Category Archives: Liturgy

American Sarum: Saturday Afternoon

Session 3: Dr. Allan Doig: The Revival of the Sarum Rite in the Nineteenth Century: Liturgy, Theology & Architecture

Dr. Doig is from Oxford University and has published most recently in the field of liturgy and architecture. He began and ended his presentation with references to the Directorium Anglicanum. Published in 1858, this was the first work to advocate a recovery of Sarum rubrics and ceremonial for application to the Book of Common Prayer (English 1662). After presenting a bit about the Directorium itself and the—literal—trials of its author, the Rev. John Purchas, Dr. Doig described the situations in England that led up to it.

In the early nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. It brought great inequity between the rich and poor and caused major shifts in the population distribution of England. The lower classes were ill-served by the Established church and Non-conformism was on the rise. With the flood of people out of the country and into the cities, the church was caught flat-footed: there qere too many clergy in the rural areas and not nearly enough in the cities. Whereas the Established Churchneededboth houses of worship and clergy, the Baptists and Methodists were able to hire halls and provided lay preachers wherever a need arose.

In 1818, the government tried to address the problem by setting aside a million pounds for the building of 96 churches. A few years later the concept was replicated with a larger scope—but far fewer resources; half a million pounds were set aside for building 450 churches. The result was an architectural style referred to as “Commission Gothic” which was a thinly Gothicized preaching box. These measures helped, but didn’t solve the problem.

In 1833,the Tractarian movement kicked off with Keble’s preaching of the “National Apostacy” sermon. In the same year, A. W. Pugin conducted a tour of English architecture and churches. He connected the spread of modern architecture with a degradation in modern morals. Gothic architecture, on the other hand, had a higher moral structure literally built into it. The symbolism and encoded meanings built into Gothic architecture made it, Pugin believed, a greater vehicle for truth. He found the faith encoded in the Gothic buildings more compelling than what was being preached and, in 1834 as a result of his architectural study, Pugin joined the Roman Catholic Church. Conversely, he associated the lack of architectural integrity in the more recent church buildings with the failures of the Established Church. Perhaps in part because of his route into the Roman Catholic Church, Pugin’s Catholicism had much in common with a medieval, Sarum perspective—it was romantic, aesthetic, and was nurtured in an environment replete with meanings.  

The Tractarian Movement, on the other hand, was well under way in 1834. It had already penetrated to the rural regions and the Tracts for the Times were making their impact felt. The catholicity of the Tracts was rather different from what Pugin desired—he wished to see a return of medieval rite and ceremonial; the Tractarians had quite different goals. Nevertheless, there were some interesting intersections between the two.

John Henry Newman made his decision to swim the Tiber in 1845. Before leaving for studies in Rome, he attended the consecration of one of Pugin’s churches, St Giles, in 1846. He described the building in literally glowing terms. He called it the most splendid building that he had ever seen. Newman’s subsequent discovery of the Baroque cooled his enthusiasm for Pugin’s work. In later years when he preached at another of Pugin’s churches Newman found the altar too small for a proper Solemn High Mass, its tabernacle too small for a proper exposition, etc. Pugin and Newman butted heads on a number of occasions due to competing views on the liturgy and the architecture necessary for its performance. Pugin envisioned a medieval rite like Sarum; Newman, a Baroque Roman.

While the Oxford Movement spawn an Oxford society on architecture that offered advice on building churches in England and in the far-flung English colonies, the Cambridge Camden Society began the central architectural powerhouse of the mid nineteenth century. Founded by Benjamin Webb and John Mason Neale, their views were far more strident than those of the Oxford group. Articles in the Ecclesiologist called for a recovery of medieval practices for use with the prayer book. They wanted a more frequent and elaborate celebration of the Eucharist and were the first to point to the Ornaments Rubric and its importance. Not everyone agreed, however, and they faced significant persecution for their stances; Webb was inhibited for 16 years as a result of his ritualizing ways.

 The central medieval touchstone for the Cambridge Camden Society was the writings of Durandus of which they released a translation in 1843. Inspired by his work, the society promoted “architecture with an agenda.” They won and the Cambridge Camden Society, later known as the Ecclesiological Society , and its aesthetic concepts became the norm for Anglican church buildings. With the renewed vigor of the English Church through the Oxford and Cambridge Movements, some 4,000 churches were built or reconditioned between the 1830s and 1870s. The great majority of these followed the precepts of the society. While Pugin had converted to the Roman Church, he was not in principle a Romanist and shared much in common with the Ecclesiologists.

It is at this point—with the maturity of Pugin, with the success of the Ecclesiological Society—that Purchas’s Directorium Anglicanum appeared. The Directorium insisted that the rubrics of the BCP were incomplete as they stood—some other information was needed to complete them and that the answer lay in the pre-Reformation era. The section “Of Ceremonies” in the 1662 BCP gave some hints and nods towards late medieval practice, Purchas believed. As a result, the Directorium cites medieval precedents, appealing to contemporary Roman ceremonial when a medieval source could not be found. Whenever possible, though, he preferred a medieval Sarum source.

What the Directorium did was to give directions for ceremonial that fit the shape of the buildings that the Ecclesiologist Society had prepared. The shape was there—Purchas provided the ceremonial that worked in them. As a result, the Directorium became the main authority for rite and ceremony in the Church of England for the next half-century.

Session 4: Canon Jeremy Davies, Precentor of Salisbury Cathedral

This presentation is harder to describe because so much of it was based around the PowerPoint presentation of photographs of the liturgies from Salisbury Cathedral. As a result, I won’t be able to do it true justice in a written format.

He began with the question of how a diverse modern community inhabits, uses, and worships within a medieval building—how do they go about being good heirs of a medieval structure?  Peter Brook, an English theatre director, wrote against the newly rebuilt Coventry Cathedral—the building was constructed first, then the church considered how to use it. This is backwards: the ceremony has to come first.

In the medieval world, this was the case. The ceremony did come first and the cathedrals were built to enable and to shape it. When Richard Poore began the construction of the current cathedral at New Sarum, he brought more than a new ground plan; he had studied at the University of Paris and brought back the new theology, a new mindset, and the desire to create something innovative. Just as he brought back the new Scholastic theology, he brought the new Gothic architecture to replace the old monastic styles. The Sarum Rite was first of all rooted in the Roman Rite of the Western Church. While the Roman Rite progressively simplified, the Sarum Rite remained elaborate. [I believe this was a reference to the liturgical reforms along Franciscan lines eventually leading to Trent and the Tridentine forms but I’m not positive of that…] Poore knew that the ceremony had to come first and would dictate the shape of the space; he had the advantage of having experienced the Old Sarum cathedral first.

At this point, the presentation moved into a lengthy presentation of the conduct of the modern Easter Vigil in the Salisbury Cathedral space. Processions remain an important part of the liturgy at Salisbury and the Easter Vigil is no exception. The description that he gave seemed to show a negotiation between a medieval space and a standard Liturgical Renewal Movement ceremony (complete with a recently-added LRM fountain-style font that looks quite out of character with the rest of the building).  

 Cocktail Hour

The day concluded with cocktails at the nearby house of a member of the parish. The finger-foods were delicious , and the setting delightful. We met a number of interesting people, including a number of folks who read the blog, and caught up on doings back in Atlanta with Bishop Whitmore, the assisting bishop of the diocese.

American Sarum: Saturday Morning

Morning Prayer

The day’s events opened with a sung service of Morning Prayer. As you can imagine at a conference of Anglican musicians, the singing was wonderful. The psalms were well-chanted by all; standing in the midst of the congregation singing the hymn was a great experience. Morning Prayer occurred and God was duly worshipped.

It was a perfectly acceptable prayer book service, but I was confused at some of the choices made. The psalms were chanted with the cantor singing the first half of the verse and the congregation singing the second half—I don’t believe I’ve ever experienced that before and found it unusual. The canticle following the single reading was the Te Deum. While I would have chosen the Benedictus on principle, the Te Deum is a perfectly legitimate choice—but the Suffrages were set A. Our current Suffrage B is the set that the West has historically appended to the Te Deum. The ’79 BCP detatched them from the Canticle and appointed them as an option, making them the natural choice when the Te Deum is used.

The combination of these choices made me wonder—if the conference is on American Sarum, why not do a more Sarum-style Office? Why not use the Benedictus, and if the Te Deum is used, why not use the suffrages sung with it at Salisbury? Why not use Sarum practice in chanting the psalms? The implication is that the Sarum Use is exclusively a Mass use. And it may be at this particular church—I haven’t seen any references to public Offices. But it needn’t be and shouldn’t be; a use that consciously engages the Sarum tradition is missing a significant piece of that tradition if it omits the Offices.

Session I: Fr. Unterseher

The first session was by Fr. Cody Unterseher, a priest associate of the parish who is finishing a PhD in Liturgics at Notre Dame, and a member of the Pray Tell blogging team. This session was focused around the notion that, contrary to the oft-repeated parish phrase, no—we haven’t always done it that way. Thus, as a theory-based introduction to the conference as a whole, it served as a reminder that there has always been diversity in Christian liturgy. Drawing on the work of Paul Bradshaw and others, Fr. Unterseher noted that discontinuity is as much a feature in Christian liturgy as continuity. No—we haven’t always done it that way. While I do have some quibbles with some of his historical points—particularly around what level of continuity did exist and an overly hasty dismissal of the Ornaments Rubric—the presentation did a good job of introducing non-specialists to the legitimate discontinuities in the liturgical past. The purpose of this historical introduction was make the point that discontinuities are not uncommon in our liturgical record—and we now live in a situation of much change and turbulence. We should’t let how we’ve done thing in the past hold us back from what we could be doing and how we can leverage our historical resources to help us in this new situation.

Session 2: Dr. John Harper

This session was one of the reason I came to this conference and Dr. Harper did not disappoint. In a fast-paced and data-rich hour, Dr. Harper walked us through the key points grounding the medieval Use of Sarum. He began by reminding us that there was a clear and distincive Ecclesia Anglicana that authorized the Sarum Use between 1534-1549. During this fifteen-year period between Henry the 8th’s definitive break with Rome and the introduction of the first Book of Common Prayer, England was a church apart from papal domination that authorized the Sarum Use as the official use of the realm. Homing in on the word “Use,” he challenged the typical protestant equation of Use with texts and suggested that we gain a fuller sense of the term is we understand a Use to be the confluence of:

  • Materials—both texts and objects
  • People—both as offices held by individuals and the personalities who inhabit those offices
  • Place—meaning both a geographical location and the normative worship spaces
  • Time—used in a general periodic sense but also referring to the local sense specific to a day and place

He then explicated these four factors with a wealth of detail and a fantastic set of slides which included the two cathedral sites at Old and New Sarum and the major stages in the construction of New Sarum. This was coupled with a discussion of the major individuals—mostly bishops—who saw the growth and expansion of Sarum and how the community of canons likewise grew until it reached a stabilized number of 52 canons on a quarterly rotation in New Sarum.

Regarding the spread of the Sarum Use he noted that it was one of the earliest coherently codified Uses in England; due to the cathedral’s shift to New Sarum and Richard Poore’s compilation of the customary and ordinal for the new building, Sarum offered a clearly defined system which other dioceses could borrow for use and adaptation. Furthermore, Sarum Use was frequently adopted by parishes in diocese which retained a monastic cathedral. Since parishes couldn’t use monastic uses without significant adaptation, the secular Sarum Use was a natural substitute for writing/compiling their own.

Dr. Harper’s final point was to return to the concept of a Use as something very much more than just a text. Medieval liturgy was very much a “sensory polyphony” where a variety of sights were overlaid by a variety of sounds and a variety of smells. Texts, actions and movements were also layered with the various parts of the worshipping body participating in different activities at the same time and only coming together at the main cofluences of the liturgy like the Great Elevations.

We were left with a sense of the wealth and richness of the liturgical environment and the possibilities that existed for us in appropriating even a bit of these for our current context.

The Solidification of Sarum

Ok, back to Sarum and picking up Richard Pfaff’s The Liturgy in Medieval England where we left off at chapter 11 (“New Sarum and the spread of Sarum Use”).

Pfaff lays down at the start that, contrary to the previous block, we have a partial map for this period; while we have no secure starting place, we do have a more definite ending place:

Two hundred or so years later [after the change from Old Sarum to New with the new cathedral in 1225 and after], by the end of the fourteenth century, a high degree of both elaboration an standardization seems to have been reached, and the very full rubrics which reflect what we study as the New Ordinal are widely copied into missals. When books with unambiguous titles like Missale as usum insignis et praeclarae ecclesiae Sarum begin to be printed at the end of the fifteenth (the two earliest are 1487 and 1492), the relevant material from ordinals has been thoroughly incorporated into the text of the missal. (Pfaff, 365).

This chapter shoots to establish what picture we can establish around the year 1290. By this time, the cathedral has been established for well over a half-century, the main recognizably “Sarum” sanctoral occasions have been added to the kalendar, and we have some actual manuscript sources from which to work.

Richard Poore, dean of the Old Sarum cathedral from 1197 (succeeding his brother Herbert who had been elected bishop) later bishop of Chichester (1214-1217) then of Salisbury (1217-1237, again succeeding his brother), both shepherded the move to New Sarum directed in 1218 and appears to have been responsible for codifying the new practice in conjunction with his dean, William de Waude (precentor from 1218, dean 1220-1245).

In his tentative reconstruction of the period, after going through quite a bit of technical data, Pfaff sketches a helpful overview of the time from Old Sarum to the end of the fourteenth century and the Risby text printed by Frere. Old Sarum probably started out with a Gregorian + Young Gelasian missal like the Leofric missal with similar adaptations for a secular context. “The ordinary would likewise have contained no striking divergences in wording from that used elsewhere throughout the kingdom—or, for that matter, in most of western Europe—and would have been supplied with a minimum of ceremonial rubrics, if any at all” (Pfaff, 384). So—our starting place with Osmund and Old Sarum is what I’m used to from my early medieval days, a regular mixed missal and the Romano-German Pontifical for directions.

By the middle of the twelfth century, two changes occurred: a growth and formalization of the cathedral chapter (so, more folks and a more hierarchical arrangement of them [i.e., the “rulers” for the choir?]) and a revision of the massbooks at the cathedral containing more extensive and elaborate rubrics. Thus, in William de Waude’s 1220 visitation (before New Sarum, remember), he speaks of “new” massbooks and “old” massbooks reflecting the slow spread of the Old Sarum revision filtering into the parish churches of the diocese.

With the move to New Sarum and, consequently, new spaces and dedications to new saints, a revision of the Old Sarum revision was necessary. The completion of this revision and its attending customary and ordinal is what we now consider to be a distinctly identifiable “Sarum Use” and began to be referenced as such by the directives of other bishops.

This period should probably be brought to a close by the year 1319 in which the feast of the relics of Salisbury was officially changed; it had been on September 15th—not a good day as it’s the Octave of the Nativity of the BVM—and was changed to the Sunday after the Translation of Becket (July 7th). This shift will become a key litmus test later on for answering the “Sarum or Not” question.

So, at the end of this stage, our direct evidence are the missals printed by Legg, the Consuetudinary and the Ordinal printed by Frere (but not the Customary…), and the two mass ordinaries with some ceremonial directions in Legg’s Tracts on the Mass.

Pfaff’s next chapter looks at the work of Bishop Grandison of Exeter (1327-69) who uses and adapts Sarum for his own purposes and is quite interesting for how Sarum was used as a base from which to make further changes in the fourteenth century. It’s really cool stuff (for a liturgy geek) but not directly relevant to the over-all condensed Sarum story which is what I’m trying to present here. Thus, I’ll pick up next time with his chapter 13.

On ‘Allegorical’ Interpretation

I’m taking a quick break from Sarum to jot down some thoughts that I’ve been having after Dean Knisely’s post on study plans. He notes that he’d like to do some thinking about hermeneutics, particularly any native Anglican form of hermeneutics, and brings up the issue of pre-modern forms of reading that tend to loosely travel under the label of “allegorical.”

This is kinda my *thing*; it’s what my dissertation was on. (Actually, if he’s not careful, I’ll send him a copy of it…)

In pondering what resources I should refer him to, I think back to my fundamental findings and to discussions about basically all pre-modern forms of reading that I had with my dissertation director. One of the points that he made (fairly constantly) and that I found to be concretely true in my research is that too many who are interested in this topic completely miss the forest for the trees.

The problem is context. The great grand-daddy of the modern study of figural interpretation is Henri De Lubac who, living in a pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic world, writes with some unconscious assumptions about contexts that it seems never occur to him to make explicit. Most medievalists (Beryl Smalley, I’m looking at you…) are interested in “interpretation of the Bible” and, in pursuit of what they think their focus is, so narrow that focus to the point where the context fundamentally disappears or is regarded as a layer that gets in the way.

The danger that everybody likes to get hyper about is the fear that if you go down the allegorical road, you can make any text say anything. Suddenly, the unbinding of Lazarus is actually about the sacrament of confession; the injunction about not eating weasels in Deuteronomy is actually about 0ral s3x (no, seriously, and that’s one from the late first/early second century Epistle of Barnabas…). Thus, the chief question becomes: what are the controls? What prevents you from plowing into totally crazy, over-the-top readings?  Or, alternatively, how do we know when an OTT reading must be reined in? In a word, context.

Figural interpretation happens within a structure of communal liturgical practices. In the patristic and early medieval periods in particular, interpretation was done by people who were enmeshed in their community’s liturgical cycles and it’s these fundamental communal practices that gave them a grounding. Constant repetition of the Offices, and constant contact with the Mass, presented a daily repetition of the Christian core practices and beliefs: the Creeds—the Canticles—the Gloria—the Canon. This grounding, in turn, gave them a flexibility for play in both their interpretive and theological musings. The playing field was marked off by the creeds, the goal was the edification of the Church centered in charity, defined by Augustine as the cultivation of virtue and the restraint of vice.

(As a side-note, this is always one of the problems with many modern readings of medieval mystics.  You can be way more “out there” and have it not be a major threat to fundamental Christianity if it’s set within the grounding practices.)

The major change with Reformation biblical interpretation, I’d argue, is the jettisoning of the context. I think it could be argued that with the rise of the Schoolmen, the mendicant orders, and the turn into Nominalism the liturgical context had already lost its important restraining function making it appear to the Reformers that they were pruning away the bad rather than losing a key component. Nevertheless, that’s what happened. Suddenly biblical interpretation was not and could not be an act of play. It was serious business. Without the grounding practices of Mass and Office, how each text was read suddenly mattered a lot more because the interpretive act was transformed into the grounding practice of the faith.

So—the liturgy was the context. But that’s not all. Particularly in the early medieval church and most especially in my world of the early medieval monastics, the liturgy was not simply the guiding context but was the fundamental tool through which Christians were inculturated into the hermeneutics of the Church. They learned to read through the liturgy.

On one hand, this is a literal truth: new monks or child oblates learned how to read through the memorization of the Latin psalter, then learning to match the words on the page with the texts they already had in their heads. They literally learned how to read from reading the liturgy. On the other hand, they also learned how to interpret the Bible from the liturgy and this happened in two ways, the first explicit, the second not so explicit. The explicit is that readings from the Fathers in the third nocturn of the Night Office gave them examples. They learned to interpret through what they heard and what was modeled for them by the patristic teachers every Sunday and feast day in the early morning.  And again at Chapter. And again at Mass. The not-so-explicit is the way that the liturgy introduces under-determined interpretive possibilities through the use of scriptural antiphons and responsories in the Mass and Office. When an antiphon taken from the Gospel of the Day is appended to the Magnificat it makes you hear it in a new way, as you are using  new lens. When a Pauline snippet is paired with a psalm, the mind begins working at it to find what the implied logical connection must be between the two. The hymns held together Scripture and Season for mutual reflection. (As it happens, the first paper I gave at the big medievalist meeting in Kalamazoo was on this topic. I’ll try and put it up on Scribd for those who are following me there.)

So—where does all of this bring us? Back to the notion of a distinctively Anglican way of reading and interpreting the Scriptures. Is there one? Maybe… Is there the potential for one? Most certainly, because we of all of the Western Non-Roman ecclesial bodies have retained in theory that which was most important in the heyday of figural reading: the Mass and the Office.

What we have to realize, though, is that our Mass and Office is not theirs. While we have inherited the structures of the early medieval pattern, we have deliberately shorn ours of the richness through which catholic biblical interpretation was learned. We have no appointed patristic readings into which we are formed. We have no cycle of antiphons and responsories  that shape our readings. We have divested our Mass of the minor propers that complemented and guided the public proclamation of the Word.

Sure, I’d like to recover these things. That’s one of the key reasons why the St Bede’s Breviary puts back into place traditional or traditionally-shaped patterns of antiphons and the old Office hymns. But can we recover them? I honestly don’t know and I honestly fear not. We have a hard enough time getting people to come to Mass on Sundays let alone Holy Days that don’t fall then. (Epiphany, anyone?) Our clergy lac a familiarity with the Office, let alone those upon whom they—and we—are relying for our biblical interpretation.

I don’t know.

I’d like to hold up the old model as the possibility for a vibrant new model—I just fear that we lack both the will and the discipline to make into what it could be.

On the Observance of All Souls in the Office

Tomorrow is All Souls, noted in the BCP kalendar as Commemoration of All Faithful Departed. I’ve written on the importance and place of All Saints and All Souls before but, a quick scan of the archives turns up only one brief piece from 2005 (!) and a more poetic piece from the Cafe. I think a new piece on this topic may be needed…

In any case, I’m becoming increasingly convinced—and you will be hearing more about this in coming days—that one of the Episcopal Church’s main theological problems is a poverty of ecclesiology. One way to act against this trend is the proper observation of All Souls alongside All Saints. Naturally, we’re having a parish All Souls mass tomorrow but the question of the Office is a live one.

All Souls only ranks as an Optional Observance in the BCP meaning that, in most methods of saying the Office, it rates only a proper collect. In traditional Western practice, the usual offices for the day are the Offices of the Dead. As the Anglican Breviary notes, the Offices of the Dead retain some of the primitive characteristics of the early Office in like fashion to the Offices of Triduum. (On their antiquity, a quick scan of Taft (Liturgy of the Hours in East and West) and Vogel (Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources) turns up nothing, raising a topic for later study.) Thus, the Offices of the Dead are unlike regular Offices since, due to their primitive character, some of the usual options are dropped. As in the case of Triduum, Anglican traditionalists must ask just how much the offices should be altered.

Looking back at the Tridentine form of the Vespers and Lauds Offices we note the following:

  • All initial verses and responses are dropped; the Office begins with the first psalm antiphon.
  • The psalms are proper and appropriate antiphons have been drawn out of those proper psalms.
  • All gloria patris are replaced by: “O Lord, grant them eternal rest, and let light perpetual shine upon them”
  • The psalms are followed by a Scriptural v/r only (viz.:  Answer. I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me : Verse. Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord. [Rev 14:13]).
  • The Gospel Canticle follows immediately.
  • After the Gospel Canticle is the Lord’s Prayer, then Ps 146 or Ps 140. [This is omitted on days of death, burial, and on All Souls, though.]
  • A brief litany concludes with the collect which ends the Office..
  • The Canticle of Hezekiah takes the OT Canticle slot in the Lauds Psalter.

Glancing at the Anglican Breviary and the Monastic Diurnal, they follow the Tridentine Offices.

Moving to the Anglican side of things, the English Office uses the structure of the Tridentine Lauds/Vespers. While the Lauds psalms are different (with correspondingly different antiphons) it is in other respects similar. The major difference is the usual change—the insertion of two full-length Scriptural readings and an additional morning canticle. The lessons chosen here are Wis 4:7-20, 1 Cor 15:35-58 || Job 19:21-27, 1 Thess 4:13-18. The Canticle of Hezekiah is used after the first lesson.

A Monastic Breviary from the Order of the Holy Cross (the first attempt to do a breviary based on the ur-text of the ’79 BCP) omits the opening material, uses one of the traditional antiphons but with the psalter for the day and replaces the gloria patri with the “Rest eternal.” The first Canticle of MP is replaced by a Respond drawn (as usual) from among the traditional Matins responds. A second Respond (composed de novo, I believe) replaces the hymn. The Office then proceeds as usual except that it ends after the collect using a brief verse-response. The readings are Eze 37:1-14, 1 Cor 15:35-49 || 2 Sam 12:15b-23, 1 Thess 5:1-11.

Galley’s Prayer Book Office retains a regular prayer book structure with the allowance for dropping the Prayer for Mission. Proper psalms are given—the evening two taken from the traditional Vespers. The readings given are Job 19:21-27a, Rom 8:14-19, 31-39 || [Lam 3:22-26, 31-33], John 14:1-6. The canticle after the first reading is Canticle 11 (Surge, Illuminare).

As I look back at my own efforts (Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer)  I’m still satisfied with the choices that I made. I abridged the Office following the Tridentine structure more closely in the same way that A Monastic Breviary did. My decision on the readings was, in keeping with the traditional Matins readings, to stick with Job texts. In fact, I think I simply took the texts from the three nocturns and squished them together in order to produce three readings (so there’s one missing from Evening Prayer).

I think what I’m doing to do for the St Bede’s Breviary is to leave the structure as is with the proper collect and Gospel canticle antiphons. However, I am going to try and get up the Office for the Dead in SSB format so that those who desire that can use it.

What are your thoughts—especially those of you who use the breviary?

Frere on Ceremonial, Part 1

I’ve been thinking a lot about ceremonial recently; my Fortescue arrived, but before I start posting anything on it, I’m taking the time to read through a little volume I discovered a while back but hadn’t yet read. It’s by the eminent Victorian liturgist W. H. Frere and it’s entitled The Principles of Religious Ceremonial. Written in 1905, the Ritualist controversies are the backdrop to it; nevertheless, some parts sound quite modern. It’s a valuable read and here are some snippets from it as I read along…

Introductory Remarks

  • “THE subject of religious ceremonial is one which has a special faculty for stirring strong feeling.” p. 1
  • “Here are two widely contrasted types. The world might be classified according to them ; for every one has his affinity either with the mind of the Quaker on the one side, or with the mind of the so-called Ritualist on the other. And every one who handles the subject of religious ceremonial will do well to think beforehand what his own affinity of mind is, and to make allowance accordingly. It is only by recollecting continually his own personal bias that he will be able to be fair and considerate to others.
    These two types of mind are not only widely separated ; they are also to a large extent inexplicable each to the other.” p. 3
  • “The broad general outlines of the history of ceremonial controversy have some thing to teach by way of caution and patience. Disturbances of this class seem to recur in cycles, and one phase of them follows upon another in a more or less regular sequence. The full cycle may be expressed by three divisions : first comes a period of experiment or innovation; after this has continued for some time, as the controversy attendant upon it dies down, there follows a period of consolidation and settlement; finally comes a period of quiet, tending to stagnation and formalism, before the cycle begins to recur.” pp. 4-5
  • “The real matter to be considered, alike in ceremonial and doctrine, is not whether it is Roman, but whether it is legitimate and true. For, after all, not everything that is Roman is wrong.” p. 7
  • “Ceremonial, it may be truly said, either safe guards piety or else degrades it ; and any changes in traditional ways bring within the horizon the peril that some may value the changes, not as ancillary to devotion, but for some less worthy reason for novelty’s sake, for their artistic beauty, and so forth ; and if so, degradation has set in.” p. 11
  • “Ceremonial is an external because it is an expression of an inner reality ; this reality is often of such a sort as to baffle expression by any other means. Reverence, for example, is more eloquently signified by the Publican’s bowed head than in any other way. Irreverence too is equally plainly signified by an attitude or a gesture. No other method of expression could be so expressive.” pp. 11-2
  • “It is therefore a form of blindness, not commonsense, that prevents a man from recognising that behind ceremonies there lie realities, principles, doctrines, and states or habits of mind. No one can hope to judge fairly of matters of ceremonial who does not see that the reason why they cause such heat of controversy is that they signify so much.” pp. 12-3
  • “It is difficult to say how far unity of doctrine and feeling precedes unity of ceremonial, or how far it follows it. Ceremonial is at one moment the outcome of doctrine, and at another the inculcator of it.” p. 13

Of Ceremonial in General

  • “A task has to be done : then it must be done somehow. That ‘ somehow ‘ may be good or bad ; therefore prudence suggests that a method should be
    devised and laid down. Ceremonial has begun.” p. 16
  • “The individual may, and if he takes enough trouble he can, avoid forming a ceremonial habit ; he can vary his methods to the extreme limit of all known permutations and combinations. But a body of people must be corporately bound ; and a ceremonial rule of some degree of strictness or laxity must govern all joint action.” p. 17
  • “No doubt in all ceremonial, secular as well as religious, some allowance must be made for differences of temperament and training. The manners of a foreigner must often seem over-demonstrative to the phlegmatic Englishman, and the ceremoniousness of Court functions over-pompous to a blunt country squire. But this principle does not extend beyond the securing of a modification in details; and ceremonial remains still undethroned as a universal law governing human action in every sphere.” p. 19
  • “It is evidently true that in the right sense ceremonial must be ‘natural’; but the question rises whether the ideal is that of nature untrained and unrefined,
    or of a refined and trained nature. For example, it is true with regard to social ceremonial that manners are not good unless they are natural. On the other hand, it is no less true that good manners do not come naturally, at any rate to
    people as a whole ; they are almost, if not quite, universally the result of careful and minute training in one form or another.” p. 20
  • “The art of ceremonial proficiency, be it in good manners or in good habits or in good drill or in good religious ceremonial, is best exemplified when it is most concealed, when the best rules have been so well acquired and assimilated that they have become, as we say, ‘ a second nature.'” p. 20

Of Religious Ceremonial

  • “…religious ceremonial is action Godwards, and therefore demands the highest possible degree of excellence.” p. 22
  • “it is often to be observed that in churches where the puritan tradition is strong, and where pale horror would creep over the face of the minister if it was even suggested that he was a ‘Ritualist,’ there does exist a well-defined ceremonial. . . . It is all highly individual ; it rests perhaps on nothing else but the vicar’s own ways or oddities ; it has possibly no relation at all to the traditions of church worship ; but it is ceremonial for all that; and it differs from the ceremonial of the ‘ Ritualist ‘ only in being based on no authority, in
    being the result of individual caprice, and possibly further in being ill conceived, or even, it may be, grotesque in character.” pp. 26, 27
  • “Public worship, besides being individual, is also essentially corporate : it is the approach to God not of a merely fortuitous conglomeration of individuals, but rather of an organised body. Just as the Court in its attendance on the sovereign is a body performing a corporate action round his throne, so the worshipping Church is a body performing acts of corporate worship round the throne of God; and it is this conception rather than the individualist view which underlies the major part of religious ceremonial.” p. 27

Congregation and Ministers

  • “One can hardly fail to see, even in the dim obscurity which surrounds all early liturgical history, that the tendency to deprive the people of their part of the service, by making it so elaborate that it was of necessity confined to the choir, was one which showed itself at very early stages. . . . Yet, in spite of all such changes, the old ideal still remained, viz. that all should contribute their
    share to the corporate Christian worship ; and it is not too much to say that without any doubt this is the only true ideal of Christian worship. . . . Then the relics of the Liturgy which remained were conglomerated into the hands of the
    celebrant and formed the Missal, or compound sacerdotal book ; the participation of the faithful disappeared, and the resultant service was rightly
    called ‘ Low Mass,’ for it represents the low- water mark of eucharistic service, and is a painful contrast to the true but almost lost dignity of the
    old celebration of the Holy Mysteries, with the full and intelligent co-operation of all the faithful, each in their several spheres and grades taking their own proper part in the adoration of Almighty God.” pp. 36-7
  • “Now there is a very close connexion between the multiplication of Eucharists and the decay in the manner of celebration. It is only in special circumstances, as for example in monastic or collegiate or cathedral churches, that it has been possible to retain the old ideal together with a daily celebration. In ordinary circumstances a choice had to be made between the two things, the multiplication of celebrations and the retention of the old ideal. Here, roughly speaking, the East and West parted company, for the East kept the ceremonial ideal and denied itself the advantage of daily celebrations, while the more utilitarian West sacrificed the ceremonial ideal to the practical advantage of
    frequent communion and daily Mass.” p. 38
  • “Other similar changes go alongside with this and influence the history similarly in the direction of decay. The spread of the Church into country
    places and the multiplication of village churches made it impossible to go on looking upon the bishop as the normal celebrant of the Eucharist, as was the case in the early days. When a priest took his place at the altar, the service was ipso facto less, not exactly because the priest was less in dignity than the bishop, but rather because the whole character of the assembly was altered.” p. 38
  • “For in practice, as the Church grew, and small churches and parishes belonging to special shrines or connected with landed estates took their place
    in the Christian economy side by side with the town churches, the materials were not available for the old solemnity of the Liturgy. For choir and
    ministers the parish had to make the best shift it could with whatever materials were available ; and when it became necessary to define the lowest terms which should be considered possible for a celebration of the Eucharist, the minimum requirement was fixed at two persons, the priest and a clerk to
    serve him. And so we come to the duet.” p. 39
  • “The multiplication of Low Masses of this sort had, no doubt, many advantages ; especially as chantries and chaplains multiplied, the convenience of numerous classes of working people who wished to attend daily was met by two or three services daily at different hours. Whatever may rightly be said derogatory to the character of such daily worship at the Holy Eucharist in the pre-Reformation days, there is no doubt as to the extent of it; all classes of persons thronged the churches daily, especially in England, where an Italian
    visitor was astonished at the universality of daily attendance at Mass.” p. 40
  • “The character of pre-Reformation Service-books in England was especially calculated to keep up a good deal of the old ideal. While continental mass-books very constantly contemplated nothing better than Low Mass, the English books always had High Mass in view. Indeed, this is so much the case that it is a matter of great difficulty to reconstruct what an English Low Mass was like before the Reformation, since the Service-books make little or no provision for it.” pp. 41-2
  • “Liturgical worship must be co-operative and corporate. It is a false sacerdotalism that seeks to comprehend as much as possible in the one pair of
    hands of the priest or celebrant. It is always a gain that, with due regard to structure and liturgical principles, the services should employ many persons in divers functions. The clergy and other ministers, servers, clerks, and choir, all have their own part. The different parts of the ceremonial action must be harmonious ; but, so long as this is the case, it is no harm, but only good, that different people should simultaneously be doing different things. A good deal is needed to get rid of the false idea of the duet of parson and clerk, or parson
    and choir, or even parson and congregation. For example, it is far better that the psalms, when read, should be read as they are sung, from side to side,
    and not as a duet; that the lessons at Divine Service and at the Eucharist should be assigned to different persons ; that the first part of the Litany
    should be sung by clerks ; and that many other survivals of the old ideal be retained. And most of all it is desirable that the true ideal should be
    so clearly set before the congregation that it may become less of a cold critic of a ceremonial which it does not understand and perhaps dislikes, and more
    of an active and hearty participant in a great act of corporate and co-operative worship.” p. 41
  • “The Kyrie and Creed at the Eucharist, and the psalms in Divine Service, are the special parts which both can be made, and ought to be kept, congregational ; and where psalms are congregational there is great gain in singing them for ‘ Introit ‘ and ‘ Communion,’ as well as the best possible authority for doing so.” p. 47
  • “But when the congregation has its own part it must not grudge others their part, nor expect to follow or share in all that others are doing ; such an expectation is a very common cause of complaint on the part of the laity, and it results from the misconception of the idea of corporate worship. No one expects or demands that on the stage only one actor should move at a time ; and if this is not expected on the stage, where all is done for the benefit of the audience, and adapted to the spectator’s capacity for taking in the situation, far less is it to be demanded in religious ceremonial, which is done not for the benefit of the congregation, but for the honour of Almighty God ; and where, therefore, there is no need, as in the other case, that it should be adapted to the congregation at all, except so far as to be decorous and uplifting in its general effect.” pp. 47-8
  • “The Eucharist is one homogeneous and continuous action, and goes forward, if one may so say, like a drama; it has its prelude, its working up, its climax, its epilogue. The Divine Service has no such unity ; it has a series of different actions which are not necessarily closely connected, and might almost equally well be placed in any other order as in their existing order. If the Eucharist may be called, in regard to the nature of the structure of the service, a dramatic action, the Divine Service may be called by contrast meditative or reflective. But, great as is this difference of nature between the two, they are alike in their ideal of corporate worship, and alike in requiring that the whole body of the faithful should as far as possible, and in very various degrees, co-operate. And in both cases this work of worship done by the Church on earth is a work in co-operation with the heavenly hierarchies in their celestial worship, whether it is the definite sacrificial climax of the Eucharist or the subsidiary work of preparation and thanksgiving, which, properly speaking, is the essence of the Divine Service.” p. 48

Liturgical Change and Museum Religion

The post on the American Sarum conference got some comments that deserve a thread all their own. In many ways, this thread is a continuation of one of the long-standing themes that this blog has struggled with over its several years. Let me lay it out anew with major/axiomatic points in bold…

Liturgies change. Indeed, liturgical and ceremonial tinkering is inevitable across any significant group of folks whether there’s a set standard liturgy or not. Sometimes it’s because the liturgy needs a change, sometimes it’s because the tinkerers want a change.

No matter which way it goes, there’s no such thing as a liturgical change; rather there are theological changes that have liturgical implications. When a worshiping community of baptized Christians gather, they incarnate in a particular way the eschatological reality of the Body of Christ.  (This is most especially the case when they gather for a Eucharist where the whole intention is the making tangible and consumable the literal Body of Christ to be shared amongst them all.) You cannot separate the liturgy, the ceremonial, and the theology of such a gathering—they are inextricably bound up in one another. When the liturgy or the ceremonial gets changed, therefore, a theological change has necessarily occurred. When we say and do something different liturgically and ceremonially, we are just as surely saying and doing something different theologically as well. Sometimes these changes are minor—and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes these theological changes are intentional and conscious—and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes the tinkerers are aware of what they’re doing—and sometimes they’re not.

When liturgies change, my sense is that the motivation for the change and the direction in which the change occurs relate to two different axes: contemporary culture and historical practice. That is, when liturgies change it tends to be because the tinkers are trying to make a statement to the contemporary culture; history can be leveraged in a number of different ways:

  • Sometimes historical practices are jettisoned entirely because of a perceived disconnect with contemporary culture (this would be your praise & worship/Willow Creek type response).
  • Sometimes historical practices are resurrected because they represent a perceived correction to the current deplorable state of the contemporary culture—if the historical practice is maintained, the culture will be restored. (I see this as one of the motivations behind some who call for the ’28BCP & ’40 hymnal/Traditional Latin Mass: if we return to a pre-’60s liturgy, maybe we’ll return to a pre-’60s culture as well.)
  • Sometimes historical practices are resurrected because they represent a perceived connection to the contemporary culture–if the historical practice is maintained, this culture will be better able to hear, receive,  and embody the Gospel.

I’d suggest that this last approach has been behind most of the major shifts in liturgy within the Christian Church as a whole. Most of the major liturgical changes in Western Christendom have been attempts to re-engage/re-enliven contemporary practice based on historical precedents. This is not a new thing. Most of the monastic renewal movements in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were rooted in attempts to return to the True Practice whether that be the Desert Fathers, John Cassian, Benedict or a combination of the three. The Protestant Reformers attempted to return to Early Church practice. The first liturgical revival driven by the monks of Solesmes was an attempt to return to proper medieval practice. The Ritualists attempted to return to a High Medieval practice. Blessed Percy and the English Use tried to return to a Sarum standard. The most recent Liturgical Renewal encompassing Vatican II and the ’79 BCP tried to return to fourth century practice. Picking up a theme from the previous post, isolating one movement as “museum religion” is a bit disingenuous because utilizing historical precedence for contemporary practice has been a consistent habit in the West for a very long time.

Furthermore, we need to note that the exercise of identifying and utilizing historical materials is always a process thoroughly invested with contemporary meanings and limitations. The Protestant Reformers thought that they were returning to Early Church patterns of worship. Their historical reconstructions of Early Church worship didn’t have a whole lot to go on and look little like how we reconstruct Early Church worship today. We have better sources and better scholarship. (Would Luther or Calvin have used the Eucharist of the Didache had they known it?) Likewise, the work of the Ritualists and the Blessed Percy are properly understood as part of a broader English Gothic Revival rooted in English Nationalism and a political and social appropriation of the peculiarly English/British heritage over and against Continental expressions of nationalism. The work of Vatican II and attendant movements cannot be separated from the cultural and social movements of the ’60s. Historical work and even its excess—antiquarianism—are events that are contemporary in nature despite their focus on the past.

Now we tie these two threads together. The appropriation of historical practices always signals theological changes to the contemporary liturgy. Some of the theological changes are because of what the historical practice itself is or does. On the other hand, the very act of incorporating a certain practice from a certain time and place is a theological statement entirely apart from the content of the practice; the very selection of any time and place as an “ideal” is a major theological statement. The selections of the Early Church for the Reformers and the Fourth Century for Vatican II were attempts to achieve a purity that had been lost. The return to the High Medieval or Sarum reflected attempts to recapture a fullness that had been lost. None of these choices are theologically neutral—they all had and have an impact.

So what, what is a Renewal vs. a Revival vs. Musem Religion? Is it purely subjective or are there objective measures? When is a Renewal/Revival/Museum Moment an imposition into a contemporary practice and when does it represent a true enlivenment and enrichment?

For me the issue goes back to theology. As I’ve said before, we’re not the Christian Historical Society—we don’t do things because they’re old, we do them because they proclaim the Gospel. But some times the old ways proclaim the Gospel in new ways or media or avenues that our contemporary society needs to hear. Whenever we try to bring back an old practice, rite or time, my questions are these:

  • Why—to what end? Is it for the sake of nostalgia or fantasizing that the contemporary culture will go away and reformulate itself accord to the ideal pattern if we can sufficiently recall this past time? Or is it because we see a way here that the Gospel can be better communicated in this time and place?
  • Is there a coherence and an integrity between this historical practice and what the contemporary community is doing now? How radical or organic is this change?
  • Are the theological messages and intentions of this change in coherent relation with the theological trajectory of the community into which it is being introduced?

These are the kinds of questions that I see and here us asking about the Vatican II changes and the changes of the ’79 BCP. They’re also the questions that I will take with me to the American Sarum conference. Why a Sarum Revival? Why here—why now? Into what deep currents, culturally and theologically, is it tapping—or do we want to revive it because it seems “cool”? Why Sarum over some other time and place? As I’ve said before, I think there’s a case to be made for infusing as bit of the English early medieval monastic spirit into contemporary American Episcopalianism. Why is Sarum a better choice?

I don’t want to focus narrowly on Sarum here, though. Instead let me just say that this movement is raising for me—for us—a number of questions that I think are important now and may become even more important in the near future. Society is shifting. Technology and the evolving world situation are bring us into new opportunities and conflicts. Where, amongst the contemporary world and the faithful works of the past, is the Gospel best found and proclaimed?

Conference Watch: American Sarum

This is one of those items that entered my in-box at the height of the moving trauma; I shelved it with an intention to get back to it later.

Later has arrived.

There’s a conference slated for January 14th through the 17th in Bronxville, New York entitled American Sarum. As the name suggests, it’s a conference dedicated to the exploration of an American form of the English Use. For those fuzzy on this particular liturgical tradition, I’ll lay out what little I know of it—and welcome correction from the better informed.

The English Use is predominately the brain-child of Percy Dearmer (affectionately referred to as the Blessed Percy). The Blessed Percy was not himself a research scholar but was a well-read popularizer of the work of Frere, Palmer, and that whole body of scholars who investigated medieval English liturgy at the end of the nineteenth century and published works for the Alcuin Club, the Henry Bradshaw Society, and the Plainsong & Medieval Music Society.

The main thought here was this: if Anglican rites need new ceremonial and liturgical blood—and the one-two punch of the Oxford and Cambridge Movements (particularly the latter) convinced many they did—then why ape contemporary Roman Catholic ways? Why not return to the traditions and uses of the pre-Reformation English Church centered in the Sarum liturgy?

Blessed Percy set out to present a ceremonial and liturgy guide to Sarum enhancements for the Prayer Book (as he was English this, of course, means the 1662 BCP). The chief vehicle for this concept was the Parson’s Handbook which attracted a certain following in its day. This style of Sarum enrichment came to be known as the English Use. It was also sometimes known as English Museum Use and, indeed, the main criticism leveled at it was that it was fundamentally an antiquarian’s head-trip; that is, it was created de novo from old liturgical documents and did not reflect a living tradition. Instead, it was a romanticized version of a High Medieval mass with the BCP standing in for the text; how and if it spoke to its new time and place was a different story.

For whatever reason, it pretty much remained the English Use and didn’t cross the pond much. There are a few churches in America that use a form of the English/Sarum Use: one is Christ Church, Bronxville where the conference is being held, another is St John’s in the Village in my neck of the woods (and where I can be found when I’m not at the Advent).

The American Sarum conference seeks to reopen the old questions:

In an age when it is increasingly difficult to define what it means to be Anglican and many Anglicans look to Rome for answers, this conference will take a good look at the origins of our liturgical and musical Anglican heritage and dare to redefine what it means to be an Anglican. The conference will include a hard look at our history from architectural, liturgical, and musical perspectives. Discussions and re-creations of early liturgical practices will provide liturgical and musical insights that are intrinsically English and completely relevant to the liturgies of the 21st century. It is not a matter of “putting the Anglo back in Anglo-Catholic.” Those who will benefit from this experience include all musicians and clergy that identify as Anglo-Catholic, but it will be of particular interest and use to those who do not identify themselves as Anglo-Catholic. This is a conference for everyone, regardless of one’s own “high” or “low” churchmanship, who loves and respects our common Anglican heritage.

The presenters include some top-notch names like Dr. John Harper—yes, that Dr. John Harper—as well as some friends of mine. I showed M the provisional  schedule and we quickly agreed that we have to go.

Whatever you think of the English/Sarum Use—and to be honest I haven’t made up my mind—it will be an opportunity to think through some of the old important questions with some new voices at the table: What does it mean to be Anglican? What place do history and heritage hold in our modern proclamation of the Gospel? Do I prefer apparels or lace on my albs and amices?

Astounding Moments through Modern Technology

I was doing some random reading around in Anglican liturgical texts contained in the Google Books archives. I came across this little gem. It is to be filed under: “Holy Crap! How totally random was that!”

Just after the title page in Vincent’s Chant-Book Companion to the Book of Common Prayer (1880) is a scrawled note by Harvard Library’s processing department when they received this particular volume on May 24, 1939. It reads “Estate of Rev. Charles Hutchins”…

As in, the Rev. Charles Hutchins who edited the Church Hymnal and, in 1897 produced the official authorized-by-General-Convention Church Psalter. Now I’m going to have to go back and look at Hutchin’s chant choices in a whole new light!

American Company of Servers?

I’ve started any number of times to write a post on this topic and they keep self-destructing after having gone on for far too long about far too little. So—I’ll get right to the point, then.

In the UK, the Society of Catholic Priests is twinned with a lay group—the Company of Servers.

The point of this group is that it teaches the laity who serve at altars and in chancels the practicalities, theology, and spirituality of service in the sanctuary.

In brief, I’m very much for it in the same way and for the same reasons that I’m for the Society of Catholic Priests. In brief:

  • Anglo-Catholicism has always had an issue with idiosyncrasy. Area-wide groups where people come together to learn can help smooth out parish level idiosyncrasies by means of a common practice.
  • Too many times, rectors jerk parishes around especially on the liturgical level. Just because the rector is having a particular spiritual journey doesn’t necessarily mean that the congregation wants to go along. I keep insisting that liturgy in any given place is the theology of the gathered community made kinetic. That doesn’t mean it’s something a rector gets to impose. Instead, a wise priest will determine the operative theologies in a parish and respond to those. A group like this helps laity articulate together what their theology is and, as a result, what sort of worship should result.
  • Sometimes, for a wide variety of reasons, Anglo-Catholics or other forms of “high” Anglicans get stuck in broad to low parishes. Wouldn’t it be nice if a local chapter of the Company of Servers could meet for the BCP-appointed Holy Days and offer a full-on reverent Mass (with the assistance of a like-minded priest) in order to retain the practice and spirituality even if stuck in a parish without it?
  • It’s rooted primarily in practice—what we do together—which seems to me a far more productive ground and purpose than meeting around theology which can get quite fraught especially when we start up the games of “More Catholic Than Thou.”

What do you think—can/could this model get transplanted here? What kind of organizational tweaks might be necessary to deal with the North American situation?