Saturday, December 8, 2012

Prayer before Mass / Collect for Purity

Deus, cui omne cor patet et omnis voluntas loquitur et nullum latet secretum, purifica per infusionem sancti spiritus cogitationes cordis nostri, ut perfecte te diligere et digne laudare mereamur.

     Corpus orationum no. 1135 (vol. 2, pp. 131-132), where the variants appear in an apparatus.

     c. 780:  "Previously known to Anglicans as the Collect for Purity, this prayer has been re-named to avoid any possible confusion with the collect of the service.  Its composition is attributed to St Gregory, Abbot of Canterbury c. 780. . . . It appears in the eleventh-century Leofric Missal, and in the Sarum rite it is part of the priest's private devotions before the start of the service" (Paul Bradshaw, Gordon Giles, and Simon Kershaw, "Holy Communion," chap. 6 in Companion to Common worship, ed. Paul Bradshaw, vol. 1, Alcuin Club Collections 78 (London:  SPCK, 2001), 110).  Attributed by whom?  An ancient source or the most recent scholarship?  By Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672-1750), apparently.  Yet his Liturgia Romana vetus (1748), ii.383, though it contains this prayer, makes (on p. 383) no attribution to St. Gregory.  Cf. "This [Votive] Mass ['For Invoking the Grace of the Holy Spirit'] can be traced back to a little Sacramentary of Votive Masses put together by the Englishman Alcuin (d. 804), the great prime minister of Charlemagne and reviser of the Latin rite of the West.  Whether Alcuin composed th[is] Collect himself or took it from an older service book no longer extant is not known" (Massey Hamilton Shepherd, Jr., The Oxford American Prayer book commentary (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1950), 67).  Something similar is claimed by a note in The Leofric missal (below).  I have not followed up on this in the more recent scholarship to see why (say) Hatchett (in 1980) does not follow Shepherd here in locating this collect in the late 8th or very early 9th century at the latest, but speaks only of the 11th-century Leofric missal.  But Corpus orationum (below) should settle that question in favor of the early 9th in any case:

     9th century, first quarter (?):  No. 2325 in the texts complementary to the Gregorian sacramentary as edited by Deschusses (Le sacramentaire grégorien:  ses principales formes d'après les plus anciens manuscrits, vol. 2 (1979) or 3 (1982)), according to Corpus orationum no. 1135 (vol. 2, p. 131).

     9th-century, first half:  No. 1379 in the Tridentine sacramentary (Trent, Museo Provinciale d'Arte del Castello del Buonconsiglio 1590), as edited by Dell'Oro ("Sacramentarium Tridentium," in Monumenta liturgica Ecclesiae Tridentinae saeculo XIII antiquiora, Fontes liturgici, Libri sacramentorum II A (1985), pp. 73-416), according to Corpus orationum no. 1135 (vol. 2, p. 131).

     9th-century, last quarter:  No. 48 in the sacramentary of St. Martin of Tours (Tours, Bibl. mun. 184, and Paris, B.N. lat. 9430), as edited by Deschusses ("Les messes d'Alcuin," in Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 14 (1972):  7-41), according to Corpus orationum no. 1135 (vol. 2, p. 131).

     c. 975:  No. 1790 in the Fulda sacramentary (Göttingen, Königl. Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. theol. 231), as edited by Richter & Schönfelder (Sacramentarium Fuldense sæculi X (), p. 203), according to Corpus orationum no. 1135 (vol. 2, p. 131), and Bruylants n. 206 (Les oraisons du Missel Romain, vol. 1, p. 64).

     . . .

     1050/1072:  No. 177 in the Leofric missal (Oxford, Bodleiana 579 (2675)), as edited by Warren (The Leofric missal, as used in the Cathedral of Exeter during the episcopate of its first bishop, A.D. 1050-1072; together with some account of the Red book of Derby, the Missal of Robert of Jumièges, and a few other early ms. service books of the English church, ed. F. E. Warren (Oxford:  The Clarendon Press, 1883), 177):  "Deus, cui omne cor patet, et omnis uoluntas loquitur, et nullum latet secretum, purifica per infusionem sancti spiritus cogitationes cordis nostri, ut perfecte te diligere, et digne laudare mereamur.  Per.  In unitate eiusdem spiritus sancti."

     . . .

     14th centuryThe clowde of unknowyng, Prologe:  God, unto Whom alle hertes ben open, and unto Whom alle wille spekith, and unto Whom no privé thing is hid: I beseche Thee so for to clense the entent of myn hert with the unspekable gift of Thi grace that I may parfiteliche love Thee, and worthilich preise Thee. Amen.

     _____:  Nos. 579 & 787 in the Sarum missal (first [printed] edition:  London, 1554), as edited by Dickinson (Missale ad usum insignis et praeclarae ecclesiae Sarum (1861-1863), and The Sarum missal, tr. [A. Harford Pearson] (1868; 2nd edn., 1884), 216401.

     1549:  Booke of the common prayer, as reproduced in The first and second prayer books of Edward VI, Everyman's Library 448 (London:  J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.; New York:  E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1910), 212:  "Almightie God, unto whom all hartes bee open, and all desyres knowen, and from whom no secretes are hid:  clense the thoughtes of our hartes, by the inspiracion of thy holy spirite:  that we may perfectly loue thee, and worthely magnifie thy holy name:  through Christ our Lorde.  Amen."

     1577:  Missale Romanum, p. 41.

     1559:  Book of common prayer (Cummings):  "Almighty God, unto whom al hartes be open, al desires knowen, and from whom no secretes are hyd:  clense the thoughtes of our hartes by the inspiracion of thy holy spirite, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy name, through Christe our Lorde.  Amen."

     1662:  Book of common prayer (Cummings):  "Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid; Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnifie thy holy Name, through Christ our Lord.  Amen."

     1928:  Book of common prayer:  "Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid; Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord.  Amen."

     1959:  The Missal in Latin and English, being the text of the Missale Romanum with English rubrics and a new translation (New York:  Sheed & Ward, 1959), 663:  "Deus, cui omne cor patet et omnis volúntas lóquitur, et quem nullum latet secrétum:  purífica per infusiónem Sancti Spíritus cogitatiónes cordis nostri; ut te perfécte dilígere, et digne laudáre mereámur."  "O God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inpouring of thy Holy Spirit, giving us grace to love thee perfectly and praise thee worthily."

     _____:  Roman missal:

     1979:  Book of common prayer, Rite I:  "Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid:  Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord.  Amen."

     1979:  Book of common prayer, Rite II:  "Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen."

     _____:  Common worship:  

     2010:  Roman missal, revised (The CTS new daily missal: people's edition, with the new translation of the Mass (Catholic Truth Society, 2012), 929):  "O God, to whom every heart is open, every desire known and from whom no secrets are hidden; purify the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily praise your holy name. Amen."

Monday, December 3, 2012

"A rocke: how call'd? The Rocke of Scandale, Peter!"

     Robert Southwell, "Saint Peter's Complaint," stanza 118, as quoted by Ephraim Radner.  A brutal unity:  the spiritual politics of the Christian church (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2012), 60.

Radner takes, as usual, the narrow way, the hard road

     "What [William] Cavanaugh and contemporary antiliberal revisionists do not address, then, is the fact that the [profoundly Christian] notion of religious tolerance over and against religious violence was later overthrown by the ongoing and spectacular failures of Christians especially in the midst of and in the face of violence in which they participated:  it is this that has inflated a narrative into a 'myth,' but one for which the greatest blamea term I use deliberatelylies with the churches themselves.  Although he studiously avoids addressing the constructive question of preventing or resisting violence, even if he had, he would not be able to offer the right answer:  that is, that churches must reorient their practice more fully, not less so, to the needs of a stable and accountable liberal democracy.  Christians in the West are realizing how difficult this is, at least if they wish to keep the integrity of their gospel intact.  Cavanaugh's worries are proving well founded, as the liberal state itself betrays its founding principles for the sake of a self-consciously 'godless' ideology that increasingly itself engages the rhetoric of violence.  In some sense, the churches are now in a place where they are responsible for maintaining the integrity of civil society that must include religion.  But before this challenge, they must prove themselves a better witness than their past (and present) has too often demonstrated.  Maintaining the integrity of the gospel in a pluralistic democracy is hard.  But it is a difficulty whose overcoming is nonetheless the necessary means by which, as it were, churches will save their souls in the face of their own violent complicities.  And any call away from the facing of this task is dangerous distraction."

     Ephraim Radner, A brutal unity:  the spiritual politics of the Christian church (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2012), 55-56.

Herbert Butterfield, Whig historian

"If this sounds like the Whig theory revived, it is in a sense.  Even Herbert Butterfield, who first articulated in 1931 the existence of such a theory itself, for the sake of criticizing it, came to admit its inescapability, at least from a moral perspective and in part through reflection on his own place as a 'dissenting' Christian in England."

     Ephraim Radner, A brutal unity:  the spiritual politics of the Christian church (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2012), 51-52, citing C. T. McIntire, Herbert Butterfield:  historian as dissenter (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2004).

"Decade after decade the historians of cartography (and the historians of astronomy too) have, with barely an exception, gone on, paying no attention, assuming that because there were no medieval flat-earthers (or hardly any), medieval Aristotelians shared the Ptolemaic concept of the terraqueous globe (something of an achievement, since they had never read Ptolemy), when in fact that concept was a bold and novel hypothesis in 1492. . . ."

"Brotton, like Woodward before him, assumes that ever since the ancient Greeks there has been a concept corresponding to our concept of Earth ('the image of the Earth') or the world ('a history of the world').  This is to miss perhaps the most remarkable development in the whole history of cartography.  In classical Latin it is hard to find terra used to mean land-and-sea, let alone the whole sphere of the Earth.  Mundus or 'world' also meant universe  we would say cosmos.  In medieval Europe there was no object corresponding to the terms 'Earth' or 'world' as we use them.  Terra meant the element earth (one of the four Aristotelian elements), or land as used to denote a country (the Holy Land is the terra sancta).  Where we (and Ptolemy) see the whole Earth, . . . medieval philosophers and astronomers saw two objects:  the sphere of the element earth, which ought to be at the centre of the universe, and the sphere of the element water, which was believed to be ten times larger  this was the result of trying to combine Greek philosophy with Genesis.  Since the sphere of water was so much larger than that of earth, there ought to be no dry land at all, had God not ensured that the sphere of earth was displaced from its central position (although it was held that it still overlapped with the centre of the universe, a claim which, Copernicus later pointed out, flouted the elementary principles of geometry).  Dry land was thus a sort of floating island in an ocean of ocean.
     "According to this two-sphere theory, the centre of gravity of the combined spheres (the point around which they would hang in equilibrium) differed from their geometrical centre, earth being heavier than water, and from the centre or centres towards which heavy objects would fall (it being moot whether earth and water fell towards the same point).  Because the earth was a sphere floating in a larger sphere, dry land   the inhabited world   was necessarily circular in shape, which is, consequently, the shape adopted by most medieval mappaemundi, or maps of the known land masses.  The known world (essentially the world known to Alexander the Great) occupied less than a quarter of the surface of the globe (or rather, of the sphere of water), which was why there was no point in making terrestrial globes, as they would have represented either a sphere of earth that was largely underwater, or a sphere of water that was largely devoid of land.  Crates of Mallos (150 BC) had hypothesized that there might be three unknown worlds spread across the surface of the globe, in addition to the known world, so that the globe itself had a generally symmetrical shape, . . . but Christian philosophers rejected the very idea of 'antipodes' as they held these implied human beings that were not descended from Adam.  The Christian medieval two-sphere system was thus asymmetrical, the circular known land mass centring on Jerusalem, while the sphere of waters had, like the universe as a whole, a North-South axis.
     "The first Christian globes were constructed after the rediscovery of Ptolemy's geography (published in 1475) to explore the heterodox theory that the known world covered a much wider extent than previously imagined, so that it might be possible to sail West in order to reach the spice islands  Ptolemy's account of earth and water making one globe was debated when the feasibility of Columbus's expedition was rejected by a commission appointed by the King of Spain.  The discovery of America showed that this hunch was basically right  the globe might be much larger, and India might be much further away when travelling West (and nearer when travelling East) than Columbus had thought, but wherever one went there was land to be found, and the antipodes turned out to be a geographical reality.  The first map to show this clearly was Waldseemüller's world map of 1507. . . .
     "Soon after Waldseemüller's map was printed, perhaps in 1511, Copernicus saw it and grasped that it showed a symmetrical world where earth and water were interlocked.  The two spheres had become one globe.  This was a world which could rotate on a North-South axis without wobbling.  It was perhaps this realization which emboldened him to abandon a geo-heliocentric model (of the sort later advocated by Tycho Brahe) in favour of full heliocentrism.  De Revolutionibus (1543) opens with a defense of this new understanding of the Earth which did not yet have a name  later it would be called 'the terraqueous globe'.  Copernicus seems to have been one of the very first to make use of this new idea. . . .
". . . the two spheres theory was described by Lynn Thorndike in 1929 and discussed at great length in a posthumous text by Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), who, unlike Thorndike, continues to be widely admired. . . . Copernicus's debt to Waldseemüller was identified by Edward Rosen in 1943, but it is so rarely mentioned that it is hardly surprising that Brotton has no knowledge of it.  Decade after decade the historians of cartography (and the historians of astronomy too) have, with barely an exception, gone on, paying no attention, assuming that because there were no medieval flat-earthers (or hardly any), medieval Aristotelians shared the Ptolemaic concept of the terraqueous globe (something of an achievement, since they had never read Ptolemy), when in fact that concept was a bold and novel hypothesis in 1492. . . ."

     David Wootton, "No words for world:  common misunderstandings in the use of maps," Times literary supplement no. 5715 (October 12, 2012):  9 (8-9), reviewing Jerry Brotton's A history of the world in twelve maps (London:  Allen Lane, 2012).
     Alfred Hiatt, of the Department of English, Queen Mary, University of London, objects in no. 5716 (October 19, 2012):  "not only was this Aristotelian theory [of "the 'Christian medieval two-sphere system'"] in vogue only from the thirteenth century, it was more flexible than Wootton allows, and coexisted with Neoplatonic theories that did not posit separate spheres for earth and water.  Nor did Christian philosophers simply 'reject' the idea of antipodal places and peoples.  They variously doubted, debated and continued to transmit classical theories of the Antipodes throughout the course of the Middle Ages.  Scholars such as Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon (both well versed in Aristotle) affirmed the existence of land beyond the known world, and even argued that it could be reached by Europeans.  Such land was represented from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries on zonal maps of the world.  Those images, which depict southern and northern hemispheres, alone show the falsity of Wootton's assertion that 'in medieval Europe there was no object corresponding to the terms "Earth" or "world" as we use them'.  In short, medieval European understanding of the world and its image was far more subtle and various than Wootton thinks.  That does not in itself lessen the significance of Copernicus, but it does mean that the familiar chiaroscuro narrative of medieval darkness and Renaissance light that Wootton tries to resurrect is essentially inaccurate" (6).  Wootton had not replied to this criticism by the end of November, though his 2015 The invention of science seems to take it into account (and includes Hiatt's 2008 Terra incognita:  mapping the Antipodes before 1600 in its bibliography).

Calvin on the "deitatis sensus"

"I do not say with Cicero, that errors wear out by age, and that religion increases and grows better day by day.  For the world . . . labours as much as it can to shake off all knowledge of God, and corrupts his worship in innumerable ways.  I only say, that, when the stupid hardness of heart, which the wicked eagerly court as a means of despising God, becomes enfeebled, the sense of Deity, which of all things they wished most to be extinguished, is still in vigour, and now and then breaks forth."

"quum stupida quam impii ad Deum spernendum cupide accersunt, durities in eorum animis tabescat, vigere tamen, ac subinde emergere quem maxime extinctum cuperent, deitatis sensum."

     John Calvin, Institutes III.3, trans. Henry Beveridge.  This I would translate somewhat as follows:  "when the stupid hardness in their minds, which the impious, in order to spurn God, eagerly cultivate, subsides, there then flourishes, and immediately [re-]emerges, what they were especially hoping [they had] extinguished, [namely,] the sense of deity."