St Anthony the Abbot in the Isenheim Altarpiece

One of the most famous late medieval depictions of the Crucifixion is the central panel of the Isenheim altarpiece, painted by the German artist Matthias Grünewald (1470 ca. - 1528) between 1512-16. I call this work “late medieval” despite its date, because Grünewald completely ignores the elegant stylizations of his Italian Renaissance contemporaries, and shows us the reality of Our Lord’s sufferings very starkly indeed: the dislocation of His shoulders, the twisting of his Hands, the contortion of His face, the discoloration of His skin, etc. Marks of the flagellation cover His whole body, and the artist seems to have imagined that the scourging was done with briars, rather than a corded whip, leaving several pieces of wood still lodged in His flesh.

The altarpiece was commissioned for a monastery and hospital in Isenheim, a town about 57 miles to the south south-east of Strasbourg (now part of France, and generally spelled Issenheim). This institution belonged to an order of hospitalers founded in Vienne, France, at the end of the 11th century, and named after St Anthony the Abbot, whose feast is today. The order’s special duty was to care for those who suffered from the painful condition which in that era was called St Anthony’s fire, which is now called ergotism, since it results from long term ingestion of a fungus called ergot which was commonly found in rye and other cereals. As my colleague David Clayton has previously noted, Christ’s disfigurement here reflects those of the patients in the hospital, and is intended to encourage them to bear with their sufferings with patience and fortitude.

In the museum where it is now kept, the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, the altarpiece has been dismantled so that all of its sections can be seen. In its original placement in the monastery, this is how it was displayed most of the time.

St Anthony is depicted on the right wing, with a demon raging at him through the window next to his head, since Anthony spent a lot of time in combat with demonic forces. Notice how he is depicted standing on a pedestal, almost as if he were a colored statue.
 

On the opposite side is Saint Sebastian, who is generally invoked as a patron against contagious diseases such as the black plague. Ergotism is not contagious, but it can do horrible things to the skin, very much as the plague can.  

At the bottom is the Deposition and Burial of Christ; patients with advanced ergotism rarely recovered, and with the reality of impending death upon them, this image would, of course, encourage them to think of their own sufferings in union with Christ, leading to the Resurrection.

On major feast days, the panels of the front would be pulled back to reveal this second set of images.

On the left, the Annunciation, with the prophet Isaiah at the upper left; the words of his prophecy of the Virgin that shall conceive are written on the book which Mary is reading. (By the early 16th century, the Italian convention had long been to have the angel Gabriel kneel before the Virgin so that his head would lower than Mary’s, to indicate Her higher dignity.)

The central panels, which in the original arrangement could be pulled open to reveal the sculptures seen below, show the Virgin holding the infant Christ as they are serenaded by a group of angels with musical instruments. (In German, the left section bears the charming name of “Engelskonzert - the angelic concert.”) On the building above the angels are small images of Moses and the four major prophets.

To the right side, the Resurrection. Christ displays His wounds as a sign of hope to the patients in the hospital that their sufferings will also lead to their transfiguration in the final resurrection. (It may be a fair gauge of how little this style is to modern tastes that when this slide was shown in my college freshman art history class, many of the students laughed out loud, to the deep annoyance of our German art history teacher.)

The panels shown above could then be opened to show this configuration. It is generally assumed that this was done for the feast days of the Saints depicted here: St Anthony, his friend St Paul the First Hermit, St Augustine and St Jerome. There may well have been various other such occasions.

The two painted panels on the side show the assaults made upon St Anthony by various demons, and his meeting with St Paul the First Hermit. The former are described at length in St Athanasius’ biography of Anthony, and have given many artists an opportunity to indulge their strangest conceits, among them, Hieronymus Bosch and Salvador Dalí, but also the young Michelangelo, in very first painting. The latter episode occupies the largest part of St Jerome’s biography of St Paul.

The sculptures in the center of the altarpiece are the work of an artist named Nicholas from the town of Hagenau, a town about 19 miles to the north of Strasbourg.

In the middle, St Anthony is depicted as an abbot with a crook. Pigs belonging to the Order of St Anthony were generally allowed to graze on common land, which is why they are often shown in his company. On the right is St Jerome, who wrote the biography of St Paul the First Hermit; on the left, with the donor kneeling in front of him, St Augustine, by whose rule the Order lived. 

At the bottom, a stylized representation of Christ with the Apostles at the Last Supper.

The Deus qui humanae substantiae

Lost in Translation #117

After offering the host, the priest prepares the next gift by pouring wine into the chalice, and water into the wine. In addition to remaining faithful to the customs of the Jews in the Holy Land at the time of the Last Supper (not to mention the Romans and Greeks), the admixture of water and wine symbolizes the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in the person of Jesus Christ. A backhanded confirmation of this interpretation of the custom is that the Armenian Apostolic Church, which is Monophysite (or, if you prefer, Miaphysite), refuses to do it: to them, at least, adding water to wine is a confession of the Chalcedonian formulation of Jesus Christ having two natures in one Divine Person. I once heard that the only liturgical change the Armenian Catholic Church was required to make when it reunited with Rome was to add water to its wine as a disavowal of monophysitism.

More specifically, the wine represents Christ and the water represents us, His disciples. As St. Cyprian of Carthage explains:

For because Christ bore us all in that He also bore our sins, we see that in the water is the people, but in the wine is showed the blood of Christ. But when the water is mingled in the cup with wine, the people is made one with Christ, and the assembly of believers is associated and conjoined with Him in whom it believes. [1]

Cyprian’s interpretation—which implies that we, like a few drops of water, are absorbed into the vast divinity of Jesus Christ—finds an interesting corroboration in the forensic science on miracles and sacred relics. The same blood type has been found in all Eucharistic miracles, as well as on the Shroud of Turin, the Sudarium (Head Shroud) of Oviedo, and the Holy Tunic (Jesus’ seamless garment). That blood type is AB, which is for universal receivers (O negative is for universal donors). It might appear counterintuitive that Christ would have the blood type for universal receivers since He gave or donated His blood for all, but it affirms the paradox that when we receive Christ in Holy Communion, He receives us into His Body and we become a part of His Body. Every Holy Communion is a heart transfer and a blood transfusion, but we are entering into Christ’s Blood and enfolded into His Heart, as well as vice versa.

Further confirming this symbolic interpretation of the admixture is what the priest says as he blesses the water and pours a few drops of it into the wine:

Deus, qui humánae substantiae dignitátem mirabíliter condidisti, et mirabilius reformasti: da nobis per hujus aquæ et vini mysterium, ejus divinitátis esse consortes, qui humanitátis nostrae fíeri dignátus est párticeps, Jesus Christus Filius tuus Dóminus noster: Qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti Deus: per omnia saecula sæculórum. Amen.

Which I translate as:

O God, Who didst wonderfully create the dignity of human nature and didst more wonderfully reform it: grant to us that, through the mystery of this water and wine, we may be made sharers of the divinity of Him Who deigned to be made a partaker of our humanity, Jesus Christ our Lord, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, forever and ever. Amen.

This ancient and beautiful prayer was first used as a Collect for Christmas in the so-called Leonine Sacramentary (mid-sixth to early seventh century), and it may have been inspired by a line from Pope Leo the Great’s Sermon 27:

Expergiscere, o homo, et dignitatem tuae agnosce naturae. Recordare te factum ad imaginem Dei, quae, etsi in Adam corrupta, in Christo tamen est reformata.

Wake up then, O man, and acknowledge the dignity of your nature. Recall that you have been made according to the image of God. This nature, even though it has been corrupted in Adam, has nevertheless been reformed in Christ.

Pope St Leo the Great, by the Spanish painter Francisco Herrera the Younger (1627-85). Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

The prayer, which existed in four different forms in different sacramentaries, was added to the Offertory of the Gallican Rite during the eighth-century Carolingian Renaissance and entered the Missal of the Roman Curia in the thirteenth century. It remained a fixture of the Roman Offertory until the promulgation of the Novus Ordo in 1969, when it was uncoupled from the mixing of water and wine and moved to Christmas as a Collect.

The prayer’s petition is unusual—namely, that we participate in the Godhead, not through the mystery of the Incarnation or the Holy Eucharist, but through the mystery of this water and (unconsecrated) wine. The use of “mystery” rather than “admixture” can be explained in one of two ways. First, it is another example of what Adrian Fortescue calls “dramatic misplacement,” a keen anticipation of the consecration. Even while he is adding water to unconsecrated wine, the priest is mindful of the Precious Blood that it will soon be. And connecting the two events (the mixing and the consecration) is the word “mystery”—the hujus aquæ et vini mysterium of this prayer and the mysterium fidei of the Words of Institution over the chalice.

Or second, the mixing is itself a mystery insofar as it expresses a reality beyond our grasp, the union of Christ and His Church, which St. Paul calls not only a mystery but a “great mystery” (mustērion mega).[2] Moreover, the prayer refers to the mystery of this water and wine, yoking this Eucharistic liturgy to the prayer’s theology of dignity and divinization, to which we now turn.

Rather than cut to the chase and simply ask for participation in the divine, the petition reminds us of the marvelous trade-off that took place at the Incarnation. When God became man in the person of Jesus Christ, human nature was allowed to participate in the Godhead. Eastern Christian thought goes so far as to call this the theosis or the divinization of the believer. As St. Athanasius famously put it, “God became man so that man might become god.” Although the West has a tradition of talking about divinization as well, it tends to prefer either the language of divine adoption or, as we see here, the language of participation. “O wondrous exchange!” proclaims the first Antiphon during Vespers for the Feast of the Circumcision:

The Creator of the human race, assuming a living body, hath deigned to be born of a Virgin: and becoming man, from no human seed, hath bestowed upon us His divinity.

In the Deus qui humanae substantiae, the wording is: “may we be made sharers of the divinity of Him Who deigned to be made a partaker of our humanity.” It is noteworthy that different nouns are used for our participation in Christ’s divinity and for Christ’s participation in our humanity—consortes (sharers) for the former and particeps (partaker) for the latter. The prayer would arguably have been more eloquent if the same word had been used in both cases, which is perhaps why many translations ignore the extra diction and use the same word both times. [3] But I suspect that the author wishes to draw attention to the fact that the way in which Christ participates in our humanity is not the way in which we participate in His divinity. We do not enter in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we are not a Divine Person who assumes a different nature, etc. Rather, we are divinely adopted and “divinized” through our incorporation into the Mystical Body of Christ and through our reception of the sacraments.

The description of God as wonderfully creating and even more wonderfully reforming alludes to the three-act metanarrative of creation, fall, and redemption, for God would not have to reform us if we had somehow not become deformed. And deformed we are, thanks to the Fall of Adam and our own sins. Et placuit in conspectu tuo reformare deformia mea, writes Augustine in the Confessions: “And it was pleasing in Thy sight to reform my deformities.” [4]

Moreover, the prayer does not speak simply of human nature (or more literally, human substance) but of its dignity. God did a wonderful thing when He endowed mankind with its dignity, and He did an even more wonderful thing after that dignity was marred by sin, namely, He elevated it even more, deigning to be made a partaker of it. It is impossible here to capture the original connection in Latin between “deigned” (dignatus) and “dignity” (dignitas). In English, when something is beneath criticism, we say that we will not dignify that statement with a response. When God chose to become man, He did dignify our cry for help with a most dramatic response.

The dignity of the human person, which nowadays is a well-known concept , was rarely acknowledged prior to the birth of Our Lord. Although Cicero had pioneered a theory of the dignity of the human race, it was Christianity that spread the idea that all humans have a unique and equal dignity, and it had this idea because it was able to see human nature in light of the Incarnation.

And one of the chief ways that Christianity developed its concept of human dignity was through this prayer. Fr. James McEvoy and Dr. Mette Lebech argue that the Deus qui humanae substantiae made a significant contribution to the conceptualization of human dignity even before its use at the Offertory, and that after it was included in the Offertory, it created an association between human dignity and the holy exchange of gifts. “In this way,” McEvoy and Lebech conclude, “the prayer significantly shaped the Christian concept of human dignity as the holy ‘place’ of commerce with God.” [5] The authors (neither of whom, as far as I can tell, is a traditionalist) also expressed astonishment that

The liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council should have blurred that reference, given the rise to prominence of the concept of human dignity with the human rights tradition after the Second World War. An explanation for this seems not to be at hand, for example in the explanatory text by Antoine Dumas, who headed the study group that revised the sanctoral. [6]

They conclude:

Given the inconclusive reasons for uncoupling human dignity from the mystery at the heart of the liturgy, it may be hoped that the prayer will be restored in its Tridentine integrity to the liturgy at some point in the future. This would seem to be in accordance with the stated purposes of Sacrosanctum Concilium.[7]

Finally, we note that the Deus qui humanae substantiae is a celebrant’s private prayer said in a low voice, and yet an entire civilization’s concept of human dignity was shaped by it. Not everything needs to be said aloud at Mass in order for it to have an impact.

Notes

[1] Epistle 62.13.

[2] Ephesians 5, 32. Marriage, of course, is another symbol or sacramentum of this union.

[3] For example, see the Baronius Missal, p. 925: “...we may become partakers of His divine nature, who deigned to become partaker of our human nature...”

[4] Conf. 7.8.12.

[5] James McEvoy and Mette Lebech, “Deus qui humanae substantiae dignitatem: A Latin Liturgical Source Contributing to the Conceptualization History of Human Dignity,” Maynooth Philosophical Papers 10 (2020), 117-33, 117.

[6] Ibid., 123-24.

[7] Ibid., 130-31.

Historical Photos of a Byzantine Episcopal Ordination

Our thanks to reader Gian Marco Talluto for sharing with us these pictures of the ordination of a bishop in the Byzantine Rite, which took place in Sicily on this day in 1938.

Giuseppe Perniciaro was born in Mezzojuso, in the province of Palermo, Sicily, on January 11, 1907. After studying at the Greek-Albanian Seminary in Palermo, he was a student at the Pontifical Greek College in Rome, where he attended the best Pontifical Universities; in 1928, finished his theology courses, and the following year, began his specialization in Oriental Ecclesiastical Sciences at the Pontifical Oriental Institute. On July 7, 1929, at the Church of Sant’ Atanasio in Rome, he was ordained a priest by Mons. Isaia Papadopoulos, Assessor of the Oriental Congregation. In 1932, he was called to take up the office of Rector of the Greek Albanian Seminary in Palermo, founded by Father Giorgio Guzzetta in 1734.

On October 26, 1937, following the creation of the Eparchy of Piana dei Greci by Pope Pius XI, Papas Giuseppe Perniciaro was elected, at only 30 years of age, Titular Bishop of Arbano, and auxiliary of the Archbishop of Palermo.

The following January 16, in the cathedral of St Demetrius, he was consecrated Bishop in the presence of Cardinal Luigi Lavitrano, archbishop of Palermo and apostolic administrator of Piana dei Greci, by Giovanni Mele, bishop of Lungro, assisted by Paolo Schirò, titular bishop of Bende (the last ordaining bishop of the Greek Rite in Sicily), and by Alessandro Evreinoff, titular bishop of Pario and ordaining bishop of the Greek Rite in Rome. During the same Liturgy, Monsignor Perniciaro conferred his first priestly ordination on deacon Matteo Sciambra from Contessa Entellina.

On July 12, 1967, after the death of Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini, Monsignor Perniciaro was appointed residential bishop of the Eparchy of Piana degli Albanesi. (The eparchy’s name was changed from Piana dei Greci to Albanesi for political reasons in 1941).

Monsignor Perniciaro actively participated as a Father of the Second Vatican Council as a member of both the Italian and Sicilian episcopal conferences. During his long episcopate he accompanied with prayer, work, and also with physical and spiritual suffering, the birth and development of the diocese of Piana, concluded his earthly mission on June 5, 1981.

Thanks to the site https://www.visitpiana.com/eparchia and the Facebook page of the parish of San Nicola di Mezzojuso for the biography and photos of the ordination of Mons. Perniciaro.

A contemporary newsreel report of this ceremony.

Initial procession

The prelates in the procession were in order: Fr Flaviano La Piana, Papas Lorenzo Perniciaro, Fr Isidoro Croce, Papas Giuseppe Perniciaro, Fr Odilone de Golenvau (rector of the Greek College) with Mons. Evreinoff, behind Mons. Schiró and Mons. Mele, and finally, Cardinal Lavitrano.

Cardinal Lavitrano

Consecration prayer, in the foreground Mons. Schirò and Mons. Evreinoff, Mons. Giovanni Mele can be seen.

Blessing performed by the new bishop

Final procession with the new bishop in the foreground

Cardinal Lavitrano and Monsignor Schirò

When Tabernacles Had Wings

Abbot Suger was one of those monumental men whose lives and personalities would seem almost incredible had they not lived in western Europe during the High Middle Ages. Well known today as a pivotal figure in the development of Gothic architecture, he was in fact of such diverse and admirable abilities as to merit a term like “Renaissance man”—which of course raises the question of why this term even exists, when so many to whom it applies predated the Renaissance. Let us say quite simply, then, that Suger was a “medieval man.”

Part of the choir of the abbey of St Denys. Around the year 1135, the abbot Suger began the process of enlarging the original Carolingian church, during which the choir was rebuilt from 1140-44. Suger created the idea of having huge walls of windows which flood the church’s interior with light, the foundation of the architecture style which we now call Gothic, and this choir is the first example of it. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Guilhem Vellut, CC BY 2.0)

Born in 1081 to a relatively humble family, the young Suger showed enough intellectual promise to be sent to the abbey of Saint-Denis for a monastic education. He rose through the ranks, eventually becoming secretary to the abbot and a trusted adviser to the king of France. A devout and cultured but not particularly ascetic man, Suger worked as a successful diplomat, was elected abbot, reformed his monks, wrote prolifically on various subjects, led the king toward victory against the emperor Henry V (who retreated without a fight), collaborated with Bernard of Clairvaux (another one of those monumental “medieval men”), rebuilt the church of Saint-Denis, and as the capstone of an already extraordinary life, ruled France as regent—and very capably—while the king was away on Crusade. A lesser Christian might have felt that ruinous itch for power after two years on the throne, but when the king returned in 1149, Suger handed him the crown and went back to his abbatial life, which ended, after an illness, in 1151.

One thing that Abbot Suger never adequately understood—and in his defense, few understood this until the mid-twentieth century—was the spiritual benefit to be gained by employing pedestrian, mundane, materially impoverished, or aesthetically bizarre vessels in the worship of the Most High God. Indeed, his thoughts on the matter were decidedly pre-modern:

Every costlier or costliest thing should serve, first and foremost, for the administration of the Holy Eucharist. If golden pouring vessels, golden vials, golden little mortars used to serve, by the word of God or the command of the Prophet, to collect the blood of goats or the red heifer, how much more must golden vessels, precious stones, and whatever is most valued among all created things, be laid out, with continual reverence and full devotion, for the reception of the blood of Christ!

He also shows himself woefully ignorant of the immense dignity of man, who ought not kneel or otherwise abase himself—frankly, ought not inconvenience himself in any way—when approaching the sacramental Flesh, and with it the true and infinitely sacred presence, of his divine Savior:

Surely neither we nor our possessions suffice for this service. If, by a new creation, our substance were re-formed from that of the holy Cherubim and Seraphim, it would still offer an insufficient and unworthy service for so great and so ineffable a victim.

It turns out, though, that his society was not completely devoid of the minimalistic, primitivistic impulses that would reach such a vigorous state of fruition eight centuries after his death. Some, apparently, were so concerned that the soul be rich and radiant with virtue as to neglect the gleaming, golden objects whose visible perfections exist so that we might contemplate, through them, the invisible glories of the all-perfect God. To these forerunners of the modern spirit the abbot responded with wisdom that one would have thought perennial in the Church, but which succumbed—for a time—to the unusually harsh winter of a vain and discontented age:

The detractors also object that a saintly mind, a pure heart, a faithful intention ought to suffice for this sacred function; and we, too, explicitly and especially affirm that it is these that principally matter. [But] we profess that we must do homage also through the outward ornaments of sacred vessels, and to nothing in the world in an equal degree as to the service of the Holy Sacrifice, with all inner purity and with all outward splendor. [1]

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Around the time of Abbot Suger’s death, a few days’ ride from the city where he lived, liturgical artisans were crafting some of the most charming and symbolically rich sacred vessels in the history of the western Church. Here is an example:

An object such as this is called a peristerium, from the Greek word for pigeon or dove. The more homegrown name is simply “Eucharistic dove.” This particular specimen, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is made of gilded copper, with the surface engraved and enameled so as to resemble feathers, though visual naturalism was clearly not the guiding principle in the choice of colors. If chains are attached to the plate underneath the dove, as shown here, it can be suspended near or even directly above the altar. As indicated by the letters “IHS,” the dove’s body includes a cavity, covered by a hinged lid, in which the Blessed Sacrament was reserved.

Below is another fine example, from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Here the supporting plate has holes instead of thin extensions, and the shape of the chest and head is particularly dove-like and graceful.

The copper surface of this next piece, also from the Walters, is wonderfully vivid and golden, with etchings that appear simple yet are skillfully wrought and surprisingly reminiscent of a bird’s feathers. The artisan also created lovely and pleasantly subdued coloration on the wing.

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The history of Eucharistic doves is not well understood. They are mentioned in passages from the Liber Pontificalis that date to the sixth or late fifth century [2], and we may presume that they were relatively common, at least in some regions of the western Church, during the early Middle Ages. But certainty here eludes us, because the artifactual record is highly restricted in both time and space: almost all of the surviving Eucharistic doves were produced in Limoges, France, in the first half of the thirteenth century.

More important for our purposes than their history is what they tell us about our Faith, and about the symbolical modes of belief and prayer that informed the entire Christian experience during the Age of Faith. To have a beautiful, golden dove suspended over one’s altar is to signify, with the sophisticated simplicity so characteristic of medieval culture, the presence and action of the Holy Spirit during the divine Sacrifice. It is also to suggest a world cleansed by the waters of the Flood, poured out in overwhelming abundance like the grace of God or like the Blood of Christ: “And the dove came to him in the eventide, and lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf that she had plucked, whereby Noah did know that the waters were abated upon the earth.” It is, furthermore, an allusion to the mystical continuity that joins the liturgical sacrifice of the New Covenant to the animal sacrifices of the Old: “He answered unto [Abram]: Take an heifer of three years old, and a she goat of three years old, and a three year old ram, a turtle dove also, and a young pigeon. He took therefore all these unto him, and divided them in the midst, and laid every piece one against another: but the birds divided he not.” It is even, perhaps, to evoke the Holy Virgin, most blessed and beautiful above all women, and prefigured by the bride of whom Solomon sings in his Song of Songs: “Behold, thou art fair, my love: behold, thou art fair: thine eyes are as doves.”

And finally, when the Body of the Savior was placed within these winged tabernacles of the Middle Ages, symbolic realities converged in an artistic retelling of the Incarnation: the cavity within the dove signified the Virgin’s womb, such that the dove itself signified both the Virgin and her divine Spouse, whose union produced the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ and has now received it, to honor and protect, from the hands of the priest—whose labor at the altar is itself a sacramental incarnation. How profound, the unsounded depths of our Catholic Tradition; how sublime, the holy and poetic rites of our fathers. Behold, thou art fair, my love: behold, thou art fair, O liturgy ever ancient, ever new.            

NOTES

1. These three quotations are from Erwin Panofsky (ed., trans.), Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, Princeton University Press (1946), pp. 65, 67.

2. See the entries for Popes Sylvester (314–335) and Innocent (401–417). 

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For twice-weekly discussions of art, history, language, literature, Christian spirituality, and traditional Western liturgy, all seen through the lens of medieval culture, you can subscribe to my Substack publication: Via Mediaevalis.

St Maurus, and a Famous Miracle of St Benedict

January 15th is the feast day of St Maurus, a disciple of St Benedict who is famous for his role in one of his master’s more impressive miracles. This is recounted by St Gregory the Great in chapter 7 of the Second Book of his Dialogues, which is devoted to the life of St Benedict.

“On a certain day, as the venerable Benedict was in his cell, the young Placidus, one of the Saint’s monks, went out to draw water from the lake; and putting his pail into the water carelessly, fell in after it. The water swiftly carried him away, and drew him nearly a bowshot from the land. Now the man of God, though he was in his cell, knew this at once, and called in haste for Maurus, saying: ‘Brother Maurus, run, for the boy who went to the lake to fetch water, has fallen in, and the water has already carried him a long way off!’

St Maurus Saves St Placid from Drowning, by Spinello Aretino, 1388, from the sacristy of San Miniato al Monte in Florence. The church is still to this day the home of a community of Olivetan monks; in accordance with a common medieval custom, St Benedict and his contemporaries are depicted in white Olivetan habit.

A marvelous thing, and unheard of since the time of the Apostle Peter! Having asked for and received a blessing, and departing in all haste at his father’s command, Maurus ran over the water to the place whither the young lad had been carried by the water, thinking that he was going over the land; and took him by the hair of his head, and swiftly returned with him. As soon as he touched the land, coming to himself, he looked back, and realized that he had run on the water. That which could not have presumed to do, being now done, he both marveled and was afraid of what he had done.

Returning therefore to the father, he told him what had happened. And the venerable Benedict did not attribute this to his own merits, but to the obedience of Maurus. Maurus, on the contrary, said that it was done only in accord with his command, and that he had nothing to do with that miracle, not knowing at that time what he did. But in this amicable contention of mutual humility, the youth who had been saved came as judge; for he said, ‘When I was being drawn out of the water, I saw the Abbot’s garment over my head, and perceived that it was he that drew me out of the water.’ ”

“The Office of the Holy Spirit” Prayed by the Bridgettine Nuns

The Bridgettine nuns once prayed, every Sunday, a specialized Office in honor of the Holy Ghost. Its arrangement is more complete than that of most Little Offices, but less complete than that of the most famous and widely used, the Little Office of the Virgin Mary. All the Hours are present, with most their constitutive parts (antiphon, psalm, chapter, hymn, versicle, oration, etc.), but Matins has neither readings nor responsories.

Presumably both for ease of memorization and for intensity of devotion, the Veni Creator Spiritus is used as the hymn for every hour, and the same chapter, from Romans 5, is also repeated. The other parts vary, and all are in service of highlighting the mystery of the Holy Spirit’s presence, operation, and fecundity in the Church.

I will present images of the pages in groups of three. The entire PDF may be downloaded here.

Extracted from the Breviarium Birgittinum published in Rome in 1908.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s Substack “Tradition & Sanity”; personal site; composer site; publishing house Os Justi Press and YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify pages.

Call for Participation - Special Issue of Sacred Music Dedicated to Dr. Mahrt

Call for Participation - A Special Issue of Sacred Music Journal, Dedicated to Dr. William Mahrt

The editorial team of the Church Music Association of America’s journal Sacred Music will dedicate the upcoming first issue of 2025 to the life and work of its recently deceased editor, Dr. William Mahrt. Submissions from readers are welcome, and may be of a varied nature:

• Short stories about Dr. Mahrt, his teaching, scholarship, or life
• Articles about a particular aspect of Dr. Mahrt’s life or work
• Articles dedicated to Dr. Mahrt about any topic suitable for the journal, though not necessarily citing his work.

The length may range from 500 words to 6,000. Submissions must follow the journal’s style sheet, available here. Submissions must be made as a Word document, with embedded footnotes (if applicable) via email to: submissions@musicasacra.com.

Deadline for submission: February 15, 2025.

Read Dr. Mahrt’s obituary and see photos from the funeral here.

Read this beautiful and fitting sermon from the Requiem Mass by His Excellency Salvatore Cordileone, archbishop of San Francisco, here. 

Romanesque Sculptures in a Swiss Abbey

Following up on two recent posts, we continue with some more of Nicola’s photos of the abbey of St John in Müstair, Switzerland. The first part showed the surviving frescos from the Carolingian era, and the second those of the Romanesque period; here we will see a number of Romanesque sculptures.  

The marble front of this altar is a piece of the original sanctuary enclosure of the Carolingian period (first half of the 9th century), which was later dismantled. Several pieces of it (seen further below) were reutilized as building materials, and have been recovered during modern restorations, and put on display in the museum. Much of the region around the monastery is protestant; the painting of Assumption, made in 1621, was brought to the monastery in 1838 from the parish of one of the nearby towns when the last Catholic resident passed away.

This relief of the Baptism of Christ, a work of a much later period, was mounted into the wall of the abbey church in 1492.

A statue of Charlemagne, the founder of the abbey; date uncertain, partially restored.

Madonna and Child, ca. 1250.

Pietà, second half of the 14th century. In German-speaking lands, this motif is known as a “Vesperbild - evening statue”, from the common custom of putting them on the altar on the evening of Good Friday.

As noted above, the original marble fixtures of the Carolingian period were dismantled and reused as building materials. Here we see another part of the sanctuary enclosure, depicting the Lamb of God surrounded by angels, the hand of God the Father above Him, and of St John the Baptist at the lower left.

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