A devoted reader might recall an old post on the work of Radulph of Rivo (d. 1403). Radulph was a Dutch doctor utriusque iuris, liturgist, historian, and dean of the Tongres cathedral chapter whose several works on the liturgy are of primary importance for understanding the development of the Mass and Breviary.
Your industrious servants have been laboring over his treatise De canonum observantia (1397) lately, converting it into the mercantile patois of the age, and will be posting sections over the coming week.
Today we reintroduce the treatise and give our translation of its first Proposition.
The Augustinian canons of the Congregation of Windesheim, an outgrowth of the devotio moderna, were zealous to find the proper liturgy to suit their reforming agenda, but had begun bickering among themselves. Some houses began to imitate the uses and abuses of their local diocese, borrowing indiscriminately here and there.
To resolve the ensuing embroglio and bring order to the fledgling congregation, the superiors put out a call for aid and consulted with local experts. Radulph, a professor at the University of Cologne and one of the foremost churchmen of the region, responded to them with a brief treatise, the De canonum observantia. In it, he laid out how the devout canons should go about establishing a uniform ritual practice for their order based on the most approved sources, so that they might “have one manner of living suitable to those who walk in God’s way.”
Naturally, he turned to Rome for an authoritative model. The Holy and Roman Church, over which Christ had placed Peter and his successors, had been established as the mirror and example for all. Canon law was clear: “Whatever she decided, whatever she ordered, must be observed forever and irrefragably.”
But what was the Roman rite?
When Radulph journeyed to Rome in the winter of 1396 to study the canons’ request, he was surprised to discover that the old Roman rite was no longer celebrated there. Over a century before, the popes had replaced the ancient rites of the basilicas with abbreviated books used by the papal curia:
“During my stay in Rome, I learned that the truth [about the Franciscan books] is quite to the contrary. In fact, when the Roman Pontiffs resided at the Lateran, they observed a less complete form of the Roman office than what was observed in the other collegiate churches of the city. Moreover, the chapel clergy, whether by papal mandate or on their own authority, always abbreviated the Roman office and often altered it, according as it suited the Lord Pope and the Cardinals to observe it.”
In their reforming zeal, the Franciscans, whose houses were spread throughout the lands of Christendom, claimed that their missal and breviary were the authentic Roman rite, the very ancient liturgy of the bishops of Rome. In actuality, the books presented an abbreviated form of the ancient Roman liturgy borrowed from the papal chapel. Their claims caused consternation to the clergy and religious of Europe’s ancient churches, whose own uses contained elements that seemed, in light of the Franciscan books, to be spurious, but which could actually lay claim to a venerable antiquity. The burden of Radulph’s Propositions 22 and 23, on the order of the Divine Office and of the Mass, respectively, is to prove that the Franciscan books are not the only authentic representatives of the Roman rite: that the uses of the French and German churches also rest on venerable authority.
Faced with his discovery about the Franciscan books, Radulph sets out in De canonum to chart a course of conservative liturgical reform that hews closely to Roman authority, pointing out the received general customs within the churches of the Roman rite, their authority and antiquity, and the ways various churches have diverged them it. He appeals to canon law, to the approved uses of ancient churches and religious rites, to the famous commentators Durandus, Bernold, and Honorius, and to old liturgical books he found in Rome.
Ultimately, he argues that a most decent and beautiful liturgical order must imitate the primitive Gregorian liturgy of Rome that flourished before the imposition of the Franciscan books. Though the “Roman Church” had always been the source of authentic Church order, Radulph argues that the ritual prevailing in the City could not be trusted without careful discrimination. Rather, authoritative models must be sought in general custom, in the rites of old churches (such as Milan), in the sacred canons, and in the uses of reputable religious orders (such as the Benedictines and Carthusians).
On the eve of the massive liturgical changes that swept Europe in the next century and in the midst of a crisis of papal government, Radulph’s treatise stands out as a sound guide to understanding and faithfully embracing the riches of the Latin liturgical tradition. His conservative intervention looks forward to the work of the Tridentine liturgical commission, whose members had access to Hittorp’s 1568 edition of his treatise.
A skilled canonist, Radulph carefully categorizes and ranks the various sources of ritual authority (general and local tradition, collections of canon law, treatises by respected commentators, etc), notes what is essential and what is subject to variation, and tells us how to spot innovation and illegitimate novelty. His overriding concern is to promote a religious obedience to the beautiful ritual order that has been ordained by the sacred canons, avoiding what is superfluous, spurious, or harmful. The whole is imbued with a spirit of reform that seeks to form the Christian heart through a faithful adherence to the Church’s lex orandi.
De Canonum Observantia Liber
Proposition I
That those who profess the canonical life should observe good canonical manners and observe what the canons proscribe with regards to the canonical offices
My lords and fathers in religion, the Prior and co-priors of Windesheim, and brethren of the Order of St. Augustine in the diocese of Utrecht, may you have one manner of living suitable to those who walk in God’s way, down which you have, until now, been going one after this manner, and another after that.[1]
The Apostle of truth, in the fourteenth chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians, toward the end, writes: “But let all things be done honorably, and according to order.”[2] The honorable is chosen for its own sake, as said in the first book of the Rhetoric.[3] And according to St. Augustine, “The honorable draws us to it by its intrinsic merit, and attracts us by its own worth.”[4] As St. Augustine says in his book On the Nature of Good, chapter 3: “All things in proportion as they are better measured, formed, and ordered, are assuredly good in a higher degree; but in proportion as they are measured, formed, and ordered in an inferior degree, are they the less good.”[5] And in his book On True Religion, chapter 25: “Everything is beautiful that is in due order. And thus says the Apostle: ‘There is no order but from God.’”[6] And St. Bernard said somewhere: “Discretion gives order to every virtue; order brings measure, beauty, and continuity.”[7] These prefatory words admonish us in our deeds to flee what is spurious or false, to seek what is meet and profitable, and to keep what we find in its proper order. For he who does not maintain order in the things done in God’s obedience introduces disorder and puts himself in danger of sin. If therefore we are bound to keep decency and order in all of our deeds, then how incomparably more honorably and in accordance with all due order must we perform those things which bind us to God, so that we admit in them only what is honorable, worthy, and approved; avoid what is apocryphal, dubious, or spurious; and maintain an order that is in every respect approved, observing neither more nor less than we ought.
My beloved, if, in your divers locales and parts where religious life has now begun to flourish once more, you adopt the sacred ecclesiastical canons just as they were set down by our holy Fathers and, when they are lacking, the canonical good manners of both the local regions where your order is found and those of the other religious orders, putting away the practices of the secular clergy, then you would do all things honorably and in good order; then no diversity or variety or discrepancy in the divine offices and other regular observances would arise between you and those in other places. For whatever is read, sung, or observed in the Divine Office has been prescribed long before out of the canonical Scriptures, the statutes of our Fathers, and the general uses of your and the other religious orders, so that God’s soldiers have no need to involve themselves in secular business. But since you are of the opinion that you should not observe what has been handed down, but rather whatever of the practice of secular churches pleases you, the ancient Traditions are being corrupted by human presumption, the order of things is disturbed, your rule is offended, and between you and your confreres who are in Brabant have needlessly arisen divers and varying practices.
Desiring, therefore, to bring this diversity of the divine and canonical Office into a concord that is honorable and according to order and in keeping with the precept of your rule, I have spent a good deal of time drafting a work from the materials I have found in various churches and books, both in foreign parts and at Rome. It is my intention, once my notes have arrived from Rome—they are still in transit—to set forth everything in one book. From the few notes in my possession from other writings, I now offer to your charity a brief work, before the countryside becomes white to harvest,[8] begging you, humbly and devotedly, to pardon its imperfections.
[1] 1 Corinthians 7:7.
[2] 1 Corinthians 14:40.
[3] Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.9: “καλὸν μὲν οὖν ἐστιν ὃ ἂν δι᾽ αὑτὸ αἱρετὸν.”
[4] Cf. St. Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus LXXXIII liber unus, no. 30—PL, 40:19. David L. Mosher, Eighty-Three Different Questions (Fathers of the Church Patristic Series), Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,1982, 55. Cf. Peter Lombard, Sentences 4, d. 31, a. 1, q. 1: “Honestum est quod sua vi nos trahit et dignitate nos allicit.” This is taken almost verbatim from Cicero: “Nam est quiddam quod sua vi nos allicit ad se, non emolumento captans aliquo sed trahens sua dignitate” (Jeffrey Henderson, On Invention, Harvard University Press: Harvard University Press, 1949, 324).
[5] Augustine, On the Nature of Good 3 – PL 42:553, translated by Albert H. Newman, from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 4, edited by Philip Schaff (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887). Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1407.htm>.
[6] See On True Religion 41.77: “Nihil enim est ordinatum quod non sit pulchrum. Et, sicut ait apostolus, ‘omnis ordo a deo est’” (Burleigh, pg. 265). The latter phrase misquotes Rom. 13.1 under the influence of the idea of ‘order.’ In Retractions 1.13.8 he admits his error, since Paul actually wrote “quae autem sunt a deo ordinata sunt.”
[7] Sermones in Cantica, XLIX, no. 5 (PL 183. 1018; Leclercq 2.76).
[8] Cf. John 4:35.
Canticum Salomonis 
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