Saturday, December 16, 2017

The Eucharistic Advent. Not First or Second, but Sacramental

Source
Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand; | Ponder nothing earthly-minded, for with Blessing in His Hand | Christ our God to earth descendeth, our full homage to demand.

King of Kings, yet born of Mary, as of old on earth He stood, | Lord of Lords, in Human Vesture—in the Body and the Blood— | He will give to all the Faithful His Own Self for Heavenly Food.

Rank on rank the Host of Heaven spreads its vanguard on the way,
As the Light of Light descendeth from the realms of endless day,
That the Powers of Hell may vanish as the darkness clears away.

At His Feet the six-winged Seraph:  Cherubim with sleepless eye
Veil their faces to the Presence, as with ceaseless Voice they cry—
Alleliua, Alleliua, Alleliua, Lord most High!

     Gerard Moultrie, Lyra eucharistica: hymns and verses on the holy communion, ancient and modern; with other poems, 2nd ed. (London:  Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864), 133, following a prose translation of the Cherubic Hymn (τοῦ χερουβικοῦ) of the mid-5th-century-or-earlier Liturgy of St. James by Thomas Rattray (ODCC, 3rd rev. ed.; J. R. Watson in The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology).  The Cherubic Hymn appears on p. 176 (Greek)/177 (Latin) of the critical edition in Patrologia orientalis 26 (1950):  119-256, and on pp. 41-42 of Brightman, Liturgies eastern and western (1896), pp. 31-68 (Greek) and 69-110 (Syriac).  I reproduce the Greek and latin here from PO 26, but with italics for Brightman's unical:
Σιγησάτω πᾶσα σάρξ βροτεία καὶ στήτω μετὰ φόβου καὶ τρόμου καὶ μηδὲν γήϊνον ἐν ἑαυτῇ λογιζέσθω· ὁ γὰρ βασιλεὺς τῶν βασιλευόντωνΧριστὸς ὁ θεὸς ἡμῶνπροέρχεται σφαγιασθῆναι καὶ δοθῆναι εἰς Βρῶσιν τοῖς πιστοῖς, προηγοῦνται δὲ τούτου οἱ χοροὶ τῶν ἀγγέλων μετὰ πάσης ἀρχῆς καὶ ἐξουσίας, τὰ πολυόμματα χερουβὶμ καὶ τὰ ἑξαπτέρυγα σεραφὶμτὰς ὄψεις καλύπτοντα καὶ βοῶντα τὸν ὕμνονἈλληλούϊα.
Sileat omnis caro mortalis et stet cum timore et tremore neve quidquam terrestre in se meditetur.  Rex enim regnantium, Christus Deus noster, prodit ut mactetur deturque in escam fidelibus, praecedunt autem hunc chori angelorum cum omni principatu et potestate, cherubim multis oculis et seraphim sex alis praedita, facies velantia et vociferantia hymnum, alleluia. 
Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and stand with fear and trembling, and ponder nothing earthly in itself; for the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Christ our God, cometh forward to be sacrificed and to be given for food to the faithful; and He is preceded by the choirs of the Angels, with every Domination and Power, the many-eyed Cherubim, and the six-winged Seraphim, that cover their faces, and vociferate the hymn, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

Let all mortal flesh be silent, and stand with fear and trembling, and meditate nothing earthly within itself:—For the King of kings and Lord of lords, Christ our God, comes forward to be sacrificed, and to be given for food to the faithful; and the bands of angels go before Him with every power and dominion, the many-eyed cherubim, and the six-winged seraphim, covering their faces, and crying aloud the hymn, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

The Liturgy of St. James "at Zante (and sometimes elsewhere) on 23 Oct. (acc. to the E. Church, the day of St James's death) and at Jerusalem on the Sunday after Christmas" (ODCC).

Monday, December 11, 2017

Semper reformanda

Although there are now many variants on the phrase semper reformanda, at the core of them all lies (in the 21st century) the formulation ecclesia reformata semper reformanda"The church reformed [and/but/because] always to be reformed," i.e. perpetually in need of further reformation.  (It should be noted that one might say exactly this of the Christian university (Universitas) as well.)  It was not used by the 16th-century Protestant Reformers, who thought the requisite degree of reformation achievable, and even—as did Calvin, who was followed in this by Jerome Zanchi (1516-1590), André Rivet (1572-1651), François Turretin (1623-1687), and Peter von Mastricht (1630-1709)—urged their successors not to introduce any further innovations (Busch, 298; van Lieburg is rightly more cautious, but cites no specifics:  "The conviction that the church had continually to examine and purify itself in doctrine and practice cannot be denied to great reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin" (44, italics mine)).  Indeed, "The 'reformanda' is in Zanchi and Turretin to be understood of Papism" exclusively, and "not the Reformed Church", such that Peter von Mastricht could speak of a two-fold theology:  "reformanda or papal, & reformata by Zwingli, Luther, and others" (Mahlmann (2010), 405n130 and especially 424n224).
The origin of the idea of, and indeed even the explicit contrast between a church reformata and yet reformanda as applied to the reformed (reformata) churches (according to Mahlmann "a hitherto unheard of claim", a "break with the tradition [that extended clear] back to Calvin" (424 and 424n224)) was until quite recently thought to lie in the late-17th-century Dutch proto-Pietists of the Nadere Reformatie ("further Reformation"), and in particular Jodocus van Lodenstein ("Such a person of understanding would not have called the Reformed Church reformata, or reformed, but reformanda, or being reformed" (Lodenstein in 1678 (not 1674), as quoted at Busch, 286, and Mahlmann (2010), 387 and 387n24, 424)), where it apparently still does represent a reversal of "the dynamic [established by Jerome Zanchius, 'The only sixteenth-century theologian . . . to use the two participles . . . in a single context to speak of the problem of reformation in the [supposedly already reformed] church'], so that reformanda [rather than the 16th-century's relatively achievable reformation] became the ideal, while reformata came to represent a passive, self-satisfied complacency in the face of lax faith and morals" (Busch, 291-292).
But it does not lie there (Mahlmann (2010), 435).  In his groundbreaking article of 2010, already much referenced above, Theodor Mahlmann pushed it—the concept, that is—nearly a century further back, as far as a Reformed 1595 hypothetically, but to a Lutheran 1610 for sure.  Here I list only the relevant Latin (rather than the many vernacular) highlights, though the treatment given this by Mahlmann is nothing if not astonishingly fulsome:
  • 1595 (Bremen)/1596 (Anhalt)/Marburg (1605)/Brandenburg (1613)/Bohemia (1618-1620):  Mahlmann hypothesizes, short of the documentary evidence he is so exceptionally good at uncovering, that the abortive attempt at a "Calvinization" ("Calvinisierung") of these areas is the background against which Friedrich Balduin was writing in 1610 (Mahlmann, 441-442).
  • 1610:  Friedrich Balduin of Wittenberg, on Mal 1:1, the ultimate source of the very nearly identical Latin claim in Johann Schmidt (1719):  "semper in Ecclesia opus esse Reformatione, quia semper occurrunt corruptelæ morum & doctrinæ" (Mahlmann, 438 ff.; in Schmidt it was est).
  • 1629-1637:  Sweder Schele of the Castle Welbergen:  "In omni facultate et ordine semper reformandum est, hos est ad principia redeundum, in Ecclesia ad Principium verbi Dei divinæ veritatis, in Politia ad ius[,] . . . et . . . in domo ad bonum ordinem domesticum et commodum honestum rei familiaris" (Mahlmann, 434 ff.).
  • 1660:  Johannes Hoornbeecks:  "commune opus reformandae in melius ecclesiae" | "reformantium, & non tantum reformatorum, ut semper debeamus reformare, siquidem reformati esse cupimus, & nomine isto digni, quia studio" (Mahlmann, 426 ff.).  1663:  Johannes Hoornbeecks:  "Omnis reformatus, est & reformans", etc. (there is more; Mahlmann, 430 ff., on "Hoornbeecks' program of a reformation of the present Reformed churches . . . on all [of the] levels at which the Reformation of the 16th century was once directed" (430)).
  • 1678 (not 1674, as usually stated, for example by Busch):  Jocodus van Lodensteyn:  "een geleerd Man de Gereformeerde Kerke [(namely Hoornbeecks, above)] genoemt woude hebben niet Reformata of Gereformeerd maar Reformanda of te Reformeeren.  Wat een suy vere Kerek woude dat werden die altijd daar in besig was?  hoe bondig in Waarheyd, hoe heylig in Practijke" (Mahlmann, 424, where, at 424n223, Busch's quotation of this is corrected).
  • 1696:  Johann Heinrich Heidegger of Zurich:  "Ecclesia quaevis particularis purgatione & reformatione indiget | Sed duplex Ecclesiae Reformatio, ordinaria, & extraordinaria est.  Illa continue esse debet" (Mahlmann, 420 ff.).
These, the concept's rather innovative and elemental roots in the early 17th-century (or possibly even the very late 16th century) aside, as blossoming on out into
  • the 18th- and 19th-century vernacular, but into
  • Latin aphorisms in the case of Alexander Schweizer in 1847-1848 and 1863and Wilhelm Goeters in 1911 (Mahlmann (2010), 420, a summary of 411 ff.), and into the Latin aphorism that Mahlmann was still ascribing to Barth alone (Mahlmann (2010), 384 ff.) in at least Kuyper in 1892 (Mouthaan, 88) and Bauer in 1893 (Perisho),
it was in fact the 20th-century Reformed theologian Karl Barth who from 1947 greatly popularized the saying that we tend to think of as so ancient today, as amplified with the re-insertion of reformata by Peter Vogelsanger in 1952 (Mahlmann (2010), 420).
Unaware of those occurrences of "ecclesia semper reformanda" in 1892 and 1893, uncovered in 2014 by J. N. Mouthaan and 2017 by Steve Perisho respectively (but not yet the earliest such, undoubtedly!), Mahlmann could speak of Barth's having forgotten that he had been the one to coin the phrase, and note that within a decade or so of 1947 he (Barth) was apparently asking the Catholic theologian Hans Küng—who, following Barth, had called the Catholic Church, too, an "Ecclesia reformanda" in an unpublished lecture delivered at Barth's invitation in January of 1959, and was later instrumental in getting the phrases "Ecclesia . . . semper purificanda" and "perennem reformationem" inserted into the documents of Vatican II (Mahlmann (2010), 391n43)—if he (Küng) could perchance shed any light on its presumably ancient (perhaps even, as Küng once speculated, its pre-16th-century) origins (since by that time Barth had apparently accepted that his formulation, too, was owed to ancient tradition (in the German of Mahlman (2010) at 388, "scheint Karl Barth . . . gar angenommen zu haben, diese verdanke sich alter Überlieferung").  It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that Peter Vogelsanger, editor-in-chief of the journal Reformatio, was calling it "th[at] ancient [(alt)] Reformed formula of the ecclesia semper reformanda" as early as 1961 (Mahlmann (2010), 394).
For an extensive treatment of the period after Barth (1947-2009), in which, by the way, Vogelsanger's mistake (?) was often made (for example by Pedersen as late as 2007 (Mahlmann (2010), 404)), see Mahlmann (2010), 384-404.
The medieval precedent for the very phrase does not appear to have been studied extensively (van Lieburg, 44), but Mahlmann cites a "monasteria semper reformanda" (403-404), and Mouthaan, a "semper reformari debet monasterium de hominibus eiusdem professionis, si fieri potest" attributed in 1582 to the canonist Bernard of Parma (d. 1266) (88).  To these van Lieburg adds certain "slogans of the Carthusian Order" ("numquam reformata, quia numquam reformanda (never reformed because it never needed reform) or numquam reformata, quia numquam deformata (never reformed because never deformed)"), and the late medieval goal of a "reformatio in capite et in membris (reformation in head and members)" (van Lieburg, 43).
For the patristic concept of reform in general, see (for starters) the undoubtedly somewhat dated classic by Ladner, below.
Busch, at least, claims to be unaware "of any evidence that a reformanda saying served as a motto or slogan for a person, movement, or institution before 1983, when one appeared on the interim seal of the newly created Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)" (289, italics mine, and quoted without any criticism at Mahlmann (2010), 391n44).
A Select Bibliography on the History: