"command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high" (the Supplices te rogamus)

"we do not call Paul's tongue or his paper and ink the body and blood of Christ, nor the significant sounds made by his tongue, nor the meaningful signs written on the pages of his letters, but only that which is taken from the fruits of the earth, and consecrated by mystic prayers, and taken by us for our spiritual salvation in memory of what the Lord suffered for us. The hands of men give this its visible appearance, but it can only be consecrated into being such a great sacrament by the invisible working of the spirit of God. For all the physical movements involved in the whole action are worked by God acting in the first place on what is invisible in the ministers, namely on the souls of men or on the services of the occult spirits who are subject to him."

     St. Augustin, De Trinitate III.4.10, trans. Edmund Hill, WSA I/5 (1991), 132-134.  Footnote at the end here:  "This strange little excursus into eucharistic theology throws an interesting light on Augustine's ideas on the subject, and must modify to some extent the impression we get of them, say from his commentary on John 6 (Homilies on the Gospel of John 26, 13-20). Augustine is customarily thought of, largely on the strength of that passage, as holding a 'symbolist' view of the sacrament as against the 'realist' view expressed for example by Ambrose in his De Mysteriis 9. On the whole this is true, as Augustine always lays great stress on the significance of the sacraments, which he classifies as signs, sacred signs, rather than as just things. In this he is firmly taken up by Thomas Aquinas, and again by the leading spirits in theology today, who are reacting, perhaps over-reacting, against a somewhat uncritical and mechanical 'realism' that has colored Catholic sacramental thought and piety for rather a long time.
     "But this passage of ours here shows that Augustine's 'symbolism' was not unqualified. He does indeed introduce the eucharist quite unequivocally in a 'signs' context here. But then he introduces this section, which is in reality a footnote, to explain that the eucharist is a quite unique sort of sign, in that it is to be identified with the thing signified (the body and blood of Christ) in a way that no other sign can be. Furthermore a real and unique spiritual, divine, causality needs to be brought into play to effect this unique sign. It is interesting to observe that he thinks angels might well be co-ministers of the eucharist. Are they thought of perhaps as playing the same kind of role as the mysterious angel in the Supplices te rogamus prayer of Eucharistic Prayer I (the Roman Canon)?"

     I was put onto this passage (though not this translation with this footnote) by A. Sage, "Saint Augustine et la prière du Canon 'Supplices te rogamus…'," Revue des études byzantines 11 (1953):  253 (252-265).  And Sage was very clearly thinking so back then.  The Supplices te rogamus, "so disconcerting for more than one theologian or liturgist" (Sage, 252), I was glad to read:

In humble prayer we ask you, almighty God: command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high in the sight of your divine majesty, so that all of us, who through this participation at the altar receive the most holy Body and Blood of your Son, may be filled with every grace and heavenly blessing.  Through Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Supplices te rogamus, omnipotens Deus: iube haec perferri per manus sancti Angeli tui in sublime altare tuum, in conspectu divinae maiestatis tuae; ut, quotquot ex hac altaris participatione sacrosanctum Filii tui Corpus et Sanguinem sumpserimus, omni benedictione caelesti et gratia repleamur. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

Four theses on St. Hildegard of Bingen

If I am right about the importance of reading the visions of St. Hildegard of Bingen in the light of the early Vita of Gottfried of Disibodenberg and (after his death) Theoderich of Echternach, who imply that they were bestowed in order to ensure the orthodox (if imagistically allegorical) interpretation of both [1] Scripture and [2] Tradition; [3] set down in the form of an imagistic early scholasticism or [comprehensive] systematic theology; and [4] endorsed at the highest levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, then "The prophetessa teutonica can be shoehorned [(fugt sich . . . ein)] only with difficulty into the history of [Christian] mysticism [in general], and so-called German [Christian] mysticism [in particular].  Hildegard is not to be placed at the head of a line [of descent] that would lead from her to a [St.] Gertrude of Helfta or [a] Mechthild of Magdegburg.  She turns out to be in hindsight a theologian of high rank who develops, via the power of image and symbol independently, [a] theology saturated by [the Christian] tradition."

     Jörg Ulrich, "Vision bei Hildegard von Bingen:  Beobachtungen zur Vita Gottfrieds und Theoderichs und zu den Visionsschriften Hildegards," Kerygma und Dogma 47 (2001):  27 (14-29).  Image:  Eibingen, Klosterbibliothek Abtei St. Hildegard, Cod. 1 (Pergamentfaksimile von Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. 1 (now lost)), fol. 1. 

"once, maybe twice. But. . . . not forever"

     "The conclusions I’ve drawn from reflecting on the question are simple. First, we never know what the effect of telling the truth will be. It’s always worth telling it once, maybe twice. But there may come a time when you’ve done that, and there’s nothing more you can do. The penny may drop in their minds over time. It’s always worth saying what you believe to be true and maybe repeating it, but not forever.
     "A second conclusion is, however, that ideologues again are not interested in a conversation; they’re interested in either persuading you or making you submit. If someone approaches you in a provocative, insulting manner from the get-go, you know they don’t want a conversation. If you engage with them, you’re likely to be reduced to an undignified scrap in which you lose your dignity and your temper. So if someone approaches you in that fashion, refuse to engage on those terms. Some exchanges are simply not worth having. They’re dangerous, and silence is the best response. And there is good dominical precedent for Christians to use silence in response to what other people say.
     "The third thing I’d say is that even ideologues and zealots may speak the truth. And that’s why I felt I ought to respond to the ten most hostile critics to my book on colonialism. I paid them the respect of taking what they said seriously and assessing how much sense it made. I conceded three or four minor points to my most obsessive and recalcitrant critic.
     "Finally, zealots are not the only ones we are speaking to. In a conference I held in Oxford in 2019, Bret Weinstein gave us the gnomic advice, “Always remember the room is not the room,” which means, when you’re faced with an aggressive zealot, you need to think about how you behave to the people who are watching. They are the more important audience. So for their sake it may be important to speak the truth as best you can without being drawn into an undignified scrap."

     Nigel Biggar in Matthew Lee Anderson and Nigel Biggar, "Liberalism in the U.S. and the UK: A Q&A with Lord Nigel Biggar," Public Discourse:  The JKournal of the Witherspoon Institute, August 13, 2026.

"In your light we see Light"

      "And sometimes, though not often, I see another light in that [shadow of the living] light, and this I have called 'the Living Light.'  But I am even less able to explain how I see this light than I am the other one.  Suffice it to say that when I do see it, all my sorrow and pain vanish from my memory and I become more like a young girl than an old women [(atque interim dum illam intueor, omnis mihi tristitia ommsque dolor de memoria aufertur, ita ut tunc mores simplices puelle, et non uetule mulieris habeam)]."

     St. Hildegard of Bingen, Letter 103r to the monk [St.] Guilbert of Gembloux (1175), Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, trans. Joseph L. Baird &  Radd K. Ehrman, vol. 2 (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1998), 23 (21-25).  Latin as supplied by Jörg Ulrich, "Vision bei Hildegard von Bingen:  Beobachtungen zur Vita Gottfrieds und Theoderichs und zu den Visionsschriften Hildegards," Kerygma und Dogma 47 (2001):  15n3 (14-29).    Image:  Eibingen, Klosterbibliothek Abtei St. Hildegard, Cod. 1 (Pergamentfaksimile von Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. 1 (now lost)), fol. 1. 

Gastadelli on the letter of St. Bernard to St. Hildegard

The legend of "The [enthusiastic] oral intervention of Bernard [of Clairvaux on Hildegard’s behalf to the effect that a luminary of that caliber should not remain obscure, but should rather be, by the papal authority of Eugenius III, proclaimed to be the recipient of a great grace, as indeed she was (according to the medievalist [Philipp] Jaffé) in Trier between 13 and 15 February 1148 (Regesta II, no. 9188),] is to be blamed on the fanciful [(phantasievoller)] biographers of Hildegard [Gottfried and Theodoric], exactly as the interpolation [of 1180/90] into [the authentically quite cagy] Epistle 366" (sometimes numbered 390) of 1147 in 11 of the 12 manuscripts of that famous letter.

     [Ferruccio Gastadelli], "Zu Brief 366" ("Aus Opere di San Bernardo, Vol VI/1, Milano 1986"), in Bernhard von Clairvaux Sämtliche Werke lateinisch-deutsch, ed. Gerhard B. Winkler et al., vol. III, p. 1188 (1187-1188).  Image:  Die Legend des heyligen hertzogen sant Ruprechts bey Byngen uff sant Ruprechts berg leyplich rastende [(Oppenheim:  Köbel, 1524)], XXVI =MDZ scan 55, Munich DigitiZation Center (MDZ) of the Bavarian State Library (BSB).

It takes a village to raze a child

"It takes a village to raise a child," but it can take a smaller "village" (of meddlesome, know-it-all busybodies) to raze or (be)traise or craze him, too.

     Steve Perisho.

Faith AND life

      "These half-dozen questions effectively synthesized what the Tudor regime had been pursuing piecemeal, as the opportunity arose, since it was first established half a century before.  The interest in the personal morality of the religious has often been upheld as the signal of a new determination to do battle with the very basis of religious vows.  But the behaviour of individuals, their social and sexual liaisons, had always figured in the visitations, both those carried out under the external authority of the bishop and those investigations undertaken by their own congregations."

     James G. Clark, The dissolution of the monasteries:  a new history (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2022), 234 (Part Two, chap. V. The King's Commissions), italics mine.  The footnote at the end of this paragraph  appears to cite sources no earlier than 1492, however.  Would this hold also against claims about the rise of a supposedly new and unprecedented reformist
interest in surveillance and control at about this time?