The Saint-Sever Beatus: An Illustrated Commentary on the Apocalypse (Part 2)

This is the second part of an ongoing series on the Saint-Sever Beatus, an illuminated manuscript of the 11th century produced at the abbey of Saint-Sever in southwestern France. The primary text which it illustrates, and for which it is named, is a commentary on the book of the Apocalypse written by Saint Beatus of Liébana, a monk who lived in northern Spain in the 8th century. It also contains a commentary on the book of Daniel by St Jerome, and a treatise on the perpetual virginity of Mary by St Ildefonse of Toledo. There are nearly thirty surviving Beatus manuscripts, but this is the only one that comes from France. For further details, see part 1. This article covers one of the most famous things about this type of manuscript, a detailed map of the world. (image 7).

A random decorated letter A, with a monkey and wolf (helpfully labeled) standing on it, and two birds underneath.

Early medieval authors did not shy away from prolixity, and the commentary begins with 24 pages of prologues and summaries.

Another purely decorative element before the commentary itself begins.

It is followed immediately by this double image; in the upper part, Christ consigns the book of the Apocalypse to an angel, and in the lower, the angel speaks to St John for the first time as he hands him the book. The figure standing behind St John is most likely St Prochorus, one of the first seven deacons, who became his amanuensis.

“The Lord upon the clouds, and His enemies, and they who pierced Him, see him.” (Apocalypse 1, 7)

Saint John’s vision of the angel with the seven stars, and the Lord Himself amid the seven candlesticks, from chapter 1. The lower part shows verse 11, where John is enjoined to write to the seven churches of Asia, each of which is represented by a building with an altar in it, the gold T-shaped object.

The highly stylized map of the world, with East at the top, and the North on the left. Right below the label ORIENS is shown the terrestrial paradise with Adam and Eve and the tree. The red strip on the right is the Red Sea, and the blue section in the middle is the Mediterranean, and the green ovals within it and in the surrounding ocean are the major islands. This particular manuscript has a much greater number of place names than its Spanish counterparts. ~ At an unknown date, the two folios of the map were removed from the manuscript and lost, but rediscovered in 1866, and reintegrated into it.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Legends of St Clement

The feast of Pope St Clement I, which we keep today, is one of the most ancient of the Roman Rite, attested in almost every pertinent liturgical book going as far back as we have them, to the so-called Leonine Sacramentary in the middle of the 6th century. It is kept on the same day in the Ambrosian and Mozarabic Rites, and one day later in the Byzantine.

The Apotheosis of St Clement, 1807, by the German painter Josef Winterhalder the Younger (1743-1807).

According to the consensus now generally accepted, he was the fourth Pope, although there is some confusion in the earliest sources as to his place in the order of St Peter’s successors. A tradition known since at least the time of Origen, who died ca. 252, identifies him with the Clement whom St Paul mentions in the Epistle to the Philippians (4, 3). This tradition is accepted in the Roman Missal as we currently have it, which read this verse in the Epistle of his Mass (Phil. 3, 17 – 4, 3), but this is not attested in the oldest Roman Mass lectionaries.

Clement vies with the anonymous writer of the Didache for recognition as the author of the first known Christian work outside the New Testament. In the Greek city of Corinth, some members of the Church had unlawfully deposed their presbyters, and Clement wrote them a fairly lengthy letter, in which he ordered that the deposed clerics be restored. This work was very well known in antiquity, and treated in some places on a par with the Sacred Scriptures by being read at the liturgy. It is included with the Gospel of John in a fragmentary Bible of the fourth century, and in one of the most important surviving great codices of the fifth, the Codex Alexandrinus. Despite the mention of it in St Jerome’s book On Illustrious Men, it was forgotten by the West until the 17th century, when the Alexandrinus was given to the English king Charles I in 1627. Since that time, it has been the subject of a great deal of scholarly study; one Anglican divine even described the letter as the first act of papal aggression against the independence of the local churches.

Part of the Epistle of St Clement shown in a photographic facsimile of the Codex Alexandrinus made in 1856.

This letter is Clement’s only known authentic writing, but the Codex Alexandrinus also has a text placed right after it, which is commonly, though improperly, referred to as his Second Epistle, a general sermon on the Christian life dated to roughly 120-140 AD. St Jerome also mentions it in On Illustrious Men, noting that it had been “reproved by the ancients”; on the other hand, he himself accepts the authenticity of two treatises on virginity which have often been attributed to Clement, but are properly dated to the third century.

In the pre-Tridentine Roman breviary, one of the Matins lessons for St Clement declares that “he wrote many books in his zeal for the Faith and the Christian religion”, a statement which is repeated in other words in the 1568 edition of St Pius V. This does not seem to refer, however, to the works mentioned above, which are three, not many; generously four, if we count the one explicitly rejected by no less an authority than St Jerome. I believe it is rather a holdover from earlier medieval sources, and refers to another set of apocryphal works, which modern scholars call the Pseudo-Clementine literature.

The history of this material is extremely complicated, and I can do no more than give a rough summary here. The article about it in the old Catholic Encyclopedia is quite thorough, although it was published in 1908, and has most likely been superannuated in some regards.

The lost original version of the Pseudo-Clementines is a document ascribed to the fourth century, and is generally believed to have resulted from the fusion and elaboration of two earlier apocryphal works. One of these is a purported account of St Peter’s preaching in various places. Eusebius of Caesarea speaks of this document in his Ecclesiastical History (III, 38), noting that it was attributed to Clement, but that it was not mentioned by any writers earlier than himself. St Jerome quotes Eusebius to this effect in On Illustrious Men, and refers to it elsewhere as “Periodi Petri – the wanderings of Peter.”

The Fall of Simon Magus, 1745, by the Italian painter Pompeo Batoni (1708-87).

The other, which provides the narrative framework, is the Klementia, a novel written in the third-century, fraught with plot twists, surprise revelations and improbable coincidences, the story of how the young Clement came to be separated from his family, and after becoming a disciple of Peter, was eventually reunited with them. Many people from the New Testament appear as characters in it, such as the Apostles James and Barnabas, the centurion Cornelius (Acts 10), and the Syro-Phoenician woman healed by Christ (Mark 7, 25-30), who is given the name Justa, and made to be the stepmother of two of Peter’s disciples. Simon Magus figures very prominently in the book as Peter’s antagonist, and much of the theological content (which is extensive, and in some regards bizarrely unorthodox) is framed within disputes between them.

Fairly early on, the book was split into two recensions, which have much in common, but also diverge from each other considerably in many places. The Greek one is known as the Clementine Homilies, while the other, whose Greek original is now lost, is called the Recognitions, from the Dickensian scenes in which so-and-so is at last revealed to be the long lost child of such-and-such, etc. The latter was the version known to the West throughout the Middle Ages, through the Latin translation made by a one-time friend of St Jerome named Rufinus, who, however, took the liberty of suppressing some of the more strangely unorthodox passages. (The acrimonious break between him and Jerome was provoked in part by his doing the same to some of the writings of Origen.)

In the long entry on St Clement in the Golden Legend of Bl. Jacopo da Voragine, about 60% of the material is taken from the Recognitions. But if the words of the Roman Breviary about Clement’s “many writings” are in fact a glancing reference to them, the story itself is given no space at all therein.

The Roman Matins lessons also skip the first part of what the Golden Legend says about Clement’s career after he became Pope. This is the story of how, after he converts a woman named Theodora, her husband Sisinnius follows her to church to see what she is doing there, but is struck blind and deaf on entering the building. At Theodora’s request, Clement comes to their house and heals him, but Sisinnius believes that he achieves this by magical powers which he plans to also use to seduce his wife. Sisinnius therefore orders his servants to seize Clement and bind him, but the servants’ minds are turned by God, and they wind up seizing and binding a marble column instead. Clement then says to Sininnius, “Because you call stones gods, you have merited to drag stones.”

In the 1860s, archeological investigation under the basilica of St Clement in Rome led to the discovery of the remains of the original church of the 4th century. At the very end of the 11th century, or the beginning of the twelfth, this structure was filled in and transformed into the foundation of a new basilica on top of it, thereby preserving some frescoes which at the time were very new, ca. 1065-1090. One of these depicts exactly this part of the legend of Clement, with Sisinnius and Theodora. At left, Clement is shown celebrating Mass at an altar decorated as it would have been in the later 11th century, accompanied by a group of clerics. (Note the candelabrum hanging from the baldachin, rather resting than on the altar.) On the right Theodora looks on as Sisinnius, struck blind and deaf, is led out of the church by his servants.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons. 

The lower part shows Sisinnius yelling at his servants; the captions which give their names and his words to them are the oldest known prose inscriptions in Italian, and, unsurprisingly, very rude indeed. (“Fili delle pute” means “whoresons”; the translation of the other part is unprintable.) A version of Clement’s words cited above is given in Latin: “Because of the hardness of your hearts, you have merited to pull away stones.” The upper part of the fresco (cut in half when the floor of the new basilica was made) shows Clement with his predecessors, Ss Peter, Linus and Cletus, and five other figures, now unlabeled.

The story goes on to say that because of Clement’s success at making converts, he comes to the attention of the Emperor Trajan, who exiles him to the Crimean peninsula, where there was a penal colony attached to a marble quarry, with many Christians among the condemned. (The Romans did in fact exile people to the shores of the Black Sea, one of them being the poet Ovid.) On arriving, Clement learns that the workers must get their water from six miles away; he therefore prays and receives a vision of a lamb standing on a rock and pointing with its foot. Like Moses, Clement strikes the rock at that place to which the lamb pointed, and water begins to flow from it. This part of the story furnishes the proper antiphons for the psalms of Lauds and Vespers of St Clement’s Office, as e.g. the third one, “I saw the Lamb standing upon the mountain, and from under His foot a living spring floweth.”

St Clement Making Water Run from the Rock, by the Italian painter Bernardino Fungai (1450-1506). Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons. 

This leads to the conversion of many others, but three years later, the news of this reaches Trajan, and he therefore sentences Clement to death. Executioners are sent from Rome, who row Clement out three miles from the shore, and throw him into the sea with an anchor tied around his neck.

The Martyrdom of St Clement, also by Fungai.

At the shore, his disciples pray that the Lord might show them the location of his body, (presumably in order to recover it), and the sea miraculously recedes to reveal a small marble temple, with St Clement’s body in an ark, and the anchor next to it. The Christians walk out to visit it, but it is revealed to them they are told not to remove the body; instead, each year, around the anniversary of his death, the water recedes again to reveal the temple. This gives us the Magnificat antiphon for Second Vespers of feast: “O Lord, Thou gavest to Thy martyr Clement a dwelling place in the sea, after the fashion of a marble temple, fashioned by the hands of Angels, granting a way to the people on the land, that they may tell of Thy wondrous deeds.”

One year, at the end of the feast, a woman is frightened by the sound of the returning waters, and rushes back to the shore, accidentally leaving behind her little son, who had fallen asleep in the temple. The following year, when the waters recede again, she returns to find him safe and sound, and indeed still sleeping, unaware that he had been under the sea for a whole year.

This story is also depicted in the lower basilica of St Clement in Rome, in a fresco in the narthex. In the lower part are shown the family who paid for it, a couple named Beno and Maria, from an otherwise unknown place called Rapiza, along with their daughter Altilia, and their son, “the little boy Clement.” To the right of Maria is a dedicatory inscription which says that they had the fresco made as a thanksgiving “for the grace which (they) received”; it seems likely that this refers to the birth of the son whom they named for the church’s patron Saint.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

William Shakespeare, Liturgist

The liturgical rearrangement—or in Peter Kwasniewski’s somewhat more colorful description, the liturgical bloodbath—that recently occurred in Tyler, Texas, has affected me on multiple levels. It affected me personally, because I have a family connection there. It affected me as a member of my local church, because I also live in a place where the Latin Mass seems to be rather unpopular among the diocesan leadership. It affected me as a member of the universal Church, because I love sacred Tradition and have for many years been devoted to the ancient eucharistic rite of western Christendom, which so fully and so poetically reifies that Tradition.

And there is yet another level, one which is not so widely shared as the first three I mentioned, and which perhaps has sent the emotional weight most directly into my heart. It has affected me—has wounded me—as someone who studies and teaches and writes about the dramatic literature of the English Renaissance. It has wounded me as someone who recently stood in front of a classroom full of college students, English majors among them, and spoke at length about Othello. This is a play in which the relentless manipulation of reality leads to appalling destruction. It is a play in which cunning words breed death.

As is my wont when lecturing on such topics, I searched for avenues of passion and beauty and timeless significance that might convince the next generation of parents and artists and scholars that this play—written over four hundred years ago, in language that is often unfamiliar and unclear to them—is still worth their time, is still worth reading and studying and talking about, is still worth pondering and admiring and loving. Imagine how strange, how disorienting, how deeply disturbing it would be if the president of the university walked into my classroom and calmly declared that Shakespeare would no longer be taught. “We have new plays now,” he explains, “and some people consider them simpler, and more relevant, and less likely to offend or exclude, and therefore Shakespeare is abrogated—for the sake of unity. We must all study the new plays now.”

“But Mr. President,” I protest “there are a great many students and faculty members who enjoy and value Shakespeare, and some have even discovered a transformative richness in his works.”

“Of course, yes, we would never—er, well, we will not now completely exclude those who believe themselves to have a preference for old things. An unused room in the basement of Ebenezer Hall will be made available once per month for Shakespeare studies. It seats nine people.”

“But Mr. President, Shakespeare is the most revered author in the history of the English language—and perhaps the most revered playwright in all the world! His works are the beating heart of the English literary experience. They are utterly irreplaceable!”

“And yet they are, as of today, replaced. And lower your voice, please—what are you, some kind of anarchist? Do I not have the authority to decide what will and will not be taught in my university?”

“But Mr. President, the university’s collection of scholarship on Shakespeare is a small library unto itself. Brilliant researchers and scholars of the past and present wrote these books, which help us to understand not only Shakespeare’s plays and poems but drama itself, poetry itself, literature itself—life itself!”

“Those books will not, in the foreseeable future, be disposed of. But you’ll have no need to assign them and no need to consult them. If they then gather dust and end up in storage, that merely confirms their irrelevance.”

“With all due respect, Sir, your logic there seems slightly—”

“Your compliance in these matters is greatly appreciated. It is the duty of the university to guard our intellectual traditions from the threat of disunity.”

“Mr. President, this classroom was united from the first day of the semester until you opened that door.”

“The stagnant unity of the past is not the same as the dynamic unity of the future.”

“But the dynamic unity of the future is, for me, no future at all. I teach Shakespeare. I read and study and esteem and cherish Shakespeare. You have destroyed my professional life, and you have broken my heart.”

“You will learn to cherish the new playwrights. Class is dismissed.”

If you are not able to imagine this scene, don’t worry. There’s really no need to imagine the unimaginable. Something like this would never happen, in a university.

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Dr. Harold Bloom—professor at Yale, preeminent twentieth-century literary scholar, prolific author—was not the most progressive of academics, but he was a thoroughly modern man. He concluded that Shakespeare “wrote the best poetry and the best prose in English, or perhaps in any Western language,” and he saw Shakespeare’s plays as

the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. They abide beyond the end of the mind’s reach.

Bloom is but one voice among many in a chorus of praise that has been heard for centuries and continues to this day. Indeed, the monumental excellence of Shakespearean drama has become a commonplace in our culture; it is woven so thoroughly into the very fabric of modern existence that one might know nothing about Shakespeare and yet live a life that is profoundly enriched by his art.

But surely, multifaceted cultural brilliance of this magnitude doesn’t simply appear in a young Englishman’s restless and uniquely rhetorical mind. Only God creates ex nihilo. What were the antecedents? The residual dramatic energies? The formative influences? Let us not oversimplify; there were many. My intention here is to discuss only one, though it is one which you perhaps have not heard of, and which may be more significant than some would like to admit.

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Though it saddens me greatly to say it, few have seen a Shakespeare play performed in anything approaching an ideal theatrical environment. Early modern theaters looked something like this:

The reconstructed Globe in London gives us an even better idea:

The style is known as a “thrust stage,” whereby the performance area projects out into the audience. The action on the stage can be seen from the front and from the sides. The arrangement is vaguely reminiscent of a traditional sanctuary, wouldn’t you say?

And though it again saddens me to say it, few people, historically speaking, have seen a Shakespeare production that sought to fully and faithfully reproduce the sensory and psychological experience of an Elizabethan theater—and we must remember, as the Shakespearean scholar Sir Stanley Wells pointed out, that Shakespeare was, “supremely, a man of the theater..., a man immersed in the life of that theater and committed to its values.” We learn from Coleridge that in a theater of Shakespeare’s time, “the circumstances of acting were altogether different from ours; it was much more of recitation”; thus, “the idea of the poet was always present.” What we call acting today is often a rather boisterous and busy affair; for Shakespeare, acting was fundamentally recitation, poetry, oratory. There was little need for extravagant scenery; ornamentation was achieved through language and music, with some help from what must have been exceedingly fine costumes and elegantly coordinated movements. The overall aesthetic was one of visual gravity and decorative simplicity offset by consummate verbal artistry; the mind was drawn, thereby, to the essence of the thing.

Can you imagine this? Does it not somehow resemble, in your mind’s eye, a traditional liturgical service? If it does, we need not be surprised: the medieval drama of sacred liturgy led, in the best possible way, to the early modern drama of the theater. That is to say, it led to Shakespeare.

Allow me to share three remarkable statements made by Dr. O. B. Hardison, who was writing not, I emphasize, as an apologist for the Latin Mass. He was writing as a mainstream scholar, and a highly distinguished one at that—an author, an esteemed educator, a professor at Georgetown, and a director of the Folger Shakespeare Library:

In the ninth century the boundary ... between religious ritual (the services of the Church) and drama did not exist. Religious ritual was the drama of the early Middle Ages and had been ever since the decline of the classical theater.

Modern Western drama is the product of a Christian, not a pagan, culture. Its forms, its conventions, and its characteristic tonalities are shaped by this fact. To study early medieval drama is to study the way in which these forms, conventions, and tonalities came into being.

Just as the Mass is a sacred drama encompassing all history and embodying in its structure the central pattern of Christian life on which all Christian drama must draw, the celebration of the Mass contains all elements necessary to secular performances. The Mass is the general case—for Christian culture, the archetype. Individual dramas are shaped in its mold.

I wrote in an earlier NLM article that “traditional Christian liturgy was the heart of Europe’s artistic genius.” We have here yet another example of this, and it is an example that should resonate throughout the artistic consciousness of the entire Christian world. Shakespeare was a playwright, a dramaturgical poet, a “man of the theater”; and the theater was a secularized descendant of the Church’s sacred liturgy—her medieval liturgy.

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I have introduced a complex subject and cannot explore it with adequate length or nuance in this one essay. We will need to return to this topic in the future. Nevertheless, I hope I have at least provided some thought-provoking context for the following statement: marginalization or prohibition of the classical Roman liturgical rites is a grievous threat to human culture, not least because it is a threat to liturgical forms and experiences that served as archetypical precursors to early modern English theater—and from early modern English theater emerged some of humanity’s most compelling, cherished, influential, enlightening, and artistically virtuosic works of literature.

Cardinal Ratzinger said, quite boldly, that “the only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.” It is unthinkable that we should deprive future generations of the liturgical rites that for so many centuries breathed the breath of life into Christian art. The modernized rites, though currently favored by the ecclesial hierarchy, have demonstrated no comparable ability to inspire great artists, sublimate poetic sensibilities, and elicit artistic masterpieces; given their apparent effects over the past sixty years, we have no justification for assuming that they ever will.

The artistic, and therefore spiritual, crisis in Western Civilization has no simple solution, but a first and crucial step in this solution is simple: Let the Roman Church return full freedom to her ancient and everlasting Mass, which was described by the French playwright Paul Claudel—and perhaps would have been described in like terms by the English playwright William Shakespeare—as “the most profound and grandiose poetry, enhanced by the most august gestures ever confided to human beings.”

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

The Basilica of St Cecilia in Cologne

Since today is the feast of St Cecilia, we continue our series on the twelve Romanesque basilicas of Cologne, Germany, with the one dedicated to her. This post will be much briefer than any of the others, and is really only being done at all for the sake of the completeness of the series; German Wikipedia says that Mass is now celebrated here only on Christmas and the patronal feast day. (All images from Wikimedia Commons., CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted.)

The interior of the church in 1911

It was founded as the church of a women’s monastic house in the late 9th century, and prominent enough within the city that it served as the station church for the dawn Mass of Christmas. The current building dates to the twelfth century; in 1474, it passed to a community of Augustinian canonesses, but all of the conventual buildings were destroyed after the dissolution of the religious houses in the early 19th century. For a time, it served as the church of a hospital, but after it was severely damaged in the Second World War, it became the home of part of a museum dedicated to religious art. In its current form, it has neither tower nor transepts; there are some bare remains of fresco in the nave and choir, but they are sadly in very poor condition.

by Chris 06

by Hans Peter Schaefer, CC BY-SA 3.0

by Островский Александр, Киев, CC BY-SA 3.0

by Raimond Spekking

by Daderot (image released to public domain)

by Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 3.0

by Daderot (image released to public domain)

Numbering the Heavens

Lost in Translation #112

In the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, God the Father is said to have created Heaven and earth (οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς) while the Son of God is said to have come down from the Heavens (ἐκ τῶν οὐρανῶν) to become man and, after His resurrection from the dead, to have ascended into the Heavens (εἰς τοὺς οὐρανούς), where He sits at the right hand of the Father. One might be tempted to dismiss the use of both the singular number and the plural as a need for poetic variety, rather than an indication of two different places. On the other hand, it is worth asking whether God the Son came from the Heaven that His Father created, as if He were a creature like Heaven itself. Surely not, for the Nicene Creed was written to reject this Arian position. Therefore, when the Son is said to have come and to return to “the Heavens,” the plural may indicate the place where the Holy Trinity alone abides, as opposed to the place created by God for His blessed creatures (the Angels and Saints).

These subtleties, in any event, are lost in translation. All the official vernacular versions of the 1970 Roman Missal that I consulted use “heaven” (singular) every time: the Italian has cielo, the French ciel, the German Himmel, and the English “heaven.”

But the greatest peculiarity of all is the Latin translation that is in both the old and new Roman Missal, which has that God is the Creator of Heaven (caelum), that His Son descends from the Heavens (caeli), and that the Son ascends into Heaven (caelum). The Latin, in other words, follows the Greek numbering of the noun the first two times but not the third.

The advantage of the original Greek is that it shows that the place whence Jesus came is the exact same place whither He returns. By ascending into Heaven, Jesus perfectly closes the circle of His journey. Such a circle, it seems to me, is typical of ancient Greek thought, from the departure and homecoming of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey to the emanation and return of the soul in Plotinus’ Enneads. The Roman mentality, by contrast, is more like the trajectory in Vergil’s Aeneid. By journeying to Italy, Aeneas is technically returning to his ancestral home,[1] but it is a home to which he has never been before. Thus, Aeneas’ journey is both circular and linear, with the movement of the plot dominated by the latter. Perhaps by proclaiming that Jesus came from the Heavens and ascended into Heaven, the Latin Creed is drawing attention to how Heaven is now different thanks to the Ascension and the holy souls, rescued from Limbo, who now fill it. Or, Heaven is now different because a human soul and body has entered it for the first time, a High Priest offering His own blood in a Temple not made of human hands. (See Heb. 9, 12)

And there may be a second reason for the Latin “mistranslation.” To my mind, rendering a place or region in the plural makes it more indeterminate or amorphous. Someone who is lost in the canyons, for example, seems more lost to me that someone who is lost in the canyon; in the latter case, we can deploy the search party with greater precision. Jesus coming from the “heavens” could mean that Jesus is coming from an amorphous place on High, but when Jesus returns, He is returning to a determinate place specified in the next verse: He sitteth at the right hand of the Father. The specificity of this location may have inspired the Latin translator to call the place of this throne “heaven” rather than “the heavens,” and that specificity ties in nicely with the specificity of the concrete body and soul of the Incarnate Word, who is not returning to the Father in the same condition as He left.

Note

[1] The Trojans are called Dardans, and Dardanus is said in Aeneid 3.163, 7.273, and 8.180 to have come from Hesperia, an ancient name for Italy.

The Basilica of Sankta Maria ‘im Kapitol’ in Cologne (Part 1)

For the feast of Our Lady’s Presentation, we continue our series on the twelve great Romanesque basilicas of Cologne, Germany, with the largest one of them, which is dedicated to Her. It is nicknamed ‘im Kapitol – in the Capitol’, to distinguish it from the smallest, ‘in Lyskirchen’, which is also Hers. This title refers to a large Roman temple which was built on the site in the first century AD, when Cologne became a Roman colony. (Its name derives from the Latin word “colonia”.) This temple was dedicated to the Capitoline triad, the gods Jupiter, Juno and Minerva; the nave of the church stands on its original foundations. (All images from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted.)

A 13th century wooden sculpture of the Virgin and Child, which stands at the front of the rood screen, known as “the Limburg Madonna.” (by Triptychon)

Even though Sankta Maria im Kapitol was terribly damaged during World War II (as were all of the churches of Cologne), it nevertheless preserves enough artistic treasures and objects of interest that they merit a separate post. This article will therefore cover just the architectural structure, and some of its major features. (One of the twelve churches is dedicated to St Cecilia, whose feast is tomorrow, so we will cover that one first, and then come back here next week.) The church also has a wooden door made at the time of its original construction, ca. 1060, which is in an astonishingly good state of conservation, even retaining some of its original paint, despite the fact that it was not brought inside for preservation until the 1930s. (It is now installed at the end of the south aisle.) The two parts have 26 panels with scenes from the life of Christ, the Nativity cycle on the left, and the Passion and Resurrection cycle on the right. This object is rare and beautiful enough to merit its own article, which I will post during Advent.

by Imme Fischer, CC BY-SA 3.0

Sankta Maria im Kapitol is traditionally said to have been originally founded by a Frankish noblewoman named Plectrude (died 718), the wife of Pepin of Herstal, during their long residence in Cologne. (After World War II, her sarcophagus was found in the middle of the bombed-out church). The construction of the current building began in the 11th century, following the plan of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, with three apses of equal size grouped around the crossing. It then became the custom for the archbishop of Cologne to celebrate the first Mass of Christmas here.

In 1170, the westwork was expanded with three large towers, modelled on those of the nearby abbey of Brauweiler, but the central one collapsed in 1637, and the other two are not much higher than the façade. Thus, although Sankta Maria im Kapitol is the largest of the twelve basilicas in terms of its footprint on the ground, it is not as visually impressive as the others on the outside.

by Michael Wittwer

The square chapels between the apses were added in the second half of the 15th century.

by Cmcmcm1

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Liturgical Notes on the Presentation of the Virgin Mary

The story of the Virgin Mary’s Presentation in the Temple comes to us not from Sacred Scripture, of course, but from some of the apocryphal Gospels. Although these are never read in the liturgy, some of what is written in them has been accepted by the Church’s tradition, both liturgical and artistic; they have given us not only today’s feast, but also influenced the depiction of Christ’s Nativity and the Assumption. It should always be born in mind that the Apocrypha (which exist in all the New Testament’s literary categories, gospels, acts, epistles and apocalypses), are not all of a piece. Some are clearly written to lend credit to one heresy or another, but others are simply harmless (or mostly harmless) tales about the Holy Family during the years of which the real Gospels say very little.

The Presentation of the Virgin, by Tintoretto, 1553-56, from the church of the Madonna dell’Orto in Venice.

One of the very oldest, the mid-2nd century Proto-evangelium of James, recounts the Virgin’s presentation in the Temple as follows.

And the child was three years old, and Joachim said: Invite the daughters of the Hebrews that are undefiled, and let them take each a lamp, and let them stand with the lamps burning, that the child may not turn back, and her heart be captivated from the temple of the Lord. And they did so until they went up into the temple of the Lord. And the priest received her, and kissed her, and blessed her, saying: The Lord has magnified your name in all generations. In you, on the last of the days, the Lord will manifest His redemption to the sons of Israel. And he set her down upon the third step of the altar, and the Lord God sent grace upon her; and she danced with her feet, and all the house of Israel loved her. And her parents went down marveling, and praising the Lord God, because the child had not turned back. And Mary was in the temple of the Lord as if she were a dove that dwelt there, and she received food from the hand of an angel.” (chapter 7 and beginning of chapter 8)

This story is told in similar terms in the “History of Joseph the Carpenter”, written about the year 400, which goes on to tell how the temple priests chose Joseph to be Mary’s husband. The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, of the same period, adds that “Joachim, and Anna his wife, went together to the temple of the Lord to offer sacrifices to God, and placed the infant, Mary by name, in the community of virgins, in which the virgins remained day and night praising God. And when she was put down before the doors of the temple, she went up the fifteen steps so swiftly, that she did not look back at all; nor did she, as children are wont to do, seek for her parents.” (chapter 4) It then describes the Virgin’s life of prayer and work in the temple, showing Her to be a perfect model of religious life.

A feast in honor of this event appears in an English manuscript known as the Canterbury Benedictional, written about 1030, and in a number of English calendars after that. It seems, however, to have died off; in the last editions of the Sarum Missal, from the mid-16th century, it is missing from the Calendar, and the Mass is included only in the appendix. Elsewhere, it appears sporadically in liturgical books printed in the century before the Council of Trent; the Mass and Office were often simply those of the Virgin’s Nativity, with the word “Nativity” changed to “Presentation” wherever it occurred. Pope Sixtus IV (1471-84), who was the Minister General of the Franciscans until two year before his election, brought his order’s traditional zeal for new Marian feasts to the Use of Rome by adding the Presentation to the Roman Missal and Breviary, as he also did for the Immaculate Conception. The unusually elaborate rhyming Office seems to refer to the novelty of the feast in the Magnificat antiphon of First Vespers.

Novae laudis adest festivitas,
grata mundo ac caeli civibus,
qua Beatae Mariae sanctitas
templo data est a parentibus,
ut olivae pinguis suavitas
uberibus redundet fructibus.
(A feast of new praise is nigh, pleasing to the world and the citizens of heaven, in which the holiness of Blessed Mary is given to the temple by Her parents, that the sweetness of this rich olive tree may redound with rich fruits.)

A page of a Roman Missal of 1515, with the rubric in the upper part of the right-hand column, “On the feast of the Presentation of the Virgin Mary, the Mass is said of (Her) Nativity, with the name ‘Nativity’ changed to ‘Presentation.’ ”

In St Pius V’s reform of the Roman liturgical books, the feast of the Presentation is suppressed, along with those of Ss Joachim and Anne, precisely because they all derive from an apocryphal gospel. This went far too strongly against the grain of traditional piety, and all three feasts were swiftly restored, St Anne’s by Pius’ own successor, Gregory XIII, in 1584, the Presentation by Sixtus V the following year, and St Joachim by Gregory XV in 1622. The liturgical texts of the feast are the common Mass and Office of the Virgin Mary, with proper readings only for the second nocturn of Matins, and a proper Collect.

The Byzantine Rite knows no such reserve or restraint in regard to the feast, which is properly called “The Entrance of the Our All-Holy Lady, the Mother of God, into the Temple.” It is ranked as one of the Twelve Great Feasts, most of which are kept with both a Forefeast and Afterfeast, broadly the equivalent of a Vigil and Octave in the traditional Roman Rite. Afterfeasts vary in length, however, and those of the Virgin’s Presentation and Nativity are the shortest, only four days, the final day being known as the Leave-taking.

As such, it has a great many proper texts to be sung in the Office, of which here I can only give a very small selection.

At Vespers: Today, let us dance, O faithful, singing to the Lord in psalms and hymns and honoring His sanctified Tabernacle, the living Ark, that contained the Word Who cannot be contained; for in wondrous fashion she is offered to the Lord as a young child in the flesh, and Zachariah, the great High Priest, joyfully receives her as the dwelling place of God.

Here and elsewhere, the liturgy assumes that the High Priest who received Mary into the Temple was Zachariah, the father of John Baptist.

Anna the all-praised cried out rejoicing, “Receive, O Zachariah, her whom God’s prophets proclaimed in the Spirit, and bring her into the holy Temple, there to be brought up in reverence, that she may become the divine throne of the Master of all, His palace and resting place and dwelling filled with light!”

At the Divine Liturgy, the usual hymn to the Mother of God “It is truly meet’ is replaced by the following:

The angels, on seeing the entrance of the Virgin, were amazed that She went with glory into the Holy of Holies. Since she is a living Ark of God, let profane hands in no way touch Her, but let the lips of believers unceasingly sing to the Mother of God, raising up a song with the angel’s voice, and cry out in rejoicing, “Truly, thou art exalted above all, O pure Virgin!”

The Apocryphal Gospels have also helped to establish the traditional manner of representing the Entrance of the Mother of God in icons. The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew states in chapter six that “when (Mary) was three years old, she walked with a step so mature, she spoke so perfectly, and spent her time so assiduously in the praises of God, that all were astonished at her, and wondered; and she was not reckoned a young infant, but as it were a grown-up person of thirty years old.” For this reason, She is represented in this icon, not as a child, but as a miniature adult, to indicate that the fullness of grace and virtue already resides within Her. The lamp-bearing virgins who accompany Her to the temple at Joachim’s request, as stated above in the Protoevanglium of James, are also shown. Note how The Virgin Mary approaches the high priest with Her hands open, to symbolize that She is offering Herself to God.

An icon of the Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple, painted by an anonymous artist of the Cretan school in the 15th century. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

The Saint-Sever Beatus: An Illustrated Commentary on the Apocalypse (Part 1)

As the Church’s year draws to a close, the book of the Apocalypse becomes very prominent in the Roman liturgy. It is read at the Mass of both the vigil (5, 6-12) and feast of All Saints (7, 2-12), and at Matins of the latter (4, 2-8 and 5, 1-14); at the third Mass of All Souls’ day (a reading of single verse, 14, 3, borrowed from the daily Mass for the Dead); and at Matins of the two dedication feasts on the universal calendar, those of the Lateran basilica on November 9th (21, 9-18), and of Ss Peter and Paul (21, 18-27) on the 18th. It also provides the epistle for the Mass of a dedication generally (21, 2-5), and the Introit and Magnificat antiphon of Second Vespers of Christ the King. In the Mass lectionary of the post-Conciliar rite, it is read on the ferial days of the last two weeks of even-numbered years.

Introitus Dignus est Agnus, qui occísus est, accípere virtútem, et divinitátem, et sapientiam, et fortitúdinem, et honórem. Ipsi gloria et imperium in saecula saeculórum. Ps. 71 Deus, judicium tuum Regi da, et justitiam tuam Filio Regis. Gloria Patri... Dignus est Agnus...

Introit, Apoc. 5, 12 & 1, 6 Worthy is the Lamb Who was slain to receive power, and divinity, and wisdom, and strength, and honor. To Him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Ps. 71 O God, give Thy judgment to the King, and Thy justice to the King’s son. Glory be... Worthy is the Lamb...

In the 8th century, there lived a monk named Beatus (730 ca – after 785) at the monastery of St Turibius in a town called Liébana in Cantabria, one of the northern regions of Spain that was never occupied by the Islamic invaders. (This monastery is still an important stop on the Camino de Santiago, since it possesses a very ancient relic of the True Cross.) Very little is known of this man, although he was a prominent figure in his own time, tutor and confessor to a queen named Adosinda, and correspondent with Alcuin of York. He participated in the controversy over Adoptionism, a Christological heresy which caused some trouble in Spain at the time. (Part of the later rejection of the Mozarabic Rite came from fears that it was tainted with this heresy.) He is now recognized as a Saint by the Church, with his feast day on February 19th, and is therefore officially “Saint Blessed of Liébana.”

Nowadays, he is chiefly known for a lengthy commentary which he composed on the book of the Apocalypse. Medieval authors valued originality much less than we do, and this work borrows heavily from a wide range of earlier writers among the Fathers of the Church. It is valuable most of all because it preserves extensive sections of an earlier commentary, now otherwise mostly lost, by an influential African writer named Ticonius, a contemporary of St Augustine. Like much of the literature of its era, it would probably not be very appealing to most readers today.

The Vision of the Lamb, with the four cherubim and the twenty-four elders, depicted in the Beatus of León, 1047 AD, also known as the Facundus Beatus after its illustrator. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

It is, however, famous among art historians of the period, because nearly 30 copies of it survive that preserve the original illustrations, which are believed to be the work of the author himself. (There are also several copies without illustrations.) The oldest of these dates to the mid-9th century; there are 8 others from the 10th, and by the middle of that century, some copyists began to expand the repertoire of images. At the same time, one line of these manuscripts was expanded to include St Jerome’s commentary on the book of Daniel, with illustrations in a similar vein. These books are collectively called “Beatus manuscripts”, and named individually either from their places of origin (e.g. “the Tábara Beatus”, produced at the monastery of the Holy Savior in that town), or the libraries that hold them, (e.g. “the Morgan Beatus” at the Morgan Library in New York.)

One of the most beautiful and complete of these is the Saint-Sever Beatus, which is now in Paris, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. (ms. lat. 8878) It was produced at the abbey of Saint-Sever in southwestern France, in the Duchy of Gascony. The name of the abbot at the time, Gregory of Montaner, is in the frontispiece, which dates the manuscript between 1028 and 1072; according to the BnF’s website, the three artists who executed it were called Stephanus, Placidus, and Garsia. (Stephanus’ signature is supposed to be on folio 6, but I can’t seem to find it.) This is the only illuminated Beatus produced in France; in addition to the St Jerome commentary on Daniel, it includes St Ildephonse of Toledo’s influential treatise on the perpetual virginity of Mary. There are nearly 100 images and decorations, with 20 before the commentary even begins, so I will present these in several posts.

The letters in the center of the frontispiece simply repeat the words “Grigorius (sic) abba nobilis” (Gregory, the noble abbot), with the -lis of the last word in the form of an L with a line through it.

This is followed by pictures of the Evangelists; each is shown sitting in a room with a disciple to whom he is consigning his book, and with his symbol above him. The picture following each of them shows two angels in a similar room holding the relevant book.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Feast of the Prophet Obadiah, and the Vigil of the Presentation

With the exception of the so-called Maccabee brothers, the Church in the West has never generally celebrated feasts of Old Testament Saints. (The Carmelite Order venerates the Prophet Elijah as one of its founders, and some churches in Venice, which has many close cultural ties to the East, are dedicated to figures such as Moses, Job and Jeremiah.) On the other hand, in the Byzantine Rite, most of the prophets are celebrated liturgically. The Tridentine reform was very concerned to emphasize the common theological patrimony of the Western and Eastern parts of the church, as united witnesses against the innovations of the protestant reformers, and in function of this, Cardinal Baronius added many mentions of Old Testaments Saints to the Roman Martyrology, on or near their Byzantine feast day.

As I have explained in a previous article, the Byzantine Rite does not have a formal Advent in the same sense that the Roman Rite does, but it does nevertheless have a period of preparation for the Nativity. The Old Testament Saints celebrated within this period are all prophets, and today is the feast of the first of these, the Prophet Obadiah (“Abdias” in Greek and Latin), as also noted in the Roman Martyrology.

An illuminated letter at the beginning of the book of Obadiah, in a Bible made in southern France in the first quarter of the 12th century, now known as the Bible of Montpellier; British Library, Harley MS 4772, f° 288r.

Since he gives no information about himself, we know basically nothing about Obadiah; he is traditionally but mistakenly identified with a man of the same name who appears in 3 Kings 18, the servant of King Ahab who saved the prophets of the Lord from the wicked queen Jezabel. His prophecy concerns the fall of the kingdom of Edom, which was descended from Esau, the brother of the Patriarch Jacob, and which the prophet reproves thus: “For the slaughter, and for the iniquity against thy brother Jacob, confusion shall cover thee, and thou shalt perish for ever.” There are a number of similarities between his book and the oracles against Edom in Jeremiah 49, for which reason he is generally believed to be a contemporary of his fellow prophet, living around the year 600 BC.

The Byzantine tradition simply presumes that like all the prophets, he foresaw the coming of the Redeemer as God in the flesh. Thus we read at Vespers of his feast, “Being filled with the light that knoweth no setting, and seeing the glory that surpasseth all knowing and understanding, and standing near to the Lord of all things, blessed Abdias, and having become the interpreter of God, beseech Him that peace and great mercy may be granted to our souls.” And likewise, in the canon of his feast, “Thou wast revealed to be like a wedding attendant of the Church, o blessed one, foretelling that the Savior would come forth from Zion, to Whom we cry out, ‘Glory to Thy power, O Lord!’ ” “Wedding attendant” explicitly associates the prophet with the last of his brethren, St John the Baptist, who says of himself, “the friend of the bridegroom, who standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth with joy because of the bridegroom’s voice.” (John 3, 29; at right, an icon of Obadiah painted in 1912, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Vespers in the Byzantine Rite always belong liturgically to the following day, and so on November 19th, they are of the Forefeast of the Presentation of the Virgin Mary in the Temple, the equivalent of a Roman vigil. The Presentation was introduced to the West very late, and has never been celebrated with a vigil, but in the Byzantine Rite, it is one of the Twelve Great Feasts, those of the highest degree of solemnity after Easter. It therefore has both a forefeast and an afterfeast, the latter being the equivalent of an octave, although these vary in length, and that of the Presentation is only four days long. The most important variable texts sung at the Divine Liturgy, the troparion and kontakion, are as follows on November 20th; the former is also sung at the conclusion of Vespers the evening before.

Troparion Today, Anna foretells to us joy, having brought forth as a fruit assuaging grief the only ever-virgin, whom indeed today she bringeth rejoicing to the temple of the Lord, fulfilling her promises, as the true temple and pure Mother of God the Word.

Kontakion All the world is filled today with rejoicing at the great feast of the Mother of God, crying out, She is the heavenly tabernacle!

A Greek icon of the Presentation of the Virgin, 17th or 18th century, now in the National Fine Arts Museum in Valetta, Malta; image from Wikimedia Commons by Matthewsharris, CC BY-SA 3.0.