A prayer referencing St. Hildegard of Bingen

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
Res/V.ss. 982 m, XIIIIv

A prayer [with reference] to [(zü)] the holy saint Hildegard [of Bingen]:

Almighty, eternal God:  we beseech thee to bestow upon us [(wir bitten dich das du uns verleihen wöllest, we beseech thee that thou wouldst bestow upon us)] the Spirit of truth and, so, [to] be gracious [to us]  as you were to the holy [and] chaste saint Hildegard, that we may fulfill your will [both] here in time and with thee in everlasting happiness.  Amen.

      Die Legend des heyligen hertzogen sant Ruprechts bey Byngen uff sant Ruprechts berg leyplich rastende ([Oppenheim]:  [Köbel], 1524), XIIIIv, as digitized by MDZ, trans. mine.

Inscription on Mt. Ararat

For Nikolay Pavlovich [Romanov I], denominated Tsar of All-Russ’, Ivan Fyodorovich [Paskevich-Erevansky] liberated, by armed might, this most-holy sanctuary of the Christian faith from (Y)Erevan in the year of our Lord 1826.

Nicolao Pauli filio
totius Rutheniae autocratore
jubente
hoc asylum sacrosanctum
armata manu vindicavit
fidei Christianae
Johannes Friedrich filius
Paskewitsch ab Erivan
Anno domini MDCCCXXVI.

     Parrot, Friedrich. Reise zum Ararat (Berlin: Haude und Spener, 1834), 145 (p. 163 of the English translation of the book published in 1845).  Inscription on the "leaden plate" affixed to a cross erected on the summit of Mt. Ararat by the Parrot expedition in 1826, translation mine.  With thanks to my colleague Paula Skreslet for the diversion.

"'Africa's domestic economy encouraged large-scale trading and possession of slaves long before Europeans visited African shores'"

     "While it is not a straightforward matter whether the transatlantic slave trade was 'the gravest crime against humanity,' surely it was a crime. It was a crime and a monumental tragedy from the perspective of tens of millions of black human lives that were sacrificed on the twin altars of greed and human stupidity. That said—and this is a crucial point—there is scant historical support for the tacit assumption that it was an organized and systematic assault against hapless Africans who, but for lack of military wherewithal, would have risen up against and repelled their enslavers. The historical evidence is more sobering. As John Thornton wrote in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 ([2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, ]1998[, 125]): '[In conclusion, then, we must accept that] African participation in the slave trade was voluntary and under the control of African decision makers. This was not just at the surface level of daily exchange but even at deeper levels. Europeans possessed no means, either economic or military, to compel African leaders to sell slaves.[ . . .  Africa's domestic economy encouraged large-scale trading and possession of slaves long before Europeans visited African shores.]' This conclusion is not controversial among serious historians of the transatlantic slave trade. It also helps explain the historical absurdity of those newfangled European abolitionists who, as it were, had suddenly started seeing the trade through a different moral lens and began struggling to convince African traffickers, until a minute ago their trading partners, of the wrongfulness of the enterprise.
     "If European abolitionists did not become saints overnight, African chiefs who insisted on business as usual were hardly Satanic. They were instead agents following a brutal social logic: So integral was enslavement to the internal workings and moral order of most African communities in that period that it is difficult to conceive of their functioning without it. Historically, a pre-colonial African kingdom that did not extract slaves from a vanquished vassal was as rare as one that did not regularly engage in slave raids. In the 1840s, Gezo, king of the West African state of Dahomey, told the importuning British, 'The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth.… The mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.' In this, he echoed a sentiment that was not uncommon for the time.
     "Indeed, not only was trade in human beings par for the course, many believed that it was God’s will. After Britain declared all slave trading illegal in 1807, the King of Bonny (now part of Nigeria) doubled down in a tone not all that different from that of King Gezo: 'We think this trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself.' Nigerian historian P.A. Igbafe observed about the pre-colonial Benin Kingdom that the institution of slavery was 'one of its main props.' This could well have been said about every single pre-colonial African kingdom. The Asante Empire, with its capital in Kumasi—located in present-day Ghana—was a slave-owning one.
     "Rather than a 'definitive break in world history,' therefore, the transatlantic slave trade was coextensive with it. That it was egregious in its brutality is without question, but it was a trade involving two sides and, crucially, seems to have unfolded within a moral and social calculus in which you were either traded or trader. It is one thing to recognize its sheer ugliness and another thing entirely to misrepresent it, which the campaigners for reparatory justice flagrantly do.
     "The transatlantic slave trade, moreover, is just one of three momentous episodes of human trafficking in African history, the other two being the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades. Consider this: The transatlantic slave trade lasted roughly 400 years. The trans-Saharan lasted for 1,300 years, and it preceded, overlapped with, and continued long [(a century or so?)] after the transatlantic slave trade had ceased."

     Ebenezer Obadare, "A Dubious Quest for 'Reparatory Justice':  The case for compensating Africa for slavery rests on bad history, questionable morality, and false promises," Commentary, September 2026.  I have not yet verified these claims, only that Obadare holds a BA in history and an MSc in international relations from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and a Ph.D. in social policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science.  On the other hand, and am currently reading J. C. Sharman, Ties that bound:  slavery and power in Africa (Princeton University Press, 2026), and there Sharman follows up his own quotation of Thornton ("Europeans possessed no means, either economic or military, to compel African leaders to sell slaves") with "This was the case ['for the first century and a half of [Portuguese] contact' and] during and after the era of the company states until the end of European involvement in the slave trade.  Such a perspective runs completely against popular stereotypes of European masters and African victims.  It also contradicts an earlier generation of scholarship holding that Europe dominated and exploited Africans right from the beginning of relations between them—a view epitomized in the book [(Rodney Walter's)] How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. . . . [T]he Europeans were consistently in an inferior position" (65, supplemented by 59).  Though Sharman is here making, in context, a point about the (nevertheless African-dominated) ramp-up effected by European demand from the later 17th century, this one still stands:  ". . . Africans had centuries of experience with slavery and long-distance slave trades before contact with Europeans . . ." (75).  Not only that, "'[B]y the middle of the nineteenth century there were more slaves in Muslim West Africa than in all parts of the Americas at any time in the history of the black Atlantic'" (104, quoting Paul E. Lovejoy, Jihad in West Africa during the age of revolutions (Princeton University Press, 2016), 160, under the sub-heading "Limitations on the involvement of Muslim West Africa in the Atlantic trade").
     For but one alternative perspective of which I happen to be aware, with equally recent citations, some of them in French, see Sègbégnon Mathieu Gnonhossou, "Soul-destroyers tore me from my mother's arms : West African resistance to the slave trade," in Awakening to justice:  faithful voices from the abolitionist past, ed. Dialogue on Race and Faith Project (Seattle, Wash.) (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2024).  What strikes me, though, is how little the footnotes to Gnonhossou overlap with entries in the twenty-page bibliography to Sharman.  Glancing through the former all-too quickly, I caught only two titles cited by Gnonhossou that appear in the bibliography to Sharman, though Gnohossou does cite titles by Sharman's authors that Sharman does not cite:  Law (notes 15, 18, 20, and 30), Manning (notes 16, 20, and 24), Monroe (notes 18, 20, 22, and 23), and Ross (note 14).

"the end can contain the beginning only because the beginning contained the end."

      Bruce Lindley McCormack, The humility of the eternal Son:  Reformed kenoticism and the repair of Chalcedon (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2021), 245n32.

"So called 'social trinitarianism' was not an option in the early church. Nor should it be today."

     Bruce Lindley McCormack, The humility of the eternal Son:  Reformed kenoticism and the repair of Chalcedon (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2021), 245n32.

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

"with the pronouncement of the words of institution, the Sacrifice of the Mass is established [(acquis)], holy, approved; but this acceptation is only manifest for us at the moment in which the offering of our oblation appears transfigured in the fires of the Holy Spirit, transferred by the ministry of the angel onto the altar in heaven, fully conformed to the vivifying Body and Blood of Christ.  It is only then that, perfectly consecrated—Saint Gelasius and Saint Gregory said even simply consecrated—it can be divided [(rompue)] among all of those invited to the royal banquet of the Lamb."

     A. Sage, "Saint Augustin et la prière du Canon 'Supplices te rogamus…'," Revue des études byzantines 11 (1953):  265 (252-265).

"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.