Kingsley Faraday (Daniel Henshall) to his sister Anna Ivin (Sarah Snook) in Episode 1.3 of The beautiful lie. Kingsley's fling meant nothing to him, but Anna is conducting hers with real passion.
Thursday, July 2, 2026
"I'm a deeply flippant person"
O BONE JESU
"O good Jesu, o sweet Jesu, o Jesu, son of the Virgin Mary, full of mercy and truth . . . who for us sinners deigned to pour out your blood on the altar of the cross: I invoke your holy name. This name of Jesu is a sweet name . . . for what is Jesu but Saviour . . . O good Jesu, call to mind what is yours in me, wipe away all that I have made alien."
"O BONE JESU. O dulcis Jesu. O Jesu, Fili Marie virginis, plenus misericordia et veritate. O dulcis Jesu, miserere mei secundum magnam misericoridiam tuam. O benigne Jesu, te deprecor per illum sanguinem preciosum, quem pro nobis peccatoribus effundere dignatus es in ara crucis, vt abijcias omnes iniquitates meas: et ne despicias [me] humiliter te petentem: et hoc nomen tuum sanctissimum Jesum inuocantem. Hos nomen Jesus nomen dulce est: hoc nomen Jesus nomen salutare est. Quid enim Jesus, nisi Saluator? O bone Jesu, qui me creasti et redemisti tuo precioso sanguine ne permittas me damnari, quem tu ex nichilo creasti. O bone Jesu Christe, ne perdat me iniquitas mea, quem fecit et creauit omnipotens bonitas tua. O bone Jesu, recognosce quod tuum est in me: et absterge quod alienum est a me. O bone Jesu, miserere mei, dum tempus est miserendi: ne perdas me in tempore tui tremendi iudicij. O bone Jesu, si merui ego miser peccator de vera tua iustitia penam eternam pro peccatis meis grauissimis: adhuc appello confisus de tua iustitia vera ad tuam misericordiam ineffabilem vtique misereberis mei, vt pius Pater et misericors Dominus. O bone Jesu, que enim vtilitas in sanguine meo: dum descendero in corruptionem eternam. Non enim mortui laudabunt te: neque omnes qui descendunt in infernum. O misericordissime Jesu, miserere mei. O dulcissime Jesu, libera me. O pijssime Jesu, propicius esto michi peccatori. O Jesu, admitte me miserum peccatorem inter numerum electorum tuorum. O Jesu, salus in te sperantium. O Jesu, salus in te credentium, misere mei. O Jesu, dulcis remissio omnium peccatorum meorum. O Jesu, Fili virginis Marie, infunde in me gratiam tuam, sapientiam, charitatem, castitatem ac humilitatem, ac etiam in omnibus aduersitatibus meis patientiam sanctam, vt possim te perfecte diligere, et in te gloriari ac delectari in secula seculorum. Amen."
"The fervent and affectionate prayer 'O Bone Jesu', invariably found in the printed Sarum Horae, and directly derived from St. Anselm's Meditations," as translated by Eamon Duffy, The stripping of the altars: traditional religion in England 1400-1580, 2nd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 236 =Christopher Wordsworth, ed., Horae Eboracenses: the Prymer or Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary according to the use of the illustrious church of York; with other devotions as they were used by the lay-folk in the Northern Province in the XVth and XVIth centuries (Durham: Pub. for the [Surtees] Society by Andrews & Co., 1920), 83-84.
Wednesday, July 1, 2026
"Each of them, [the] man and [the] woman, should acknowledge and accept his[/her] sexual identity"
"By creating the human being man and woman, God gives personal dignity equally to the one and the other. Each of them, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity."
"Deus, creaturam humanam virum creans et mulierem, utrumque pari donavit personali dignitate. Ad unumquemque pertinet, ad virum et mulierem, suam sexualem agnoscere et acceptare identitatem."
Catechism of the Catholic Church no. 2393 (under the Sixth Commandment; English, Latin). Identitas is post-classical, apparently 4th century and following. Blaise doesn't carry the modern sense, but the DMLBS (the other dictionary of medieval Latin to which I have immediate access from here at home) offers the following, no. 3a of 9: "identity, condition or fact that person or thing is itself and not something else" (the OED gives the 8th century for that sense, and 1756 for 'individuality, personality' as a sense of the French identité).
Saturday, June 27, 2026
Holy Kinship
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| Hans Thoman, Heilige Sippe (c. 1515), Andreas Preifcke, photographer |
The cult of St. Anne "was a popular one in the late Middle Ages in England as elsewhere, and she and her daughters provided a symbolic affirmation of the rootedness of the Incarnate Christ within a real human family. At a time when much in the cult of the saints militated against a positive valuation of human sexuality and the realities of marriage and childbearing, the cult of Anne provided an image of female fruitfulness which was maternal rather than virginal, and her thrice-married state, rivalling the career of the Wife of Bath, was an unequivocal assertion of the compatibility of sanctity and married life. She represented both the notion of the family and the principle of fertility, whose three holy daughters gave birth in their turn to six Apostles and the Saviour of the world".
St. Margaret, "whose spectacular torments and miraculous preservation spoke of holiness and otherness, was a symbol of transcendent power, the sacred beyond the limits of the experience of ordinary people. Her power to help sprang from her divinely protected and heroic virginal integrity. The figures in the other paintings are even more sacred beings - Christ and his six cousins, all of them Apostles, and Anne's three holy daughters. But here they are mothers and children of flesh and blood: one of the toddlers blows bubbles from a pipe, another clutches a toy windmill. The screen spoke to the women of Ranworth simultaneously of the divine indwelling in the concrete reality of the family, of the sanctity of marriage and procreation and God's blessing on ordinary things, and at the same time of the transcendent power of God to help those in extremity, symbolized by Margaret's virginal intercession. As in the case of Henry Walter and St Erasmus, the specialist saint is given a richly human symbolic context which prevents her being seen as a mere mechanical dispenser of power and favour."
Eamon Duffy, The stripping of the altars: traditional religion in England 1400-1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 181-182.
Friday, June 26, 2026
A prayer cobbled together out of Jn 17 RSV
Holy Father, keep me in thy name, which thy Son, Jesus Christ, hast given me, that I may know the glory of being perfectly one with thy saints in thee, even as ye are one. Guard me, and lose me not. Keep me from the evil one. Sanctify and consecrate me in the truth, thy word, that I might have his joy fulfilled in myself. May I be with him where he is, to behold his glory which thou hast given him in thy love for him before the foundation of the world. And may this love with which thou hast loved him be in me, and he in me.
Holy Father, keep me in thy name, which thy Son, Jesus Christ, hast given me, that I may be perfectly one with thy saints in thee, even as thou, Father, art in him, and he in thee. Guard me, and lose me not. Keep me from the evil one. Sanctify and consecrate me in the truth, thy word, that I might have his joy fulfilled in myself. May I be with him where he is, to behold his glory which thou hast given him in thy love for him before the foundation of the world. And may this love with which thou hast loved him be in me, and he in me.
Or us/we/ourselves.
Inspired by this late 5th-century tablet, found in a grave at Hács-Béndekpuszta, east of Budapest, in "A world winking with messages" (Peter Brown).
Thursday, June 18, 2026
Pseudonymity
Roger Bacon, "Epistola de secretis operibus artis et naturae, et de nullitate magiae," in Opera quaedam hactenus inedita, ed. J. S. Brewer (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1859), 526, as translated at Anthony Grafton, Magus: the art of magic from Faustus to Agrippa (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2023), 26. (Yet Bacon was himself more enamoured of astrology than, say, Nicholas of Cusa.)
Monday, June 8, 2026
Neue Quäckerey in der Quietisterey
Ehregott Daniel Colberg, Platonistich-hermenetisches Christenthum, begreiffend die historische Erzehlung vom Ursprung und vielerley Secten der heutigen Fanatischen Theologie, unterm Namen der Paracelsisten, Weigelianer, Rosencreutzer, Quäcker, Böhmisten, Widertäuffer, Bourignisten, Labadisten and Quietisten (Frankfuhrt: 1690) 1.16 (vol. 1, pp. 75-76). The reference seems to be to Apology 11.5. I was put onto this by Bern Roling, “Mittelalterliche Mystik im Kreutzfeuer des Pietismusstreites: der Wittenberger Theologe Martin Chladni (1669-1725) und seine Auseinandersetzung mit der Frauenmystik des Hochmittelalters, Pietismus und Neuzeit 46/47 (2020/2021): 40 (38-84):
War es Zufall, so hatte Colberg gefragt, das ein Quäker wie Robert Barclay (1648-1690) sich auf Bernhard von Clairvaux (1090-1153) and Bonaventura (1221-1274) hatte befufen können?
Cf. the title cited in n6: Conrad Tiburtius Rango, Neue Quäckerey in der Quietisterey (Frankfurt: 1688). For what very little it may be worth, neither Colberg nor Rango are listed in Smith's 1873 Bibliotheca anti-Quakeriana.




