Wednesday, July 2, 2014

"the mind in doubt thinks in a pagan mode: 'Perhaps the promise does not apply to me.'"

"mens in dubitatione ethnico more:  fortasse ad me nihil pertinet promissio."

     Philip Melanchthon, as channeled by Bernhard Ziegler (who presided over the disputation), Disputatio prima:  de iusticia fidei, Thesis 28, in Disputationes duae prima de iusticia fidei, secunda de bonis operibus . . . habitae a Bernardo Ziglero, D. Theologiae (Leipzig, 15 February 1549), as trans. Timothy J. Wengert, in Defending faith:  Lutheran responses to Andreas Osiander's doctrine of justification, 1551-1559, Spätmittelalter, Humanism, Reformation:  studies in the Late Middle Ages, Humanism, and the Reformation 65 (Tübingen:  Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 14.  CR 12:667; De hac sententia, fide iustificari homines coram deo absque merito operum, capita ad disputandum proposita . . . ad diem XV. Februar (Leipzig:  [V. Bapst, 1549]); Disputationes duae prima de iusticia fidei, secunda de bonis operibus . . . habitae Bernardo Ziglero (Leipzig:  Bapst, 1549).

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

"learned criticism . . . always finds the most to do where the least is to be got for the labour."

"der Gelehrsamkeit . . . da immer am Breitesten sich ausdehnt, wo am Wenigsten zu holen ist."

     Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, [Lectures on] The philosophy of history III.Preface ("The Roman world"), trans. J. Sibree; GBWW,1st ed. (1952), vol. 46, p. 286; Berlin Werke, ed. Ph. Marheineke et al., vol. 9, ed. Eduard Gans (Berlin:  Dunker und Humblot, 1837), p. 291.  Hegel is referring to the jurists and philologists, as distinguished from the historians (who "hold to the grand features [(halten sich an an die großen Züge)]"), here.

Cranmer a better translator than writer

"in the judgment of some of Cranmer's most astute critics, his prose is best when he translates rather than composes.  G. J. Cuming notes that Cranmer 'does seem to require an external stimulus to release the flow of creative activity'; this judgment is quoted approvingly by MacCulloch in Thomas Cranmer, 418."

     Alan Jacobs, The Book of Common Prayer:  a biography (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2013), 211n2.

Sunday, June 29, 2014

No, God is still incarnate

"The real defect in the Greek religion, as compared with the Christian, is, therefore, that in the former the manifestation [(Erscheinung)] constitutes the highest mode in which the divine being is conceived to existthe sum and substance of divinity; while in the Christian religion the manifestation is regarded only as a temporary phase of the divine [(während es in der letzteren nicht seine allgemeine Bestimmung zu erscheinen ist, sondern dieses nur als ein Moment angenommen wird)]."

     Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, [Lectures on] The philosophy of history II.ii.2 ("The objective work of art"), trans. J. Sibree; GBWW, 1st ed. (1952), vol. 46, p. 271; Berlin Werke, ed. Ph. Marheineke et al., vol. 9, ed. Eduard Gans (Berlin:  Dunker und Humblot, 1837), p. 259.
     Hegel continues as follows:
Here the manifested God dies, and elevates himself to glory; only after death is Christ represented as sitting at the right hand of God.  The Greek god, on the contrary, exists for his worshippers perennially in the manifestationonly in marble, in metal or wood, or as figured by the imagination.
The German is very different (entirely devoid of an enumeration of media) in the Berlin Werke.  This must be due to the fact that the Sibree translation of 1857 is based on the Karl Hegel manuscript first published in 1840.
Der griechische Gott ist dagegen für die Hellenen noch ein Jenseits; als in der Erscheinung perennirend ist die wahrhafte Versöhnung im ihn nicht vorhanden, denn die Erscheinung ist nicht als Moment der Subjectivität in Gott affirmativ gesetzt; . . .
     Do I mistake Hegel in thinking this account of the Incarnation seriously deficient?

"O Roma felix"

O Roma felix, quæ tantorum principum
es purpurata pretioso sanguine,
non laude tua, sed ipsorum meritis
excellis omnem mundi pulchritudinem.


     Stanza 5 of the 6th (???)-century hymn "Aurea luce et decoro roseo" (earliest manuscript listed in CANTUS:  1000s/c. 1075).  "Aurea luce et decoro roseo" was for a time replaced by the incipit "Decora lux aeternitatis auream", but restored in the post-Vatican II Liturgia horarum (if not earlier).  In Connelly's edition of "Decora lux aeternitatis auream" it appears as follows:

O Roma felix, quae duorum principum
Es consecrata glorioso sanguine.
Horum cruore pupuata ceteras
Excellis orbis una pulchritudines.

Trans. Connelly:

How happy, Rome, your fortune in being dedicated to God in the Prince's noble blood; for clad in a robe dyed in purple with their blood, you far outstrip in beauty all else the world can show.

     But the original incipit "Aurea luce et decoro roseo" was restored to the post-Vatican II Lituria horarum:  Hymn, First Vespers (Evening Prayer I), Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, 29 June, Liturgia horarum.
     Still, "O Roma felix" was not original to "Aurea luce et decoro roseo", having been imported from the nth-century "hymnus de sancto Petro Pauloque" "Felix per omnes festum mundi cardines" (earliest manuscript listed in CANTUS:  c. 1075), where it was stanza number seven, and where, with its original order-of-the-lines and a fifth, it appears (in the properly critical edition ed. Milfull) as follows:

O Roma felix, que tantorum principum
es purpurata pretioso sanguine
excellis omnem mundi pulchritudinem
non laude tua, sed sanctorum meritis,
quos cruentatis jugulasti gladiis.

Trans. Milfull:

O happy Rome, you who are clothed in the purple of the precious blood of such great princes, you surpass all the beauty of the world not by your fame, but by the merits of your saints, whom you murdered with your bloodied swords.

Milfull:  "Cf. the poem O Roma nobilis (The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse, ed. F. J. E. Raby (Oxford, 1959), p. 190)."

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