Tuesday, December 30, 2014

"a remark addressed to the contemporary gay fight for marriage equality."

"What you want is to live with a man in a happy home.  But you don't know how trivial it is.  Marriage is emblematic of modern life.  The way men and women are together—it's a silly business, it has no nobility."

     The fictional character Hom, after reading the manuscript of Maurice, in Arctic summer, by Damon Galgut, a novelization of the life of E. M. Forster (therein Morgan) in which "Forster's homosexuality . . . is definitive."  As quoted by Edmund White in "Forster in love:  the story," New York review of books 61, no. 17 (November 6, 2014):  53 (52-53).  White's comment:  "This could well be a remark addressed to the contemporary gay fight for marriage equality" (53).

Honest Abe

"'With him truth is out of the question, and as for getting a good bright passable lie out of him, you might as well try to strike fire from a cake of tallow.'"

     Abraham Lincoln and maybe Mary Todd, in 1841 (27 August 1842, according to  pp. 291 ff. of vol. 1 of the 1953 Collected works of Abraham Lincoln), in "a series of scurrilous letters from a fictitious [!] 'Rebecca' that vilified James Shields, a rising candidate in the Democratic Party" (the "Rebecca" letter from the Lost Townships), as quoted by Garry Wills, in "How Lincoln played the press," a review of Lincoln and the power of the press:  the war for public opinion, by Harold Holzer, New York review of books 61, no. 17 (November 6, 2014):  25 (25-26).  "It was a dirty game by later standards, and no one played it better than Abraham Lincoln" (25).

"let us not be at enmity with ourselves, but change our way of life without delay."

"by taking a body from the Virgin he refashioned our fallen nature. . . .
"he offered his own manhood as the firstfruits of our race to keep us from losing heart when suffering comes our way, and to make us look forward to receiving the same reward as he did, since we know that we possess the same humanity. . . .
     "The [Socratic] saying 'Know thyself' means therefore that we should recognize and acknowledge in ourselves the God who made us in his own image. . . .  So let us not be at enmity with ourselves, but change our way of life without delay. . . .  God is not beggarly"; "for the sake of his own glory he has given us a share in his divinity."
     St. Hippolytus of Rome, Philosophumena or Refutation of all heresies (Refutatio omnium haeresium) 10.33-34 (Refutatio omnium haeresium, ed. M. Marcovich, Patristische Texte und Studien 25 (1986); Hippolytus Werke 3 (GCS 26), ed. Paul Wendland (Leipzig:  J. C. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1916), p. 291, ll. 8 ff.PG 16, pt. 3, cols. 3452A-3453C), as reproduced in the Office of readings for 30 December, Liturgy of the hours, vol. 1, pp. 459-461.  For the ANF translation by J. H. MacMahon, go here.  For the translation of the Cruice text by F. Legge, see vol. 2 (London:  SPCK, 1921), p. 176 ff.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

"grant, we pray, that we may share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity."

"O God, who wonderfully created the dignity of human nature and still more wonderfully restored it, grant, we pray, that we may share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity. . . ."

     Collect for Mass during the Day, Feast of the Nativity (and elsewhere), Missale Romanum (3rd edition of 2002, as re-translated in 2010).


"O God, who didst wonderfully create, and yet more wonderfully restore, the dignity of human nature:  Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, thy Son Jesus Christ. . . .'


     Traditional version of the Collect for the Second Sunday after Christmas Day, Book of common prayer (1979).


"Lord God, we praise you for creating man, and still more for restoring him in Christ.  Your Son shared our weakness: may we share his glory, for he lives and reigns. . . ."

     Missale Romanum (pre-2010 translation).

Deus, qui humanae substantiae dignitatem et mirabiliter condidisti, et mirabilius reformasti, da, quaesumus, nobis eius divinitatis esse consortes, qui humanitatis nostrae fieri dignatus est particeps. . . .”


     Corpus orationum 1692c, a Christmas collect that dates back, in the form of Corpus orationum 1692a, to somewhere between 440 and 555, depending on the scholar (Sacramentarium "Leonianum" or Veronense, Cod., Verona, Bibliotheca Capitularis LXXXV (80), Mohlberg no. 1239 =dating attempts nos. 25 (Leo I, 440-461), 26 (post-451), 27 (anti-Eutychian), 51 (Gelasius I, 492-496), and 68 (Vigilius, 537-555)), and visible (from "Substantia") online in the end-of-the-8th-century Sacramentarium Gellonensis (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale lat. 12048) at fol. 5v.  Cf. 1692b (from "Deus") at fol. 5r.  In the 14th century the words “per huius aquae et vini mysterium” (“through the mystery of this water and wine”) were added and it passed from the Christmas season into the ordinary of the Mass at the point of the Offertory (blessing of the wine mixed with water) (Pristas, 76 ff.), where it can still be seen in the Missale Romanum of 1962, and, in an abbreviated form, the Missale Romanum of 1970 ff.  According to Hatchett (170), it did not appear in the Book of common prayer until 1928 in England (the Book ultimately rejected by Parliament), and 1979 in the United States.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

HERE I FALL (Roland Bainton's Here I stand on “‘A Mighty Fortress [Ein feste Burg]’ in Luther’s Hand”)

UPDATE, 29 October 2019:  see now Steve Perisho, "Here I fall:  a blunder in Roland Bainton's Here I stand," Theological librarianship 12, no. 2 (October 2019):  5-20.  I'm leaving what follows up until I can find the time to be sure that there isn't information here (including bibliographical information) that got cut out of the published article.


     On p. 371 of his much-beloved Here I stand:  a life of Martin Luther (New York & Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1950), Roland Bainton reproduces “‘A Mighty Fortress’ in Luther’s Hand” (below), citing "Charles Schneider, Luther, poète et musicien [et les Enchiridien de 1524] (1942), p. 71" (409):



The problems with this are at least five in number:  1)
  • we possess no authentic Luther autograph of "Ein feste Burg".  Indeed, the critical editions (e.g. Jenny, 100-101, 247-249, and elsewhere) and (so far as I have been able to gather) the best current scholarship (e.g. Hahn and Lauterwasser, not to mention Leupold on pp. 283-285 of Luther's Works 53) discuss only the earliest printed editions, some of which (even they!) are no longer extant.  Cf. e.g. the other major contender, the (by contrast notation-free) Hermann Kyrieleis forgery of the text discredited by Max Herrmann (Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott) by 1905 at the very latest.  (Gerhardt, at p. 13, below, takes a hint from Herrmann (who says on p. 23 that he found a couple of pages from Kade among the things confiscated from the Kyrieleis home and lying with the acts of the trial) in arguing that the-forgery-of-the-superscript I am discussing here, the one at the head of the Johann Walter "Luther-Codex" published by Otto Kade in 1871, if not actually perpetrated by (a much younger) Kyrieleis himself, served as one of the latter's "Vorlage".  And Koschlig, at pp. 224, 242, and 244 (Abb. 10) follows them both in this, calling it Kyrieleis' "Textmuster".  "Dabei fiel wahrscheinlich der Fälscher auf einen Fälscher herein!" (Koschlig, 224)  But that's not all!  For in 1970, Koschlig, at least (p. 231, note 11), argued against Albrecht (at WA 48 (1927), pp. 289-290 (no. 5)) that the loose leaf inserted at the back of a Luther Bible published in 1534 and bearing a fake Luther dedication to a "Herr von Reuß-Greiz" was the model for the inscription imposed by a second forger on the Kade Codex.  So if Koschlig was right (WA 48 (1972) say?), then Bainton, too, ignoring 1) the rejection of his caption twice present in the source he himself cites (Schneider, below), was, like Kyrieleis himself, deceived by 2) a forger (not Kyrieleis) himself deceived by 3) a forger (also not Kyrieleis according to Koschlig, though Albrecht had attributed it to Kyrieleis)!  WA 48 (1972), by contrast, rejected Koschlig's interpretation, considering it obvious that the Kade forgery and the Reuß-Greiz forgery "stem . . . from different unknown hands" (no. 289 f. on p. 138).  But assuming that the hand on which the Kade forger relied was the hand of a forger, then WA 48 (1972) clearly wasn't reducing the number of forgeries in that one single line of descent.  By the way, according to Koschlig, Kyrieleis himself used or invoked the text of "Ein feste Burg" in at least eight of his forgeries (255, under "Eyn fest Burgh").)  This, by the way (still true in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century for "Ein feste Burg" at the very least), was a red flag already for Georg Buchwald (the first to draw attention to what were later recognized as the specifically Kyrieleis forgeries) in 1896.  For Buchwald "the height of audacity" was the fact that autograph copies of (portions of) no less than four different Luther hymns had suddenly surfaced in three, three, two, and two ("Ein feste Burg") copies respectively, each exemplar of a hymn-text in Luther's hand carefully hawked in only one of three different European cities:  Milan, Münich, and Vienna (Buchwald & Schulz, p. 512).  And that despite the fact that “To my knowledge we possess not a single hymn by Luther in [an] original manuscript.”
2)
  • Schneider, the authority explicitly invoked by Bainton, actually argues against the attribution of the reproduced copy of the text of "Ein feste Burg" to Luther, and in italics no less!  Citing its first publication in France in 1888 (Courtois, 54, and, before that, the Strasbourg dissertation published in 1887), Schneider goes on to say (referencing a comment by (supposedlyLuther himself clearly excluded from Here I stand by Bainton),
     Le choral est donc dédié par Johann Walther à Luther — et non... le contraire.  Fait essentiel, que n'ont pas remarqué — semble-t-il — ceux qui ont certifié que l'œuvre elle-même était de 1530.  Le texte allemand est clair, tout à fait clear:  il ne s'agit pas du manuscrit même d'Ein' fest Burg, mais bien d'une copie qu'a faite Walther et qu'il a offerte au Réformateur.  «Hat myr verehret meyn guter Freund Herr Johann Walther...» (73). 
     The chorale is therefore dedicated by Johann Walter to Luther — and not... the contrary.  [An] important fact that those who have [on the basis of this manuscript] sworn that ['Ein feste Burg'] itself was composed in [était de] 1530 have not, it seems, noticed.  The German text is clear, completely clear:  it is not a question of the very manuscript of 'Ein' fest Burg', but rather of a copy that Walter made and that he [then] offered [back] to the Reformer.  «Hat myr verehret meyn guter Freund Herr Johann Walther...» (73).
The fact that Schneider was wrong to consider the superscript genuine is irrelevant to 2) the fact that Bainton both a) misread him and b) excluded from his own reproduction the complete text of the superscript plainly four times (!) evident in his source.  It is also irrelevant to 1) the fact that we have of course no autograph of "Ein feste Burg".

 
3)
  • The superscript signed by "Martinus Luther", which is in reality separated from the copy of "Ein feste Burg" by many pages, and was clearly meant to apply to the collection as a whole rather than "Ein feste Burg" in particular, is in factunlike the said collection-in-manuscript itself, the 16th-century Nürnberger Tenorstimme (Germanisches Nationalmuseum M369=Hs83795), "one of the so-called Torgau Walter-Manuscripts""a forgery of the 19th-century" (Blankenburg, 20-21, 255, citing especially Gerhardt; cf. Stalmann, 38), and therefore not genuine at all.  (According to Gerhardt, the Nürnberger Tenorstimme (=Germanisches Nationalmuseum M369 / Hs83795 =the "Luther-Codex" published by Kade in 1871) is an authentic Walter manuscript, over two-thirds of which (including the copy of "Ein feste Burg" depicted above) is in Walter's own hand (=Hand 1 of 15; cf. p. 10, where "Ein feste Burg is unser Gott" appears under "Hand 1").)  In sum, the Codex is a genuine manuscript of the 16th-century, but the superscript signed "Martinus Luther" is a 19th-century forgery.  The Codex was used and added to by the "musicians:  cantors, students, and copyists" of Torgau (Gerhardt, 13) right on up to the end of the 16th century (Walter had ensured for it a long usage by inserting into it a whole slew of blank pages), after which its trail of ownership goes "dark", until it resurfaces with the superscript in the mid-19th century, is purchased for a pretty penny by the publisher H. Klemm, and handed over to the Walter scholar Otto Kade for the preparation of a published edition.  O. Albrecht, writing on p. 290 of WA 48 described it as "lost" in 1927, but by the time Gerhardt wrote in 1949 it had been rediscovered in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, where it remains today.  According to Gerhardt, its whereabouts was lost to Luther research upon the death of Klemm in 1886, and only rediscovered in the context of Walter research in about 1936 (Gerhard (1949), 6-7), though we know now that it was acquired by a H. von Below of Dresden in 1886, and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in 1893 (Jenny (1983)).
And, finally, 4-5)
  • Bainton obscures the fact that the superscript is separated from the Walter manuscript of "Ein feste Burg" by many pages.  (Relying upon Schneider, who was relying upon Courtois, who was probably relying upon Kade, who did not make this clear in facsimile, Bainton may not have realized this.)
  • Bainton omits all of it (present four times (!) in Schneider, his source) except the signature.  This means that he omits what would make it clear that the claim (of the forger!) is not that it is "in Luther's hand"!
     Courtois (who on p. 53 cites "Deutsche Literaturgeschichte von Robert Kœnig.  Bielefeld et Leipzig. 1881") would have been drawing ultimately upon the first publication of the 16th-century Nürnberger Tenorstimme by Otto Kade.  Yet Kade himself felt it necessary to argue for the authenticity of both Codex and superscript already in 1871 (Gerhardt, ), and questions about the authenticity of both had appeared in print as early as 1874, if not before ("Die Echtheit dieser musicalischen Luther-Reliquie ist von vielen anerkannt, von andern bezweifelt worden.  Namentlich ist die Echtheit des Inscripts nicht ohne bedenken.  —  Vgl. 'Luther und der Sängermeister Johann Walther' im 'Daheim' 1874, S. 102-106" (Holstein, 197)).  As Tomasz Ososinski, citing p. 224 of Koschlig, pointed out to me in a note dated 7 January 2015, O. Albrecht, on p. 290 of WA 48 (1927), the volume of WA devoted to "Uncertain, incorrect, forged", but at that point more especially "Further dubious, incorrect, false" "Bible and book markings by Luther"), writes as follows:
The words on the title page of the so-called Kade Luther-Codex ([see the] more precise details [given] at [WA] 35 (1923), 85-87)—they are no[t themselves a] dedication, but an acknowledgement of [(Notiz über)] a dedication [already] effected [(eine geschehene Widmung)]—exemplify certainly not Luther’s own hand; whether they are an old copy or a new forgery, and what the value of this [now] lost musical manuscript, considered apart from this remark on its title [page (diesem Titelvermerk)], is, have not yet been clarified.
(As I've already noted, the manuscript was apparently not lost, and its value "für die Walter-Forschung [is, unlike the forged Luther superscript,] von großer Bedeutung" (Blankenburg, 21).)
     On pp. 90 ff. of his book Die verräterische Tinte (1958), to which I was first directed by the Polish scholar Tomasz Ososinski (whose inquiry, posted to ATLANTIS by Dr. Mark Glen Bilby, sparked these investigations), Luther specialist Otto Schlisske tells of having been approached in the mid- (on the basis of the publication date of the first German edition of 1952, I would guess rather the very early) 1950s "von einem der namhaftesten deutschen Verleger" (this would have to have been Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), whose translator (this would have to have been Hermann Dörries) had thought there wasn't an extant autograph of "Ein feste Burg", and was checking to be sure that one hadn't turned up in the United States after the Second World War.  Schlisske, who apparently wasn't given a glimpse of the reproduction in [Bainton], responded by forwarding his already published comments on the long-since discredited forgery by Kyrieleis, and communicated his suspicion ("Verdacht") that [Bainton] had been duped by something analogous.  I say "[Bainton]" because Schlisske doesn't actually name anyone in particular, yet reproduces the Bainton caption (as communicated to him by [Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) virtually word-for-word ("'Ein feste Burg von Luthers Hand'").  Not surprisingly then, the first German edition of 1952 reproduces only the text of "Ein feste Burg", but not a reproduction of what Bainton claimed was the original autograph.  (This Schlisske says and I have confirmed.)
     I have been working my way through all of the reviews of Here I stand listed on pp. 133-135 of Cynthia Wales Lund's Bainton bibliography (a list that Lund does not claim is exhaustive), and, though still waiting for a number of them to come in, have yet to encounter a single one that mentions this howler.  Indeed, not even the Germans (not even the church historian and translator Hermann Dörries (for some reason "D. Dörries") of Göttingen, who has to have been the one to raise the question put to Mr. Schlisske (above), and who, writing in the Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte (on whose Board of Editors Bainton was at that time sitting) in early 1951, noted that "A German translation by the reviewer is in press and should be published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht of Göttingen in late summer") do so.
     Nonetheless, reprints as late as the Hendrickson of 2011 have continued to follow Bainton in attributing both script and superscript to "Luther’s Hand", rather than to Walter and company on the one hand, and an as yet unidentified 19th-century forger on the other.  Schlisske says that it was precisely this that, in the late 1950s, prompted him to write his "Kriminalroman der Handschriftenforscher [Max Herrmann]":  "Since then the extraordinarily valuable works [(plural, as in the letter from V & R)] of American scholarship on Luther [that were the subject of the V & R inquiry of c. 1950/52 have] been translated into still more languages.  In this connection I came to realize that [it was] precisely the image of Luther’s ‘handwritten draft of the hymn "Ein feste Burg . . ."' [reproduced therein that] was sensationally [over]valued [(sensationell gewertet wurde)].  [It was] this [that] prompted me to revisit again in depth the superb investigations conducted 50 years ago by Max Herrmann" (92).

     Chap. 21 of Here I stand appeared for the first time "Inadvertently" (Studies on the Reformation, 13) in Church history 17, no. 3 (September 1948):  193-206, as "Luther's struggle for faith", and then, in 1950, in the 1950 Festschrift für Gerhard Ritter zu seinem 60. Geburtstag, ed. Richard Nürnberger, and then, in Collected papers in church history, series two:  Studies on the Reformation.  In that version, reprinted in The Reformation:  material or spiritual (1962) and the two editions of The Reformation:  basic interpretations (1962, 1972), both edited by Lewis W. Spitz, Bainton closes with the words, "What wonder then that Luther, in the year of his deepest depression, composed 'A Mighty Fortress is our God.'"  Only in the biography does he conclude with "What wonder then that Luther, in the year of his deepest depression, composed these lines:", the text in an (his own?) English translation, and the image of A Mighty Fortress’ in Luther’s Hand”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sunday, December 21, 2014

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other".

"We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other".

     John Adams "To the Officers of the . . . Militia of Massachusetts," 11 October 1798.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Teilhard de Chardin on "the difficulties . . . in 'living in the world as though not being of the world'"

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.  We are, quite naturally, impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.  We should like to skip the intermediate stages.  We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.  And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—and that may take a very long time.  Thus, we have been through a whole year’s suspense, not knowing what the future holds for civilization.  And so, I think, it is with you.  Your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste.  Don’t try to ‘force’ them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make you tomorrow.  Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.  Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you surely through the obscurity and the ‘becoming’, and accept, for love of him, the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

     Pierre de Teilhard de Chardin to his cousin Marguerite Teillard-Chambon (aka Claude Aragonnès, 1880-1959), [Zuydcoote], 4 July 1915, in The making of a mind:  letters from a soldier-priest 1914-1919, trans. from Genèse d’une pensée:  lettres 1914-1919 (Paris, B. Grasset [1961]) by René Hague (New York:  Harper & Row, Publishers, 1961), 57-58.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Speaking truth to [me]

"As I've said many times before, we have serious obligations as believers to care for the poor, the immigrant, the elderly, and persons with disabilities.  Those duties belong personally to you and me, not just the governmentthough the government clearly has a role.  If we ignore the poor, we will go to hell.  If we blind ourselves to their suffering, we will go to hell.  If we do nothing to ease their burdens, then we will go to hell.  Ignoring the needs of the poor among us is the surest way to dig a chasm of heartlessness between ourselves and God and between ourselves and our neighbors."

     Charles J. Chaput, the Archbishop of Philadelphia, in "Strangers in a strange land," First things no. 249 (January 2015):  30 (25-31).  And by the way, "lest we forget:  The poor include the unborn child."

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

The human soul considered qua soul is to be distinguished from the human soul qua form of a (particular) body

"the soul seeks so to enjoy God that that enjoyment redounds to the body to the degree this is possible.  Therefore as long as it enjoys God without its body, its desire is quieted by what it has, which, however, it still wants its body to have by participation in it."

"Appetit . . . anima sic frui Deo, quod etiam ipsa fruitio derivetur ad corpus per redundantiam, sicut est possibile. Et ideo quandiu ipsa fruitur Deo sine corpore, appetitus eius sic quiescit in eo quod habet, quod tamen adhuc ad participationem eius vellet suum corpus pertingere."

     Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II.4.5.ad 4, on whether the body is required for the perfect happiness of the beatific vision, as trans. Ralph McInerny.  Unconfirmed Latin from Corpus Thomisticum.

Saturday, December 13, 2014

vox Verbi

"When the word [(verbo)] has been conveyed to you, does not the sound seem to say:  The word ought to grow, and I should diminish?  The sound of the voice [(Sonus vocis)] has made itself heard in the service of the word, and has gone away, as though it were saying:  My joy is complete."

     St. Augustine, Sermo 293.3 (PL 38, cols. 1328-1329), as translated in Liturgy of the hours, vol. 2, p. 261.  I have not checked PL 38 directly, but only this rekeying.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

God "does not create the world, he saves it".

     Alfred North Whitehead, Process and reality:  an essay in cosmology V.ii.4 ((New York:  The Macmillan Company, 1960 [1929]), 526; corrected edition ed. David Ray Griffin & Donald W. Sherburne (New York:  The Free Press, 1978), 346).  Whitehead's rejection of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is, of course, well-known.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

God is a se, not (as in Whitehead and process theology generally) causa sui

     Jean-Michel Maidamé, "Cosmologie et théologie:  Étude de la notion de création dans la théologie nord-américaine du 'Procès'," Revue thomiste 86 (1986):  102n37 (90-114).  Though too soft on Whitehead and the process theologians, this is one of the better articles on process theology that I have read so far.

Friday, December 5, 2014

"No folk tale has ever begun thus: 'Once upon a time there was a president.'"

     Nicolás Gómez-Dávila, as quoted in "Deathless truths," by Matthew Walther, First things no. 248 (December 2014):  56, a review of Scholia to an implicit text:  bilingual selected edition (Bogatá:  Villegas Editores, 2013).

Monday, December 1, 2014

"Seigneur, faites de moi un instrument de votre paix" | "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace"

1912 December:  the prayer appears for the first (and last) time in La clochette 9, no. 12 (decembre 1912):  285, edited by l'abbé Esther Bouquerel (1855-1923), without any further attribution or commentary as follows (Christian Renoux, La prière pour la paix attribuée à saint François:  une énigme à résoudre, Présence de saint François 39 (Paris:  Les Éditions Franciscaines, 2001), 25 ff., where it is also set in the context of the editorial and authorial practices of Bouquerel, whose personal papers had not by the year 2001 been uncovered):

Belle Prière à faire pendent la Messe

     Seigneur, faites de moi un instrument de votre paix.
     Là où il y a de la haine, que je mette l'amour.
     Là où il y a l'offense, que je mette le pardon.
     Là où il y a la discorde, que je mette l'union.
     Là où il y a l'erreur, que je mette la vérité.
     Là où il y a le doute, que je mette la foi.
     Là où il y a le désespoir, que je mette l'espérance.
     Là où il y a les ténèbres, que je mette votre lumière.
     Là où il y a la tristesse, que je mette la joie.
     O Maître, que je ne cherche pas tant à être consolé qu'à consoler, à être compris qu'à comprendre, à être aimé qu'à aimer, car c'est en donnant qu'on reçoit, c'est en s'oubliant qu'on trouve, c'est en pardonnant qu'on est pardonné, c'est en mourant qu'on ressuscite à l'éternelle vie.

1913 January:  the prayer appears in Annales de Notre-Dame de la Paix à Beauchêne (Orne), no. 95 (janvier 1913):  582, ed. le chanoine Louis Boissey (1859-1932), who was a La clochette subscriber, and who retained the title and cited La clochette, but changed "Là où il y a la discorde" to "Là où il y a de la discorde", and "Là où il y a l'erreur" to "Là où il y a de l'erreur" (Renoux, 46-47).  Here it was encountered by the Marquis Stanislas de La Rochethulon et Grente (d. 1941) (Renoux, 47), president of the Anglo-French Souvenir Normand (Renoux, 48), a "Ligue universelle de paix" committed to the realization of the supposedly last wish of William the Conqueror, ancestor of the monarchs of Europe, for "'La justice.  Le droit.  La paix de Dieu'" throughout Christendom (Renoux, 52).

1915 December:  the prayer is commended by the Marquis Stanislas de La Rochethulon to the peace pope Benedict XV via Cardinal Gasparri in the form of a prayer for peace addressed to the Sacred Heart of Jesus ("Prière du Souvenir Normand au Sacré-Cœur inspirée du testament de Guillaume le Conquérant, Rouen Saint-Gervais, 9 sept. 1087", but attributed penultimately to "La Clochette normand").  It lacks the second of the two changes introduced by Boissey, and places "foi" and "espérance" in all caps (Renoux, 47 ff., 59).  Gasparri acknowledged receipt on 1916 January 24 (Renoux, 55).

1916 January 20:  the prayer appears at the request of Cardinal Gasparri or maybe Pope Benedict XV in an Italian translation on p. 1 of L'Osservatore Romano ("Le preghiere del 'Souvenir Normand' per la pace"), with the changes outlined at Renoux, 62, and especially the "psychologizing" shift from "c'est en s'oubliant qu'on trouve" to "nel dimenticare se stessi che si ritrova se medisimi" ("c'est en s'oubliant soi-même qu'on se retrouve soi-même").

1916 January 28:  the prayer is translated back into French (from the much-altered Italian of L'Osservatore Romano) on p. 6 of the Paris Assumptionist daily La croix (Renoux, 62 ff.), and even further psychologized ("c'est en se donnant que l'on reçoit", Renoux, 62-65).  Until the discovery of 1912 December in [year], above, the French Franciscans long considered this the original text (Renoux, 63-64).

1916 February 3:  La croix publishes a letter from the Marquis Stanislas de La Rochethulon specifying that "[this prayer was published for the first time in January of 1913 in the Annales de Notre-Dame de la Paix]", and crediting Boissey, though the Marquis de La Rouchethulon had himself specified La clochette in his letter to the Pope (Renoux, 65-67; cf. 59, under 1915 December, above).

1917:  Face à l'épreuve!, by Alexandre Pons (1887-1938), appears, in which the prayer is called, not just (as by the Marquis de La Rochethulon, referencing William the Conqueror) medieval, but "très ancienne" (Renoux, 69).

[post-1918 (?)]:  Fr. Étienne Benoît (Étienne de Paris), OFM Cap., a visitor assigned to the Third Order Franciscans of Rheims, prints it for them (as "Extraite [(Extraité?)] du «Souvenir Normand»") on the verso of a holy card bearing on its recto an image of St. Francis of Assisi, and calls it for the first time specifically a "Prière pour la paix".  Beneath the prayer appear the following two paragraphs:  "[This prayer sums up marvelously the exterior physiognomy of the true Child [(i.e. Tertiary)] of Saint Francis and the salient traits of his character.  May all the Tertiaries of the district of Rheims make of it their program of life.  The surest means of realizing it is of course [(encore)] to recite this formula piously every day and to ask God with fervor for the grace to put it into practice]" (Renoux, 71 ff.).

pre-1925 September:  an English translation dependent on the original French of Group B is made and becomes in turn the source of the French in the September 1925 issue of Vie franciscaine (Renoux, 134, 130, 87, 74-75, etc.).  It is, so far as we know, only the second to appear outside of France.

1925 December:  the original version of 1912 December, only very slightly modified (Renoux, 80n15), is adopted as the official prayer of the Mouvement des Chevaliers du Prince de la Paix (1924- ) and published on p. 3 of no. 7 of the Bulletin des Chevaliers de la Paix by the French lieutenant, Mouvement founder, and Protestant Etienne Bach, who had been introduced to it "[in Paris in the Spring of the year 1925]" by the Protestant pastor and reconciliation activist (Secretary of the Union protestante chrétienne/Evangelisch-Christliche Einheit) Jules Rambaud (Renoux, 80).  Bach called it, following Bouquerel, "Une belle prière" (later "Prière des Chevaliers de la Paix").

1927 August:  the version published by the Protestant Etienne Bach is "Attribuée à St François d'Assises" (sic) in a short account of the third assembly of the Mouvement des Chevaliers du Prince de la Paix in Bois-Tizac, Gironde (Renoux, 81), and often by said Mouvement thereafter.  On 20 March 1967, the (by then) Rev. Bach wrote Fr. Willibrord to say that he had looked into its origin, but without success (Renoux, 82).  "[It is therefore in Protestant circles that our prayer was first attributed to Saint Francis]" (Renoux, 81).

1936:  a new English translation differing from the one at the root of the back-translation in the 1925 September issue of Vie  appears in the anthology New every morning:  the prayer book of the daily broadcast service (London:  British Broadcasting Corporation, 1936), and an extract entitled "A Prayer of St. Francis", on a prayer card published in London by Mowbray (Renoux, 87-88).

1937:  the German pastor F. Delekat (1892-1970) translates the "Prière de saint François d’Assise" into German at the request of a Mademoiselle Martin, then resident in Geneva and a member or booster of (probably) the Mouvement des Chevaliers de la Paix, and the Delekat translation spreads throughout (Switzerland? and then) Germany from 1945 (Renoux, 88-89).

1939 September 4:  Joseph Lanza del Vasto hears a French version of the prayer dependent on that of La Croix (above) at the Catholic church in Thonex, near Geneva (Renoux, 89-90).

1945:  "La prière de François d’Assise (XIIIe siècle)" appears on p. 427 of the official Liturgie de l’Eglise de Genève (Renoux, 90).

. . .



"Toutes des vérifications montrent donc que saint François n'a pas écrit la prière pour la paix.  Et pourtant, aujourd'hui, cette prière est certainement pour le grand public le texte le plus connu de ce saint.  Les franciscains d'Assise eux-mêmes ne diffusent-ils pas des cartes en plusieurs langues portant imprimées ce texte avec en signature la nom de saint François[?]  Comment a-t-on pu en arriver là?  C'est ce que nous allons essayer de comprendre à travers l'histoire de l'apparition et de la diffusion exceptionnelle de cette prière."

     Christian Renoux, La prière pour la paix attribuée à saint François:  une énigme à résoudre, Présence de saint François 39 (Paris:  Les Éditions Franciscaines, 2001), 20.

"This text, attributed to the saint with the reputation for being one of the great Christian mystics, is not addressed to Jesus Christ, does not even name him.  There is to be found in it no evangelical or [even] biblical allusion.  None of the desires it expresses is specifically Franciscan or [even] Christian."

     Fr. Willibrord-Christian van Dijk, O.F.M. Cap., "Préface" to Christian Renoux, La prière pour la paix attribuée à saint François:  une énigme à résoudre, Présence de saint François 39 (Paris:  Les Éditions Franciscaines, 2001), 6-7, translation mine.
     That, at least, seems extraordinarily unjust.  For it begins with the profoundly biblical appellation "Seigneur" (e.g. Lk 5:12 and very often elsewhere; cf. 1 Thess 3:12), and contains in fact many allusions certainly consistent with Scripture, if not uniquely biblical, references to peace, love, pardon, truth, faith, hope (and thus all three of the theological virtues), light, joy, the superior blessedness of giving (Acts 20:35), the necessity of death to resurrection (Jn 12:24 and very often elsewhere), and so forth. 

"Noble as its sentiments are, Francis would not have written such a piece, focused as it is on the self, with its constant repetition of the pronouns 'I' and 'me,' the words 'God' and 'Jesus' never appearing once."

     Augustine Thompson, O.P., Francis of Assisi:  a new biography (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2012), ix.

"which in fact dates from the end of the nineteenth century".

     André Vauchez, Francis of Assisi:  the life and aftermath of a medieval saint, trans. Michael F. Cusato (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2012 [2009]), 243, citing only Renoux.

Selected works on the prayer published since Renoux 2001:

"I can be in error, but I cannot be a heretic, because the first belongs to the intellect, the second to the will."

"Errare enim possum, haereticus esse non possum."

     Meister Eckhart, Response to the list of forty-nine articles, Introduction, trans. Bernard McGinn (Meister Eckhart:  the essential sermons, commentaries, treatises, and defense, trans. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and Bernard McGinn, Classics of Western spirituality (New York:  Paulist Press, 1981), 72); [Magistri Echardi reponsio ad articulos sibi impositos de scriptis et dictis suis I.1, Responsio ad articulos primi rotuli], abbrev. as Responsio I, n. 80 (Meister Eckhart: Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke: Die lateinischen Werke, ed. Josef Koch et al., 5 vols. (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1936-), vol. 5, ed. Loris Sturlese, p. 277, ll. 4-5).  Surlese cites also "Bonaventura Sent. IV d. 13 dub. 4, Opera omnia IV, 313b: . . . contra Augustinum, qui dicit primo De Trinitate [I c.3 n. 5]:  Errare potero, sed haereticus esse non potero", I shall be able to err, but a heretic will not be able to err.  I do not see this exactly at De Trinitate I.3.5 in the translations, so maybe Bonaventure was paraphrasing?  The edition of Bonaventure at the link above goes on to say, in a footnote, "Colligi potest ex c. 1-4, praesertim ex c. 3, n. 5.  Cfr. praefatio in libr. de Haeres. [7], ubi dicit, quod non omnis error haeresis est, quamvis omnis haeresis, quae in vitio ponitur, nisi errore aliquo haeresis esse non possit", "not every error is a heresy; yet, since every heresy involves a defect, a heresy could only be a heresy by reason of some error" (trans. Teske, Works of Saint Augustine:  a translation for the 21st Century I/18, p. 33).
     I was put onto this by Lee Staman.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Collect for the Feast of Christ the King

Almighty ever-living God,
whose will is to restore all things in your beloved Son,
      the King of the universe,
grant, we pray, that the whole creation, set free from slavery,
may render your majesty service
      and ceaselessly proclaim your praise.
Through. . . .

Omnipotens sempiterne Deus,
qui in dilecto Filio tuo, universorum Rege,
omnia instaurare voluisti,
concede propitius,
ut tota creatura, a servitute liberata,
tuæ maiestati deserviat ac te sine fine collaudet.
Per. . . .

     Collect, Last Sunday in Ordinary Time/Feast of  Christ the King, Missale Romanum, 1970- .

Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui in dilecto Filio tuo, universorum Rege, omnia instaurare voluisti, concede propitius; ut cunctæ familiæ Gentium, peccati vulnere disgregatæ, ejus suavissimo subdantur imperio:  Qui tecum. . . .

     Collect, Last Sunday of October/Feast of Christ the King, Missale Romanum, 1962.  =Bruylants no. 785.  Bruylants gives (other than Eph 1:10, below) no pre-20th-century source, and neither version of the prayer is present in Corpus orationum before the Missale Romanum of 1970 ff. (CO 12, p. 180 (186/2 521); CO 13, p. 178 (no. 529)).

Almighty and everlasting God, who in Thy beloved Son, the King of the whole world [(universorum Rege, King of [all] bodies politic)], hast willed to restore all things, mercifully grant that all the families of the nations now kept apart by the wound of sin, may be brought under the sweet yoke of His rule:  Who. . . .

     The daily missal and liturgical manual with Vespers from Sundays and feasts from the editio typica of the Roman missal and Breviary, 1962. . . . (London:  Baronius Press, 2009), 1551-1552.

Almighty, everliving God, who hast willed that in thy beloved Son, the universal king, all things should be made new, grant in thy lovingkindness that all the peoples of the earth, now torn asunder by the wound of sin, may be subdued to the gentle sway of him who is God.

     The missal in Latin and English, being the text of the Missale Romanum with English rubrics and a new translation (New York:  Sheed & Ward, 1949), 1235.

Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in thy well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords:  Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule; who liveth and reigneth with thee. . . .

Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords:  Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule; who lives and reigns with you. . . .

     Collect for the Sunday closest to November 23, Book of common prayer (1979).  According to Hatchett, "This is a somewhat free translation by Capt. Howard E. Galley of the collect of the Feast of Christ the King in the Roman Missal" (p. 195).

Almighty Father,
whose will is to restore all things
in your beloved Son, the King of all:
govern the hearts and minds of those in authority,
and bring the families of the nations,
divided and torn apart by the ravages of sin,
to be subject to his just and gentle rule;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

     Third Sunday before Advent, Common worship (Church of England).

Eph 1:9-12:
. . . ut notum faceret nobis sacramentum voluntatis suae secundum bonum placitum eius quod proposuit in eo in dispensationem plenitudinis temporum instaurare omnia in Christo quae in caelis et quae in terra sunt in ipso in quo etiam sorte vocati sumus praedestinati secundum propositum eius qui omnia operatur secundum consilium voluntatis suae ut simus in laudem gloriae eius. . . .
Lumen gentium 36 (where there is also or only (?) a quotation from the Preface to the Feast of Christ the King):

Gaudium et spes 39 (where there is also or only (?) a quotation from the Preface to the Feast of Christ the King):


Saturday, November 22, 2014

Further up and further in?

     "Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?
     "I do not know. I have told his story as he told it to me. There are times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the victim of the coincidence between a rare but not unprecedented type of hallucination and a careless trap, but that indeed is not my profoundest belief. You may think me superstitious, if you will, and foolish; but, indeed, I am more than half-convinced that he had in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense, something—I know not what—that in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him in the end. But did it betray him? There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination. We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger, and death.
     "But did he see like that?"

     H. G. Wells, "The door in the wall," The door in the wall, and other stories (1911), as reprinted in Tales of the unexpected (London:  Collins, [1922]), 209-210; and The complete short stories of H. G. Wells, ed. John Hammond (London:  J. M. Dent, 1998), 583-584.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

"if we do not look exclusively to Jesus Christ and therefore to God we lose the capacity on this basis to think inclusively."

"wer nicht exklusiv auf Jesus Christus und so auf Gott blicken will, der verliert eben damit die Fähigkeit, von ihm aus inklusiv zu denken!"

     Karl Barth, CD IV/1, par. 57, trans. Bromiley & Torrance, p. 58.  =KD IV/1, par. 57, p. 61.  German from the Digital Karl Barth Library.

Monday, November 17, 2014

Happiness uninterrupted and complete

Cod. Bibl. Capit. Veron. LXXXV [80].
Replace with the very collect once available here.
Give to us, we pray, O Lord our God, 
always to rejoice in your devotion, because perpetual and complete is [our] felicity if we serve continually the author of all goods. Through.

"Da nobis, quaesumus, Domine Deus noster, in tua semper devotione gaudere, quia perpetua est et plena felicitas, si bonorum omnium iugiter serviamus auctori.  Per."

     Collect for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time.
     This is no. 934 in Corpus orationum, which traces it back to Mohlberg no. 486 in the Veronese or "Leonine" sacramentary (Cod. Bibl. Capit. Veron. LXXXV [80]) written in the early 7th century, but containing prayers dating back into the early 5th (400-440 according to the ODCC).  (The scholars consulted through 1956 by Mohlberg had attributed this collect to Popes Damasus (366-384), Leo I (440-461), Gelasius I (492-496), and Vigilius (537-555), i.e. to periods ranging from the mid-4th to the mid-6th century.)  But it is also no. 2599 (sacramentaries from the 8th century and later):

"Fac nos, quaesumus, domine deus noster, in tua devotione gaudere, quia perpetua est et plena felicitas, si bonorum omnium serviamus auctori."

Cause us, we pray, O Lord our God, always to rejoice in your devotion, because perpetual and complete is [our] felicity if we serve continually the author of all goods.  Through.

The former is mistranslated in the 2010 Missal as:

"Grant us, we pray, O Lord our God, the constant gladness of being devoted to you, for it is full and lasting happiness to serve with constancy the author of all that is good.  Through."

And, according to Fr. Z, in the 1973 Missal as:

Father of all that is good, keep us faithful in serving you, for to serve you is our lasting joy.