Abstract
Even as pre-Reformation images have been carefully and lovingly restored in parish churches in England, the liturgical poetry that informed and inspired those images has languished or remained obscure, as the province of specialists and scholars. The rich body of pre-Reformation hymnody and liturgical poetry—much of which has its roots in sixth- and seventh-century texts—deserves to be a source of prayer, reflection, and theological inspiration for all Christians. The Anglican world is especially well-suited to offering fresh translations and mediating increased access to pre-Reformation poetry.
In St. Peter’s Church Wenhaston, Suffolk, there resides a fifteenth-century treasure: a wooden tympanum panel depicting the Last Judgment, almost completely intact, its greens and reds and pinks nearly as brightly preserved as when it was painted in the 1480s. The tympanum was discovered under whitewash during a nineteenth-century restoration, and now is displayed once again in St. Peter’s.
Doom of St. Peter’s Wenhaston. At Christ’s left side is the Archangel Michael, weighing the souls of the dead; at Christ’s right, the souls of the blessed. (Matthew 25:31–33). Photo credit: Mike P. Shepherd/Alamy Stock Photo.
But the tympanum has a ghost—three, to be exact. Outlined against the wood panel are the three blank spaces where the statues of Mary, John, and Jesus on the cross would have been affixed, before the paroxysm of the Reformation tore them down. Viewers of the Wenhaston Doom today can see the vibrant background, but the Rood figures of the foreground that gave meaning and purpose to the scene of the Last Judgment have been lost. These figures survive at Wenhaston and many other places throughout England only in shadowy outline, a ghostly testament to the Reformation assault on images.
The remarkably violent iconoclasm of the English Reformation has in the last forty years moved from controversial opinion to scholarly fact. The traditional nineteenth-century view of the English Reformation underlay most historiography of the period until the 1970s, and that view was a simple one: the end of Catholicism in England was the inevitable result of a moribund and corrupt religious system, and the Reformation itself was a broadly and immediately popular movement representing the triumph of reason, order, and good sense over the forces of fanaticism and superstition. These assumptions (and there are some seven or eight ahistorical assumptions packed in there) went largely unchallenged until the last quarter of the twentieth century, when revisionist historians began taking aim at this propagandistic framing of a complex era through a careful examination of primary sources in parish records, material evidence, and contemporary accounts. 1
These days, visitors to Wenhaston and many other restored English parish churches can see underneath the layers of whitewash to glimpse the polychrome world of late medieval Catholicism, and they can gain some sense of what was lost. Less evident, however, is another kind of iconoclasm, and that is the loss of the texts that supported, explained, and inspired this dense visual world. While some of the material casualties of iconoclasm have been recovered or restored, the casualties of “logoclasm” have been more lasting. In the years following 1536, a millennium of Christian poetry, hymnody, and liturgy was swept away—a whole Alexandrian library of text that was at first censored, then restricted, and finally done away with altogether in the imposition of the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549. The scaffolding of the psalter remained, but the vast supporting structure of antiphons and hymns built around the psalms in the Office and Mass had vanished. The full round of the daily Office was abolished with the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536–1541, and this same period saw the destruction of the parish service books as well. Even the smallest village church had owned missals, antiphoners, Gospel book, Psalter, and additional books as needed for Evensong and processions, not to mention the separate volumes required for Holy Week, the Triduum, and other feast days. Richly illuminated psalters tended to survive—snatched up by noble buyers or for the royal library—but most of the ordinary service books did not fare so well. After the abolition of the Mass, many of these books were sold for parts or simply scrapped. The books and the poetry they contained no longer served any conceivable purpose, for anyone other than a rarefied scholarly elite.
Sometimes the monks and nuns went to great lengths to save their books. We know of one such case in the survival of the St. Albans Psalter—so called because of its creation in the scriptorium of the great abbey of St. Albans. This extraordinary twelfth-century manuscript is the pinnacle of Romanesque illumination in the British Isles, and each psalm is lavishly illustrated. Scholarly consensus says that this book was created as a gift for the first prioress of Markyate Priory in Hertfordshire, the hermit and clairvoyant Christina of Markyate, 2 who might in fact be depicted in the initial of Psalm 105:
The book would have been among the greatest treasures of the relatively small and poor priory, which at the time of the dissolution in 1536 had fewer than twelve nuns and an income of less than two hundred pounds a year. In the list of England’s great religious establishments, the little foundation of Markyate hardly merits a mention—a footnote at best, known today only for its foundress Christina and for its remarkable Psalter. But even though the destruction at Markyate would have been small-scale, there is a certain pathos to imagining the last prioress handing over her keys and her books as the doors of their church were shut forever behind this handful of insignificant, unknown women who had spent their lives there. There is of course no way of knowing what was taken, what was destroyed, and what was set aside for sale. But somehow, the St. Albans Psalter escaped the royal examiners and was smuggled overseas, where by the seventeenth century, it ended up in the possession of the English Benedictines of Lamspringe. It could be that the last prioress of Markyate, Joan de la Zouche, buried or hid the book until it could be safely sent away; it could be that a wealthy benefactor of the priory stepped in to help the nuns hide their treasure. But a manuscript like the St. Albans Psalter could only have left the country and escaped royal oversight with great difficulty. The prioress could not have hidden Markyate’s entire library, and though the collection would not have been large, the rest entered the royal maw and was either sold or burnt. The one survivor stands for the dozens of books that did not survive.
Psalm 105, St. Albans Psalter (f. 285r). The veiled figure who possibly represents Christina intercedes before Christ for the monks gathered behind her. The “C” of the initial begins the Psalm (Confitemini Domino) but could also be a nod to Christina’s name. Hildesheim, St. Godehard Dombibliothek MS. 1. Photo credit: public domain.
This logoclasm has received less popular, devotional, and scholarly attention than its iconoclastic counterpart, possibly because most of those texts survived in some version in the rest of the Catholic world until the twentieth century. But they were gone from the English devotional imagination after the sixteenth century. Even as the texts of medieval devotional writers like Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and Margery Kempe resurfaced and gained popularity in the Anglican world, the liturgical texts of Office and Mass that shaped Julian, Rolle, Hilton, and Kempe remained obscure. The “O” Antiphons are one notable exception: revived in Anglo-Catholic circles in the nineteenth century, they continue to inspire musical settings today, and the hymn “O Come O Come Emmanuel” has returned the “O” Antiphons to popular devotion during Advent. The elaborate Scriptural riffs contained in these antiphons exploring the names of Christ are striking, but by no means unique in their vocabulary or in their compact distillation of Scriptural themes. This same approach of using poetry and liturgical composition to summarize, explain, and re-frame doctrine in carefully constructed interlocking phrases characterizes many of the hymns and antiphons of the medieval liturgical corpus of both Office and Mass.
What follows is an exploration of two such texts: the Lenten hymn of Lauds and the Benedictus antiphon of Epiphany. These are two especially vivid examples of the way that liturgical composition did more than just re-state Scriptural themes: at its best, this literature expanded on traditional teaching, opening new understandings, and drawing connections between Scriptural ideas which illuminated the entirety of traditional Christian teaching. The commentary offered by these texts served as a signpost for listeners, nudging them toward a fuller understanding of the Scriptural event or passage. These hymns and antiphons, in their frequently impassioned language, were a direct emotional response to the Scriptural text—a response which then guided, validated, and informed devout listeners in their own responses. By assuming a kind of “Greek chorus” relationship to Scripture and Biblical events, the immense body of literature that was lost to logoclasm opened a path of emotional participation in parish, monastery, and cathedral. Most importantly, these texts offer a different way of thinking about doctrinal authority, and can point the way to a particularly Anglican theology not just supported by liturgical texts but actively shaped and created by them.
The joy of Lenten Lauds
At the hour of Lauds, medieval monastics greeted the rising of the sun. They themselves would have risen hours before, saying the office of Matins in the dark hours before dawn. “Rising at night, we all keep vigil” (nocte surgentes vigilemus omnes), says the summer Matins hymn for Sundays, and Matins poetry is full of reference to this darkness that envelops the world while the faithful pray. By contrast, the hymns of Lauds are often full of references to light: usually prayed right after Matins, this shorter, more cheerful office consists of psalms of praise (the “Lauds” in question) and the joyful canticle of Zechariah, hailing the “dayspring from on high” (oriens ex alto). The hymn sung at this Office during Lent plays on many of the traditional themes of Lauds: Christ is the “Sun of Righteousness” (sol iustitiae) bringing back to the faithful the “light of grace” (virtutum . . . lux) even as he returns daylight to the earth (terris diem cum reparas).
The imagery of light associated with the old office of Lauds carries special significance in Lent, when liturgical poetry riffs endlessly on the theme of darkness versus light: the days slowly lengthen, letting in more light, just as those who have been constant in prayer and discipline during Lent feel the slow increase of light in their souls. This internal drama of the soul plays out against the background of the impending resurrection of Christ the true Dayspring, so light imagery in Lenten liturgy rings all the changes—light in the physical world, light in the individual human soul, and finally light in the cosmic order. These three levels of understanding (natural, human, and universal) were more or less instinctive to a medieval Christian, monastic or secular.
In thinking about how a medieval Christian would have encountered this text, it helps to keep in mind that the division that marks our understanding of the ecclesiastical world—clergy versus lay—would have been of secondary importance to pre-Reformation Christians beside the larger division of religious (i.e., monastic) versus secular. Most monks (and of course, all nuns) were not priests throughout most of the medieval era, so “secular” included ordained priests who lived in the world, outside of the cloister. A bishop was “secular,” as was the laywoman who washed his floors, as was the parish priest serving his flock. Something of this ancient understanding is reflected in William Butler Yeats’s 1904 poem Adam’s Curse, when he refers to the “noisy set/Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen/The martyrs call the world.” Secular religious authorities were always trying to “tame” the influence of monastic religious authorities, and the oldest and surest way to do that was to turn monastics into priests. When Athanasius of Alexandria came to make his episcopal visitation of the monasteries of the Egyptian desert, Saint Pachomius instructed his monks to flee lest they be caught and ordained. 3 The spiritual authority of the holy man of the desert did not depend on the bishop’s power, and in fact existed in contrast to—and frequently in conflict with—the urban centers of power represented by bishops and their secular functionaries. 4
The hymn that monks would have sung at Lauds in Lent post-dates those first-generation fathers of the desert, but like most such liturgical poetry, it is hard to say just when—not to mention where—it comes from. It is possible that Iam Christe Sol Iustitiae dates to St. Benedict’s own sixth century as he shaped the office that his monks would keep, with its seven-fold round of daily prayers (eight if you separate Matins and Lauds, which monastics rarely did). It is also possible that the hymn dates to a later period, to the tenth century. Like the overwhelming number of such texts, it is anonymous. All we know is that it begins to appear in liturgical manuscripts around the tenth century, but the name of the poet is lost to us—no doubt as he or she intended. These hymns were poetry, but they were also (and chiefly) prayer. Their verse presents deep Christology and complex doctrine in taut, layered lines intended to pull the mind into deeper meditation on the mysteries of Christian revelation and of the soul’s relationship to her savior.
Unfortunately, most Office hymns are available to English speakers in rhymed translations that have not aged terribly well. John Mason Neale (1818–1866) translated nearly every Office hymn of the Roman Breviary into English, and his work bore fruit in the 1875 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern, which contains fifty-eight of Neale’s translations of medieval Latin Office hymns. Although other translators also worked with these hymns, it was Neale’s ear for poetry that cracked open these texts for nineteenth-century audiences. Neale’s penchant for hymnography was, however, regarded with distrust by many of his Tractarian colleagues, who were by nature suspicious of hymns. Benjamin Webb wrote him in irritation that I expect I shall loathe your Methodistical snuffling hymnizing article. It is the oddest thing to me that you have never slipped off that Evangelical slough: and it is due, I take it, to your own fatal facility for versifying.
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That facility was keyed more to nineteenth-century tastes than our own, and Neale’s translations (brilliant as they are) consistently prioritize meter, rhyme, and general meaning over a more literal, accurate rendering—an understandable goal, since Neale’s intent was to make these texts singable.
In that, Neale was following the lead of other translators who had worked with Englishing these texts before him. The first translation of Iam Christe Sol Iustitiae is usually attributed to John Dryden some two hundred years before Neale, and in Dryden, we see the same drive to preserve the original’s iambic tetrameter. The result is that the seventeenth-century translation has little of the spare elegance of the Latin, and frequently sacrifices meaning to meter. The staid rhythms of Dryden’s poetry are lovely, but absent the urgency or starkness of the Latin, and some of it is just made up. For instance, in the third stanza, the translation asks for “some penance kindly but severe,” as though God is a mildly abusive parent who will only spank us enough to make us aware how bad we have been. “Kindly but severe” is a very seventeenth-century English way of thinking about God as village schoolmaster, but that is not at all the God that the medieval author knew. The Latin of that stanza reads:
Quiddamque paenitentiae
da ferre, quo fit demptio, maiore tuo munere,
culparum quamvis grandium.
In less flowery English, it says this: And give us to bear something of penance, through which—by your greater gift— there may be an erasure of our sins, however great.
The word which I have translated (under Dryden’s influence) as “penance” is paenitentia, and it does not in fact just mean (or even mainly mean) penance. Its primary meaning was always penitence, repentance, a change of heart and mind. The author is asking for the gift of repentance and for the “greater gift” of forgiveness. The hymn is not really asking for a penance—for something we can perform to please God—but for a complete uprooting of the old ways in our heart, for the repentance that turns us around in the middle of the road to face the light of God’s forgiving grace. That is the gift the author prays for, and prays as well for the strength to bear it: “Give us to bear something of repentance” because repentance is a beautiful but terrible gift that once let loose in the soul re-orders it completely. We can catch some echo of the author’s spiritual agony, too, in that word quiddamque, “something.” If we can only catch hold of the trailing skirts of repentance, if we can have just a glimmer of it, just a little “something,” it will be enough of a gift. It is not just our humility but our fear that pulses in that quiddamque, for what would happen if we asked not just for something of repentance, but for (so to speak) the full monty? Would it be granted? Could we bear it, if it were?
A final note about this stanza: Dryden was a masterful Latinist, and moving from a tightly interwoven language like Latin to the expansive plains of English is a linguistic challenge. My own rendering is not somehow better than Dryden’s verse, just designed to showcase theological meaning for an audience that prizes simplicity of language. There are, however, places where English cannot quite get there. My translation stumbles over two Latin words: maiore and grandium. I have used a form of “great” for both—“your greater gift” and “our sins, however great”—because any other adjective in English sounds odd, but really the word describing our sins (grandium) means something more like tall, lofty, massive. The poet is describing sins that are so large that we cannot see around them, a visual obstruction so massive that it blocks our view of the light that begins to dawn in the next stanza. But there is no way to talk about “our sins, however massive,” without the English sounding odd and stilted.
The real theological meat of this hymn lies in that following stanza, the one that talks about the day returning to earth. A cleaner, simpler rendering of the verse looks like this:
The mournfulness of the hymn turns on a dime toward rejoicing. Gone is all the mourning over the weight of our sins, and the somewhat gloomy vocabulary of the preceding verses. The hymn has persuaded the listener that the dies we are preparing for is, of course, Judgment Day: THAT day. The day is coming, the hymn announces, and the reader’s assumption is that this is the day on which God will clear his account books, in which we must be judged, and in which we discover whether all our paenitentia and fasting was really sufficient. The first line of the stanza sounds an ominous note, with its repetition of dies and its impending arrival: dies venit, dies tua. But then at the second line of this stanza, things take a turn. Because Judgment Day is not the day the hymn means at all, not even a little. The great day the hymn is talking about is in fact that other day, the day of final renewal of the cosmos.
On a practical level, the hymn points us toward the day of Jesus’s resurrection, the joy of Easter that we can glimpse afar off. It reminds us that all our Lenten preparation finds its fulfillment and joy in the light of Easter. That too is the day that is coming, just visible over the horizon in our somber and penitential observances of Lent. That phrase dies tua, “your day,” expresses the convergence of both the natural and the liturgical calendar: the day that slowly returns to the natural world at the dawn while Lauds is sung, the daylight that is slowly returning with spring to the earth, and also the day that will dawn on Easter morning.
But there is one more layer revealed in this hymn, and that is the cosmological layer. The hint that the hymn is talking about more than just Easter morning lies in that omnia. “All things flower again,” says the text. The day being talked about here is not just the day of Jesus’s resurrection, but the day of the great ingathering: the day of final fulfillment and everlasting joy for every corner of the cosmos, when all the universe is renewed, and in which every dry branch and twig miraculously flowers again. That omnia points us toward the renewal not just of Jesus’s own flesh, and not just of our own souls, but toward the remaking of the entire universe in the final consummation of all things: “your day through which all things flower again.”
There is not a single future verb tense in this stanza, which Dryden’s English renders as relentlessly future: Soon will that day, thy day, appear and all things with its brightness cheer: we will rejoice in it, as we return thereby to grace, and thee.
But in fact the hymn nowhere says that the day will come, any more than it says that all things will flower again, or that we will rejoice. All those verbs are present tense, in the Latin: they are now. The literal translation by contrast says this: The day is coming, your day Through which all things flower again Let us rejoice in it, so that through it We are led back to your grace.
The Latin could not be more clear: “the day is coming,” present tense; “all things flower again,” present tense; “let us rejoice,” present tense; “we are led back,” present tense. The drumbeat of now resounds throughout this stanza. Both the great days of our joy—the resurrection of Christ and the renewal of the entire created world at his second coming—are on the horizon, yes, but they are also here now, present with us. Neither Lenten preparation nor Easter joy are play-acting; we are not pretending to be sad and sorry for our sins so that we can pretend to be surprised on Easter morning. Easter has already happened, and the light of its joy infects all our penitence. Because time too is a creation of God’s providence and bends also to His will, the great day of renewal of the whole cosmos has in a sense already happened and is happening now. The gates of hell lie shattered now under the feet of Jesus, and because of that, the re-ordering of the cosmos that was set in motion then is happening now, all around us.
Most significantly, the hymn does not promise that we will rejoice in all of this, once it happens. The hymn exhorts us to rejoice now, to let the joy of Easter morning and the joy of the Great Day seep into our souls now, even—and especially—in the midst of our fasting, our penance, and our prayer. The hymn breaks down the wall between penitence and rejoicing. Penitence and rejoicing are not linear acts, with one leading directly to another; they are rather circular and simultaneous, with each one infecting the other, and both happening at once. This knowledge turns our fasting, penance, and prayer into fundamentally joyful acts. We rejoice, even as we repent, and we rejoice, because we repent.
This paradox of the joyful penitence has a long heritage in Christian thought, dating at least to the beginning of the monastic movement in Egypt and Palestine. The lives of the desert fathers was a harsh one, marked by frequent deprivation and rigorous feats of asceticism. The writer of the fourth-century Historia Monachorum in Aegypto reports his astonishment at the devotional exploits of the monks of the monastery of Apa Apollo in Bawit: After having eaten, they sit and listen to the father’s teaching on all the commandments until the first watch of the night. At this point some of them go out into the desert and recite the Scripture by heart throughout the night. The rest remain where they are and worship God with ceaseless hymnody until daybreak. I saw them with my own eyes begin their hymns in the evening and not stop singing until the morning. Many of them only come down from the mountain at the ninth hour, and having taken part in the Eucharist leave right away, satisfied with spiritual food alone until the ninth hour of the following day. A large number of them do this for many days at a time.
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And yet this bodily severity exists alongside a joy that the writer records with an equal wonder: Nevertheless, one could see them in the desert filled with a joy and a bodily contentment such as one cannot see on earth. For nobody among them was gloomy or downcast.
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Apa Theon is described as a man “with the face of an angel, giving joy to his visitors (ἦν δὲ ἰδεῖν αὐτὸν τὸ πρόσωπον ἀγγέλου ἔχοντα)”; Apa John of Lycopolis has a “bright smiling countenance (φαιδρῷ τῷ προσώπῳ ἑκάστῳ προσιλαρευόµενος)”; when the pilgrims come to the monastery of Apa Apollo, the monks of Bawit “came running to meet us, singing psalms (µετὰ σπουδῆς προσδραµόντες ὑπήντησαν ἡµῖν ψάλλοντες).” 8 This same bright joy seeps into the solemn rhythms of Iam Christe Sol Iustitiae in its climactic stanza. Hardly anyone in a Western medieval audience would have known the Historia Monachorum, even in its Latin translation. But if the earlier sixth-century date is correct for the hymn, that places it near the birthdate of Benedictine monasticism, during which the spiritual wisdom of the desert found its way into medieval hymnography via John Cassian, Jerome, the monks of Lérins, and of course Benedict himself. The eloquent terseness of the Lenten Lauds hymn bears witness to its place in this long tradition and linked the medieval believer to the insight of the desert.
Restoring agency and ancient meaning
Nineteenth-century translations also worked subtly to erase the agency of female actors in salvation history. The sixth-century hymn to the Virgin, Quem terra, pontus, aethera (“The God Whom Earth, and Sea, and Sky” in Neale’s translation) often attributed to Venantius Fortunatus, celebrates Mary’s significance in a series of poetic praises in which she is the ark of God (ventris sub arca), the doorway of the King (regis alti ianua), the shining gate of light, (porta lucis fulgida), the glorious Lady (gloriosa Domina). 9 Fortunatus was equally devoted to his own glorious lady and spiritual patron, Queen (later St.) Radegund, whom he often addressed in language that explored her spiritual motherhood—he is “the loving lamb driven from its mother’s udder” when he has not been able to hear her voice. 10 The latter part of Fortunatus’s hymn (sung at Vespers on feasts of the Virgin) contrasts Mary and Eve in theological commonplace, and though the idea of Mary as a reversal of Eve might be a usual one, Fortunatus’s language is not:
Most nineteenth-century (and later) translations of this verse carefully shift the action away from Mary. The 1905 Hymner renders the lines as “Through thy sweet Offspring we receive/The bliss once lost through hapless Eve,” which remembers Eve’s action while erasing the salvific action of Mary that balances it, turning Mary’s restitution into an action performed only by the Offspring. 11 In this translation, it is Jesus alone who acts, not the Kind Lady (benigna), and the emphatic “you” (tu) of the second line is ignored. It is probably less misogyny than the Anglican translators’ bedrock Protestantism that squirmed a little at de-centering Jesus’s action in favor of Mary’s. But the effect is to unbalance the theological and poetic equation: if Mary cannot restore what Eve lost, then female action is effective only for sin and not for salvation. The medieval Office hymn is categorical in its assertion of Mary’s ability to put right her ancestor’s wrongdoing. She may not herself be the path, but she is the one who points the way and provides the passage.
Sometimes liturgical poetry was able to testify to and restore the ancient meaning of a feast by uniting disparate (and even competing) themes with rhetorical sleight of hand. Epiphany is perhaps the most theologically chaotic feast on the Christian calendar, not least because of its entirely different meaning in the Eastern and Western halves of the Christian world. In its origin, Epiphany (or Theophany, among Eastern Christians) was the feast of Christ’s baptism: the starting point of his ministry and the point from which the rest of the Gospel radiates outward, in Mark. Among Western Christians, almost all of those baptismal associations were lost, and as Christmas gained in importance, Epiphany was colonized as a kind of liturgical outpost of that feast, eventually becoming a bookend to the Christmas season by commemorating not the beginning of Jesus’s anointing and ministry, but the end of the infancy narrative with the arrival of the Magi. The original meaning of the feast—the baptism of Christ, the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry, and the manifestation to the world by the presence of the Holy Spirit—was pushed to the following Sunday, so that the second Sunday of Epiphany became associated with the baptism. The Sunday after that was devoted to the miracle at Cana—another beginning point of Jesus’s ministry, this time not the baptism as in the Synoptics but the wedding at Cana according to the Johannine tradition (in which the baptism of Jesus is strictly an “offstage” affair). So the Epiphany became over the course of years a feast of multiple manifestations and starting points, struggling to pull together Eastern and Western traditions as well as synoptic and Johannine traditions.
This is captured brilliantly in the antiphon on the Benedictus canticle for Epiphany Day 12 :
In language that recalls the wedding of earth and heaven in the Paschal Exsultet, 13 the antiphon has in one deft sentence united the disparate elements of this complex feast under the controlling metaphor of marriage. It is the wedding of Christ to his Church, and the baptism becomes the mikveh-cleansing of the bride before her marriage, accomplished by her bridegroom himself. The gifts of the Magi acquire a meaning and purpose beyond the usual symbolism of the gifts (gold for kingship, incense for divinity, myrrh for burial). Here, they have become wedding gifts offered at the joyous event of Christ’s union with his people, and the people themselves are both the bride (Ecclesia) and the guests (convivae) who are invited to make merry. This is not the bloodless theological abstraction of “manifestation,” which requires the central actor (God) to manifest himself to humanity as mute and appreciative audience. In this image, humanity are the honored guests who are made glad (laetantur) by the miracle, and who rejoice alongside the Magi and Christ himself.
As in the Lenten hymn, here too the poetry moves the listener away from brooding solemnity and toward joy. The antiphon functions as an image of the marriage feast of the Lamb and of the Kingdom itself. The antiphon collapses time and space: there is no distance here between Jesus as infant and Jesus as adult, or between Bethlehem, Cana, and the Jordan River. The multifocal nature of the feast has been resolved into an icon of the Kingdom, and this antiphon framing the high point of Lauds—the Gospel canticle of Zechariah—re-packages the entire Epiphany season into a coherent whole focused on nuptial joy.
The three levels at which liturgical poetry operates—natural, human, and universal—here open the feast to more than a commemoration of a one-time event. On the natural level, Epiphany/Theophany celebrates the baptism of Jesus by John, but on the human level, we are baptized as well. Gregory of Nazianzen connects Christ’s action to our own souls in his Sermon On the Holy Light, read at the second Nocturn of Matins in the medieval office.
Christ is enlightened, let us be enlightened together with him; Christ is baptized; let us go down with him, so that we may rise again with him . . . so that he may utterly drown the old Adam in the waters.
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The action of renewal in Christ’s baptism does not stop at the human person, but involves the whole created world, which is also cleansed and sanctified with and through Christ at the moment of his baptism. As Jesus rises out of the waters, continues Gregory, He brings together with him the cosmos, and he beholds the heavens torn open which Adam had closed for himself and for his descendants.
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The event of the baptism is cosmic as well as human and natural. It is the blessing of the material world which was begun in the incarnation and completed in Christ’s willing immersion in the waters, an immersion which both mirrors and foretells his immersion in the tomb. As that immersion in the sepulcher causes divinity to enter the hidden spaces of death, so his immersion in the Jordan breaks open the hidden spaces of earth to the power of God. This is the source of the patristic joy of the feast, a joy which causes Gregory to cry out “I cannot hold back my joy, I have become so full of God.” 16 These registers of natural, human, and cosmic joy are reflected in the antiphon, which culminates in the final striking image of the guests at the wedding who are “made glad” (laetantur) by the water made wine, and which finds expression in the final cry of the antiphon, rising from the redeemed at the feast and from the Church on earth: alleluia!
* * *
Mining theological meaning from texts that were lost to logoclasm is more than just an interesting literary exercise. This small exegesis is only a beginning, both in the sense that there is still much left to explore in each text discussed above, and in the sense that there are hundreds and hundreds more such hymns, antiphons, and other poetic compositions that deserve this kind of intentional consideration. That consideration should be made available at all levels of the Church, because these texts were not ever intended for a narrow scholarly audience; they are the common heritage of all Western Christians, and their reclamation for devotional life is as important as the restoration of the Wenhaston Doom.
What would such a reclamation look like? It would look like a broad movement that returned as much of this material to the faithful as possible, in as many ways as possible: a “Markyate Project” designed to re-open the treasure-house of Christian poetry to an English-speaking readership, named for the nuns of Markyate Priory who helped save the St Albans Psalter. To start with, the project would require new translations of much of this material, translations that build on the work of Neale and others but that do not rely on nineteenth-century poetic language and do not prioritize meter over meaning. These new, more supple translations could then be used in a variety of ways, as both bound volumes and online reference. A Markyate Project could produce (1) supplemental service material available to composers, musicians, and liturgists; (2) reference books for preachers and students, arranged according to the liturgical calendar and possibly cross-referenced with the Scriptural and patristic allusions; and maybe most importantly, (3) devotional books for laypeople interested in expanding their prayer life and their knowledge of the Church’s year. The latter could be as simple as a daily meditation on a hymn stanza, an antiphon, a collect, or a versicle, and could be geared toward families as well as individuals. The treasury of Christian poetry is deep and wide, and it can and should be made available to the Church writ large—not just to pillage a few objects of interest, but to re-discover the mind of the Church and to see our own heritage with new eyes.
Of course, “heritage” is a loaded word that packs some ominous cargo. Among our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, the pre-Reformation liturgy of Mass and Office has become a kind of rallying point for the forces of conservative reaction. Because the loss of these texts post-Vatican II is so recent in the Catholic world—within the last fifty years—the emotional, political, and spiritual scars of reform are still painful. In the thin air of the “trad” Catholic blogosphere, the medieval Office has become a marker of resistance to the post-conciliar world.
For Anglicans, these texts represent neither recent trauma nor embattled debate. For most Anglicans, they matter not at all—a better position to be in than one in which they matter as identity markers. The medieval liturgy passed out of devotional consciousness in the Anglican world some four hundred years ago, which means that we can approach these texts not as signifiers of controversy but as part of our own history, detached from the emotion and censorious furor of both the sixteenth century and the present day. It could very well be part of the particular Anglican charism to curate and restore these texts—to model reverent and dignified vernacular translations as well as a way to return parts of this heritage into our corporate and personal devotion.
None of that is to deny that in the Anglican world, the translation and use of the pre-Reformation Office has been bound up with the Oxford Movement and with Anglo-Catholicism in general. The first translations of the complete texts of the Office into English were made by Neale for the Society of St. Margaret, and the Office in some form or other was for a time used by almost all of the newly founded Anglican religious orders—for many of them in the United States until the 1970s. 17 But it is time to push back against the narrative that confines these texts to a narrow slice of the Church, or to a particular style of worship or churchmanship. For more Reform-minded and evangelical Anglicans, the word has always been the focus of intense devotion—and this is at its heart a project to restore the word by increasing the store of text available to scholars, to priests, and to the laity. What more Reformed project could there be than one that transforms the whole treasury of Christian text into a tongue understanded of the people and that ensures increased access to that treasury? The undoing of logoclasm is a uniquely Reform project.
Bishop Kallistos Ware, in his introduction to The Festal Menaion, tells the story of the hesitation felt by some of the French Roman Catholic hierarchy when the dogma of the Assumption was promulgated in 1950, in Pius XII’s encyclical Munificentissimus Deus. The bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary had always been a matter of widely held pious opinion, but before 1950, had not been classified as dogma necessary to salvation, nor tied so explicitly to the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. These bishops approached Metropolitan Vladimir, the Russian Exarch in Europe for the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and asked him if he could summarize for them the Orthodox teaching on the Assumption. The Metropolitan replied that they should read the Orthodox office of the feast, used on August 15, and he said that he had nothing further to add to what was written there. 18 The bishops must have found his answer evasive at best, but Metropolitan Vladimir’s response points to the richness of doctrine available to him in a liturgy that runs (in The Festal Menaion) to more than twenty pages of unique material for Matins alone. That is roughly the same amount of proper material in the old Western office as well, so the Catholic bishops would have been familiar with the richness and poetry of the liturgy associated with August 15; that part would not have been strange to them. What would have been unusual for them is the attitude toward that poetry, which does not regard the liturgy of Office and Mass as a source of authority subject to hierarchical interpretation, but as an authority to which the hierarchy itself must in the end submit: a final authority vested not in a single person, but in the collective voice of the tradition handed down from generations of largely anonymous poets.
This world—a world in which liturgy is not just an expression of doctrine, but a teacher of it—is a world that is also deeply Anglican in leeriness of doctrinal formularies and its willingness to see liturgy as a deposit of revelation. Anglicanism is historically wary of the kind of dogmatism that concerned the French bishops. As a matter of custom, the churches of the Anglican communion—while affirming the historic creeds—have tended to found their theology on multiple sources of authority and tradition. A restoration movement that advanced medieval poetry, music, prose composition, and other non-dogmatic sources of theological authority—a Markyate Project—would not be a movement in a new or unprecedented direction, but an expression of an intensely Anglican way of praying, thinking, and believing: not a recent or fanciful invention, but the claiming of its own past.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
1
This re-examination has its roots in John Bossy’s The English Catholic Community 1570-1850 (1975) but really took off with J. J. Scarisbrick’s 1982 Ford Lectures (The Reformation and the English People, published 1984) and Christopher Haigh’s The English Reformation Revised (1987). Patrick Collinson’s The Birthpangs of Protestant England (1988) opened the door to scholarly discussion of the troubled world of the Elizabethan and early Stuart religious landscape, a discussion treated most exhaustively in Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992 and in a new edition as of 2022.)
2
Scholarship on Christina of Markyate and on the St. Albans Psalter exploded in the twentieth century, especially after Otto Pächt, Francis Wormald, and C. R. Dodwell’s magisterial study of the Psalter published in 1960, The St. Albans Psalter (London: Courtauld Institute, 1960). Her unfinished Vita, The Life of Christina of Markyate, was translated by C. H. Talbot in 1959 (New York: Oxford University Press), and since then Christina studies, in particular, has been a vibrant area of continuing scholarship.
3
The Life of Saint Pachomius and His Disciples, trans. Armand Veilleux (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1980), 317. (Greek Life of Pachomius chapter 30). Athanasius was also a famously prickly individual, and it is not outside the realm of possibility that the monks’ aversion to archiepiscopal visitation was down to dislike of Athanasius even more than dislike of priestly ordination.
4
The best and most succinct exploration of this idea remains that of Peter Brown in “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 71 (1971): 80–101.
5
Letter of September 1, 1849. A. G. Lough, The Influence of John Mason Neale (London: S.P.C.K. Press, 1962), 74. For more on Neale’s involvement with the musical aspect of Tractarianism, see Richard William Wilkinson, “A History of Hymns Ancient and Modern” (PhD. Diss., University of Hull, 1985), 2–14.
6
The Lives of the Desert Fathers: Historia Monachorum in Aegypto (Cistercian Studies no. 34), trans. Norman Russell and Benedicta Ward (Trappist: Cistercian Publications), Chapter VIII: 50–51, 77. ειθ᾽ οὓτως διαιτηθέντες ἐκάθηντο ἀκούοντες αὐτοῦ διδάσκοντος πάσας τὰς ἐντολὰς ἄχρι τοῦ πρωθυπνίου. ἐκείθεν δὲ οἱ µὲν ἐπὶ τὴν ἔρηµον ἐξ αὐτῶν ἀνεχώρουν ἀποστηθίζοντες τὰς γραφὰς ὅλην τὴν νύκτα, οἱ δὲ ἐκεῖ προσεκαρτέρουν ἀπαύστοις ὕµνοις τὸν θεὸν εὐφηµοῦντες ἄχρις ἡµέρας· οὃς ἐγὼ αὐτὸς αὐτοψὶ ἐθεασάµην ἑσπέρας ἀρξαµένους τῶν ὕµνων καὶ µέχρι πρωῒ οὐ παυσαµένους τῆς ᾠδῆς. πολλοὶ γοῦν αὐτῶν κατὰ τὴν ἐννάτην ὥραν µόνον κατήρχοντο ἐκ τοῦ ὅρους καὶ τῆς εὐχαριστίας µετελάµβανον καὶ πάλιν ἀνῄεσαν ἀρκούµενοι τῇ πνευµατικῇ µόνῃ τροφῇ ἄχρις ἄλλης ἐννάτης. τοῦτο δὲ ἐποίουν πολλοὶ ἐξ αὐτῶν ἐπὶ πολλὰς ἡµέρας. (Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, ed. A.-J. Festugière (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1961), Chapter VIII: 50–51, pp. 66–67).
7
Lives, Chapter VIII: 52, 78. ἦν δὲ ἰδεῖν αὐτοὺς ἀγαλλιωµένους κατὰ τὴν ἔρηµον, ὡς οὐκ ἄν τις ἴδοι ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς
τοιαύτην ἀγαλλίασιν οὐδὲ εὐφροσύνην σωµατικήν, οὐδὲ γὰρ στυγνὸς ἤ κατηφής τις ἦν ἐν αὐτοῖς. (Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, ed. A.-J. Festugière (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1961), Chapter VIII: 52, p. 67.)
8
Lives, Chapter VI: 1, p. 68 (HM VI: 1, p. 44); Lives, Chapter I: 13, p. 54 (HM I: 13, p. 13); Lives, Chapter VIII: 48, p. 77 (HM VIII: 48, p. 65.)
9
The second portion of the hymn (sometimes seen as O Gloriosa Femina instead of Domina) is often reproduced as a stand-alone hymn for Lauds of a Marian feast, as in a twelfth-century manuscript in the British Museum (Harley MS 2928, f. 120b).
10
Venanti Fortunati Opera Poetica, ed. Friedrich Leo (Berlin: Weidmann, 1881), 286, Appendix, xxi.
Qualiter agnus amans genetricis ab ubere pulsus tristis et herbosis anxius errat agris.
11
Translation of J. W. Doran and M. J. Blacker, in The Hymner: Containing Translations of the Hymns from the Sarum Breviary (London: Plainsong and Medieval Music Society, 1905), 72.
12
Latin text from Monastic Diurnal: The Day Hours of the Monastic Breviary in Latin and English (Farnborough: St. Michael’s Abbey Press, 2020), 131*. (All Latin and Greek translations mine unless otherwise noted).
13
O vere beáta nox, in qua terrénis cæléstia, humánis divína iungúntur!
“O truly blessed night, in which heavenly things are joined to those of earth, and the divine to human!”
Or, in the language of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer: “How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined and man is reconciled to God” (Easter Vigil, 287).
14
Gregory of Nazianzen, Oratio 39 In Sancta Lumina, chapters XIV-XV, Patrologia Graeca vol. 36, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: 1858), col. 350–352.
Χριστὸς φωτίζεται, συναναστράψωµεν; Χριστὸς βαπτίζεται, συγκατέλθωµεν, ἳνα καὶ συνανέλθωµεν. . . πάντα τὸν παλαιὸν Ἀδὰµ ἳν᾽ ενθάψῃ τῷ ὓδατι.
15
Gregory of Nazianzen, In Sancta Lumina XVI, PG 36, col. 354.
Συναναφέρει γὰρ ἑαυτῷ τὸν κόσµον, καὶ ὁρᾷ σχιζοµένους τοὺς οὐρανοὺς, ὃυς ὁ Ἀδὰµ ἔκλεισεν ἑαυτῷ καὶ τοῖς µετ᾿ αὐτὸν.
16
Gregory of Nazianzen, In Sancta Lumina XIV PG 36, col. 349.
Οὐ δύναµαι κατέχειν τὴν ἡδονὴν, ἔνθεος γίνοµαι.
17
The Community of St. Mary, both Eastern and Southern province, moved to a prototype of the 1979 Prayer Book’s four-fold office in 1972, and away from the Monastic Diurnal, a 1932 translation of the 1925 Breviarium Monasticum published at Bruges, and which has had a vigorous life in reprint from Lancelot Andrewes Press. The Order of the Holy Cross also moved to a modified Prayer Book Office even earlier, in the late 1960s. The history of Anglican religious orders and their relationship to the pre-Reformation Office is a fascinating and complicated one, and deserves more scholarly attention than it has received.
18
Bishop Kallistos Ware, “The Orthodox Services and Their Structure,” in The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware (South Canaan: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1998), 65.