it’s fascinating to see how large a role education and literacy play in this process down to his recommendation that she start playing with alphabet blocks as soon as possible so she can begin learning how to read and then to write.

So—of these 21 ascetic letters, 17 are best defined as treatises, exhortations to the ascetic life. The remaining 4 are encomia written to relatives on the death of these ascetics. So, Letter 52 contains instructions to Nepotian on how a cleric should live; Letter 60 is addressed to his uncle the bishop Heliodorus on the occasion of Nepotian’s death. So, here Jerome praises the dead and, in looking back over a life well lived uses this as an opportunity to both remember them to their relative and to memorialize them as a model of ascetic life. Thus, we get a very idealized image of the dead that tells us just as much about Jerome’s ascetic ideals as it does the dead person themselves.

So it’s these ascetic writings that serve as the fundamental context for Jerome’s letter 53 to Paulinus of Nola in 394. Paulinus was a wealthy senator of the best education and credentials and he had just been ordained by force in Spain that year. He had some ascetic tendencies but Jerome sought to reinforce those very much in this Letter 53 which appears to be Jerome’s first letter to him, sent in response to a letter that Paulinus had sent to him requesting advice.

At the very outset of the letter, Jerome thanks Paulinus for the little gifts that he had sent along with his letter, then says this: “A true intimacy cemented by Christ Himself is not one which depends upon material considerations, or upon the presence of the persons, or upon and insincere and exaggerated flattery; but one such as ours, wrought by a common fear of God and a joint study of the divine Scriptures.” He then draws on a whole host of examples of both classical scholars and biblical characters who travelled great distances to attain knowledge. He sharpens his point with the observation that “want of education in a clergyman prevents him from doing good to anyone but himself and, much as the virtue of his life may build up Christ’s church, he does it an injure as great by failing to resist those who are trying to pull it down.” It’s not enough to be virtuous. You have to use knowledge to refute the heresies that threaten the church.

Jerome then goes through a whole chain of passages that emphasize that getting wisdom is difficult and hidden.  Jerome writes, “These instances have just been touched upon by me (the limits of a letter forbid a more discursive treatment of them) to convince you that in the holy scriptures you can make no progress unless you have a guide to show you the way.” The pay-off here is that it doesn’t matter how smart you are, when it comes to Scripture you need direction.

Let me be real clear on one point here—Jerome is clearly denying from his perspective a Reformation-notion of the perpecuity of the Scriptures which suggests that the meaning of the Scriptures is plain and accessible to anyone who is reading in the Holy Spirit. Instead, he’s balancing in the middle of two interrelated theological controversies—the fight against Origenism (or more specifically, the teasing out of what Origen got wrong and what Origen got right) and the Anthropomorphic controversy which, in reaction to an overly subtle Origenism took the opposite road into a naïve literalism. Jerome is thoroughly invested in Origen’s hermeneutics and categories which assert that the primary meaning of the Scriptures, especially the Old Testament is at the Spiritual level of the text and that can only be discern through training.

Jerome’s rehearsal of the books of Scripture follow. While he begins by making references to the contents of each Scriptural book, then gives some basic fundamental directions as to where the spiritual and/or typological level of the book can be found. For instance he writes the following concerning Leviticus: “The meaning of Leviticus is of course self-evident, although every sacrifice that it describes, nay more every word that it contains, the description of Aaron’s vestments, and all of the regulations connected with the Levites are symbols of things heavenly!” So it’s completely self-evident but it all points to heavenly symbols. Clearly, Jerome and I mean two different things by the word self-evident!

Another example regards the books labeled today as 1 and 2nd Kings: “The 3rd and 4th books of Kings called in Hebrew Maláchim give the history of the kingdom of Judah from Solomon to Jeconiah, and of that of Israel from Jeroboam the son of Nebat to Hoshea who was carried away into Assyria. If you merely regard the narrative, the words are simple enough, but if you look beneath the surface at the hidden meaning of it, you find a description of the small numbers of the church and of the wars which the heretics wage against it.”

So, what he’s doing here is giving Paulinus a set of hermeneutical skeleton keys—they’re the briefest outline of pointers towards unlocking the spiritual meaning of text where the meat really lies.

After going through all of the canon, then Jerome concludes the letter with a more or less standard exhortation for Paulinus to divest himself of this wealth. Sell what you’ve got and give it to the poor—you can’t be a real Christian if you’re tied to your possessions.

So, the leetr’s overall shape is a quick intro, an exhortation on the difficulty in searching out wisdom, a sketch of the canon with hermeneutical pointers to the spiritual sense of the text, and a concluding exhortation to holy poverty and alms-giving.

The rhetorical function of the canon list here is to point Paulinus to the real meaning of the Scriptures, to the spiritually beneficial contents and some basic directions on what that is and how to dig it out. Does Jerome believe that Paulinus is going to go and read through all of these books? Absolutely yes, no question. He exhorts him to “live among these books, to meditate upon them, to know nothing else, to seek nothing else.” And this is entirely in line with his understanding of the ascetic life. To be an ascetic is to be saturated in the text of the Scriptures and to understand its spiritual meanings. In his letter to Laeta, he lays down for her the order in which little Paula should begin memorizing the books of Scripture. Not reading, memorizing. As he writes to Eustochium, “Read often, learn all that you can. Let sleep overcome you, the roll still in your hands; when your head falls, let it be on the sacred page.” As he eulogizes Paula, Eustochium’s mother he writes, “The holy Scriptures she knew by heart, and said of the history contained in them that it was the foundation of the truth; but, though she loved even this, she still preferred to seek for the underlying spiritual meaning and made this the keystone of the spiritual building she raised within her soul.” Again in Jerome’s second letter to Paulinis, written a year later while it largely goes over the ascetic principles for the letter to Nepotian hits again the necessity of reading Scripture and the necessity of grasping the Spiritual sense. He says, rephrasing Paul, “This veil rests not only on the face of Moses, but on the evangelists and apostles as well.” So it’s only through spiritual exegesis that proper reading happens.

So, to sum up Jerome here, for Jerome, meditation on the written word of Scripture is central to the ascetic life and calling. Origenist principles of sacred reading are fundamentally required to get the deepest meanings out of Scripture. Thus Jerome’s rehearsal of the canon to Paulinus focuses on directing him to where these readings can be found.

(To be continued…)

Lo, How A Rose

“Lo, How a Rose” is one of my favorite songs in this liturgical period and I just ran across what I believe explains the theology behind the images of the hymn. It’s from Jerome’s Commentary on Isaiah, taken from the 2nd Nocturn appointed for Advent 2.

“AND there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse”; From the beginning of the Book of this Prophet till the xiiith chapter, where commenceth the vision, or burden of Babylon, the whole of the vision of Isaiah, the son of Amoz, is one continual prophecy of Christ. We must explain it part by part, for if we were to take it all at once, the memory of the reader would be confused. According to the Jewish commentators, the rod and the flower would both relate to the Lord Himself. They take the rod to mean the sceptre of His Royal dominion, and the flower the loveliness of His beauty.

We, however, understand that the rod out of the root of Jesse signifieth the holy Virgin Mary. She was a clean stem that had as yet put forth no shoot ; as we have read above : “Behold, the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son.” (Isa. vii. 14.) And the flower we believe to mean the Lord our Redeemer, Who hath elsewhere compared Himself to a flower ; “I am a flower of the plain, and a lily of the valleys.” (Cant. ii. i.)

THE Spirit of the Lord then shall rest upon this flower ; this flower which shall come forth from the stem and roots of Jesse by means of the Virgin Mary. And truly the Spirit of the Lord did rest upon our Redeemer. It is written that ” In Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” (Col. ii. 9.) The Spirit was not shed on Him by measure, as it is upon the Saints. To Him we may apply the words of the Hebrew Gospel used by the Nazarenes ; “The whole fountain of the Holy Ghost shall be poured forth upon Him : ” “The Lord is a spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” (2 Cor. iii. 17.)

Brief Anglican Covenant Thought

Much ink, real and virtual, has been spilt over the Anglican Covenant. I’ve largely stopped commenting on the on-going inter-Anglican feuds but can’t resist just one little comment here…

The Archbishop of Canterbury is right: the Covenant has no ability to change what any one church does. It cannot make anybody do or not do anything. If we want to have either girl bishops or gay bishops, a Covenant will and can do absolutely nothing about it.

All the Covenant can do is more completely describe what other parties do about how one particular church acts.

A Covenant cannot and will not limit the actions of the Episcopal Church.

Take a look at the vote numbers from England’s General Synod for a second:

Bishops 39 for 0 against 1 abstention
Clergy 145 for 32 against 11 abstentions
Laity 147 for 25 against 8 abstentions

The passage of the motion for the Covenant to be sent to the dioceses for discussion and ratification was not half-hearted or narrow.

There are two ways to look at the Covenant: 1) a relatively province-neutral organizational scheme or 2) a referendum on North American actions. It seems that most of the rhetoric from the major players see it as the second. If this is true, then the English vote should be seen as a wake-up call to the Episcopal Church. Whether we’re doing the right things or not, our sister church has sent us a message—our actions will have consequences. Our response should be appropriate. That is, continued argument against the Covenant is, to my mind, pointless because it reads as a continuing argument for American exceptionalism, a statement that we don’t want to live up to the consequences of our actions.

A New Publishing Model?

I’ve got a couple of writing projects I’ve been working on that may be developing into books. Bits and pieces of these have appeared here on the blog in various forms. One is a practical guide to the liturgical year, the other is a text on liturgical/lectionary spirituality. I pitched the first to Church Publishing a little while back; they said that they were interested but that the timing wasn’t right. Of course, now we hear that there’s been a great deal of change at Church Publishing including a significant reduction of staff and therefore capability.

What does this bode for liturgical works for an Anglican audience? I don’t know for sure.

If I had to guess, however, it would indicate that the chance of being published through Church Publishing is shrinking. Furthermore, I’d imagine that they’re more likely to pick up works that are in line with the national church’s liturgical direction as exemplified by Enriching Our Worship. Material like mine with plenteous references to earlier times and other church traditions (e.g. the Missals…) may not be what they’ll be interested in publishing.

Where, then, to go? Will LTP start picking up the slack? Or is it time to look for a new model?

I’ve been following with interest the Simple English Propers Project as reported by Chant Cafe, NLM, and the CMAA. They just completed a fund-raising campaign which raised money for the completion of the project; the resulting work will, if I understand it rightly, be distributed freely on-line and for the cost of printing at Lulu. This was acheived through the use of digital micro-patronage–collections of $5, $10, $20 and, I’d assume, some larger donations that when pooled made it a viable project.

Now, there’s a certain cachet lacking in that it’s not produced by an official press. For the purpose of, say, a typical academic resume, a self-published work of this sort would have the credibility of—well—a blog posting. And the resulting work may lack something in not having the eye of an experienced editor looking it over. On the other hand…it works. It’s a means for circulating ideas, and particularly ideas that lack the financial viability need in the modern publishing market.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the patronage idea recently. I’d actually been considering making a standing announcement that I’d be willing to code a traditional calendar version of the breviary that would accept the use of pre/non-Vatican II lectionaries like the American or English ’28 versions or even the classical prayer book forms that don’t work with the current post-Vatican II scheme if I could get a patron, parish, or group of parishes to underwrite it. But that hadn’t bubbled to the putting-it-into-practice phase.

So here’s the thing: traditional print publishers are having a hard time. This is bad for niche writing and publishing. Nevertheless, there’s still interest in niche materials. Patronage, particularly in the form of digital micro-patronage, may represent a way forward for the production of work for which an author/editor deserves compensation but which can then be freely/cheaply circulated.

Thoughts?