Skip to content

Trinity of infinite personal love

Monday, August 23, 2010

Bishop Thomas Ken (1637-1711)

Over at Comfortable Words (which is very sadly being wrapped up), Nicholas Armitage has posted an interesting passage from William Beveridge on 2 Corinthians 13:14, the “Grace” with which the offices of Mattins and Evensong in the Book of Common Prayer end every day, in which the Trinity is mentioned with God the Son in the first position:

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore.

Bishop Thomas Ken (1637-1711) alludes to the same passage at the end of the opening section of his devotional meditation on the Apostles’ Creed in his The Practice of Divine Love, an Exposition on the Church Catechism, a work remarkable for its insistence that the potentially dry dogmatic elements of our faith ought to excite in us a rapture of love towards God who has deigned to reveal his nature to us:

My Lord and my God, with a full free, and firm assent, I believe all the articles of my Creed, because thou hast revealed them;

I know Thou art infallible truth, and canst not, Thou art infinite love, and wilt not, deceive me: glory be to Thee.

With all my heart, O my God, do I love and praise Thee, who art so infinitely amiable in Thyself, and so full of love to us, that all I can know, or believe of Thee, excites me to love Thee.

Lord, daily increase my faith; make it active and fruitful, that I may believe and love Thee as entirely as becomes one entirely devoted to Thee.

I believe, O my God, that Thou art one, and that there is no other God besides Thee; Thou art that one infinite and independent Being, that one only true God, whom all men, and all angels, are to adore: all glory be to Thee.

O Lord God, help me to love and to praise Thee with godlike affections, and a suitable devotion.

I believe, O my God, that in the unity of Thy Godhead there is a Trinity of persons. I believe in Thee, O Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in whose name I was baptized, to whose service I am religiously devoted: all glory be to Thee.

I believe, I admire, I love, I praise, I adore Thee, O most blessed and glorious Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, for being the joint authors of our salvation: all glory be to Thee.

O sacred, and dreadful and mysterious Trinity, though I cannot conceive Thee, yet let me daily experiment Thy goodness; let Thy grace, O Lord Jesus; let Thy love, O God the Father; let Thy communications, O Holy Spirit, be ever with me.

The Practice of Divine Love, an Exposition upon the Church Catechism, Part II: The Creed.

The Holy Trinity is not, it seems, a major focus of devotion for most Christians today — though there are some strange folk who have taken to referring to “Holy Spirit” as if that were the proper name of the Third Person!  But even a shallow familiarity (like mine) with the thought and writings of the early Church will show that the doctrine of the Trinity was absolutely central to Christian devotion and life from an early stage.  This was, I think, because it was  a revelation of God’s essential nature as a Unity in Three Persons, and because through Jesus Christ our humanity has been drawn up into the very life of God.

In Ken’s meditation, I am particularly struck by the phrase “who art so infinitely amiable in Thyself, and so full of love to us”.  In Ken’s time, “amiable” could have two meanings.  Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary gives the following:

1. Lovely; pleasing.

2. Pretending love; shewing love.

In the second definition, we need a further gloss on “pretending”, which for Johnson has the sense of “holding out”, “extending”, as in his supporting quotation from Shakespeare, “Lay amiable siege to the honesty of this Ford’s wife; use your art of wooing.”  Either meaning would fit in this passage from Thomas Ken.  God is “infinitely amiable” in the sense of being lovely (and lovable) beyond anything we can know.  But I rather like the second meaning here, which would allow us to gloss the phrase “infinitely amiable in Thyself” as “infinitely showing/extending love within yourself”.  It is indeed almost a theological platitude today to speak of the Trinity as a Community of Love from eternity — and that community and that love have opened to embrace our humanity, for as Ken immediately continues, the Trinity is “so full of love to us”.

A remarkably similar approach, unfolded with beautiful depth, may be seen in another interview, embedded below, with the great Romanian Orthodox priest and theologian Prof. Dumitru Stăniloae (1903-1993), in which he addresses the problem of young people (“youngs” in the subtitles) being drawn to political philosophy and the sciences as the paths whereby humanity will achieve its ultimate good, when in fact:

The Son of God made Himself the model of the highest good, a model that we can never achieve [i.e. solely from a secular, humanist perspective] because it is infinite. Christ represents the infinite level of our advancement.

This leads Stăniloae to reflect on the congruity of the revealed doctrine of the Trinity with our own experience of love, which in order to be satisfying must be personal. And if there is to be an infinite love to satisfy us all, it must be a personal love from eternity, which in turn implies an eternal community of three persons (underlying the phenomenon of the family and the “I, thou, he” of grammar) in whom love is eternally and perfectly expressed.  On this basis, Stăniloae can say with astounding simplicity, “Christianity is the religion of endless love.” This is the same sentiment with which Thomas Ken ends his meditation on the Creed:

O inexhaustible Love, do Thou eternally breathe love into me, that my love to Thee may be eternally increasing, and tending towards infinity, since a love less than infinite is not worthy of Thee.

O Thou great Author and Finisher of our faith, do Thou daily increase my faith, and heighten my love; O grant this, in holy ardours of love to Love crucified, my love may at last ascend to the region of love, that I may have nothing to do all eternity but to praise and to love Thee: Amen. O infinite Love! Amen, amen.

Filed in Anglican Doctrine | | Comments (0)

Christ the Foundation

Thursday, August 19, 2010
Front cover of Hanson's Continuity of Christian Doctrine

The Continuity of Christian Doctrine, by Bishop R. P. C. Hanson (1916-1988)

I recently finished reading a short book by R.P.C. Hanson (1916-1988) called The Continuity of Christian Doctrine (New York: Seabury Press, 1981). Hanson held theology professorships at Durham, Nottingham and Manchester.  He was also, from 1970 to 1973, (Anglican) Bishop of Clogher, which (I learn from the dust jacket) “straddles the border between the Irish Republic and the province of Ulster”). Hanson experienced at first hand the ongoing animosity between Catholics and Protestants, and it is indicative of his standing among Catholics that this book is the published version of a series of lectures given in 1979 at a Jesuit institution, John Carroll University.

Hanson takes up the problem of how we are to identify legitimate “developments” in the truths taught by Christianity. The crucial problem is that Christian teaching has evolved and changed over time, and that the legitimacy of this change must be demonstrated if Christianity’s teaching is to be accepted as true:

As far as Christianity is concerned, it can be demonstrated with some ease that it stands or falls by historical continuity. I do not gather from [Dennis] Nineham’s book [The Use and Abuse of the Bible, 1976] in what sense he can continue to believe in Christianity once he has abandoned belief in the validity of its continuity. Presumably devotees of Christianity today claim to be on contact with some form of truth. Presumably they are not simply playing an enjoyable game or telling a pretty story or indulging in a form of self-delusion.  Whether this truth is envisaged as consisting of communication with God, who must be true, or knowing the gospel, or even just finding a true paradigm or example, it must have some form. It cannot be completely formless nor wholly inexpressible. That form must have some relation to Jesus Christ, an historical personage, or at least a character believed to be historical. The form therefore must be related to the period in history when Jesus Christ appeared. Contemporary Christianity can only vindicate itself as authentic if it can show that it is related to this historical event. The subject of continuity cannot be evaded (p. 18).

Hanson opposes the historic Catholic view, famously expressed in John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, that, beginning with a seed-bed in the New Testament, doctrinal development “inevitably takes the form of an ever-increasing mass of dogmas, logically or organically or even mystically related to each other in a vast and growing web” (p. 26). This notion Hanson counters with a strong argument that “development may take the form of reduction” as well as of accretion (p. 27). But Hanson equally opposes Newman’s Protestant critic J. K. Mozley, who “still can deny that any change or development had taken place at all, and apparently believes that the full doctrine of the divinity of the Son is directly revealed in the Scriptures, that the Apostles and the generations who immediately succeeded them believed in a doctrine of the Holy Trinity and in a Christology little different from that of [the 451 Council of] Chalcedon” (pp. 24-25).  For Hanson, it is evident from the Scriptures themselves and from subsequent Christian history that fundamental points of Christian doctrine have been altered and re-evaluated.  He explores two major examples: the change from eschatological to Christological reflection in the face of Christ’s delayed return (ch. 3); and the eventual definition of Christ’s divine and human natures in response to the Arian controversy (ch. 4).  In both cases, he argues that what passed uncritically for orthodoxy in one age (in both cases a tacit acceptance of Christ’s “less-than-divinity”) was formally defined as heresy in the next.  This does not mean, however, that Hanson accepts the theory of some modern theologians that when it comes to doctrinal development “anything goes”.

For Hanson, the revelatory event that is the person and work of Jesus Christ, uniquely documented in the New Testament, supplies necessary “historical checks” to control illegitimate developments of doctrine.  After a rather devastating assessment of the Catholic dogma of the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (formally proclaimed only in 1950), he observes that without the limiting control exerted by Scripture:

The result is either a virtually uncontrolled doctrinal space flight in which one extravagant and outrageous development is piled upon another to build an apparently imposing structure on the flimsiest of foundations, or (what I suspect to be the Protestant reverse of the coin of which the Catholic development is the obverse) a reduction of Christianity to a purely historical phenomenon like the development of Parliament whose evolution can move in whatever direction the whims of men dictate or the pressures of circumstances suggest. And when we speak about historical checks we realize at once that there can be only one primary check, Holy Scripture (p. 77).

Hanson goes on to propose a framework that sees doctrinal development as a process of “trial and error”, with continual recourse made to the fundamental deposit of Revelation whose boundaries have been fixed in the canon of Holy Scripture.  He affirms an old Anglican maxim:  ”the Church to teach, the Bible to prove”:

The gospel is not bits of the New Testament transformed into sermons. It is the teaching of the Church according to the norm of the New Testament. The New Testament as an indispensable historical witness stands immovable between the Church of today and its origins (p. 21).

This leads him to propose some striking images for how we might understand the process whereby legitimate development in the Church’s teaching might come about:

We might compare development to a boat moored to a fixed buoy. It can float off in several directions, one after another, at the bidding of wind or tide or current. But there is a point at which the cable attached to the buoy always checks its course, not always pulling it back to the same point, but always preventing it moving any further on its existing course. Or we could liken the development of dogma to a dance between the church and Scripture; the two partners are constantly in motion, sometimes moving in harmony, sometimes pulling against each other, but always inseparable. The image of a conversation or dialogue … might be a valid one, as long as we understand that it is a conversation which can never break off (p. 29).

In the final chapter, he proposes the following striking analogy:

The analogy from the progress of some humane study, such as Shakespearean criticism, seems to me valuable. Here change, vicissitudes, reversal, radical critique, the appearance of new viewpoints and approaches, the constant influence of the changing patterns of secular thought, all play their part in a unity of study and subject which certainly does not proceed in a simple line of ever-increasing insight and unanimity, but does in the long run gradually contribute to an increased understanding of Shakespeare’s works, which the actual performance of his plays enhances considerably. We have only to consider the very different treatment of Shakespeare’s work during the seventeenth century, during the eighteenth century, in the nineteenth century, and in our own century to appreciate this point. The young Milton could write patronizingly of hearing

Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child
Warble his native woodnotes wild.

The eighteenth century appreciated Shakespeare (witness Garrick’s festival at Stratford-on-Avon), but it could also commit the egregious solecism of adding a happy ending to King Lear. The nineteenth century bowdlerized and sentimentalized Shakespeare. Our own age has returned to a fuller and more detailed investigation of Shakespeare’s work, acting his plays, inter alia, in the costume of a dozen different ages, but it has also, quite recently, rivalled the bad taste of the eighteenth century by producing Measure for Measure with an unhappy, or at least a squalid, ending. In a sense every age judges itself by its reaction to Shakespeare.  And yet we can never say that we know more about Shakespeare’s works than he did himself. He wrote them. They came out of his living experiences as they do not out of ours. Revelation, so to speak, cannot be repeated, but prayer and worship (i.e. the acting of the plays) can constantly return to it (p. 86).

The scriptures and the “Christ event” are, of course, not mere documents (as Shakespeare’s plays ultimately are). But the comparison of a play’s performance as a faithful restatement of a “deposit of faith” around which numerous interpretations have arisen strikes me as a powerful image of Christian life, especially in its liturgical dimension. Hanson’s placement of the New Testament in this central position shows how even a scholar persuaded to reject, on historical critical grounds, “the old idea that the Scriptures are inspired and inerrant” can nevertheless “believe in their sufficiency and uniqueness” (p. 22).

Richard Hooker

Richard Hooker (1554-1600)

In all this, Hanson seems (perhaps unwittingly) to be calling up the ghost of Anglicanism’s greatest theological exponent, Richard Hooker (1554-1600).  Hooker, too, saw the history of the Church as a continuing and varying relationship to a single foundation, Jesus Christ himself.  This comes out strongly in a catena of passages from Hooker’s writings given in Paul Avis’s Anglicanism and the Christian Church (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989). In the following passage (from Avis’s pp. 49-50), references to volume and page numbers are to Keble’s standard edition of Hooker’s works:

Hooker does not provide a systematic account of the fundamental articles of Christianity, but … he does clarify the concept of fundamentals — though Hooker prefers to speak of “the foundation” of faith. If this is taken as meaning “the general ground whereupon we rest when we do believe”, it must consist of the New Testament gospels and epistles (III, p. 501). But Hooker takes the foundation of faith to be generally understood as “the principle thing which is believed” (ib.). This, for Hooker, is simply the person and work of Jesus Christ. Again and again in the great and seminal sermon “Of Justification, Works and how the Foundation of Faith is overthrown” he recurs to this with radical simplicity and evangelical passion. The foundation, the crucial thing in Christianity is:

“Christ crucified for the salvation of the world” (p. 502)
“salvation by Christ alone” (p. 505)
“salvation purchased by the death of Christ” (p. 512)
“salvation only by Christ” (p. 528)
“Salvation … by Christ” (p. 532)

In his fullest statement, Hooker pronounces:

This is then the foundation, whereupon the frame of the gospel is erected: that very Jesus whom the Virgin conceived of the Holy Ghost, whom Simeon embraced in his arms, whom Pilate condemned, whom the Jews crucified, whom the apostles preached, he is Christ, the only saviour of the world: “other foundation can no man lay” (p. 513).

This “precious doctrine”, this “inestimable treasure” is the “rock” which forms the foundation of the church (pp. 500, 502). So long as a church professes and acknowledges it, it remains a branch of the visible church. However, the foundation may be denied directly or indirectly (p. 514). No Christian church can directly deny the foundation without ceasing to be such. Only unbelievers can directly deny the foundation of the faith. To those who directly deny it there can be no salvation (p. 504). But a church may (and often does) deny the foundation indirectly, by implication or “by a consequent”. Some may hold the foundation “weakly and as it were by a slender thread”; others may continue to hold it though “they frame many base and unsuitable things upon it” (p. 500). Those who overthrow it indirectly must be condemned as erroneous, “although for holding the foundation, we do and must admit them Christian” (p. 515).

An Anglican could, of course, go an and on with quotation from Hooker, so refreshing are they to his soul!  But for now, I simply observe that Hooker’s emphasis on the historical basis of the Gospel (the same Christ born of Mary, held by Simeon, condemned by Pilate, etc.) and on the fact of the Church’s varied faithfulness to that Gospel is exactly parallel to Hanson’s proposed hermeneutic of development.  And in both Hooker and Hanson I find comfort — which for various reasons I have greatly craved over the past year — in remaining faithful to the Anglican Way.  That Way is much derided from various quarters these days.  We are told either that we are no church at all or that it is ridiculous in this modern age to care whether one is “in” the Church or not. And whereas once it was against Rome and other churches that Hooker directed his criticisms, nowadays I wonder if we Anglicans are not the ones holding to Christ the Foundation “as it were by a slender thread”.  I pray that in all changes and chances we will continue to seek out Christ the foundation.

Filed in Anglican Doctrine | | Comments (0)

Struggling against the passions

Friday, August 13, 2010

Bishop Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667

I reflected in my last post on the necessity of a final judgement as a vindication of the Christian’s faith, which to the world seems to be (as Roman Guardini puts it)  ”annoying and dangerous nonsense” and “the self-consolation of losers”.  An important element of the Christian’s “foolish” life in this world is the denial of physical pleasure for its own sake (from food, drugs, sex, etc.).  This is not because these created things are bad, but because they can very easily become our sole focus.  As we are admonished in the First Epistle of Peter,

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul (2:11; cf. James 4:1).

It is nowadays almost completely forgotten that Anglicanism historically taught careful self-control in matters of “fleshly lusts”, which were only to be gratified so far as the needs of nature require.  So Bishop Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667) says about eating and drinking:

I deny not but eating and drinking may be, and in healthful bodies always is, with pleasure; because there is in nature no greater pleasure than that all the appetites which God hath made should be satisfied: and a man may choose a morsel that is pleasant, the less pleasant being rejected as being less useful, less apt to nourish, or more agreeing with an infirm stomach, or when the day is festival by order, or by private joy. … But when delight is the only end, and rests itself and dwells there long, then eating and drinking is not a serving of God, but an inordinate action; because it is not in the way to that end whither God directed it.

The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living, II. 2

Taylor applies the same standard when he comes to speak about sex, as in this advice to married couples:

In their permissions and licence, they must be sure to observe the order of nature, and the ends of God. He is an ill husband, that uses his wife as a man treats a harlot, having no other end but pleasure. Concerning which our best rule is, that although in this, as in eating and drinking, there is an appetite to be satisfied, which cannot be done without pleasing that desire; yet since that desire and satisfaction was intended by nature for other ends, they should never be separate from those ends, but always be joined with all or one of those ends, with a desire for children, or to avoid fornication, or to lighten and ease the cares and sadnesses of household affairs, or to endear each other; but never with a purpose, either in act or desire, to separate the sensuality from these ends which hallow it.

The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living, II. 3

Thus, we are to see our bodily needs and desires as part of God’s good creation; but we are never to gratify them for their own sake, but rather for their natural purposes.  This is the standard for our day-to-day conduct.

Beyond this, however, we have a need for occasional “mortifications of the flesh”, occasions when we bring our bodies under deliberate subjection (1 Cor. 9:27).  The Church has therefore throughout its history set aside certain days and seasons for fasting (the abstention from food in kind and quantity).  Among early Christians this often meant going on bread and water — which was found inconvenient in northern climates!  The Eastern Orthodox have various disciplines about food (e.g. days on which oil must not be used in cooking).  The Canadian Prayer Book (p. xiii) gives the following:

Major Fast Days: Ash Wednesday and Good Friday

Days of Abstinence:

1. All the Fridays of the Year except Christmas Day and the Epiphany.

2. The Forty Days of Lent.

Jeremy Taylor acknowledges three main purposes to which fasting may be applied:  1. to prayer; 2. to mortification of bodily lusts; 3. to repentance.  He recommends different kinds of fasting and abstinence for these different purposes.  But he warns strongly that there is no benefit in fasting by itself without complementary spiritual exercises and works of virtue, nor should it be an occasion of pride:

All fasting, for whatever end it be undertaken, must be done without any opinion of the necessity of the thing itself, without censuring others, with all humility, in order to the proper end; and just as a man takes physic, of which no man hath reason to be proud, and no man thinks it necessary, but because he is in sickness, or in danger and disposition to it.

The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living, IV. 5

Anglicanism has demurred from legislating what will constitute proper fasting for any individual.  But it nevertheless recommends it for its great benefits.  As Taylor concludes:

By the doctors of the church it is called the nourishment of prayer, the restraint of lust, the wings of the soul, the diet of angels, the instrument of humility and self-denial, the purification of the spirit.

None of this makes any sense at all if the Christian faith is a fiction. If the dead rise not, let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die (1 Cor. 15:32).  But because we look to a joyous life beyond this world, we struggle against our passions so that we may obtain it.  Not that we may by any means earn it, but so that we will not, by feeding our stomachs, starve the life of Christ that is growing within us.

The following short video is part of an interview with Prof. Dumitru Staniloae (1903-1993), a Romanian Orthodox priest regarded as one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century.  He here offers his opinion of what constitutes the essence of Christianity.  For him, it is struggling against the passions so that we may be sons of the Father together with Christ:

Filed in Anglican Doctrine | | Comments (5)

The time of our visitation

Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Holy Trinity, Grand Falls

Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland

I’m just back from holiday in my wife’s native Newfoundland, where on Sunday I had the pleasure, at long last, of attending a Prayer Book Communion at which the BCP’s Collect, Epistle and Gospel were used (instead of substituting the provisions of the Book of Alternative Services).  Notwithstanding its 1960s architecture, Holy Trinity, Grand Falls-Windsor, has preserved many of the historic furnishings of a traditional Anglican parish church.  It even has a faldstool (kneeling desk for saying the Litany) at the crossing from the nave to the chancel, and on it is a book bound in red leather and stamped in gold with the title The Litany.  I didn’t get a chance to ask the rector (a sound and uncompromising preacher) whether it’s still ever used for that purpose.

The Gospel for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity is Luke 19:41 ff., in which Jesus weeps over Jerusalem:

If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes.

He sees that he, the Messiah, will be rejected, and that his mission must end not only in his own death, but also in judgement on the city that has rejected him:

For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.

During my holiday, I resumed reading (in English translation) Romano Guardini’s book The Lord (Chicago: Regnery, 1954), a profound investigation into “the life and person of Jesus Christ” by a great Catholic author of the last century.  Guardini points out that Jesus’ prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem (fulfilled in A.D. 70) cannot be seen as isolated within mere political history:

Behind the downfall of the Holy City looms a catastrophe of quite different dimensions: the downfall of the world (p. 332).

This connection is clear from Jesus’ words in Luke 21, where he moves seamlessly from describing the fall of Jerusalem to describing a time when “Heaven and earth shall pass away” (v. 33).

I was greatly impressed by Guardini’s meditations on what it can mean to speak of a final judgement of the world as an event not found in the eventual atrophy or cataclysm of the universe’s energies and motions, but as an act of God:

The end of the world — like that of the Holy City — is a judgment, and comes, not from any natural development, but from the sovereign will of God (p. 333).

This is uncomfortable territory for me, because I have spent a great deal of time over the past ten years trying to reconcile my Christian faith with a “modern”, rational, scientific world view.  As one Anglican author (whose name I cannot remember) put it, “No one can really bring himself to believe that the world will end tomorrow.”

I was therefore sobered to read the following extended passage (pp. 333-6):

When the modern hears of such things, he smiles. At best he accepts them as a profound myth. In his consciousness, the world is a given quantity, condition on which everything rests, absolute content. How can it then cease to be? For him and end of the world would be utterly meaningless, both from its own point of view and from God’s — if he happens to believe in God. Here we sense the unreality of our modern conception of God and world, and we begin to realize how little claim the “belief” of this late era can make to its name. For such believers, God is the ultimate consecration of existence; he is the activating mystery behind all things, an exalted Something somewhere “up there,” far too removed to ever tamper with the reality of the world. He is a sacred impotence that satisfies the nebulous desires of human sensibility, but nothing that could really threaten the world with catastrophe.

And yet this is the meaning of Revelation: that the world is neither a given quantity nor a unique reality, but a part of creation that exists because its Creator so wills — for as long as he wills. Even its beginning is due not to any natural phenomenon relating to an eternal material or protoenergy, but to a voluntary act of God. He, her Creator, is also her Lord. Within the world God permits natural and historical necessity to reign; the world as a whole, however, is an autonomous piece neither of nature nor of history; it is God’s property, of which he can dispose as he pleases — even if, in the meantime, it has become “modern” and ceases to believe in him.

Terrible irony! The scientific skeptic, the man of practical success, the philosopher of self-exalted worldliness all chuckle over such “fairytales.” As if God could make an end of the world! This was precisely the amusement of the powerful and sophisticated in the days of the prophets, through whose mouths God proclaimed disaster over city and nation. They too considered themselves enlightened realists; reasoned along lines of fact and necessity — and the catastrophe came. And not for any objective cause that they had failed to predetermine because their logic had been insufficiently precise, not because they had not acted circumspectly enough; it came, simply from the same source that had called the prophets to announce its coming. Because the intellectual elite saw city and people only politically, the prophets’ warnings were for them annoying and dangerous nonsense. The Hebrew people had been called upon — simultaneously its yoke and its glory — to fulfill its history not according to natural cause and effect, but in accordance with its faith. Thus it was from the least expected quarter, from the apparently non-existent, that its fate fell. It is the same thing today. For those who take only the natural and historical order of things seriously, every word about the end of the world is utter nonsense. Nevertheless, it will come; and not of itself, but of God. To accept this and to live accordingly, that is faith.

[Guardini goes on to compare the Old Testament situation with Christ's prophecies over Jerusalem and the world, and their seeming emptiness in view of his apparent impotence.]

Perhaps the modern Christian’s “arena” is this constant challenge to his words and beliefs by an incredulous world. To every answer faith gives, the world knows a different one. The world’s conception of existence seems to grow increasingly complete, whereas the reasoning of faith continues to be looked at askance and is accordingly isolated. Thus it becomes more and more clear that the believer can prove his standpoint to the world only after death. This is not easy, but must be accepted, along with the mockery over faith itself, which the world can explain only as the self-consolation of its losers.

This is the faith in which we must exercise ourselves, even as in the fear of God. The end of the world and Judgment are not to be regarded as myths of a distant future, but as possibilities of God’s wrath that keep astride our own lives. We do not inhabit a safe, biological, historical and spiritual unit that goes its invulnerable way under the canopy of a harmless religious mystery called God, but like Jerusalem, both we as individuals and the world as a whole live under the ever-present possibility of judgment. Only when the protection that direct reality seems to give my obtuse senses has been partly withdrawn and the threat of God has become a personal reality, am I a believer in the full Biblical meaning of the word.

Modern thought has pushed all this to the background. The modern approaches to the whole subject of the fear of God morally or with a peculiar shyness, because he does not see it for what it is: the fruit of sacred, threatening wrather mighter than the city of Jerusalem and mightier than the world. Therefore the Christian today does will to “practice” this too, sharpening his consciousness of the situation as seen from the standpoint of faith.

“Annoying and dangerous nonsense,” “the self-consolation of losers”: Guardini fully grasps what the world thinks of a faith whose ultimate vindication is to be sought “only after death”.  And especially in today’s world, must we not ask ourselves, “Is not this precisely the faith of poor, duped fanatics who have been promised virgins in paradise in exchange for blowing themselves up?”

The Christian can offer no better refutation of that last comparison than to turn the other cheek. But it remains the case that we put our trust in a final judgement, a resurrection from the dead. And if that is really just a “fairytale”, then truly “we are of all men most miserable” (1 Cor. 15:19).  Because to be a Christian is to act on the basis that what seems to be all of reality (from the broad expanse of history and to the intimacy of our own biology) will be done away with, and that our future bliss or misery will depend on a relationship with God through Jesus Christ — a “faith which worketh by charity” (Gal. 5:6).

This all feeds into the deep uneasiness that I often feel with the direction of modern Christianity, and my beloved Anglican Church in particular.  Anglicanism was, in many ways, born as a compromise with the realities of the here and now.  Once the Reformed Catholic faith of the Church of England was subject to the guidance of the monarch.  Today, now that the state has largely lost interest in control of religion as a bulwark against foreign interference and internal disquiet, Anglicanism is still threatened by what the current pope (who is, incidentally, an admirer of Guardini) has called the Dictatorship of Relativism.  The strife currently besetting our Communion has, I think, perhaps less to do with the controversial issues of the day, than with a gut reaction on the part of “conservatives” to what they see as accommodations both to secular conceptions of “rights” and — precisely the view challenged by Guardini — an acceptance of the created order as a complete, permanent and invulnerable reality testifying to a God who is “a sacred impotence … that could never threaten the world with catastrophe”.

Our perennial temptation as Anglicans is to baptize the world instead of calling it to repent.  I wish to draw no conclusions here about any “hot-button” topics.  But I think that Guardini gives us a good lens through which to view them: a faith in a final judgement that will vindicate our foolishness in the world’s eyes.

Over at Comfortable Words (in its new home on Blogger), Nicholas Armitage has a wonderful excerpt from Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656), who compares our acceptance of Christ to a marriage “for better or for worse”:

I will take him on any terms, be they never so hard, for I shall be a saver in the end: when we take Christ, as it were, with all his faults; such his cross, and the afflictions of the Gospel seem to our carnal apprehensions: though to St. Paul these were the chief, indeed the only matter of his boasting: “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” When, I say, we can thus take Christ, this is the will [i.e. the "I will" of the marriage service] which God requires.

A faldstool for the reading of the Litany

I cannot help but wonder if those injustices and inconveniences (annoying and dangerous nonsense) that liberals would like to reform (and I’ve been one of them) may not in fact number among the “faults” of Christ to which we are invited to give our “I will” on any terms, be they never so hard.  If we’re not sure of these steps, what will be the result in the time of our own visitation?

From all sedition, conspiracy, and rebellion; from all false doctrine, heresy, and schism; from hardness of heart, and contempt of thy Word and Commandment, Good Lord, deliver us. (The Litany, BCP Canada 1962)

Filed in Anglican Doctrine, Anglican Liturgy | | Comments (2)

A summer Evensong experiment

Friday, July 16, 2010

We’re taking a break this Sunday at the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, and since many folks are on holiday during the rest of the summer, we’re considering a prolonged vacation until September.  This is giving me a chance to ponder our direction moving forward.  In short, it just takes me too long to prepare the weekly booklets (usually a couple of days), and that’s not ideal at this stage in my career as a scholar and parent of tiny children.

I’m therefore thinking about moving to one of the currently available published plainchant psalters, or perhaps even the free pdfs of the 1902 Manual of Plainsong made available by David Stone.

It would be really sad, however, to lose all the antiphons that we’ve been singing at Evensong.  We’ll probably have to abandon them with the psalms, but I’d hate to do this with the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis.  There is, interestingly, a complete English version of the Mag and Nunc antiphons of the medieval Office of the “Sarum Use”.  It was first made in the early twentieth century by G. H. Palmer, and the copyright holders, the sisters of the Community of St. Mary the Virgin, Wantage, have recently given permission for the collection to be distributed freely online.  (It can be downloaded either from my site or from MusicaSacra.com.)

Palmer’s approach is, naturally, a bit different from mine.  I have always consulted his work, but very often I have chosen instead to adapt one of the settings of Winfred Douglas in The Monastic Diurnal Noted, which is based mainly on the early Latin chant editions of Solesmes (its exemplar was obviously not the 1934 Antiphonale Monasticum), or to make my own version directly from the Latin original.  Also, I have deliberately eschewed “Sarum” because most singers of chant today are taught the psalm tones of the Vatican Edition, as found in the Liber Usualis and the Antiphonale Monasticum.

But I wonder if it might not be sensible after all just to go with Palmer’s English versions, seeing that he has already done the work.  Occasionally the Canadian Prayer Book uses a different Gospel reading from the Sarum/1662 pericope.  But since I have yet to discover a single parish that actually uses the BCP lections and collects — they all seem to favour the Revised Common Lectionary even when they use the BCP Communion service — perhaps I won’t let that trouble my conscience too much.  And it doesn’t get much more “Anglican Identity” than this!

So here’s an experiment:  the Magnificat for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity, as done into English by G. H. Palmer:

Cut-and-paste music sheet here — Notice how Palmer marks the Mag text so that it can be sung with any of the eight tones; I’ve reinforced this with a pencil stroke at each mediant and final cadence point.  The Sarum Tone I mediant is much simpler than what one usually finds; just a fall of a tone on the penultimate syllable of the half-verse.

Ant. And Jesus took the seven loaves – Magnificat (Sarum/Palmer)

The Gospel for this Sunday is Mark 8:1-9, the feeding of the four thousand.  It is interesting that Palmer does not follow the King James text exactly.  The BCP would have made this text:  ”And he took the seven loaves, and gave thanks, and brake, and gave to his disciples to set before them; and they did set them before the people.”  The antiphon, apart from replacing “he” with “Jesus”,  has instead, “and when he had given thanks, he brake“.  It’s quite possible that Palmer just wanted a few more syllables to accommodate the melody (the English text gets inconveniently monosyllabic just here).  But his alteration unmistakably recalls the wording of the BCP Prayer of Consecration, and Jesus’ miraculous distribution of bread has ever been understood as a foreshadowing of the Eucharist.  And as we read in the Catena Aurea a remark of Remigius of Auxerre notices that Jesus’ action in this miracle is mediated by his disciples (he “gave to his disciples to set before them, and they did set them before the people”).  Remigius may be pointing to the establishment of a distinctive Eucharistic ministry (the episcopate and priesthood) descending through the Apostolic Succession.

If using Palmer’s versions of the antiphons is desirable, I would eventually hope to produce a booklet in which the Mag and Nunc texts were pointed for each separate tone and final cadence permutation.  Perhaps this could even be bound up with a “Lulu” edition of the antiphons.  I’d be grateful to have people’s suggestions about this.

Filed in Anglican Liturgy, Sheet music and sound files | | Comments (1)

Evensong for Trinity VI

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

The next service of Evensong in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd will be on Sunday, July 11, at 5 p.m.  The service is for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity.  The music booklet can be downloaded here:  Booklet for Trinity VI.

Those wishing to practise at home in advance may find the following recordings useful.  Psalm 31 is very long, and my webhost wouldn’t let me upload the whole thing in one recording, so it is here divided into two:

Ant. Deliver me, O Lord – Psalm 31 (part 1)

Psalm 31 (continued)

Here is the Magnificat, with its antiphon (the Nunc is the same as in recent weeks):

Ant. Be ye therefore merciful – Magnificat

Finding this antiphon was a bit of an adventure. The traditional Gospel reading for this Sunday is Matt. 5. 20–26 (Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the Kingdom of Heaven). But the 1962 Canadian Prayer Book assigns Luke 6. 27–36 instead (Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.’). The 1962 Gospel doesn’t occur in the old Roman liturgy, but a single verse of it (v. 36) overlaps with the Gospel for the First Sunday after Pentecost (Luke 6. 36–42).  And it just so happens that verse 36 supplied the text for a medieval antiphon used as a commemoration of the Octave of Pentecost when this was displaced by comparatively recent feast of Trinity Sunday.  It was formerly the Benedictus antiphon at Lauds of the Octave of Pentecost.  So I leave myself the problem of what I’ll assign to the Benedictus of Trinity VI when (Deo volente)  I finish all the Sunday Evensongs and start setting Mattins.

Filed in Evensong Commentary, Sheet music and sound files | | Comments (1)

Commemorating Thomas More

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Thomas More, Chancellor of England, Martyr (1535)

In the calendars of both the Book of Common Prayer (1962) and the Book of Alternative Services (1985), the Anglican Church of Canada marks July 6th as a commemoration of the death on this day in 1535 of Thomas More. The Prayer Book calls him “Thomas More, Chancellor of England, Martyr”. It is a commemoration that I can greet only with extreme ambivalence, not because I doubt the sanctity of Thomas More, but because our commemoration of his sanctity undermines the very ground on which our Church claims to stand. More was executed for “treason” in that he refused to take an oath affirming the title given by Parliament to Henry VIII, “only supreme head of the Church in England”, a supremacy More held to be:

… directly oppugnant to the laws of God and his holy church, the supreme government of which, or of any part thereof, may no temporal prince presume by any law to take upon him, as rightfully belonging to the See of Rome, a spiritual preeminence by the mouth of our Savior himself, personally present upon the earth, to Saint Peter and his successors, bishops of the same see, by special prerogative granted

Therefore, if Thomas More is a martyr (Greek: “witness”), it is as a witness, not to those truths of our religion to which both Anglicans and Roman Catholics give their assent, but against the claim of the Church of England to be able to continue as truly the Church and as truly Catholic while choosing to be separate from communion with, and obedience to, Rome. Or rather, that More himself could not be obliged to prefer the religious opinions of one part of Christendom to the consent of the whole, as he further argued at his trial:

My lord, for one bishop of your opinion I have a hundred saints of mine; and for one parliament of yours, and God knows of what kind, I have all the General Councils for 1,000 years, and for one kingdom I have France and all the kingdoms of Christendom.

This clarifies More’s opinion. It was not for the papal jurisdiction, per se, that he was content to die, but for his allegiance to the universal assent of catholic Christendom to that jurisdiction as agreeable to God’s will as discerned in scripture and tradition. No one part of the Church could or should, he argued, decide that matter for itself alone, still less vest the authority for such a decision in a single temporal legislature or monarch. As he said on the scaffold, he was “the king’s good servant, but God’s first.”

More’s personal holiness and dedication to his principles, which cost him everything, won the admiration of many, including notable Anglican writers. I will not reproduce here what may be read of his posthumous reputation in the relevant Wikipedia entry and at the Center for Thomas More Studies.

What troubles me, though, is that we commemorate him liturgically. My anxiety has nothing to do with this making him an “Anglican saint” (though he was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1935). As the introduction to the 1962 Prayer Book calendar says:

New names have been added from the ancient calendars, and also from the history of the Anglican Communion, without thereby enrolling or commending such persons as Saints of the Church (p. ix).

The Book of Alternative Services explains the commemoration of saints in its calendar at greater length:

The Church celebrates the victory of Christ in the lives of particular individuals in the commemoration of saints. The calendar of saints’ days varies among the various Christian Churches and among the various Churches of the Anglican Communion. Some saints’ days are of great antiquity and universal observance and take precedence of certain other days. The Calendar also includes the names of a variety of Christians who are remembered for a number of reasons: some inspired the reverent wonder of another time and place; some are associated with the heroic struggle involved in the development of the Church in this country. In addition to those whose names appear in this Calendar, it is appropriate for the Church, , at regional and even local levels, to add the names of Christians whose lives have reflected the mystery of Christ (p. 14).

On this rationale, Thomas More must be understood as included in our calendars because his life “reflected the mystery of Christ” and “inspired the reverent wonder of another time and place”. I have no difficulty in so accepting his commemoration. But what am I to do when I find simultaneously in our calendar the commemoration of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer on March 21 (the date on which he was burned at the stake in 1556, following the ascendance of Mary Tudor to the throne and the restoration of communion with Rome) — the same Cranmer who was the architect of Henry VIII’s first divorce, as well as of the Book of Common Prayer, and who was at least passively content for Thomas More, like hundreds of others who rejected the “new religion”, to be killed. He went to his own death repudiating the pope as “Christ’s enemy, and Antichrist”. And him, too, we commemorate as one whose life “reflected the mystery of Christ”.

The obvious problem is that these men died for two different faiths. Both were, of course, Christians. But what each understood Christianity to entail was rather different. Is it therefore appropriate for both to be commemorated in our calendar? Must we not choose which one was right? The issue is addressed, with specific reference to More and Cranmer, in Michael Perham’s The Communion of Saints (Alcuin Club Collections 62, 1980):

The action of those who appear to promote division must be looked at in terms of their integrity. Did they honestly believe themselves to be doing God’s will? Were they trying to conform to the divine plan? If they were, they were men of integrity and as such they were in a right relationship with God. And Christian sanctity belongs to the man in the right relationship rather than to the man with the right views. It is because of this emphasis on integrity that a calendar of saints can include two men who very fundamentally disagreed. Sometimes it is clear to us, in the light of history, which was right. Sometimes it is not. But even where it is, we are not by that prevented from honouring as a saint the one who was wrong, providing that his relationship with God was a right one. It is this attitude which allows us to consider the inclusion in the calendar of both Thomas Cranmer and Thomas More. The same attitude allowed the English church to recognize as saints both Wilfrid and Chad, who did not see eye to eye at all (pp. 116-17).

What then is the mark of a true saint? Perham continues:

There has to have been about the life of the saint an attractiveness, a sort of magnetic pull, that made people feel that here was a life lived close to God – increasingly close as it went on – and one through which God could disclose himself (p. 117).

There is one level where, of course, Perham is exactly right. God, in his abundant mercy, gives us glimpses of himself in the lives of people who, while they are drawing ever closer to God, are nevertheless insuperably divided from each other, and even at enmity with each other. But there is, I fear, a great danger here. We do well to hope and trust that God sees and judges, not as man sees and judges, but according to the heart, and that men and women who seek to follow him with sincerity and integrity will all find his mercy. Christianity is not, however, a religion of good intentions. We believe in, and teach, objective truth, a truth revealed in the incarnate Word of God. To force these men together in the calendar, when they (unlike Wilfrid and Chad) reached no earthly agreement, is, it seems to me, to make concrete the idea that the truth of our religion doesn’t matter, only our intentions. I cannot help but think of John Henry Newman’s summary of “religious liberalism” in his famous “Biglietto Address”, delivered when he received formal notice that he had been named a Cardinal of the Catholic Church:

Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy. Devotion is not necessarily founded on faith. Men may go to Protestant Churches and to Catholic, may get good from both and belong to neither. They may fraternise together in spiritual thoughts and feelings, without having any views at all of doctrine in common, or seeing the need of them. Since, then, religion is so personal a peculiarity and so private a possession, we must of necessity ignore it in the intercourse of man with man. If a man puts on a new religion every morning, what is that to you? It is as impertinent to think about a man’s religion as about his sources of income or his management of his family. Religion is in no sense the bond of society.

It strikes me that both Thomas More and Thomas Cranmer would have agreed absolutely with Newman’s analysis. Neither was willing to let his religion be merely a private matter, nor was the age in which they lived likely to let them do so.

Let me not sound controversial. Perhaps we commemorate both these men because we would like to claim them both as ours: the reforming zeal and liturgical genius of Cranmer, and the principled faith and devotion to the Church of More. And perhaps the more mature Anglicanism of the Elizabethan and Caroline periods, eventually enshrined in the 1662 Prayer Book, owes something to them both, seeing that it curbed both the radical theology advocated by Cranmer and the Erastianism opposed by More. These men may be guideposts to the Via Media that Anglicanism tries to walk. For all that, though, I am not easy in my mind on this Commemoration of Thomas More, Martyr. Not least because if one had to choose between these men, I think that More’s “magnetic pull” would be greater. How we may mourn that the English Reformation did not, and for political reasons could not, proceed on principles agreeable to so great a soul.

During my years in Cambridge, I had the precious opportunity to know the late Dr. Mary Berry, who was almost single-handedly responsible for the revival of Gregorian chant in England and  to whom I owe most of what I know about how to sing chant. Her name in religion was Sister Thomas More. Having grown up an Anglican, she converted to Catholicism as a young woman, and in professing as an Augustinian Canoness she took the name of this great English saint, canonized during her teenage years. At his trial for treason, Thomas More concluded his defence with these words:

Like as the blessed apostle Saint Paul, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, was present and consented to the death of Saint Stephen, and kept their clothes that stoned him to death, and yet be they now twain holy saints in heaven, and shall continue there friends forever: so I verily trust and shall therefore right heartily pray, that though your lordships have now in earth been judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together to our everlasting salvation.

The cards distributed at Dr. Berry’s requiem mass read: “Pray for me, as I will for thee, that we may merrily meet in heaven.”  It was only at her death that I realized that Dr. Berry, in choosing this name and living by these words, was trying to bring about, in her person, that merry meeting.  I, too, pray for it. And today I repent to consider that heaven may be the only place where such a meeting will be possible.

Meanwhile, on this side of eternity, I wonder if the same Thomas More we commemorate today, who chose death rather than to walk apart from the Church Catholic, might not have something sobering to say to the Anglican Communion about “provincial autonomy”.

Requiem Mass Card for Dr. Mary Berry (Sister Thomas More)

Filed in Anglican Doctrine, Anglican Liturgy | | Comments (6)

Evensong for Trinity V

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

The weeks are marching on, and it is time to post the music of Evensong for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity:  Booklet for Trinity V

Assuming that there’s anyone still around on the holiday weekend (and I’ll be there regardless), Evensong will be held in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd at 5 p.m.  Books will be provided as always.  Here are recordings of the psalms and canticles to aid private study:

Ant. I will magnify thee – Psalm 30

Ant. Be glad, O ye righteous – Psalm 32

Ant. Master, we have toiled – Magnificat

And just as a refresher, here’s an old recording of the usual Nunc Dimittis for the Sundays after Trinity:

Ant. Preserve us – Nunc Dimittis

Filed in Sheet music and sound files | | Comments (1)

Antiphons in the BCP Office

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

E. F. K. Fortescue's The Anthem Book: An Antiphonal Adapted to the Book of Common Prayer

My recent acquaintance Deborah Gyapong, both on her own blog and in the larger forum of The Anglo-Catholic, has very kindly brought attention to my ongoing project of setting BCP Evensong to plainchant. She generously suggests that this is a part of the “Anglican Patrimony” worthy of preservation. As Nicholas Armitage has recently argued, it does seem that the English Reformers intended for the revised English Office to be sung in its entirety (psalms, prayers, lessons, everything), and from John Merbecke’s Book of Common Praier Noted (1550) onwards, there have been various published settings of the BCP Office to chant, most notably A Manual of Plainsong (Briggs and Frere, revised by G. H. Palmer), which is still in print and widely used in England’s great choral foundations. Canada has its equivalent in The Canadian Psalter: Plainsong Edition, edited by the late dean of Canadian composers, Healey Willan.

What makes my own editions of the Offices different, however, is that they include the Gregorian antiphons that were anciently sung with the psalms and the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis. Some of these have been done into English before (and I credit my sources in the notes to each weekly booklet). Others I adapt afresh from the Latin originals, most often in the case of the many psalms that were sung only in the Night Office of Matins; for most of these, their antiphons were first competently edited and published only in the 1981 Psalterium Monasticum.

It would be hard to argue that these antiphons form an obvious part of the “Anglican Patrimony”, except to the extent that the “Patrimony” is construed to include England’s pre-Reformation liturgical heritage, which is really more “Northern European” than the Sarum enthusiasts of the nineteenth century were aware. But there are excellent reasons to sing the Prayer Book Office with antiphons. For me, the clincher is that I see no point in randomly choosing a psalm tone for a given psalm (as in existing Anglican plainsong books). Psalm tones are governed by their antiphons, and their selection is purely arbitrary otherwise. Merbecke intended for all the psalms to be sung to a simple, unvarying tonus in directum.

A more eloquent argument for the inclusion of antiphons in the Prayer Book Office was made long ago, however, by E. F. K. Fortescue (brother of the more famous liturgist Adrian Fortescue of Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described renown) in a little 1875 work entitled The Anthem Book: An Antiphonal Adapted to the Book of Common Prayer, which suggested antiphons (text only) for use with the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis throughout the whole year. I offer here a few extracts from Fortescue’s preface, in which he argues that had literacy and printing been at a higher level in the sixteenth century the antiphons would likely have been retained, and that it is no more disloyal to the Prayer Book services to augment them with antiphons than to interrupt them with hymns:

When the English Office Books were reformed in 1549, the Compilers of the Book of Common Prayer, following the example of Cardinal Quignon in his reform of the Roman Breviary forty years previously, abolished Legends, Responsories, Verses, Commemorations, and Synodals, on the plea that these additions to the Daily Office interrupted the regular course of reading of Holy Scripture, and cut up the daily lessons into short and often incomplete portions. By doing this the Offices undoubtedly lost much that was valuable in the way of marking the different seasons of the Christian year; but inasmuch as the English Office Book of the future was to be not merely the private prayers of Ecclesiastics recited in a dead and too often unknown language, but rather a form of worship, in which the Laity were to be invited to join and to have a share, it was absolutely necessary to simplify and to render as intelligible as possible the recitation of the Psalms and the readings of Holy Scripture in the vernacular. Judging from the Preface to the First Prayer Book of King Edward VI., it would seem that the Compilers of that work at first felt that they had done all that was necessary to simplify the Service in abolishing those portions thereof which interrupted the regular reading of Holy Scripture; and, taking into consideration the use that they made of Cardinal Quignon’s Preface to his simplified Breviary, we may fairly come to the conclusion that, had the art of printing and the consequent general ability of laymen throughout the country to read been more fully developed than it was, the Anthems or Antiphons, which were sung before and after the Psalms and Canticles, would have found the same place in our present Book of Common Prayer as they had occupied in all the Daily Services of the Western Church since the earliest days of their compilation.

But printing was far from what it now is, and no such tables had then been drawn up, as those which now make the saying of the Daily Office a comparatively easy matter among the Clergy of the Latin Communion; and it was because of the difficulty of the intricate rules to be found in the rubrical directions, commonly called the “Pie,” not because in these sentences of Scripture the early Reformers found anything repugnant to the Word of God, or any interference in the reading of Holy Scripture, or any cause of vain repetition, that Anthems were omitted from their proper place in the revised Anglican Daily Office.

If, then, against the strict letter of Statute Law, Hymns are everywhere used, why should not these Anthems, which in all ages have formed part of the Daily Offices of the Church, find again a place in our Daily Services, and why should not those Clergy who feel that their congregations are longing for a more marked distinction between the different seasons and days of the Christian Year, act in the same matter with reference to the restoration of the ancient Anthems of the Church, as they have hitherto done with regard to Hymns?

The Anthems in this work (are those better known by the Greek word Antiphon, and) are merely short sentences, generally taken from Holy Scripture, sung before and after the Psalms and Canticles, in order to bring out their different emphasis, and place them in accord with the feeling of the day for which they are used; for as the late Dr. Neale wonderfully expresses it, “The same sun-ray from the Holy Ghost rests indeed at all times on the same words (of the Psalms), but its prism of the Church separates that colourless light into its component rays: into the violet of penitence, the crimson of martyrdom, and the gold of the brightest seasons of Christian gladness.”

Filed in Anglican Liturgy | | Comments (0)

Evensong for Trinity IV

Thursday, June 24, 2010

The next service of Evensong in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd will be on Sunday, June 27, at the new time of 5:00 p.m.  After a well-deserved rest-week with a simple said service, we will resume full chanted splendour.  The booklet, for those wanting to practise in advance, may be downloaded here:  Booklet for Trinity IV

I have had time only to do a very vocally unrefined rendition of the psalm and the Magnificat (the Nunc takes the usual “ordinary time” antiphon, Preserve us).  I went a full semi-tone sharp in the course of the psalm, so please don’t imitate me in this respect!  These recordings serve as a rude reminder of how badly my technique and tuning have deteriorated since my earlier Cambridge days…

Ant. The Lord liveth – Psalm 18 part 2

Ant. Judge not that ye be not judged – Magnificat

*****

UPDATE: Pronunciation of Hebrew Names

The first reading for Trinity IV (Year 2) is 2 Kings 22, which tells of the restoration of the Temple under King Josiah and the rediscovery of the book of the Law. It includes a wonderful cast of characters, and their names might throw an unsuspecting reader.  I thought it might be helpful for me to list them here and to read them out in order of appearance (follow with the list below the mp3 clip). I use the pronunciation guide included in the Cambridge “Compact Reference Edition” Bible, adapted where necessary for my Canadian accent.

Hebrew names in 2 Kings 22

Josiah
Jedidah
Adaiah of Boscath
Shaphan the son of Azaliah
Meshullam
Hilkiah
Ahikam
Achbor the son of Michaiah
Asaiah
Huldah the prophetess
Shallum the son of Tikvah
Harhas

Readers may wish to be reminded of my earlier Suggestions for Good Reading at Evensong.

Filed in Sheet music and sound files | | Comments (2)