It has been several years since M. Jurieu[1] undertook in one of his books to attack the ceremonies of the Mass and even to subject them to mockery. I found myself charged at that time by M. the Bishop of Meaux, and also by my own interest, to refute this minister, who had used me as a sort of witness and proof of his own ideas. Thus I wrote him a letter[2] on the subject. Since it was clear from certain places in his work that mystical and symbolic explanations were not to his taste and left no impression on him, I thought it best to accommodate myself to his dispositions. In other words, in my response the only explanations I admitted were those that were simple, natural, and historical, against which I judged M. Jurieu would have no objection. It pleased God to grant my attempt so much success, that my letter has remained without response for fifteen years.
But this is not the only effect that this manner of explaining the ceremonies of the Church has produced. It has also pleased a great number of new Catholics. Even several converted ministers were intrigued by my explanations and did me the honor of writing to say (and these are their own words):
“We have always been convinced that in order to give an account of the ceremonies of the Church, especially to new converts, one must make use of common sense, give the facts as simply as possible, and in the end explain things as naturally as possible. We have already experienced the cogency of your natural explanations with two completely opposite sorts of people, namely, with some grudging converts who saw only superstition and mummery in the Church’s rites; and with some old ecclesiastics who would hear nothing about the literal sense or about the traces of ancient customs in the liturgy, recognizing only mystery and speculation in it.”
They said that neither of these groups were able to resist my historical reasons, and the connection I made between the letter and the spirit left them speechless.
They were certain that a full discussion of all these things would be well received by both scholars and the unlettered, and even by stubborn opponents of the Church. M. Jurieu’s brief controversy had not provided the occasion for such a discussion, but the wish and need of the Church compelled me. The attempts that I had already made in my letter had given them so much pleasure that they were impatient for a complete treatment of the subject. Further, in my explanation of the Introit, Kyrie eleison, Collect, Secret, Supraquae propitio, etc., of the mingling of a part of the Host in the chalice, I had said things that no one had yet thought and that promised countless further discoveries.
Moreover these ministers plied me with innumerable questions and difficulties which they implored me to answer. And so this is the occasion and, so to speak, the foundation of the present work that I present to the public.
At the same time another ministers, one of my friends, who had also converted some years ago, but converted sincerely in good faith, through persuasion, intelligence, and knowledge, brought me one of his nephews who was still in the grips of error. […]
He was already very prejudiced against our ceremonies and especially against the exterior cult of our Religion. After having questioned me on many practices, he appeared so content with my responses (all literal and historical) that he said to his uncle (who later told me) that one more meeting with me would be enough to remove all his scruples and doubts.
[Another Successful Conversation with a Protestant Lady….]
[….]
[2. Support from Catholic Ecclesiastics]
To these proselytes, and others that I have not named, I could add a large number of Catholics: ecclesiastics and laymen of every state and personality. M. Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux especially (and all know that his name alone is synonymous with knowledge, eloquence, beauty, genius, and zeal for the Church) often did me the honor of urging me, face to face and in writing, to explain and develop all this material to its fullest extent. I did this in two or three conferences. He listened, made objections, gave counsel, and offered his advice on difficult and delicate points. I will always remember how he encouraged me not to attack the Mystical Authors or their reasons, telling me that all I had to do was lay out the facts and establish them soundly, and the truth speak for itself.
But he isn’t the only who encouraged me to work my ideas into a book. M. the Bishop of Chalons sur Saône, so well versed in this discipline, and engaged since the start of his episcopate in the correction of the usages of his church, which he is reforming wholesale and in a manner worthy of his zeal and intelligence: the Breviary, the Missal, the Ritual, and Ceremonial. After approving my Letter to the Minister Jurieu, he asked if:
“I might give a more ample, literal, and historical explanation of the ceremonies of the Mass and in general of the whole Office.”
Others told me:
“The quickest and easiest way to refute every calumny the Heretics advance against the practices of the Church is to trace them back to their origin and institution. Hence we learn the true reasons for the ceremonies, and we see their simplicity. We prove that it was necessity or utility that introduced them, and that they have been preserved either for decency or out of fear of innovation. Because the reasons are simple and natural, we see their connection to the ceremonies immediately. It has been said that the primary reason the ministers of the Protestant religion declaim against the ceremonies of the Catholic Church is that they see these ceremonies only through the mystical reasons that some Catholic authors have given to them, without seeing the natural sense that the same authors presume as the basis of everything they say.”
[…]
[On the Usefulness of this Method in Seminary Education]
M. Wateblé (who recently passed away), Superior of the seminary of Beauvais, also asked me many times to share my reflections on this question, assuring me that they would be welcomed in the seminaries of the Congregation of the Mission [….]. He said that, if he had only known these reasons a long time ago, then our seminaries would have embraced them, and this manner of explaining the ceremonies would be held in high regard. This holds as much for the priests of St. Lazare as for the Jesuits, the Fathers of the Oratory, for the congregation of St. Sulpice, and other ecclesiastics who form clergy in the seminaries. In these excellent schools, after having given the seminarians the primitive and fundamental reasons for the ceremonies, we could present them other reasons for their edification, to nourish their piety; I am referring to what I call secondary and subsidiary reasons: spiritual and symbolicideas and pious moralities. In these holy congregations, in their frequent conferences on the practices and uses of the Church, we could develop the analogy of all these different senses and teach them to join the spirit with the letter, and figurative and allegorical explanations to literal and historical ones.
[The Catechism of Montpellier already does this]
[….]
[3. Justification for this Method from the Fathers]
In the interest of justifying this approach with examples and authorities, we see that always and in all times the practices and ceremonies of the Church have been interpreted in their proper, primitive, and necessary sense, and whenever people have understood them, they have given as far as possible simple and natural reasons in preference to those called mystical (mystiques) and figurative (figurées), and often enough even to their prejudice and exclusion. Therefore, my project is neither new nor unique. I am merely following and imitating nearly all of the authors who have ever written on this subject.
St. Jerome, for example, in his Letter to St Paulinus, St. Augustine says that the Host is broken at the Mass in order to distribute it to the faithful, ad distribuendum comminuitur. Behold: another entirely simple and natural reason for the Fraction of the Host, and very different, as we shall see, from the allegorical reasons to which the Protestants accuse us of having reduced this practice.
[Mass on Holy Thursday morning]
St. Isidore (7th c.) and the Rule of the Master written about the same time, teach us that the washing of the altars, which is still practiced today in many Churches on Holy Thursday and Good Friday is donein order to remove the dust and odors that may have collected on the tables throughout the year. In addition, they washed and purified the walls and sacred vessels, so that the whole Church was washed and set in order from the vaults to the pavement in preparation for Easter.
Amalarius, not content with the various mystical reasons given for the custom of reserving only the Body of Our Lord on Holy Thursday, without the Blood, concludes (along with the Bishop of Meaux[3]) that a more simple explanation is that this species is corrupted more easily than bread. Thus we see that this author seems to prefer this reason to the “mystical” reasons. The same author says that the priest washes his hands at Mass in order to clean and purify them from any uncleanness he may have come into contact with by touching the bread received during the Offertory. His testimony is all the more credible because Amalarius certainly cannot be accused generally of preferring simple and natural explanations. Indeed Cardinal Bona reproaches him for his excessive subtilty (quandoque nimium subtiliter). The Ordo Romanus VI, St. Thomas Aquinas, Durandus, the Jesuit P. Scortia, and others give the same reason.
[….]
[St. Thomas on the Use of Incense]
Now, what are we to make of St. Thomas’s response to the objection regarding the use of incense in the Church (this irrefragable doctor, who cannot be contradicted with impunity in the Schools of Theology, where he justly bears the excellent title of Angelic)? It is to dispel bad odors: Ut scilicet per bonum odorem depellatur si quid corporaliter pravi odoris in loco fuerit, quod posset provocare horrorem.[4] Dominic Soto, Cardinal Bellarmine, Genebrard, Scortia, Gavantus, M. Meurier, and others whom we cite later on in the work, all adopt the same reason.
[….]
[The Paschal Candle]
In the Benediction of the Paschal Candle, the Church herself teaches us that its purpose is to give light during the night: Cereus iste, in honorem nominis tui consecratus, ad noctis huius caliginem destruendamindeficiens perseveret. Thus it is left burning until the morning (flammas eius lucifer matutinus inveniat[5]).
[…]
The Council of Trent teaches us (along with the whole tradition) that water is mixed into the wine in the chalice as an imitation of Our Lord Jesus Christ who, we think, did the same: quod Christum Dominum ita fecisse credatur.[6] And why did our Lord dilute his wine at the Last Supper? Because, as St. Thomas and many theologians and scholastics tell us, it was the custom of the place to do so (secundum morem illius terrae).
[4. Conclusion]
The method we have supposed is not novel, its purpose is not unusual or surprising. Rather to the contrary, there are authors who absolutely reject every mystical reason, regarding their different applications as impractical. And the truth is that since everything in ritual and discipline is subject to perpetual change, it is quite difficult to assign mysteries to the Church’s customs and practices. Let us say, for example, that I want the chasuble, which was once entirely round and reached down to the floor, to be a symbol of charity which (according to St. Peter) covers a multitude of sins. Today this vestment is significantly shortened, trimmed and open at the sides. What possible relation could this modern garment have with the proposed mystical reason?
Or again, the Cardinal bishops were once seven in number. They could represent the seven angels or seven Churches of Asia. But now that there are only six, what can they represent? The six wings of the Seraphim? Hence the difficulty or rather the impossibility of allegorizing practices that are subject to such variation.
[….]
[Apology for Mystical Reasons]
Thus, following the understanding and taste of all these different authors, I have seen fit to explain the ceremonies of the Mass in their simple, literal, and historical sense, but with this difference, that I do not go so far as some of them. God forbid that I should ever condemn the mystic writers or mystical reasons. On this point I hold to what I said in my Letter to M. Jurieu, and to what I shall say again in the present work. To put it simply, everything I say here about historical reasons is always without prejudice to the mystical reasons. Further, even if I seem to privilege these latter, it is not that I have made my own decisions, but that I have sought the truth, and I will always be happy to learn from not only pastors and superiors, but from the littlest disciples and smallest children of the Church. Quaero non affirmo.
[4] De Vert omits the rest of Thomas’ response, which adds a spiritual explanation: “[The use of incense] has reference to two things: first, to the reverence due to this sacrament, i.e. in order by its good odor, to remove any disagreeable smell that may be about the place; secondly, it serves to show the effect of grace, wherewith Christ was filled as with a good odor, according to Genesis 27:27: “Behold, the odor of my son is like the odor of a ripe field”; and from Christ it spreads to the faithful by the work of His ministers, according to 2 Corinthians 2:14: “He manifesteth the odor of his knowledge by us in every place”; and therefore when the altar which represents Christ, has been incensed on every side, then all are incensed in their proper order.”
[5] Of course, even a cursory fair reading of the Exultet, with its florid descriptions of Christ as the Light of the World, and comparisons of the candle with the Pillar of Fire, would make it one of the strongest arguments against the validity of De Vert’s reductive literal sense.
[6] Again, De Vert neglects the spiritual reason given in the same chapter of Trent: “Monet deinde sancta Synodus, praeceptum esse a Ecclesia sacerdotibus, ut squam ino in calice offerendo miscerent: tum quod Christum Dominum ita fecisse credatur, tum etiam quia e latere ejus aqua simul cum sanguine exierit, quod Sacramentum hac mixtione recolitur; et cum aquae in Apocalypsi beati Joannis populi dicantur; ipsius populi fidelis cum capite Christo unio repraesentatur.”
Recently we discussed how the Voyages Liturgiques, a layman traveler’s account of French liturgical life in the late 17th century, seemed to favor contemporary reform movements in the Gallican church, shaped by the classical and archeologizing “taste” so characteristic of its age. The author’s “classical ideal” has much to commend it, and the work remains an invaluable witness to the 17th-century Catholic worldview.
Today we shall discuss an author of far greater importance, whose influence on liturgical scholarship and reform was far more consequential. Guéranger called him, more or less justly, “the apostle of the rationalist spirit” and “the voice of his century.“[1]
Not so long ago, we introduced readers to Pierre Lebrun’s commentary on the Mass, his Literal, Historical, and Dogmatic Explanation of the Mass, a work directly provoked by De Vert’s own Simple, Litteral, and Historical Explanation of the Ceremonies of the Church (1709-1713, 4 voll.). The title of our post (“The Origins of Liturgical Ressourcement”) was perhaps rather tendentious, but it did express something of our conviction that liturgical scholarship in that era had become noticeably estranged from the classical tradition. Sometimes by accident and sometimes by intent, churchmen everywhere had subjected the mind and heart of the Church to modern thinkers’ peculiar standards of reasoning, and proved generally ignorant or contemptuous of the previous tradition, to the point that a fresh representation of the classical tradition in all its vigor was desperately called for.
This had widespread ramifications for Catholic belief and practice, not the least of which was a new approach to the sacred liturgy, manifesting itself in new genres of liturgical commentary that diverged sharply from the medieval and Patristic tradition.
Liturgy and the Catholic Enlightenment
The 18th-century was the dawn of a systematic application of “science” and “reason” in service of wholesale reform of social and ecclesial life. This was a complex and multi-faceted movement that offered many benefits, while also posing many challenges to the Church. Churchmen everywhere participated with enthusiasm in the century of lights, promoting new forms of church government, education, and scientific inquiry. In its more radical manifestations, under the influences of Gallicanism, Febronianism, and Josephinism, local churches everywhere became departments of ascendant nation states, strictly regulated to serve the needs of political economy: religion within the bounds of pure reason.
Behind its splendorous veneer, the Gallican Church was a welter of factions. After Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes (1685), the mass conversion of Protestants caused a sort of “pastoral crisis.” The bishops worked with an already reform-minded Versailles to manage the transition, and the result was a variety of reform projects. Vernacular missals, Mass commentaries, and pastoral tracts were sanctioned and widely distributed. At the same time bishops and cathedral chapters destroyed the great medieval rood screens, alleging among other reasons that they blocked the faithful’s view and posed an unnecessary obstacle to Protestant sentiment. These efforts were all linked by the new enthusiasm for universal knowledge, a zeal to illuminate all “superstition” and “mystery” with the light of reason.
Catholic Classicism. It was the high tide of Classicism, a turning back toward the forms and sources of antiquity (such as they were available or understood, at times very poorly). Jungmann explains:
“The desire was to get free from all excess of emotions, free from all surfeit of forms; to get back again to ‘noblesimplicity.’ As in contemporary art, where the model for this was sought in antiquity and attained in classicism, so in ecclesiastical life the model was perceived in the life of the ancient Church. And so a sort of Catholicclassicism was arrived at, a sudden enthusiasm for the liturgical forms of primitive Christianity, forms which in many cases one believed could be taken over bodily, despite the interval of a thousand years and more, even though one was far removed from the spirit of that age.”[2]
High esteem for St. Augustine and the “golden age” of the Fathers led some to idealize an imaginary liturgy of the 5th century–imaginary since we have no liturgical books that go back that far, and only a few scattered references to liturgical customs in the writings of the Fathers. The Gallican Church especially had a marked archeologizing tendency. Many viewed medieval developments with suspicion, disparaged the cult of the saints and other traditional devotions, moved for drastic simplification of church decoration, and tried to return to what they perceived to be the most “primitive” and classical Church practices.
Enlightenment. It was also the age of Enlightenment, which valued simplicity and strove everywhere for “the elimination or radical restructuring of institutions seemingly little more than unproductive relics from the past.”[3] Everywhere feudal forms of administration gave way to modern bureaucracy; traditional exegesis was rapidly replaced by historical-critical scholarship; and even among very devout Catholics, Scholasticism was largely ousted by enthusiasm for Descartes and the New Learning, which some saw as a powerful ally for religion.[4]
English agnostic literature also exerted powerful influence. Geoffrey Hull (“The Proto-History of the Roman Liturgical Reform”) cites a contemporary ecclesiastic’s bitter complaint about the spirit of the age:
“Such is the frailty of human nature that involuntarily and without even suspecting it, people are taking on the tastes, fashions, language and idiom of the country and age in which they live… Our century is the age of Anglomania. It is the dominant strain in the agnostic movement, which rails against the superstition of the populace, the credulity of the devout, the excesses of the cult of the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, the despotism of the Pope, the neglect of Sacred Scripture and the Church Fathers, and so on. They would deprive religion of all its flesh if they could, leaving just the skeleton. To this end they abolish, polish, simplify, reduce to nothing the little that has been preserved.”[5]
Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
Gallicanism. In France, all these movements took place in the wider context of Gallicanism, a cluster of claims about the French Church’s right to self-governance and independence from Rome and about the inviolability of her perennial customs. Gallicanism meant that the French liturgy was largely out of the Pope’s control, so that bishops were free to carry out liturgical revisions under the pretext of exemption from Roman jurisdiction.
Amidst seismic shifts in European thought and culture, the Church adopted new strategies of apologetics, trying to showing that the faith could measure up to the new standards of reason. Many Catholics–sometimes called “Enlightened Catholics”–advocated for adopting the new historical, scientific, and administrative methods, seeing them as the only hope for the Church’s continued relevance. Not until late in the next century would the Roman Church’s stance toward all these different movements coalesce and harden,[6] so that there was much freedom and openness of discussion at this time about the proper role of the new methods and forms, a freedom that rarely tolerated the periodic papal interventions.
In Scripture studies, many began to adopt historical methods that would later come to be known as Wissenschaft. Sensible to its dangers, they also saw that it could bear good fruit for the Church.
In the realm of liturgy, the 17th and 18th centuries saw the rapid production of new rites (Neo-Gallican) to replace traditional missals and breviaries. Bishops hired scholars who employed historical methods to reconstruct “primitive” liturgical rites[7] more suited to the tastes of their age. The reformers introduced major rearrangements of offices, and as a working principle eliminated nearly all non-Scriptural texts from the Mass and Office, replacing them with new compositions by contemporary Latin literary figures. Much the same would happen in the 20th century, when the hymns and over 70% of the Roman collects were rewritten.
Claude De Vert, O. S. B.
Claude De Vert, a monk and officer at Cluny (1645 – 1708), finds his place in this drama. He became interested in liturgical rites after a trip to Rome where the splendor of the ceremonies left a lasting impression. He wrote some minor works before he finally began his major work, the Explication simple, littérale et historique des cérémonies de l’Église (Paris, 1709-1713). The immediate provocation, he explains in a preface, was a pamphlet controversy with the Protestant minister Pierre Jurieu over certain Catholic ceremonies, and over the allegorical interpretation of the Mass.
Pierre Jurieu
Encouraged by Reformed ministers and Catholics ecclesiastics (among them Bossuet) to expound his insights at greater length, he became convinced that a thoroughgoing rational presentation of the divine worship would have a widespread appeal for contemporary Protestants and Catholics alike. Specifically, it would settle Protestant disgust for sacrament and mysticism, while also assuaging agnostics’ doubt and flattering the modern “taste” for historical inquiry. As others were already doing in other disciplines, so in liturgy, De Vert sought for a common standard of “reason” that could settle confessional disputes and measure up to the requirements of modern reason.
For De Vert, the “mystical,” symbolic, or spiritual explanation of divine offices, such as that purveyed by the medieval commentary tradition, is pernicious mystification and bad scholarship.
asically, each ceremony serves a simple, physical, hygienic convenience or reflects a simple historical accommodation. Incense dispelled bad odors. Immersion baptism was a hygienic practice meant for cleaning newborn babies. The chasuble was an ordinary Roman garment. The rood screen simply amplified a lector’s voice, a purpose just as easily achieved by a small lectern. The commixing of water and wine in the chalice is a simple imitation of historic Jewish practice. “Mystical” reasons are added later.
The principle is thoroughgoing: in no case can a spiritual-symbolic reason be the first cause for the institution of a ceremony. At best, a symbol can be edifying. For example, full-immersion baptism borrowed (for decency’s sake) the pagan practice of cleaning newborns in large baths. The hygienic practice was later exploited by St. Paul, who saw in it a fortuitous allegory for our death and rising in Christ. The Pauline allegory edifies, but it is entirely extraneous and fortuitous to the original institution.
At worst, symbolism is a sort of death mask that one imposes on a ritual whose original, simple, natural, and historical reason is no longer understood. Symbol petrifies the ritual by linking it necessarily to an unchanging dogmatic truth; since the truth cannot change, the ritual cannot change. In this way ritual becomes un-elastic, unable to respond to the Church’s contemporary needs: especially the needs of a learned class with no “taste” for mysticism. Symbol is the rigor mortis of ritual, freezing it forever and rendering it useless for Christian progress.
The learned man’s job is to scatter the clouds of mystical obfuscation to reveal the (simple, physical, historical) rational structure underneath: like an architect renovating a Gothic church for modern use–removing votives and side-altars, taking down rood screens, etc.–to reveal to clear view the clean geometrical lines of the fabric.
If the Church is to have a liturgy that is sensible and adapted to the present moment, She must remove the offending edifice of allegorical-mystical commentary once and for all.[8] Once symbol is chased away, and the liturgy appears in all its rational simplicity, it will no longer be a stumbling block to Protestants or the Enlightened: it can stand as a beacon of good sense, whose rational simplicity we can contemplate with admiration.
Further, significantly, it can once again pliably evolve and adapt to urgent contemporary needs. Ceremonies instituted for transient historical reasons should be allowed to change when modern historical circumstances call for it.
De Vert was not the first to apply historical methods to the study of Church offices. The 16th and 17th centuries had been the age of collectors and editors of liturgical sources. Historical explanation began to crowd out the mystical, and “application of the historical-critical method gradually exhausted all straightforward interest in researching its spiritual meaning.”[9] By our author’s day, historical commentary had already become a genre parallel to the historical-critical turn in Scripture studies, and largely borrowing the same methods: the faith-based search for the totus Christus behind the letter of the Old Testament yielded to (supposedly) neutral, scientific studies of Scripture from various points of view. The same happened in liturgy at this time.
So Dom Edmond Martene, in his “De antiquis ecclesiæ ritibus libri 4” (Rouen, 1700-1702), observed that earlier authors had appealed to “mystical reasons” which were “a style of writing distasteful to the learned men of our age” (rationes tantum mysticas adhibuerunt, quod scribendi genus saeculi nostri studiosis minus sapere solet). and in his own work he resolved that, “setting aside the mystical explanations that anyone may consult in the published sources, I shall present all the rites of the Church from a historical perspective.”[10] Note that Martene does not so much challenge the legitimacy of the spiritual senses, as politely excuse himself from the task of spiritual exegesis. He is writing history, not theology. It is a genre choice.
In other words a new genre is being born, and the ground is being laid for a new scientific study of liturgy, posthabitis rationibus mysticis. If the Carolingian age witnessed the founding of the expositiones missae as a genre–though one largely in continuity with Patristic commentary–the early modern period saw the foundation of the “scientific” commentary, often predicated on a rejection of the former. Henceforth, neglect or outright contempt for the allegorical tradition became de rigeur–even if it was not unopposed, and De Vert’s prefaces document this change coming about in his conversations with contemporary scholars.
Golgotha: The temple veil is torn, attributed to Vicomte Ludovic Napoleon Lepic, 1873
One almost has the sense that these authors thought they were part of a new Dispensation, performing a second “unveiling” of the Christian religion: as Christ had lifted the veil and dispelled the shadows of the Old Testament cult with his light, so De Vert banishes the shadows of Christian primitivism to reveal the truth of the rites in their bare historical reality, denuded of all mystery. To use the words of Guéranger, De Vert comes as the apostle of a new, more rational dispensation.
Enduring Relevance
If his eulogist can be considered any fair judge, the Explication was a game-changing event, a watershed in the brave project of Enlightenment:
“We can say with confidence, that this book has changed the whole picture. The physical causes for the institution of ceremonies were smothered underneath mystical and allegorical ones. A false piety had fooled itself and others, losing sight of the true reasons: we had the shadow instead of the body. Dom de Vert came with his torch in hand to dispel these thick shadows. This book has made the scales fall from the eyes of innumerable people, and now no other way of thinking is possible” (Elegy for Dom De Vert, Explication…, vol. 3, xxxi – xxxii)
De Vert’s method is not to be simply discounted outright. He is right to point out the primacy of the literal sense. But he is wrong to imagine that the literal reason for a ceremony can never be symbolic. Hence Lebrun:
“The true literal and historical sense of a writing or a ceremony is that which the author or institutor had in mind, and it is often a figurative sense, of symbol and of mystery. If we consider the scepter of kings and the crosier of bishops and abbots in a coarse and material fashion, we might say that it is given to them for support while walking, because this is the more ordinary use of staves and because in fact in ancient times bishops and abbots availed themselves of staves in their travels. But since we are seeking the reason for the institution of the ceremony of the pastoral staff, we would distance ourselves from the true sense of the Church if we gave, as a reason of institution, the ordinary usage of support while walking; for the scepter and the crosier are given to both young and old to be used only in actions of magnificence and ceremony. The proper and historical significance of the scepter is to be the symbol of the power of the king in all his dominions, just as the pastoral staff is given by the Church to bishops and abbots to mark their authority in their diocese and in their monasteries, and because as pastors they have the crook to protect their flock and to chastise those who trouble its peace and good order. The Church herself teaches us these symbolic senses in her pontificals[11].”
Nor is the new scientific approach unhelpful. It would be absurd to dismiss the benefits of progress in knowledge of the historical origin of rites. In many cases it really does dispel superstitions about the meaning of liturgical ceremonies.
Nevertheless, De Vert’s willful misreading of liturgical texts, cherry-picking from sources, and deafening silence about the witness of Christian tradition to the primacy of the spiritual sense is really not to be forgiven, and can only be seen as a prejudiced effort at reconstruction for political purposes. He uses history amateurishly. He first equates the meaning of a practice with its historical origin, then he dismisses it out of hand. (In this sense, he does not fit the mold of either an antiquarian or a Biblicist, but rather sings a more secular strain.)
On the other hand, in early modern liturgical scholarship no less than in physics and in Scripture, new methods were being devised and tested whose precise value and limits had not yet been (and perhaps have never been) definitively decided. The whole early modern period presents a strange (to us) spectacle of halting attempts and half-baked methods. A very charitable reading of De Vert would excuse his too-radical application of New Learning, chalking it up to the excessive enthusiasm (and poor theological formation) of his generation.
All told, M. de Vert’s work gives us a fascinating glimpse into the world of 18th-century Catholic scholarship, and into the cradle of the modern historical method, when no less than a Benedictine monk attempts to give an entirely literal explanation for the origins of liturgical prayers and ceremonies. All imaginary causes–allegory, mysticism, etc–are dismissed as “bad taste,” for this is “the taste of learned men, who in every genre of science and literature always come back to the simple and the natural, and thus to the truth.”
Scipione de’ Ricci, Bishop of Pistoia
The high-water mark of the pre-Revolutionary project to re-interpret and re-fashion the liturgy (like Scripture) in the light of new historical awareness, to simplify the Church’s liturgical life and bring it more in line with modern tastes, was the Synod of Pistoia in 1786, which put many Enlightened liberal reforms into place. Though De Vert was certainly not the only or even the main ideological influence behind this synod, his work is a particularly clear and thorough exposition of the radical wing of the new liberal, Enlightened Catholic worldview, and a sort of arch-nemesis to Prosper Guéranger and the Romantic and ultramontane reaction.
This week we will translate the prefaces of voll. 1 and 2 of De Vert’s work, the Simple, Litteral, and Historical Explanation of the Ceremonies of the Church (Tome 1)(Tome 2)(Tome 3)(Tome 4), in which he explains and justifies the new rational method of liturgical commentary. The other two volumes are without prefaces.
We hope the translation will give insight into that turbulent century, the cradle of modernity, the origin of so much of what has come to be taken for granted in later scholarship. In the end, despite his serious defects as a theologian, De Vert is a useful source of information about contemporary French liturgy, and (in our opinion) a case study of how the historical method can be misapplied when allied with dubious preconceptions.
[1] “The rationalist spirit of which Dom Claude de Vert, the voice of his century, was the apostle, contributed to the clergy’s neglect of religious aesthetics. To the eyes of a spiritualist religion, only one thing can elevate form, and that is mysticism. But since this rationalism deprived the ceremonies of their proper objective—viz. to sanctify visible nature by making it serve the expression of the invisible world—it is easy to understand how the clergy, already deprived of the poetic elements of the ancient liturgy, could reach such an indifference to art with respect to worship” (Institutions Liturgiques, vol. II, Ch. XX,, 387).
[3] John O’Malley, Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontone Church, 30.
[4] For example, Cardinal Melchior de Polignac (1661 – 1742) wrote his famous Anti-Lucretius, an elaborate scientific-didactic poem showing that God’s agency can be clearly perceived and worshipped in the works of nature uncovered by science and Cartesian philosophy. He argued that modern science only makes the works of God’s hands stand out in clearer relief.
[5] Marie-Madeleine Martin, Le latin immortel (Chiré-en-Montreuil: Diffusion de la Pensée Française, 1971), 173.
[6] Not that Rome took no interest in Gallican developments. Jansenism and all its works was repeatedly condemned, and Rome lodged protests, usually in vain, against some liturgical experimentation. See our post on Vernacular Translations of the Missal.
[7] As Geoffrey Hull, Alcuin Reid, and László Dobszay among others have argued, the Neo-Gallican rites were the real forerunners of the 20th century Novus Ordo. Their architects were guided by similar principles, and achieved similar results.
[9] See Claude Barthe, “The Mystical Meaning of the Mass in the Middle Ages,” in The Genius of the Roman Rite, 179 – 197, 193.
[10]De antiquis ecclesiae ritibus, vol. 1, Preface: His igitur attente consideratis, alicuius opellae pretium visum est, si quantum per imbecilles ingenii mei vires licet, posthabitis rationibus mysticis, quas apud editos scriptores quisque consulere potest, universos ecclesiae ritus more historico hic repraesentarem…
[11] A stab at De Vert’s stubborn insistence that the Church herself teaches his simple, natural method.
Today we present a chapter from Prosper Guéranger’s Institutions Liturgiques, whereinhe attacks the artistic decadence of the Gallican Church, contrasting it with the sobriety and universality of the Roman rite.
Introduction
In his recent book Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church, John O’Malley pointed out Prosper Guéranger’s (1805 – 1875) key role in the great ecclesiastical controversy of the 19th century.
In the chaos of post-Napoleonic France, while figures such as De Maistre and Lamennais argued strenuously that the Church had to submit to a strong Roman authority in order to confront the centralized power of the rising secular nation states, Guéranger saw that “liturgical unity was essential to the success of the Church’s renewal.”
Unity under the one Roman Rite, which to his mind had always preserved itself serenely from error in all its parts, would guarantee the salutary spiritual submission to Roman authority that the liturgical diversity of the Gallican Church had always prevented.
Therefore, as Peter Raedts argues:
“What Guéranger contributed to Ultramonantism was not his passion for the pope, nor his reactionary political ideas, but his unique insight into the possibilities of the liturgy as a way of visualizing the unity of the Church and the authority of the pope everywhere in the Catholic world.”[1]
The Institutions Liturgiques (pub. 1841 – 1851) were a major step in this direction. Written after his move to Solesmes, “the Institutions launched Guéranger’s campaign to install [the Roman Rite] in the churches of France and then in the other churches throughout the Catholic world”[2] The work treats the history of the Mass in the West, with special focus on France in the modern period.
Raedts argues that “the thrust of the book is more political than historical; Guéranger did not so much want to describe the past as to change the present.”[3] He aimed to show that, in liturgy as in doctrine, Rome had always been a bulwark against heretical influence. Aware of this polemical purpose, the modern reader has to read cautiously, as Gregory DiPippo argues:
“Guéranger was a 19th-century romantic, with all that that entails. It has been noted more than once that he sometimes let his zeal get the better of his judgment; what he writes here should not be taken as the final word on the condition of the music in the Neo-Gallican period, of which he knew only the rump end. He was born in 1805, when most of the chapter system was already completely destroyed, so would not have heard most of what he is describing in actual liturgical use. It should also be remembered that the ‘pure’ Gregorian chant of Rome was also in pretty awful shape in his time, with everybody using the reduced music of the old Medicean edition.”
For a reader who keeps this caveat in mind, the Institutions remains a useful work of erudition and scholarship. It is of timely importance for understanding the development of the “ultramontane Church,” and a landmark of the Romantic phase of the Liturgical Movement.
Would that some generous soul would undertake the immense labor of translating the whole work!
(excerpt from Ch. XX of Vol. II of the Institutions Liturgiques, 1st edition, Mans, 1861, pp. 428-449)
“The General Character of the Liturgical Innovation in Relation to Poetry, Chant, and Aesthetics in General”
Let us rather say that these men, who remade the liturgy according to their own ideas, although perhaps unaware of the evil they foisted upon us, have contributed as they could to the total extinction of Catholic poetry in France on account of their utter ignorance of good taste. They expunged from the liturgy the ancient chants of Christendom, and put in their place the pretentious patchwork of their scriptural antiphons and responsories. We will not reflect now upon the effects of their liturgical innovations on literature, since we shall discuss the language and style of the liturgy in another part of this work. Let us then go over the effects of the liturgical revolution on chant.
[The Revolution in Chant]
This is one of the deepest injuries we must report. One could consider the question solely on an aesthetic level, or on the much more serious one of Catholic sentiment. We shall first denounce the barbarous anti-liturgists of the 18th century, who bereaved our fatherland of one of the most admirable glories of Christendom. We have seen elsewhere how the last remnants of ancient music were set down by the Roman pontiffs, and especially St. Gregory, in the two repertoires called the Roman Antiphonal and the Roman Responsorial. This collection, made up of many thousands of musical compositions, most of them of solid and melodious character, had accompanied all the Christian centuries in the expression of their joys and their sorrows. From this source Palestrina and the other great Catholic artists took their inspirations. For posterity, it was a sublime spectacle to see that the genius for preservation innate to the Catholic Church was the means by which the famous music of the Greeks and the harmonies of the days of yore reached—in a purified, corrected, and Christianized form—barbarous Western ears, which it proceeded to soften and civilize.
In the new [Neo-Gallican] breviaries and missals, almost all these ancient compositions were replaced by completely new ones. It necessarily led to the material suppression of all the ancient melodies and hence to the loss of many thousands of old pieces, a great number of which were remarkable for their nobility and originality. Lo! An act of vandalism if there ever was one, and one for which the 18th century, with its frenzy for destruction, has yet to be rebuked. And what excuse could they possibly give to justify such monstrous destruction? On the one hand, liturgical manufacturers such as Frédéric-Maurice Foinard[4] said that nothing would be easier than transporting the motifs of the ancient responsories and antiphons onto new texts,[5] and we have seen how they got together to prepare the material for the composers. On the other hand, there were forgers of plainchant who actually thought that if they composed new chants without materially departing from the character of the eight Gregorian modes, all would be well. As if it were no great loss to abandon an immense number of compositions from the 5th and 6th centuries, veritable vestiges of ancient tunes! As if inspiration were assured by adhering perfectly to the rules of Gregorian tonality! For, let us remember, if they were going to interfere they should have been able to do a better job than the Romans.
It was certainly a pitiful sight to see our cathedrals forget, one by one, the venerable canticles whose beauty had so ravished Charlemagne’s ear that he, acting in concert with the Roman pontiffs, made it one of the most powerful tools for civilizing his vast Empire; and then to hear them resound with the great noise of a torrent of new compositions bereft of melody, bereft of originality, as prosaic for the most part as the words they enshrouded. Admittedly, they did set a certain number of the new texts to old Gregorian melodies, and oftentimes even with happy results. Some of the new compositions, too, were quite inspired. However, the bulk of them were frightfully crude, and the best proof thereof is that it was impossible to learn these new chants by heart, whereas the people’s memory was a living repository of the vast majority of the Roman chants.[6] When performing these boring new melodies, they could not have enough serpents, double basses, and counterpoint, under the noise of which the chant almost entirely disappeared. The Gregorian tunes, on the other hand, being so lively, vibrant, and often syllabic, were declaimed with sentiment, even when singing in unison, so that they produced great effects upon the souls of the faithful, impressing upon them the thoughts their texts expressed.
The suppression of the Gregorian books was not only a loss for art, but a calamity for popular faith. A single consideration will allow us to understand this point and at the same time expose the culpability of those who dared to do such a thing. The divine offices are of no use to the people unless they are interesting to them. If the people sing along with the priests, one can justly say that they are assisting at the divine service with pleasure. But if the people are used to sing during the offices, and all of a sudden are forced to keep silence and allow the voice of the priest alone to be heard, one can also justly say that religion has thereby lost a large part of its attraction for the people. Yet this is precisely what has happened in the greater part of France! And so the people have, little by little, deserted the churches, which became mute for them on the day they could no longer join their voices to that of the priests. This is so true that if in those churches that resound with modern chants the people ever attempt to join their voices with those of the clergy, it is when they perform (usually in a disfigured way) some of the ancient Roman compositions, such as the Victimae Paschali, Lauda Sion, Dies irae, certain responsories or antiphons of the Blessed Sacrament, etc. When, however, it comes to the new responsories, introits, offertories, etc., the people listen without paying attention, or rather they put up with them passively, without attaching any idea or sentiment whatever to them. But go to one of those last parishes in Brittany whose choirs still sing Roman chant, and you shall hear the entire people sing from the beginning of the offices to their end.[7] They know by heart the easy melodies of the Gradual and the Antiphonal. That is how they expressed their great joys on Sunday, and during the week, one can often hear them repeating them as they work. Surely, it would be an extremely serious thing to tear this music away from them, for that would vastly diminish the interest they take in the Church’s offices.
If, after these saddening reflections, we were to move on to the history of the Revolution as it affected the singing in our churches in the 18th century, we would say lamentable things. Think of the frightful task imposed upon the composers of plainchant from the moment when the brains of those learned men hatched their new breviaries and missals, and when the printers, burdened like never before with books of this genre, finally brought them to light. Before they could launch these masterpieces, they had to take the necessary measures so that the entire corpus of new pieces could be chanted in the choirs of cathedral, collegiate, and parish churches. Thousands of pieces had to be improvised. Now recall the great Gregorian Antiphonal. A repository of ancient music, a body of melodies popular, grave, and religious, a work that harkens back at least to St. Celestine, gathered and corrected by St. Gregory, then by Leo II; then enriched again every century; presenting a marvelous variety of chants, from the severe motifs of Greece to the tender and moving strains of the Middle Ages. What did the 18th century have to offer in replacement? First, we cannot repeat enough that this meant an immense loss of so many remarkable musical pieces, popular and often of historic value, but let us go further. How many hundreds of musicians would be employed for this great task? Where, in the age of Louis XV, would one find men able to replace St. Gregory? Would 50 years be enough time to complete such a work? Alas! Any hypothesizing is pointless. Within two or three years everything was ready, composed, printed, published, and chanted with the noise of serpents, double basses, and loud voices.[8] Do you want to know how many dioceses found the men needed to cover the antiphons in question with great big musical notes, how they went about inviolati inveniri in pace? [9] They made an appeal to men of good will. As we have seen, those in charge of the whole operation were bereft of any instinct for art and poetry, and so they were hardly difficult or demanding when it came to the melodies. A learned 18th-century writer on plainchant, Léonard Poisson, Curé of Marsangis, had this to say in his Traité historique et pratique du Plain-chant appelé Grégorien:
Of all the churches that adopted new breviaries, some, it is true, made greater haste to compose the chants than others. All of them, however, wanted to see the completion of this task at any cost, and sought all sorts of ways to satisfy their eagerness to use the new breviaries. Hence the rabble of people who put themselves forward to compose the chants. Everyone pretended and thought himself capable to composing them. Even some mere schoolmasters did not shy away from signing up. Because their profession involves using chant and ordinarily they know how to chant better than others, they too threw themselves into the work. Isn’t it astounding that musical pieces by such people were adopted by men who doubtlessly were not as ignorant as they? For, although they knew how to sing well, these schoolmasters were nonetheless ignorant of Latin, which is the language of the church. And so, anyone can see how many blunders such a handicap necessary entailed.
Thus for the composition of the new chants, they chose those they thought most capable, and placed the entire execution of this great work on their shoulders. Such an enormous enterprise required a proportionate amount of time, and they were rushed. In response to the urging of those who had chosen them, they were hasty in their work. Their pieces were sung almost immediately after the compositions left their hands. Everything was received without careful examination, or with a very superficial examination, and this only after printing, without having tried them out. Only after they had been authorized for public use were their defects perceived, but too late, and after there was no longer any time to fix them.
Then they saw with regret, either that they were were mistaken in their choice of composers, or they had pressed them to work too quickly. It is not possible to ignore the innumerable and often gross shortcomings of these compositions, which of course ought to have been pleasing at least for their novelty, but which did not even have this minimal advantage.
Who indeed could bear faults as clumsy and revolting as those which for the most part fill these works? I mean the errors in metric quantity, especially in the music of the hymns; the phrases mixed up by the tenor and flow of the music, which should have been marked out as they are by the natural sense of the text; other phrases maladroitly split up; others maladroitly left hanging; chants utterly opposed to the spirit of the words: grave, when the words called for a light melody; a rising melody, when it should have been falling; and so many other irregularities, almost all caused by a lack of attention to the text.
Who would not be disgusted to hear these same old chants so frequently—so many responsories, graduals, and alleluias—, which are truly beautiful in themselves, but were imitated too often, almost always disfigured, and generally at the expense of the sense expressed by the text and at the expense of the flow and energy of the primitive chants?
What more can be said about the exaggerated and neglected expressions; forced tones; lack of good judgement in the choice of modes, without regard for the text; and the childish affectation of arranging them by number seriatim,[10] i.e. by putting the first antiphon and first responsory of an Office in the first mode, the second antiphon and second responsory in the second mode, and so on, as if any mode were appropriate for any words and any sentiment?[11]
This is the judgement of the liturgical innovations with respect to chant by a man who was adroit in composition, nourished by the best traditions, and otherwise full of enthusiasm for the texts of the new breviaries. He is therefore an irrefutable witness. We will only add one more word about the new chants, viz. that although it was inexcusable that the fabrication of new chants in certain dioceses was left up to the mercy of the multitude, it was no less deplorable to impose the colossal mission of filling up three enormous volumes in-folio with musical notes upon a single man. Yet this is exactly what happened with the new Parisian breviary. The Herculean task was imposed upon Fr. Jean Lebeuf, a canon and sub-cantor of the Cathedral of Auxerre. He was a learned and industrious man, profound in his theoretical discussions of ecclesiastical chant and well-versed in the antiquities of this genre. That was something, but even if his spark of genius had been greater still, it could not but be snuffed out soon enough under the thousands of pieces he had to put to music, despite their multitude and the strange circumstances of their manufacture. For all that, he approached this task in good faith and, since he appreciated the ancient chants, he strove to introduce its motifs into many of the new pieces. “I never had the intention,” he said, “of providing anything new. I decided to centonize, as St. Gregory had done. I have already said that to centonize means to draw from everywhere and make a selection out of all one has gathered. All those who worked before me in similar tasks either made a compilation or at least tried pastiche. I intended to do sometimes the former and sometimes the latter.
Fr. Jean Lebeuf
“By and large the Antiphonal of Paris follows the lines of the previous antiphonal, which which I occupied myself in 1703, 1704, and thereafter. But since Paris is inhabited by clerics from the entire kingdom, many noticed that that there sometimes was too much levity or aridity in Archbishop de Harlay’s antiphonal. And so I have used the melodies of 9th-, 10th-, and 11th-century French symphoniastes[12] more widely or more frequently, especially for the responsories.[13]
These intentions were praiseworthy and one ought to do justice to them, but the results failed to live up to the intentions. Besides a small number of compositions, part of which had been written by Fr. Claude Chastelain for the previous version of the Parisian books, one must admit that the Parisian Gradual and Antiphonal are entirely devoid of interest to the people; that its music is not of the sort easily learned by heart; and that it is difficult even to perceive an overall melody in the new responsories, introits, offertories, etc. The imitations, even if done note by note (which is at any rate impossible), are usually unable to reproduce the effect of the original compositions, because these latter have no rhythm and hence owe their character entirely to the sentiments expressed in the words, to the words themselves, to the sound of their vowels. Moreover, the syllables are not measured, so it is almost impossible to find two pieces that perfectly match in syllabic number. One must, therefore, eliminate or add notes, and so sacrifice the entire expression of the piece.[14]
We have spoken elsewhere of the Introit for All Saints, Accessistis, which Chastelain based on the Roman Gaudeamus with such felicitous results. Lebeuf rarely matched this standard in his imitations, and with respect to the compositions of his own invention, they are almost always impoverished, cold, and bereft of melody. The numerous chants he had to compose for hymns are also sad and monotonous, showing that he had none of the creativity Chastelain displayed in the music he composed for the Stupete gentes. Lastly, Lebeuf was unable to liberate Parisian chant from those horrible quarter notes called périélèses, which ultimately disfigure the rare beautiful melodies among his compositions. It is impossible to recall without indignation that the Alleluia verse Veni, sancte Spiritus, a tender and sweet melody miraculously retained in Archbishop Ventimille’s Missal,[15] is torn up seven times by these quarter notes. One is tempted to surmise that Lebeuf feared that this piece, if allowed to retain its original melody, would make too manifest a contrast with the pile of new and insignificant morceaux that surround it.
Lebeuf’s fecundity gave him a reputation. In 1749, when he was over 60 years old, he accepted the offer to compose the chant for the new liturgy of the diocese of Mans. In a period of three years, he succeeded in giving musical notes to the three enormous volumes that make up this liturgy. And so this composer furnished the liturgical innovation with a contingent of three volumes in-folio of plainchant! It was nevertheless evident that Lebeuf’s last work was of even lower quality than the first. Weariness had finally caught up with him. But one doesn’t hear that he ever felt any remorse for the active part he played in the vandalism of his century.
[Modern Chant Styles]
Enough talk of the new chant-books that replaced the Gregorian melodies. We will only add a word on the subject of the all-too-famous plain-chant figuré, which we have proposed elsewhere to our readers’ animadversion, and which was again in vogue in this time of universal destruction of the ancient chant traditions. An immense number of compositions of this sort blossomed, first in the hundreds of new proses [i.e. sequences], mostly bland when not mere ditties in the style of the Régence.[16] This era also produced the insipid collection known under the title of La Feillée, which is still regarded as the archetype of musical beauty in many of our provincial seminaries. We will limit ourselves to insert here the judgment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on this ignoble and bastardly form of music whose unfortunate charm has so unhappily contributed to distract French singers from the sad loss of the Gregorian repertoire:
“The modes of plainchant, as they have been transmitted to us in the ancient ecclesiastic chant, preserve therein a beauty of character and a variety of affections very sensible to an impartial connoisseur, and which have preserved some judgement of the ear for the melodious systems established on principles different from ours: but we may well say that there is nothing more ridiculous and more flat than these plainchants suited to our modern music, embellished with the ornaments of our melody, and modulated on the chords of our modes; as if our harmonic system could at any time be united to that of the ancient modes, which is established on principles exactly opposite. We ought to thank the bishops, prevosts, and choristers who have opposed this barbarous mixture, and use our utmost endeavours for the progress and perfection of an art which is very far from the point at which it has been placed, that these valuable remains of antiquity may be faithfully transmitted to those who have sufficient talents and authority to enrich the modern system by the addition of them.”[17]
[The Other Liturgical Arts: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Vestments]
We have said elsewhere that all arts are tributaries of the liturgy, and again and again lend themselves to its sublime pomps. We have just seen what 18th-century innovation made of ecclesiastical chant; the other arts followed the liturgy in its degradation. We have already pointed to decadence in the latter half of the 17th century. It became more profound and more humiliating when the churches of France in their greater number abjured the ancient traditions of the liturgy to create new forms to the taste of the age. Religious painting, which in the 17th century descended from Eustache Le Sueur to Nicolas Poussin and Pierre Mignard, took shelter in the workshops of François Boucher and his school. Thus the same brushes that decorated the boudoir of Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry in the time of the little epigrams of the Abbé de Bernis[18] degraded the severe majesty and suave mysticism of Catholic artistic subjects with affected grimaces and effeminate poses.
François Boucher, Putti with Birds, c. 1730–1733
Sculpture, no less impoverished and just as materialized, had nothing to offer in representing Our Lady than the vacuous posing of Edmé Bouchardon’s Virgin, or the fat and burly bearing Charles-Antoine Bridan gave the Queen of Angels even in her Assumption into heaven.
Edmé Bouchardon’s Virgin of SorrowsCharles-Antoine Bridan, Assumption, Chartres Cathedral
But how could such works (and out of modesty we have only cited the least boorish production of this age), how could such works be accepted for as church adornments by the grave characters who delighted in the new breviaries, whence all the carnal license of the Roman Breviary had been severely expunged? Here we must admire the judgements of God. It is written that whosoever is puffed up in spirit falls by the flesh; this is a universal law. Yet, since the partisans of innovation were unaware of the full extent of their fault on account of their utter impotence in matters of poetry, God allowed the sense of the beautiful to be extinguished in them. By leaving them to the mercy of the degraded artists of the age of Louis XV, he did not allow their consciences to sense the degree of profanation they allowed them to carry out. They gave themselves up so confidently to these artists of the flesh that the Parisian Breviary of 1736 itself shows on its frontispiece some repulsive courtesans bedecked in the attributes of Religion. They even found a way to introduce some variety into each of the four volumes, so as to show the richness of the brutish brush of the age. The 1738 Parisian Missal also offers on its frontispiece a virago plopped down upon clouds and likewise tasked with representing Religion. The collection of these sundry engravings will someday be the precious monument of the horrible familiarity with which artists of that time treated religious subjects, and proof of the clergy’s indifference to anything related to art, even in connection with divine worship. But we must still mention the last effort at scandal: the frontispiece of the 1782 Missal of Chartres, in which the Immaculate Virgin, the glory of this town and its ineffable cathedral, is outraged with an immodesty that forbids all description.
Parisian Breviary, 1786
This indifference to form, a few of the effects of which we have just pointed out, also led to the suppression of the innumerable rich engravings around solemn feasts which had thitherto adorned the new missals and breviaries. This custom had persisted until the 18th century as a souvenir of the rich miniatures that gave life to the ancient missals and antiphonals. The new Parisian Missal of 1738 still had images for feasts, but done anew by artists of the time. In the second half of the 18th century, the missals of the rest of France contented themselves with an engraved frontispiece at best, and most limited themselves to a Crucifix, which they dared not remove from the first page of the Canon. Happy were those that did not place, as did the Parisian Missal of 1738, Jesus Christ’s arms above his head to prevent him from embracing all men. That sort of crucifix was a symbol dear to the Jansenists, and we know how much influence this party had over divine worship in France at this time.
One can well imagine the fate suffered by architecture, the most divine of the liturgical arts, in this unhappy age. It waned even more than it had at the end of the 17th century. Domes like that of the chapel of Hôtel des Invalides[19] were no longer built. (Italian-style churches, with their luxurious paintings and marbles, although out of place in our cold and foggy climate, are always, whatever one might say, Christian churches.) The Church of Saint-Sulpice,[20] so bare and stripped of soul and mystery, was soon found too mystical. Louis XV lay the cornerstone of two new churches. One, Sainte-Geneviève, was to have a dome, but on the condition of having a portico in front of its doors inspired by Agrippa’s Pantheon, so that passers-by would think it was a pagan temple. The other, which was to be open presently, looked as if it were prepared for Minerva; Louis XV intended to dedicate it to St. Mary Magdalene.[21] Admittedly, the original plan was entirely different to the one that was adopted in our day. What need is there to talk of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, built a bit later,[22] modeled perfectly on an ancient temple, and so many other churches that have neither pagan or Christian appearance! To such a degree were sacred traditions forgotten that no one raised his voice in protest and no complaints were made. To that degree had religion, as understood by the French, departed from form! Such was the depth of the break from the Ages of Faith!
Saint-Philippe-du-Roule
This was also the source of the degradation of priestly vestments, especially of the surplice, whose sleeves, which around the middle of the 17th century had already been split and let to fall behind, were in the 18th century stretched out and entirely separated from the body of the surplice itself. They took the name of ailes [wings], waiting for the 19th century to amuse itself by pleating them in the ridiculous and uncomfortable fashion of our days.
When it comes to the choir biretta, it was, at the beginning of the reign of Louis XIII, the same in France as it was in the other churches of the Catholic world. By the end of the 17th century, the projection of its upper part had been eliminated, and the biretta itself lengthened it by a third. In the 18th century, this upper part was made pointed and the body of the biretta was lengthened further still, thus leading to the ridiculous and annoying headpiece of our day, which looks like a candle snuffer and thus compromises the gravity of priestly functions, and gratuitously furnishes freethinkers with an occasion to declaim against the bad taste of the Catholic Church.
The rationalist spirit of which Dom Claude de Vert, the voice of his century, was the apostle, contributed to the clergy’s neglect of religious aesthetics. To the eyes of a spiritualist religion, only one thing can elevate form, and that is mysticism. But since this rationalism deprived the ceremonies of their proper objective—viz. to sanctify visible nature by making it serve the expression of the invisible world—it is easy to understand how the clergy, already deprived of the poetic elements of the ancient liturgy, could reach such an indifference to art with respect to worship. This is the opposite of what happened in the Middle Ages, when Catholicism spiritualized material nature, divinizing science through its contact with theology, and sanctifying the government of society by the upshot of Christ’s Kingdom.
[Contemporary Evaluations of the Neo-Gallican Rites]
We could continue to protract these reflections, but we will come back to them in due time. Now we will bring together some contemporary judgements about the new French liturgies, and show that illustrious prelates—Jean-Joseph Languet, archbishop of Sens; Charles de Saint-Albin, archbishop of Cambrai; François-Xavier de Belsunce, bishop of Marseille; Jean-Félix-Henri de Fumel, bishop of Lodève; etc.—were not the only ones in the 18th century to defend liturgical tradition and judge the work of the reformers with severity.
The first judgement we shall produce is—would you believe it?—Foinard himself; he is all the less suspect. In his Projet d’un nouveau Bréviaire, while explaining the new liturgies tried out before 1720, condemns them with these observations, which are just as applicable to the breviaries put out thereafter:
“It does not seem that unction is the basis of the new breviaries. They have, it is true, labored much for the mind, but it does not seem that they have labored as much for the heart.”[23] Later on, he adds these remarkable words: “Could it not be said that most of the antiphons in the new breviaries were only made to be seen by curious eyes outside of the Office?”[24]
Let us now harken to Fr. Urbain Robinet, author of the breviaries of Rouen, Mans, Carcassone, and Cahors. Here is a valuable admission: “Those who composed the Roman Breviary had a better taste for prayer and the words appropriate to it than we do today.”[25]
The testimony that follows that of Robinet in chronological order is that of Pierre Collet in his Traité de l’Office divin, first published in 1763. Speaking about certain clerics who obtained permission from their bishops to say breviaries other than those followed in their dioceses, under the pretext that the newer breviaries were better made, he shows the shallowness of this sort of whim: “Scripture, the psalms, and most homilies are the same in all the breviaries. If, to nourish one’s devotion, one needs legenda or some other similar composition from a foreign breviary, one can make use of it for spiritual reading. But how many antiphons seem the most beautiful thing in the world when they stand alone, and so pitiful when one one sees them at their source!”[26]
Later on, he adds these words so full of sense and candor: “A young priest might loudly declare that he recites the Breviary of Paris with greater piety than that of his own diocese, but he would say very quietly that his diocesan breviary is much longer than that of Paris and, even if one did not change any verses or responsories, he would return to his own if one made it shorter than the one whence he finds so much material for devotion. After all, as we have already said, true piety does not disdain proper order. A commonplace thought can nourish it: the less it strikes the mind, the more it touches the heart. The antiphons of the Office of St. Martin come, I think, from Sulpicius Severus. Is there a single one that cannot serve as material for meditation for an entire year? How much force of sentiment there is in these words: Oculis ac manibus in cœlum semper intentus, invictum ab oratione spiritum non relaxabat…. Domine, si adhuc. populo tuo sum necessarius, non recuso laborem… O virum ineffabilem, nec labore victum, nec morte vincendum; qui nec mori timuit, nec vivere recusavit, etc.”[27]
The Ami de la Religion, in its twenty-sixth volume, which we have already cited several times, and the Biographie universelle, mention a dean of the chapter of the cathedral of Montauban named Bertrand de la Tour, a man very attached to the Holy See and zealous for the good of the Church,[28] who after the publication of the Breviary of Montauban by the bishop Anne-François de Breteuil, in 1772, attacked the liturgical innovation and published a collection of twenty-one articles on the new breviaries, a total of 397 pages in-4°. The author discusses the Breviaries of Paris, Montauban, and Cahors in particular.[29] Our attempts to acquire this collection have so far been unfruitful. Thus, we will limit ourselves here to citing the judgment of the Ami de la Religion, which tells us that “the Abbé de la Tour is not generally favorable to the new breviaries, and regrets that they have distanced themselves from the simplicity of the Roman Breviary.[30]”
We do not have any further witnesses among 18th-century French authors against the novelties whose history we are recounting; but these few lines will prove at least that the revolution was not accomplished without protest on the part of many zealous persons who united their voices to those of illustrious prelates whose names we have mentioned. The admissions of Foinard and Robinet are also not without meritOne the other hand, if we wish to inquire about the judgments that have been rendered in foreign countries concerning the serious changes that the 18th century saw introduced in divine worship among the French, it is difficult to find any testimonies expressing such a judgement. The reason is clear: first, because foreigners are not obliged keep up with all the fantasies that cross our minds. Secondly, because when they heard about liturgical uses particular to France they imagined, but since they did not have the new books in their hands, they supposed that these uses not only existed before the Bull of St. Pius V, but indeed went back to the earliest antiquity. We ourselves have found well-educated people who believe this in our own day, even in Rome. Nevertheless, we have found the opinions of three learned foreigners, two Italians and one Spaniard.
The first is the immortal Prospero Lambertini, who later became pope under the name of Benedict XIV. In his great word on The Canonization of Saints,[31] he judges the new breviaries in relation to the authority of the bishops who promulgated them. He severely reprimands Pierre-Jean-François Percin de Montgaillard, bishop of Saint-Pons; Jean Grancolas;[32] and Jean Pontas[33] for having unreservedly sustained that it is within the bishops’ purview to change and reform the breviary, without distinguishing between those dioceses where the Roman Breviary had been followed and those that did not follow the Bull of St. Pius V. Because this question is mainly related to liturgical law, we will keep the explanation and discussion of this passage by Benedict XIV to the part of our work where we will treat this matter in particular.
Giuseppe Catalani, in his learned commentary on the Roman Pontifical, published in 1736, expresses himself with a severity we are unable to translate on the subject of the bishops who incurred the infelicity of lending their trust to heretics for the composition of the breviaries of their churches:
Jam praesertim pro auctoritate breviarii Romani plura possent afferri testimonia quibus abunde ostendi posset, quanta fuerit nuper quorumdam episcoporum insignis audacia atque insolentia, dum illud, inconsulto Romano pontifice, non modo immutarunt, sed et fœdarunt, hœreticisque ansam dederunt constabiliendi suas pravas sententias.[34]
(“In favor of the authority of the Roman Breviary in particular, many witnesses could be brought forward to show the signal audacity and insolence of certain bishops who have recently, without consulting the Roman Pontiff, not only changed this Breviary but employed and entered into pacts with the heretics to establish their false opinions.”)
Finally, the illustrious Spanish Jesuit, Faustino Arévalo, in the interesting dissertation de Hymnis ecclesiasticis he placed at the beginning of his Hymnodia Hispanica, after having reported Benedict XIV’s doctrine on the rights of bishops with respect to the liturgy, adds:
“I have perused a few of these new French breviaries, and I have found many things therein that seem to me worthy of approbation and praise. Yet not on that account am I weary of the Roman Breviary. Rather, I began to hold it in higher esteem after having read several other breviaries. Somehow, what is most excellent in the latter was either taken from the Roman Breviary or formed according to its model.”[35]
Arévalo’s language is a bit less gentle with regard to the new breviaries in the critique of Jean-Baptiste de Santeul’s hymns we have placed at the end of this volume: “In the course of this century, there have appeared in France so many new breviaries, and one finds in the Mercure de France, in Dinouart’s Journal, and in Zaccaria’s Bibliotheca ritualis such a number of works and dissertations on particular offices, on the form of the canonical hours, and on the litany and recent hymns to Our Lady, that one might be tempted to fear that in France, just like women ceaselessly make up new fashions for their clothes, so do priests invent new breviaries each year which please them only because of their novelty.”[36]
[Conclusion]
But it is time to conclude this chapter with the following considerations:
Such was the upheaval of ideas in the 18th century that one sees prelates oppose heretics and, at the same time, by some inexplicable zeal, undermine tradition in the sacred prayers of the Missal. They profess that the Church has her own proper voice, and then silence this voice by giving the floor to anyone with learning but no authority.
Such was the naïve effrontery of the new liturgists that they, in agreement with each other, proposed nothing less than to bring the Church of their times back to the true spirit of prayer, to purge the liturgies of all that was unrefined, inexact, immoderate, dull, difficult to give good sense to—everything that the Church, in the pious movements of her inspiration, had infelicitously composed or adopted.
Such was, in the fairest of judgements, the barbarity into which Frenchmen fell in matters of divine worship, that, since liturgical harmony was destroyed, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture, which are the tributary arts of the liturgy, followed in a decadence that has only increased with the passing of time.
Such was the abnormal situation into which the innovators placed the liturgy in France that they themselves testified against their work, and joined the defenders of antiquity in regretting the loss of the Gregorian books.
NOTES:
[1] Peter Raedts, “Prosper Guéranger O.S.B (1805–1875) and the Struggle for Liturgical Unity,” 336.
[6] De Moléon’s Voyages Liturgiques makes special mention of which chapters still sang from memory, as if singing from books was still a fairly recent phenomenon.
[7] It is true that in the 1950s, people in Brittany still sang Sunday Vespers by heart, and in many places the Requiem Mass was known, as Domenico Bartolucci recalls:
“When I was a boy I remember that the people used to sing in church. They sang at Vespers (all from memory: the antiphons, psalms and hymns); they sang at devotional functions (Way of the Cross, Marian devotions, etc.); they sang in processions (the Magnificat, Te Deum, Lauda Sion, and other hymns); they sang even at Solemn Mass sometimes. (When I was a boy, each Sunday at my little church there was a Solemn Mass, and on normal Sundays the people sang by themselves.)” I used to sing too, either behind the altar with my father, who was the parish cantor, or with the people in the pews whenever there weren’t cantors behind the altar. The people sang: they sang in a loud voice, a song that centuries and centuries had handed down to them, a lusty song, severe and strong, that the children had learned from their elders, not at school desks or examination rooms but by constant habit, in the continuous practice of the Church. How can I recall without a still-living emotion the participation of all of people at the Liturgy of the Dead, and especially in the Obsequies? Everyone, I mean everyone, belted out the Libera me Domine and then the In Paradisum and then the De Profundis…! Everyone! And the music, that gorgeous music, attained an unmatchable power; the last, deep, hearty farewell to the dead as he left the church where countless times he had sung full-throatedly the praises of God! The people sang!”
[8] This situation is a remarkable parallel to the state of affairs in the Roman church in the 20th century, where the complete revision of the Mass and Office propers required the composition of thousands of new pieces; a work still not even near completion fifty years later, either in Latin or in the vernacular languages. The Neo-Gallicans had this at least to boast, that they tried to replace the former melodies with true chant, rather than taking the folk music ready at hand.
[9] “Finding [men] blameless in peace,” 2 Peter 3:14. Perhaps he is elliptically and sarcastically suggesting that these composers would have had to have been people found “before [the Lord] unspotted and blameless in peace.”
[10] To be fair, this was done in the composition of new Offices since the Middle Ages; e.g., it is the case for the antiphons for Trinity Sunday and for Corpus Christi.
[14] He is not entirely correct, since we know that chant was original rhythmic. The prevailing idea in the Solesmes school in Dom Guéranger’s time was that all the notes in a chant piece had the same basic value and that any variation would be based on the text (e.g. syllables at the ends of phrases would make those notes a bit longer). Therefore, when the reformers changed the prose text, they had to change the music too, adding or deleting notes, and the results were usually infelicitous.
[15] It was the only musical proper this Missal retained (besides the sequences) whose text was not taken from Scripture.
[16] The regency between 1715 and and 1723, when King Louis XV was a minor and the Kingdom was ruled by the Philippe d’Orléans.
[18] François-Joachim de Pierre de Bernis, a friend of Madame de Pompadour in the court of Louis XV, and whose famous witticisms were admired by Voltaire. He later became Archbishop of Albi and a Cardinal.
[21] The Revolution interrupted its construction, and it was finished by Napoleon in 1806 as the Temple to the Glory of the Great Army. In 1842, King Louis-Philippe had it consecrated as a church.
[28]L’Ami de la Religion, tome XXVI. Sur la réimpression du Bréviaire de Paris, page 294.
[29] Recall that the Breviary of Cahors was Robinet’s, and also followed in Carcassonne and Mans.
[30] L’Ami de la Religion. Ibidem. —Les mémoires canoniques et liturgiques de l’abbé de la Tour ont été publiés en 1855 dans le septième volume de ses œuvres, réimprimées par l’abbé Migne. (Note de l’édit.)
[31] De Servorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canonizatione, lib. IV, part. II, cap. XIII.
[34] Catalani. Commentarius in Pontificale Romanum, tome I, p. 189. We offer this translation with all due respect to Dom Guéranger.
[35] Nonnulla ego istiusmodi breviaria pervolutavi, ac multa reperi in eis, quas approbatione, et laude digna mihi visa sunt; non idcirco tamen breviarii Romani me tœdet, imo pluris hoc habere cœpi, ex quo diversa alia perlegi, ac nescio quo pacto partes illae, quae in ceteris potissimum eminent, aut ex breviario Romano desumptae sunt, aut ad hujus similitudinem effictae. (Arevalo, Hymnodia Hispan., page 211. Dissert. de Hymnis eccles., § XXXII.)
[36] Tot nova Breviaria hoc seculo in Gallia prodierunt, tot opuscula, et dissertationes de officiis singularibus, de precibus horariis universe, de litaniis, hymnisque recentibus Deiparae in Mercurio Gallico, in Diario Dinouartii, in Bibliotheca rituali Zachariae indicantur, ut possit aliquis subvereri ne in Galliis, ut feminœ novas vestium formas, ita sacerdotes nova breviaria quotannis inventant, in quibus vel sola novitas placeat.
As we saw on Sunday, the Office of the Dead had ancient origins. Early in the Middle Ages it became an obligatory supplement to the cursus of the Divine Office on ferial days, as well as on All Souls, until the the former obligation was suppressed in the wake of the Council of Trent.
All Souls stood, after the Tridentine reforms, as an oddity in the liturgical calendar, the sole day retaining double Vespers, Mattins, and Lauds. It is hardly surprising that its peculiar nature, even despite its venerable antiquity, made it the target of liturgical reformers.
The 1779 edition of the breviary of Cluny, which claims to be based on the Benedictine breviary from which it manifestly diverges
By the 17th century the Abbey of Cluny, that erstwhile centre of liturgical excellence, had become the vanguard for a rationalist liturgical movement whose most practical result was the production of a genre of reformed liturgies that later came to be called Neo-Gallican. These have been rendered somewhat infamous by the exhaustive critique to which they were submitted in Dom Proper Guéranger’s Institutions liturgiques. Guéranger censures the reformers for holding an “anti-liturgical heresy,” that consisted, in keeping with the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment, to refashion the liturgy based on “rational” principles of their own devising without respect for inherited forms.
For example, amongst the more noteworthy characteristics of these Neo-Gallican liturgies were a rejection of the use of non-Biblical texts for Office antiphons and Mass propers (except hymns and sequences), the substitution of ancient hymns with new versions in a classicizing style, and a reduction in the number and rank of feasts to favour a re-arranged ferial psalter.
The earliest and most radical break with previous liturgical custom was the Neo-Gallican breviary adopted by Cluny in 1686. Dom Guéranger points out that it was not a reform, but the “complete and violent destruction of the entire corpus of the Gregorian offices”. In his own review of the material, Fr. Thiers wryly quips that it ought to have be called “The New Breviary” for all the connection it had with the old liturgy of Cluny.
In the novel breviary, the Office of the Dead itself was untouched except for the replacement of all non-Scriptural antiphons and responsories with new ones composed from Biblical texts. All Souls, however, became a proper liturgical day ending with None, but not following the precedent of uses like the Dominican; rather, the office was crafted almost entirely anew. All the antiphons and responsories were rewritten from Scripture. The readings from Job were excised from Mattins: thenceforth the first Nocturn had the readings of the occurring feria, the second Nocturn an excerpt from St Augustine’s sermon 127, and the third Nocturn a pericope from chapter 15 of St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians.
This responsory, derived entirely from Biblical texts, replaced the traditional Libera me as the last responsory of Mattins of the Dead in the Neo-Gallican Cluniac Office, and was later taken up by the Parisian and other Neo-Gallican uses. The version here is from a Parisian antiphonary and gradual published in 1827.
Hymns were composed to conform Mattins and Lauds to the normal scheme for feasts. They were composed by Jean-Baptiste Santeul, a Canon Regular of St Victor, whom Dom Guéranger accuses of having Jansenist sympathies and who, the Abbot of Solesmes superciliously notes, was better known for being a bon vivant than for his piety.
Canon Jean-Baptiste Santeul, composer of many hymns used in the Neo-Gallican liturgies, described by a contemporary as “most excellent company, a good dinner-guest above all, fond of wine and good cheer, but without debauchery.”
None of the other Neo-Gallican rites strayed as far from tradition as did Cluny. Most were modeled after the Parisian use, whose breviary underwent its final and definitive reform in 1736. In it, Second Vespers of All Saints is followed by Vespers of the Dead, reformed only by the removal of non-Scriptural elements. All Souls itself was a full liturgical day ending with None. Mattins and Lauds were again altered to replace texts not coming from Scripture, losing some of their most beautiful responsories, which were replaced by new compositions of dubious musical quality. The readings of the first Nocturn come from Job, and those of the second and third follow the arrangement in the Cluniac breviary. At the Little Hours, the psalms begin immediately after the silent prayers, and are taken from Sunday in the new Parisian psalter. They are followed by one of the new Scriptural responsories and finish with the Lord’s prayer, the usual preces, and collect.
The memorable propers of the Mass of the Dead were also doomed to revision, since none them derive from Biblical texts. New propers were duly composed, and in most Neo-Gallican rites they are the following:
Introit (from Ps. 73).Respice, Domine, in testamentum tuum; ne tradas bestiis animas confitentes tibi, et animas pauperum tuorum ne obliviscaris in finem. Ps. Ut quid, Deus, repulisti in finem; * iratus est furor tuus super oves pascuæ tuæ. ℣. Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, * et lux perpetua luceat eis. Respice, &c. Have regard, O Lord, to thy convenant; deliver not up to beasts the souls that confess to thee: and forget not to the end the souls of thy poor. Ps. O God, why hast thou cast us off unto the end: why is thy wrath enkindled against the sheep of thy pasture? ℣. Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual life shine upon them. Have regard, &c.
Gradual (from Ps. 141). Clamavi ad te, Domine; dixi, Tu es spes mea, portio mea in terra viventium. ℣. Educ de custodia animam meam ad confitendum nomini tuo: me expectant justi, donec retribuas mihi. I cried to thee, O Lord: I said: Thou art my hope, my portion in the land of the living. ℣. Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name: the just wait for me, until thou reward me.
Tract (from Baruch 3). Domine omnipotens, anima in angustiis, et spiritus anxius clamat at te. Audi, Domine, et miserere, quia Deus es miséricors; et miserere nostri, quia peccavimus ante te. Domine omnipotens, Deus Israel, audi nunc orationem mortuorum Israel. O Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, the soul in anguish, and the troubled spirit crieth to thee. Hear, O Lord, and have mercy, for thou art a merciful God, and have pity on us: for we have sinned before thee. O Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, hear now the prayer of the dead of Israel.
Offertory (from Micheas 7). Ad Dominum aspiciam, expectabo Deum salvatorem meum; audiet me Deus meus: consurgam cum sedero in tenebris, Dominus lux mea est: iram Domini portabo, quoniam peccavi ei: educet me in lucem, videbo justitiam ejus. I will look towards the Lord, I will wait for God my Saviour: my God will hear me, I shall arise, when I sit in darkness, the Lord is my light. I will bear the wrath of the Lord, because I have sinned against him: he will bring me forth into the light, I shall behold his justice.
Communion (from John 6). Qui manducat meam carnem, et bibit meum sanguinem, habet vitam aeternam, et ego resuscitabo eum in novissimo die. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day.
The sequence Dies iræ was preserved, but its first stanza was amended to suppress mention of the Sibyl, and the thirteenth to remove the suggestion that the sinful woman Our Lord absolved was St Mary Magdalene.
The Neo-Gallican introit for Masses of the Dead. The melody follows that of the traditional Introit.
This was the state of the Office of All Souls throughout most of France—even whilom conservative Lyons eventually chose to forsake its traditions and ape the Parisian use—until Dom Guéranger began his efforts to replace the Neo-Gallican rites with the Roman, imagining that Rome—surely Rome!—would prove a bulwark of tradition. It is intensely ironic, then, that St Pius X’s reform of the Roman breviary broke with the very tradition Dom Guéranger cherished, and did so considerably influenced by the Neo-Gallican experiments. We will discuss this final chapter in the saga of All Souls on Friday.
asically, each ceremony serves a simple, physical, hygienic convenience or reflects a simple historical accommodation. Incense dispelled bad odors. Immersion baptism was a hygienic practice meant for cleaning newborn babies. The chasuble was an ordinary Roman garment. The rood screen simply amplified a lector’s voice, a purpose just as easily achieved by a small lectern. The commixing of water and wine in the chalice is a simple imitation of historic Jewish practice. “Mystical” reasons are added later.
Canticum Salomonis 