much and earnest

Carson Holloway’s recent “What’s Really the Matter with Pop Music?” disappoints. He begins the essay (a Part 2 of 2) by rehearsing the ancient and intriguing claim that “the music itself” –the rhythm, tune, etc.,–and not lyrics, are the more influential element of songs, in moving the listener toward good or ill. I’d have really enjoyed hearing him out on this point, but the remainder of the essay builds to the more familiar argument that the modern practice of censorship (e.g., replacing potty words with beeps or honks) only lowers our standards of what counts as “good”; and that instead, we ought to listen to music that “encourage[s] our pursuit of the highest goods attainable”: “reason’s enjoyment of moral nobility and theoretical truth.”

When reading an ancient text…we have to start somewhere, and in the end, I’m not sure that it matters much where. Should we begin with the contexts and assumptions of the ancient world and work our way towards the present situation? Should we begin with present forms of understanding and work our way back towards the ancient text’s lifeworld? Though we are accustomed to the idea that readers need to be governed by the right hermeneutic, in fact theory and method mean next to nothing in reading. [...W]e may not have as much choice [about the "tools we bring to the task of reading"] as we think we do anyway.

- Alan Jacobs, “The Genesis of Wisdom,” an essay on Leon Kass’s The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, originally in First Things, but reprinted in Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truthtelling (Eerdmans, 2004). My emphasis.

The impostor of whom we have been speaking [Simon Magus], as though his mind’s eye had been struck by a divine miraculous flash of light when earlier, in Judaea, his mischievous practices had been exposed by the apostle Peter, promptly undertook a very long journey overseas from east to west, and fled precipitately, thinking that only so could he live according to his inclinations. [...] Close on his heels, in the same reign of Claudius, the all-gracious and kindly providence of the universe brought to Rome to deal with this terrible threat to the world, the strong and great apostle, chosen for his merits to be spokesman for all the others, Peter himself. Clad in the divine armour, like a noble captain of God, he brought the precious merchandise of the spiritual light from the East to those in the West, preaching the good news of light itself and the soul-saving word, the proclamation of the Kingdom of Heaven.

- The History of the Church, 2.14 (G.A. Williamson’s translation)

By the end of the fourth century, there is a strong sense in some writers that the worshipper at the Eucharist stands in the presence of Christ sacrificed. John Chrysostom, for example, speaks of ‘the most awesome sacrifice’ and of ‘the Lord sacrificed and lying there and the priest bending over the sacrifice and interceding.

- R. J. Halliburton, The Study of Liturgy, Pt 2, ch 3.7, “The Patristic Theology of the Eucharist”

Here: the English Broadside Ballad Archive, no subscription required. The archive contains high-quality digital versions of the ballads collected in five volumes by Samuel Pepys. It also includes what they call “facsimile transcriptions” – digital representations of the broadsides which attempt to retain the feel of the original, while replacing the text with more legible, modern type.

Wow.

The knowledge of ourselves no doubt ought to be most precious to us: and therein the Holy Scriptures, if not the only, are certainly the incomparable lantern in this fleshly darkness of ours. For (alas!) what is all knowledge, if in the end of this little and wearisome pilgrimage, Hell become our schoolmaster? They, therefore, are diligently to be read.

- from a letter to his friend Sir Edward Denny, dated 22 May 1580. Text  (modernized) taken from Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet, which I’m reading.

I want to do nothing but read this book, all day.

I recently found this comic in a 2004 Commonweal article. I think the anonymity of the saint is intentional.

Anthony Sacramone (whose blog is often quite funny, especially when he moonlights as Martin Luther) expresses it here.

I’m reading the 1559 Book of Common Prayer in a modern spelling edition (ed. John E. Booty). The Te Deum, an ancient Christian hymn, is sung during the morning prayer service. It includes these lines sung to the Trinity:

We praise thee, O God: we knowledge thee to be the Lord,

…

The Father of an infinite majesty.

Thy honorably, true, and only Son:

Also the Holy Ghost, the comforter.

The editor supplies a gloss for “comforter”: that it means “strengthener.” I might have noticed that, if I’d paid attention: “fort” is embedded in the word. But how different a sense that word carries, now.

I’m reading and writing about the Henrician “Reformation,” if Henry 8’s break from Rome (1534) and the subsequent doctrinal and liturgical innovations introduced during the latter years of his reign can be called that. For several years, two men figured large in this evangelical movement: Thomas Cranmer (Archbishop of Canterbury) and Thomas Cromwell (Vicegerent in Spirituals). Why did their names have to be so similar?

I’m reading Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (1992; 2nd ed., 2005) to establish a context for my last research project this semester: a study of the newly-protestant English Church’s first book of homilies, published in 1547 for use during the reign of (young) King Edward 6. E6’s reign was short; his Catholic half-sister Mary 1, who also ruled for short time (a mere five years, 1553-1558), would license a Catholic book of homilies (in the vernacular) to replace the Edwardian book. When Elizabeth 1 ascended (1558), the original book, slightly updated, would be re-issued, and would be in regular use until the mid- to late-17c.

Back to Duffy. This book famously advanced a new understanding of the religious climate of 15c and 16c England: that it was dominated by conservatives, who were not interested in leaving Catholicism.  In the new “Preface,” Duffy describes the Church’s response to Lollardy (or “Wycliffism”), a late 14c and early 15c movement often characterized as a kind of proto-protestantism (but which he thinks historians have over-emphasized):

Concern over Lollardy probably did form part of the prehistory of such artifacts, just as heresy in general was one contributory cause among others of the heightened concern for theological correctness which is so striking a feature of late medieval religious culture (notably in France and the Low Countries). Such concern, however, hardly constitutes evidence of a continuing panic about heresy, but rather the pearly precipitation of heightened orthodoxy round an ancient piece of heretical grit, which in most places had long since ceased to irritate directly.

Sentences like that last one make for, not just informative, but enjoyable reading.

“Adiaphora,” which I ran across in a review of Ramie Targoff’s 2001 Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England. It means “things indifferent,” and in the Christian context, refers to matters of doctrine that are considered non-essential to orthodoxy.

It should be emphasized that the people of New Castile had additional, less orthodox methods for dealing with disaster. As that time lay professionals circulated through the Castilian countryside selling their services to individuals or communities to ward off disease, locusts, other insect pests, or hailstorms by magical methods. Known variously as necromancers, enpsalmers, or conjurors of clouds, they competed directly with the priests of the parishes…. One of their methods for dealing with locusts or vine pests was to hold them up for trial and excommunicate them….

The clergy had their own “legal” prayers and exorcisms to chase the clouds. After prohibiting “enchanters, fortune-tellers, bewitchers, magicians, and enpsalmers,” the Synodal Constitutions of Toledo of 1566 continue, “and for this reason we do not prohibit, but on the contrary we order and exhort all the clergy of this archdiocese who are responsible for souls: that decently and without scandal for those cases in the form that is in the manuals, they employ the exorcisms approved by the Church.”

Even locust trials, although generally condemned by theologians, were not entirely unacceptable. One trial was held as late as 1650 in the Hieronymite monastery of Santa María de Párraces, near Segovia…. [T]he judge who pronounced the excommunication on the grasshoppers was Our Lady Saint Mary, “constant advocate of men, particularly those in anguish and need,” speaking through her lieutenant, the prior of the monastery. Her sentence, after consultation with her advisors Saint Jerome, Saint Francis, Saint Lawrence, and Saint Michael the Archangel, was that the insects would automatically fall under excommunication if they did not leave the territory. The trial was held after all other remedies over the space of two years had failed….

- William Christian, Local Religion in 16C Spain, ch. 2

“Abusus non tollit usum,” which I just ran across in a FT review of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory. According to Merriam-Webster, the phrase translates “abuse does not take away use.” Need to remember that one.

Henry VII was not an extravagant monarch–he was thought, if anything, to be something of a skinflint–but the magnificent late Gothic chapel he ordered built at Westminster was, according to one architectural historian, “the largest and certainly the most expensive structure ever built for funerary purposes.” Three monks of Westminster were to serve as chantry priests, perpetually praying for Henry’s soul, and these constant suffrages were to be supplemented by anniversary masses in an impressive number of cathedral, conventual, and university churches. But even these extraordinary efforts to hasten his soul through Purgatory were not enough for a king who evidently thought he might be facing a long prison sentence in the afterlife…. Finally, he saw to it that immediately after his death ten thousand masses would be said for the remission of his sins and the good of his soul. Ten thousand masses.

- Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, ch. 1

I first encountered the work of René Girard about a year ago, while studying the Gospel of Matthew. First Things recently interviewed him. Here are a few things he says:

I think the most influential aspect of my work is to show that Judaism and Christianity exist in a continuity with archaic religions.

The religion of the Incarnation should be an anthropology as well as a theology. Incarnation means man and God together. Theology is pure God and is built on schemes that completely neglect what we call Incarnation in Christianity.

…religion is a very concrete phenomenon that means to prevent people from killing each other completely.

Here’s the full interview.

Ceremony keeps up all things; it’s like a penny glasse to a rich spirit or some excellent water; without it the water were spilt; the spirit lost.

- one John Selden, 17C English polymath, also qtd in Maltby, ch. 1

The countrey parson preacheth constantly; the pulpit is his joy and his throne…and with particularizing of his speech now to the younger sort then to the elder, now to the poor, and now to the rich – ‘This is for you, and this is for you’; for particulars ever touch and awake more than generalls….

- George Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, qtd. in Maltby’s Prayer Book and People, ch. 1

…liturgy is an expression of a community’s beliefs, as well as a shaper of them.

- Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England, Introduction

Here’s a snip:

LOPEZ: What is “real freedom” and should Americans worry about its future when voting?

FR. WILLIAMS: “Real freedom” is more than the absence of external constraints on our choices. It involves an accomplishment, a conquest of ourselves that allows us to govern our own actions. There is a slavery that we impose on ourselves from the inside, when we don’t have the upper hand over our impulses, passions and inclinations. As has been said, “a man has as many masters as he has vices.”

You and I may be “free” to climb Mount Everest, in that no one will stop us. But we are only truly free to do so if we have trained enough to be able to make the climb.

What applies to the individual applies to the nation as well. A virtuous nation is a free nation, since its people are able to discern good and evil, and have the willpower to choose the good. A nation where vice is celebrated, and virtue is scorned, can have no claim to true freedom.

- from “A Matter of Conscience,” an NRO interview with Fr. Thomas D. Williams

The point of Christian scholarship is not recognition by standards established in the wider culture. The point is to praise God with the mind. [...] The real point is valuing what God has made, believing that the creation is as “good” as he said it was, and exploring the fullest dimensions of what it meant for the Son of God to “become flesh and dwell among us.”

- The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, ch. 9

I’m trying to make myself study modernity (and post-modernity), in order to overcome the backwards chronological snobbery to which I have been subject for some time. As an undergraduate, I told myself I’d be happy to get lost in old books, old ideas, old debates. I think I’ve found two good reasons to turn over a new leaf:

1. To acquire the ability to critically examine others’ and one’s own philosophical principles.
2. To be more attuned to my students.

What others can you think of?

Learning matters because the world matters – the world both as material object and as the accumulated network of human institutions. For a Christian, the most important reason for exercising the life of the mind is the implicit acknowledgment that things do not exist on their own. This acknowledgment is a specifically Christian presupposition; its denial characterizes much of the scholarship that shapes our lives so decisively. When we study something, we are of course learning about that thing. But even more, we are learning about the One who made that thing.

- Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, ch. 2

In my youth group days, I was taught a mnemonic for ordering my prayers. “ACTS” stood for Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication, a kind of chronological guide for praying to God respectfully.

“TAWG” was another mnemonic device we were taught: “time alone with God.” On youth group trips, after listening to a message, or singing in a worship service, we were given a sheet of paper listing both of these mnemonics (TAWG along the top, ACTS along the side), and instructed to find a quiet, private place to read several specific passages of Scripture, answer a few questions about them, and pray. Since most of these trips were campouts, I had little trouble finding a secluded flat rock or fallen tree on which to plant myself to read, pray, and write.

I kept up with this scheme of prayer throughout high school, and still return to it sometimes, when praying spontaneously. But in the last five years or so, in the course of considering Christian history and the Church from non-evangelical perspectives, and drawing back from the individualism inherent in evangelicalism, I’ve come to doubt its reasonableness–especially TAWG. What would it mean, to be alone with God? Since human life is necessarily communal, is it even possible to be alone? Is it possible to isolate the inner core of a person from the influences of others (people, circumstances, God Himself)? Can entering an empty room empty my consciousness of the lives, thoughts, influences of others? On the contrary, even when I am alone, my self-consideration employs concepts and questions that I did not originate.**

Yesterday I found a fine expression of this idea in some of my academic reading. On the advice of my faculty advisor at UA, I’ve picked up Dom Gregory Dix’s The Shape of the Liturgy (1945). He writes as follows in the Introduction:

The most isolated christian–say a celtic anchorite (the nearest equivalent to a christian Robinson Crusoe)-in so far as he is specifically christian, does not come to God like the pagan mystic; as the alone to the Alone. Even if he does not use a traditional formula like the Lord’s prayer or the ‘Glory be to the Father,’ he prays within a whole framework of christian ideas received from others. When his prayer is most spontaneous and from his own heart, the belief according to which he prays, the general type of his prayer and much-probably most-of his actual phrasing are still largely drawn from what he has learned from others-his teachers, christian services he has attended in the past, his mother, his bible, many different sources. Ultimately it all comes to him, even the use of his bible, from the tradition of prayer evolved in the worshipping church.

**A similar question has arisen for me in consideration of the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura, and the role translation plays in understanding the Bible (or any text, for that matter). The interpretation of Scipture is a complicated task, involving a number of different ‘translations’: from one language to another, from the page to one’s mind, from sensible signs (e.g., letters, words, sentences) to what they signify, etc. Those who undertake the task of interpretation can only do so because they have been taught, by others, how to navigate these choppy waters. One must know, for starters, the alphabet, the language in which the text is written, a host of cultural and historical facts, and an innumerable set of ideas, both true and false. And how may they understand without a teacher? Strictly speaking, there can be no understanding, for humans, apart from community. Even the principle of sola scriptura involves more agents than the reader and the Spirit.