"no power of oureselues to helpe ourselues"

"O God, Who seest that in our own weakness we do continually fall, make, in thy mercy, the examples of thy holy children a mean whereby to renew in us the love of thyself. Through."

As trans. Divinum Officium (online).

"Deus, qui nos conspicis ex nostra infirmitate deficere: ad amorem tuum nos misericorditer per Sanctorum tuorum exempla restaura. Per."

The Anglican breviary containing the Divine office according to the general usages of the Western church put into English in accordance with the Book of common prayer (1955), E474 (Feast of St. Calixtus, 14 October, and possibly elsewhere in the Proper of the saints, Tridentine breviary and missal):  "O God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves:  we pray thee, that, by the examples of thy Saints; thou wouldest mercifully restore us to the perfect love of thee.  Through."

The collect for the Feast of St. Calixtus in the contemporary Liturgy of the hours is very different, and much less interesting.  Indeed, there does not seem to be a single occurrence of the clause "qui nos conspicis ex nostra infirmitate deficere" anywhere in the contemporary Liturgia horarum.

BCP 1549:  "we haue no power of oureselues to helpe ourselues", followed by a different text:  seconde Sonday [of Lent].

BCP 1662:  "we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves":  Second Sunday of Lent.

BCP 1979:  "no power in ourselves to help ourselves":  Third Sunday of Lent.

"How many years it would take to reveal, direct, and confirm the necessary line, until the defense would stand as one with the prosecution and the court, and the accused would be in agreement with them too, and all the resolutions of the workers as well!"

     "This is an instructive example. Although 'revolutionary legality' won a partial victory, how enormous an effort it required on the part of the presiding judge! How much disorganization, lack of discipline, lack of political consciousness there still was! The prosecution stood firmly with the defense. The convoy guards stuck their noses into something that wasn’t their business in order to send off a protest. Whew, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the new kind of court were not having things easy by any means! Of course, not all the sessions were anything like so turbulent, but this wasn’t the only one of its kind. How many years it would take to reveal, direct, and confirm the necessary line, until the defense would stand as one with the prosecution and the court, and the accused would be in agreement with them too, and all the resolutions of the workers as well!
     "To pursue this enterprise of many years’ duration is the rewarding task of the historian. As for us—how are we to make our way through that rosy mist? Whom are we to ask about it? Those who were shot aren’t talking, and neither are those who have been scattered to the four winds. Even if the defendants, and the lawyers, and the guards, and the spectators have survived, no one will allow us to seek them out.
     "Evidently, the only help we will get is from the prosecution.
     "In this connection, I was given by well-wishers an intact copy of a collection of speeches for the prosecution delivered by that fierce revolutionary, the first People’s Commissar of Military Affairs in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, the Commander in Chief, and later the organizer of the Department of Exceptional Courts of the People’s Commissariat of Justice—where the personal rank of tribune was being readied for him, until Lenin vetoed the title—the glorious accuser in the greatest trials, subsequently exposed as the ferocious enemy of the people, N. V. Krylenko. And if, despite everything, we want to attempt a brief review of the public trials, if we are determined to try to get a feeling for the judicial atmosphere of the first post-revolutionary years, then we have to learn to read this Krylenko text. We have no other. And using it as a basis, we must try to picture to ourselves everything that is missing from it and everything that happened in the provinces too.
     "Of course, we would prefer to see the stenographic record of those trials, to listen to the dramatic voices from beyond the grave of those first defendants and those first lawyers, speaking at a time when no one could have foreseen in what implacable sequence all of it would be swallowed up—together with those Revtribunal members as well.
     "However, as Krylenko has explained, for a whole series of technical reasons, 'it was inconvenient to publish the stenographic records[.] It was convenient only to publish his speeches for the prosecution and the sentences handed down by the tribunals, which by that time had already come to jibe completely with the demands of the accuser-prosecutor."

     Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag archipelago 1918-1956:  An experiement in literary investigation I-II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York:  Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973, Part I, chap. 8 ("The law as a child"), p. 305-306.

The liturgy "composed on his own by, say, some Pentecostal pastor in Houston for next Sunday's service in his church"

     ". . . the traditional liturgies have stood the test of time across many centuries by billions of Christians. For that reason, the understanding of God implicit and explicit in ['the points of convergence of'] those liturgies has more authority, carries more weight (gravitas), than one composed on his own by, say, some Pentecostal pastor in Houston for next Sunday’s service in his church; the theology implicit and explicit in the latter is more likely to be quirky, distorted, out of the mainstream. . . .
     ". . . the traditional liturgies have a depth, a richness, a beauty that, in my experience, these contemporary alternative liturgies lack. In my (admittedly limited) experience, the latter liturgies strip elements out of the traditional liturgies, reduce the imagery, make the language chatty and prosaic so that everyone can understand immediately what is being said. There remains only a faint echo of the enormous devotion and creativity that the early church poured into its liturgies. The most radical example of this reductive flattening-out that I have encountered was a Sunday morning service that consisted of nothing more than a praise band performing for about half an hour, followed by a perfunctory prayer spoken by the leader of the band and what was described as a 'talk' by the minister — nothing more.
     "If the alternative contemporary liturgies that I have experienced are typical of these liturgies as a whole, then these liturgies do not represent a fresh burst of liturgical creativity but represent instead the stripping out from the traditional liturgies of almost all their components. Accordingly, in discussing the theological implications of the acts to be found in the traditional liturgies we are also discussing the acts to be found in these alternative contemporary liturgies, since there are none to be found in the latter that are not to be found in the former.
     "My focus on the traditional liturgies does, of course, pose a question to the alternative contemporary liturgies, namely, why have they stripped so many things out? Why was there no confession of sins in that service I mentioned? Why no intercessions? Why no reading of Scripture? And why was there almost no sense of the majesty and awesomeness of God? Is there an understanding of God implicit in this radical stripping out that is different from the understanding to be found in the traditional liturgies? If so, what is that different understanding? . . ."

     Nicholas Wolterstorff, The God we worship:  an exploration of liturgical theology (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2015), 19-20.  "I should add here that the revisions of their traditional liturgies that all denominations, with the exception of the Orthodox, undertook in the twentieth century also amounted to the stripping out of a fair number of traditional elements and theological principles" (20n11).  Agreed!  But granted that the Novus Ordo was itself a comparatively free-wheeling and parochial hatchet job, why is it necessary, leaving that aside, to focus on "the points of convergence" of the traditional liturgies if not because the Reformers, say, did the same (if to a much lesser degree than that "Pentecostal pastor in Houston")?

"death over death did forever triumph"

St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 391 (c. 990/1000), p. 64

"Thou alone excellest in stature all the cedars of Lebanon; for on thee the Life of the world was hanged, on thee was Christ victorious, and death over death did forever triumph."

"Super omnia ligna cedrorum tu sola excelsior, in qua Vita mundi pependit, in qua Christus triumphavit, et mors mortem superavit in æternum."

     Antiphon to the Benedictus, Lauds, Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (14 September), Brevarium Romanum (e.g. vol. 4 (Boston:  Benziger Brothers, Inc., 1941), 617), as trans. Morning prayer, Divine worship:  Daily office, North American edition (Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter), as reproduced at prayer.covert.org.  Undoubtedly there have been many other translations of this, just e.g. this one, a bit more literal, from Divinum officium (online),

Thou art higher than all cedars, whereon the Life of the world hung, whereon. Christ openly triumphed, and His death trampled down death for ever.

The Anglican breviary containing the Divine office according to the general usage of the Western church put into English in accordance with the Book of common prayer (Mount Sinai, NY:  Frank Gavin Liturgical Foundation, 1955; repr. 1998), E411 =1431:

O Tree of life, thou excellest in greatness all the cedars of Lebanon, for on thee the Life-Giver of this world was hung; on thee Christ was victorious in his death, and triumphant over all death for ever.

Perfect vacuity

Source

     "As a Jew with the greatest respect for the Catholic Church, I had always to this point assumed that in the Vatican only extraordinarily discriminating [(ausschließlich höchstkundige)]—[if] probably only [(nur) mere]—men work.  But the Pope’s answer[, almost three months in coming,] is perfectly vacuous [(nichtssagend)] because completely balanced.  Terror is not called terror, and no attempt is made to discriminate between perpetrators and victims.  Peace is called for, but with no attempt to indicate, even [if] only in a preliminary way, how, apart from flowery language, it is to be attained.  Of a moral compass there is, apart from commonplaces and the (naturally) congenial reference to God, no trace.  [What is more,] that reference to God is nothing more than a vacuous [(inhaltsleere)] vocable.  If one wanted to interpret Francis maliciously, one could say that the Hamas terrorists, too, shout 'Allahu akbar!,' 'God is great!' before, during, and after every murder."

     Michael Wolffsohn, "Papst Franziskus, die Juden and die Hamas:  Zur Debatte um das Papstscheiben an jüdische Gelehrte," Website of the Internationale Zeitschrift Communio, 22 Februar 2024, translation mine.  The reference, of course, is to this document.

Seebach in defense of St. Augustine on women

Persönliche Homepage Prof. Dr. Larissa Seelbach

"Augustine distinguished with reference to every human being between the outer human being, the homo exterior, and the inner human being, the homo interior.  While only the inner human being is in a position to know God, only the outer human being encompasses the specificities of human sexuality.  With respect to the outer human being the woman is placed on an equal footing with the man, since both possess an asexual soul.  Only with respect to the outer human being is the woman subjected to the man, since her bodily and social position corresponds ultimately to the traditional patriarchal subordination of the woman.  In reference to th[is] image-bearing [(Gottesebenbildlichkeit)] it is [at Gen. litt. 7.24/35] therefore said [that] 'we can only correctly understand the words to his image with reference to the soul, and the words male and female as having reference to the body.'
     "Augustine in no way doubted the image-bearing of the woman as homo, and from that point of view grappled with [(stand . . . vor)] the problem that in 1 Cor 11:7 Paul appeared to champion another understanding.  There [Paul] says, 'For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man.'  According to this [passage] a pre-eminence over and against the woman would correspond to the man as image and glory of God.  This Bible passage was of value to Augustine for its capacity to harmonize with [(galt es . . . in Einklang mit . . . zu bringen)] his own understanding of the image-bearing of the woman according to Gen 1:27.  His decision to interpret 1 Cor 11:7 figuratively, and thereby to defend the wording of Gen 1:27, 'So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them', was pathbreaking.  Augustine saw in the outward distinction between man and woman an illustration of the differentiation within the human soul, independent of whether th[e soul in question] belongs to a man or to a woman.
     "Within every human soul [there] was[, for Augustine at Gen. litt. 3.22/34-24/35, but] in every case figuratively speaking, a male and a female element [(ein jeweils bildlich zu verstehendes männliches und ein weibliches Element)].  Both [of these] elements [of the human soul] functioned with respect to one another as [did] man and woman in society.  To the superordinate position of the man [in society] corresponded the function of the 'contemplation of eternal truth', [or] sapientia, and to the position of the woman [(der weiblichen Stellung) in society] appeared to correspond the subordinate 'management of temporal affairs', [or] scientia.  The male [element] alone connoted sapientia [and] possessed direct access to the eternal and divine.  And for this reason the man would—again in the figurative [(übertragenen)] sense—be [(wäre)] treated always [as] image-bearing [(gottebenbildlich)].  In the figurative [(übertragenen)] sense—[but] not in the real [(wirklichen) sense]!—the figurative [(figurativen)] woman, [and] therefore scientia, would rise to no image-bearing [(Gottebenbildlichkeit)].  The image-bearing of a real [(realen)] woman, whose asexual soul was the seat of [(beherbergt, harbored)] the figurative [(übertragenen)] male function, or sapientia, as well as the figurative [(übertragenen)] female function, or scientia, is not belittled [(geschmälert, diminished or curtailed)] by this intra-psychic distinction of function."

     Larissa Carina Seelbach, "'Das webiliche Geschlecht ist ja kein Gebrechen, sondern Natur:  Augustins Wertschätzung der Frau (the title, also (?), of a 302-page dissertation published in 2002), Augustinus-Studientag 2004, Toscanasaal der Residenz, Würzburg, as published on the Zentrum für Augustinus-Forschung website, but also on pp. 71-91 of Würde und Rolle der Frau in der Spätantike:  Beiträge des II. Würzburger Augustinus-Studientages am 3. Juli 2004, ed. Cornelius Mayer unter Mitwirkung von Alexander Eisgrub =Res et signa 3 =Cassiacum 39, no. 3 (Würzburg, 2007).

"no one should . . . suppose that the creator of sex despised sex"

      "To heal souls God adopts all kinds of means suitable to the times which are ordered by his marvellous wisdom. . . .  But in no way did he show greater loving-kindness in his dealings with the human race for its good, than when the Wisdom of God, his only Son, coeternal and consubstantial with the Father, deigned to assume human nature; when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  For thus he showed to carnal people, given over to bodily sense and unable with the mind to behold the truth, how lofty a place among creatures belonged to human nature, in that he appeared to men not merely visibly—for he could have done that in some ethereal body adapted to our weak powers of vision—but as a true man.  The assuming of our nature was to be also its liberation.  And that no one should perchance suppose that the creator of sex despised sex, he became a man born of a woman [(et ne quis forte sexus a suo creatore se contemptum putaret, uirum suscepit, natus ex femina est)]."

     St. Augustine, De uera religione xvi/30, trans. Burleigh, LCC 6, 239.  Latin from CAG as reproduced in Past Masters =CCL 32, 205-206.  I.e., no one should suppose that the Creator of the sexual difference despised the sexual difference.