The Twelve Days Of Christmas, 2019/20.

If you, like good king Wenceslaus in the song, look out on the Feast of Stephen -- that's 26 December, but we'll get back to that -- you might think Christmas is over. Already on the evening news on Christmas day the local stations are posting Christmas tree pick up sites and times. Some decorations hang around for a week to give a festive atmosphere to New Year's Eve and Day, then come down. On 2 January, Valentine's Day candy is in the stores.

That fits with the world's Christmas season. The church has a little different season going on. December is largely taken up with Advent. The idea is preparation there too, but not as in buying presents and food. It's about a preparation of repentance for celebrating three three related things:  1) the coming in the flesh of God as Jesus who will die to save us from our sins, 2) the coming of faith in him into our hearts, 3) the coming of Jesus again in glory to judge the living and the dead on the Last Day.

For which reason the colour of Advent is purple, the colour of royalty and also of repentance. His coming in history, in our hearts and his return are not prepared for by buying stuff.

Christmas Is Not Just One Day!

The church's celebration of Christmas does not begin with December and end on Christmas with New Year's tacked on. It begins on Christmas and continues for several days! Our Christmas manger scenes often have the "humble" shepherds and the "important" visitors -- called Magi, Wise Men, or Kings most often -- all there. But as the story reads, the Three Kings were not there at Christmas! They arrived twelve days later, 6 January, which we celebrate as Epiphany. These twelve days from Christmas through Epiphany are the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Now how did that happen? No-body knows. The thing is, Epiphany is a much older feast than Christmas, yet is now largely forgotten by most, lost in the shuffle by many, and celebrated by a few. Now how did THAT happen?

The Original Christmas.

Well, it looks like this. By the late fourth century after Christ, 6 January as the Epiphany existed. The earliest known reference dates from 361, and in those days the references indicate not just the appearance of the Three Kings -- epiphany is an English form of a Greek word meaning "appearance" or "manifestation" -- but rather the appearance or manifestation, the epiphany, of God, including his birth!

It's not that there wasn't Christmas, it's that this is "Christmas", as well as a celebration all the other events of the young Jesus up to and including his Baptism and his first public miracle at the wedding in Cana. A very big day!

Developments In The Western Church.

In the Western Church, these events began to be spun off from Epiphany. By the sixth century 25 December had become the celebration of his birth. His baptism began to be celebrated after Epiphany, so Epiphany itself in the West fairly early on narrowed its focus to the arrival of the Three Kings (Magi, etc.), who, not being Jews but Gentiles, give it the significance of the appearance or manifestation of the Messiah to the Gentiles.

I'm of English descent, but I was adopted by people of Irish descent, and my Dad, as I was growing up in the pre-Vatican II RCC, always referred to Epiphany as "Little Christmas", an Irish custom from when 6 January in the pre-Gregorian calendar was also Christmas. In later life I was to find out this is one echo of all the stuff mentioned above. Growing up, decorations were always left up through Epiphany, and there was one more "Christmas" gift. I did the same in my house. And I'll post about Los Tres Reyes  (Spanish for The Three Kings) on 6 January, having been culturally adopted by the Puerto Rican contingent at university.

Developments In The Eastern Church.

This did not happen in the Eastern Church, where it retained its original character much longer, with many places much later adopting 25 December as the feast of his birth but keeping the celebration of his baptism on Epiphany, and in a few places still keeping the Nativity on this day. And there's the added complication that 6 January in the older (Julian, as in Julius Caesar) calendar still used liturgically by the Eastern Church is 19 January in the Gregorian (as in Pope Gregory) calendar used in the West and now pretty much world wide as a convention.

In the Eastern Church the day is more commonly called the Theophany -- divine appearance or divine manifestation -- and is considered the third most important feast in the church's observance, Easter (Pascha) being first and Pentecost second. There ain't no Twelve Days of Christmas for our brethren in the Eastern Church, it's a Western thing, but on the other hand Theophany is more in line with the original of what we in the West call Epiphany, if we remember it to call it anything at all.

And Then Came Vatican II, Oy.

And to complicate it further, after a millennium and one half of usage, the Roman church, ever at the ready to tinker with the very tradition it says it conserves, decided at its last council, Vatican II in the 1960s, to make it a moveable feast, not on 6 January but on the Sunday after the first Saturday in January. So, if you listen to the Roman church (and if you do, quit!) there ain't no Twelve Days of Christmas in the West now either! Nice going, guys.

For us confessional Lutherans -- those who seek to hold to the catholic, as distinct from the Catholic, faith and church -- while our latest service book, Lutheran Service Book, is infected with the latest Roman virus (please support research that a cure may be found in our time!) Epiphany has survived as 6 January.

So What's This Feast of Stephen Thing?

"Good King Wenceslaus looked out, on the Feast of Stephen". Getting back to that, you think Epiphany got lost in the shuffle, what about this Feast of Stephen? It's 26 December, the day after Christmas. Why? Well, the Stephen remembered on this day is the first recorded martyr for the Christian faith, in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles.  It is the custom in the church to commemorate someone not on the day of his earthly birth but the day of his birth to eternal life -- generally called death in the world -- but in a case like Stephen the date is not known.  When that happens a date will be chosen for some other reason associated with the person.  For Stephen, the first person known to have been born to eternal life by martyrdom for his faith is celebrated right after the earthly birth of him who came to make eternal life available to us.

So Who's This Wenceslaus, Why Is He Good and Why Is He Looking Out?

Wow, has this guy got a story. Right here, call it ironic, coincidence, or one of those divine consistencies that look like loose ends until you know what they are, but he ended up being a martyr for the Christian faith just like the first one, Stephen, on whose feast he looked out.

Here's a short version of the rest. Wenceslaus, also Wenceslas, is English for his name Vaclav. He was functionally king of Bohemia, which is now part of the Czech Republic, also since 2 May 2016 officially known by its short name, Czechia. But, as he was backed by the German Holy Roman Empire, his title was not actually king but duke, which is just below a king.  Duke comes from the Latin dux, which means leader, and was first the title of military officers without a particular rank and then the title of those who ran a province just under the head of state.

"King" actually Duke Wenceslaus had this position first via the Duke of Saxony and King of the Germans Henry the Fowler/Heinrich der Vogler. But then via his son Otto I, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor on 2 February 962 by Pope, aka bishop of Rome, John XII, who then turned on Otto. So Otto went back to Rome and had a layman elected pope instead as Leo VII.  Otto was kinda used to naming bishops and abbots himself. Then, when John staged a comeback but died and left Benedict V on the papal throne, Otto went back to Rome yet again to get rid of Benedict and make them promise to quit electing popes without the Emperor's (his) OK! There's some "hermeneutic of continuity" for ya, to paraphrase another Pope Benedict, XVI; "apostolic succession" in action. Otto was the first clear Holy Roman Emperor since Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus, Charles the Great, Karl der Grosse), who had been crowned by the bishop of Rome Leo III on Christmas in 800 the first Imperator Augustus in the West since the Fall of Rome on 4 September 476 .

Wenceslaus being backed by such a power did not sit well with some Bohemians, including in his own family, all of them caught between changing religions along with their entire social order.  Which is why he's called "good" --  he stayed with the Christian faith of his grandmother who raised him, St Ludmilla, who was herself converted by Saints Cyril and Methodius no less, the "Apostles to the Slavs". His brother Boleslaus (Boleslav) though stayed with the native Bohemian religion of their mother Drahomira, who had Ludmilla killed. Boleslav didn't like the Germans or their state-run Christian church. The martyrdom happened when Boleslav arranged to have Vaclav killed, then took the throne. But, he ended up having to work with the Germans anyway and then his son, also named Boleslav, became Christian and took over from him and established the bishop's seat in Prague!

The irony, coincidence, or divine consistency continues to our time. This man Vaclav who in his own time was killed for selling out to the Germans and their power and new religion is now the patron saint of the Czech Republic, which in 2000 established his feast day of 28 September as Czech Statehood Day, a national holiday.

Yeah, that's a short version. Oh, and what was he doing looking out on the Feast of Stephen? Checking things out after he woke up. But the rest of the story isn't told in the "Twelve Days of Christmas" song. That was first published in England in 1780. Despite recent speculation, there is no evidence the gifts were code words for Catholic catechesis under persecution. Lyrical peculiarities come from its being an adaptation of a French song. It was introduced in the US in 1910, as part of the Christmas programme at Downer in Milwaukee, now part of Lawrence University.

The rest of the story is told in the carol by John Mason Neale, same guy who wrote O Come, O Come Emmanuel based on the O Antiphons posted about earlier. Small world, huh? Or another of those consistencies. Ain't it great when loose ends become consistencies!

Anyway, good Duke Vaclav spotted a guy scrounging for food and asked his page where the guy lived. He then set out with his page to bring the man and his family some aid. The page started faltering due to the cold and snow, but when he followed in Vaclav's footsteps found the ground warm to his feet. Now how's that for being, uh, ablaze!

We Still Got 'em, The Twelve Days of Christmas!!

Guess what, you can still follow in the good duke's footsteps. Neale's carol concludes:

Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.

So let's get on with the Twelve Days of Christmas like, give him his due, Good King Wenceslaus!

NOW is when all the fun and festivities are supposed to happen! LEAVE those decorations up, right on up through Twelfth Night! That's the night of 5-6 January, in case you weren't counting, and yes, it's that from which the title of Shakespeare's great play is taken. So far, Twelfth Night has not been retitled First Sunday After The First Saturday In January Eve, though who knows, sillier revisionism happens all the time in the RCC and we ape it sometimes. Maybe even GIVE A GIFT to someone special for Epiphany, which in some places is the gift giving day, not Christmas, just as God gave himself to us and the Three Kings brought gifts to him. BAKE A CAKE; that's how Kings Cake started and still is done in some places. HAVE FRIENDS OVER -- you get the idea!

And like good king Wenceslaus, DO SOMETHING TO HELP SOMEONE IN NEED! If you don't know someone in need, ask your pastor, he will.  You don't have to live in a country that has Boxing Day to box up something helpful and give it to someone in need.  This custom began because boxes for collection of stuff for the poor were collected in mediaeval times at churches for distribution on the feast of Stephen, inspired by good Duke Vaclav's act of charity.

Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.

The appearance or manifestation of God is just too big to contain in one day!!

And therefore the church doesn't, but extends the celebration of God's coming among us over twelve days, so don't let the world, or, sadly, some entities called church, take a bit of it away from you!

Textual Note: I am most honoured that The Lutheran Witness asked if they could print this post as an article in the December 2010 issue. That article is not the same as this post, but was based on the 2009 blog version of this post by their excellent editorial staff. The print version was approved by me, and you can read it online. Generally I revise the annual posts in my Blogoral Calendar somewhat from year to year, so this year's post is not the exact text of the printed version.

Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Fröhliche Weinachten 2019!

Here is the 2019 edition of my Christmas post.

First off, if your Christmas is a little rocky, or maybe not all you hoped it would be, good news -- you're not left out, you're right in there with the first Christmas!  That one was as rocky as it gets.  As we mentioned at the start of Advent, Joseph wasn't the glowing saint of paintings and icons, he was a working guy with a pregnant wife about to give birth, in town to follow the law and get counted in the census ordered by the Roman Emperor, with all the hotels full and no place to put his family up but a stable for animals, and after the baby was born they had to put him in a feeding trough for animals (that's what a manger is), and pretty soon they'll have to high-tail it out of town into another part of the Roman Empire due to local persecution.  Christ knows all about when Christmas isn't so merry, or happy.

And that's just for starters.  In addition to the many other things remarkable about Christmas, it is so rich in significance for the Christian faith that over time the church has evolved, unlike any other feast in the church calendar, three distinct masses, or divine services, at three distinct times of the day to contain it all.  And after that the celebration continues for twelve days!

Jesus' Birthday? 

We'll get to the twelve days later.  Here. the word Christmas is exactly this, a contraction of Christ's Mass. The first appearance of the word in English, Old English, to be exact, that survives is from 1038, Cristes maesse, which became Christemasse in Middle English, and now Christmas.

25 December is not Jesus' date of birth. The actual date is unknown. Scripture does not record it according to any calendar, although context clues would suggest sometime in about what we call October. But we just don't know, though many theories abound.  From which I think it is safe to conclude that the exact and actual date of Jesus' birth is not important since if it were God would have seen that it got recorded in Scripture.

Another Winter Solstice Thing Like the Others?  

So why 25 December? Because it's nine months, the period of human gestation, after 25 March, which for reasons we'll get into in later posts was traditionally held to be the date Jesus' conception.  And it's pretty cool how that worked out for December.  In the larger culture around the Hebrews in which Christianity first took hold, both the day and the general time of year already had religious significance. In a world ruled by Rome, every year at the time of the winter solstice was the Saturnalia. What's a Saturnalia? Originally it was held on 17 December and later expanded to one week. Saturn, known as Cronus to the Greeks, was the son of Heaven, Uranus, and Earth, Gaia. Saturn took power from his father Uranus/Heaven and castrated him. But a prophecy arose that a child of Saturn's would one day overthrow him, so to prevent this Saturn ate his children.

That's right, ate his children. But Saturn's wife, Opis, known to the Greeks as Rhea, hid their sixth child Jupiter, known to the Greeks as Zeus, on Crete and gave Saturn a big rock in a blanket instead. Yeah, he ate it. Jupiter/Zeus thus survived and, with his five brothers and six sisters, all called Olympians from their hang out Mount Olympus, did indeed overthrow Saturn/Cronus and his own five brothers and six sisters, all twelve called Titans. (If you're hearing modern words like Titanic and Olympics in here, you're right.)

Now in the Greek version of this story the losing Titans got sent to Hell, well, Tartarus actually, meaning a deep place. But in the Roman version Saturn escaped the rule of Jupiter/Zeus and the Olympians and went to Rome where he established a rule of perfect peace called the Golden Age. In memory of this perfect age, Romans celebrated Saturnalia, when no war could be fought, no business conducted, slaves ate with their masters, and everybody set aside the usual rules of propriety for eating, drinking, gift giving and even getting naked in public.

Right after this came Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, The Day of Birth of the Unconquered Sun, celebrated on 25 December, which in the calendar of the time was winter solstice, the day with the shortest daylight hours of the year, demonstrating that darkness cannot completely overcome light. A number of the early Christian Fathers, St Cyprian among them, spoke of the parallel that Jesus the Son of God and Light of the World was born on the same day as the physical sun and light of the world, neither to be overcome by the forces of darkness.

In addition, other religions in the Roman world had a god's birthday on 25 December, for example the Babylonian sex goddess Ishtar, and the Persian mediator god Mithras, whose mystery cult was popular in the Roman army and carried throughout the Empire. On top of that, the barbarians living to the north of the formal boundaries of the Roman world (sorry, Germanic types) where Winter is harsher had their own winter solstice observances.  Most notably, Yule.

The word has come to be more or less a synonym for Christmas, but that it literally co-incidental, Yule and Christmas are unconnected celebrations that happen at roughly the same time.  Yule is well attested in Old Norse, including the Edda (i.e the Prose, or Younger, Edda), by the great English C8 historian (and Benedictine!) Bede, and farther back than that, to C4.  The earliest references indicate a two-month period on either side of Winter Solstice, in which the word occurs, connected to Odin, who is generally the leader of the Wild Hunt in the sky, seeing who's ready for the coming Winter and who's not, with much combined feasting and sacrifice, the blood of the animals offered to this or that god for this or that favour, the meat eaten.  And watch out for those draugar, again-walkers from the dead.

We see a faint echo of Yule in the word Yuletide, Yule logs, and as we saw in the St Nicholas post, Santa Claus flying around.  So it can look like the whole Christmas thing originated with the Christian Church adopting and adapting familiar material from the world around them, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, Saturnalia, Yule and the widespread observance of Winter Solstice, to create a time of celebration for the birth of Jesus. Is that it then? Is Christmas and the observances that go with it simply another step in the evolution of stories about the sun and light not going away but coming back, gods getting born and golden ages, another recasting of universal human themes -- maybe just like Christianity itself?

Missa in festo Nativitatis Domini.  (Don't worry, I'll explain.)

Don't think so. But also I don't think it is at all necessary to become defensive about the fact that other new life and new light stories pre-existed it, or to insist that Christmas was entirely independent of them, or (yeah, I know, too many ors) to fasten on to one or the other of the many attempts to theologise, like Cyprian, the date of 25 December.

Consider: What did Saturn do? Here's a god who had kids all right -- then ate them to prevent them from doing to him what he did to his own father. In contrast to the stories Man makes up about gods, the story God reveals to Man is just the opposite!  Man is a creation, not a child, of God, lost in his own nonsense, some of which he encapsulates in mythology and some of which he considers the latest of enlightened thinking, each new version replacing the last.  Man who will thus destroy himself, to avoid which, God becomes Man in Jesus, whose body and blood will be given for our salvation on the Cross that the creation of God may become children of God, and in the mass he gives that body and blood as the pledge of that salvation.

Consider:  A child of God who does not overthrow his father but lives in perfect submission to his will; a child of God who does not banish his father's rule but proclaims his kingdom; a God who does not eat his child in fear but gives him to us in love so we could eat his body and blood as the food of eternal life, a real golden age to come; a mother who has to hide her newborn son not from God but from Man for his survival. And the imagery of light, not validating all sun gods but demonstrating that even in its fallen and broken state Creation still shows that the Creator will not be overcome no matter how the darkness gathers.

Consider:  The Divine comes to Man, not in a Wild Hunt but in an Incarnation, the sacrifice being not the blood of animals, not even those prescribed in the Law of Moses, and not human sacrifice, but the sacrifice of God made Man, his body and blood for the sins of Man, historically at Calvary and sacramentally presented to us in Holy Communion as the pledge of that salvation.

These pre-Christian observances are not the real roots and story of Christmas, but rather aspects of God's truth written into both Man and Nature even in its fallen state, which we now see in retrospect point to the truth we could not see in prospect, as we look forward and try to make sense of our situation, so, God reveals it to us. The Christmas liturgy will exactly sum this up in the Introit, the introductory Scripture passages, for the first mass of Christmas:  Quare fremuerunt gentes, et populi meditati sunt inania?  Huh?

Hopes and Fears.

OK I'll translate.  The ESV gives it as: Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain? That's ok, but there's more to it than that.  What's translated "rage" is that, but not so much with the connotation of anger but of grumbling, complaining, growling, howling, roaring; we don't have a word that comes from the root verb, fremo.  And see "meditate" in there?  That's where it comes from, plot yes, but in the sense of thinking on, contemplating, pondering, planning, devising.  And coming up with what?  Inania, that's what.  See "inane" in there?  That's it -- inane stuff, empty, hollow, worthless.

We sense something's off, not right, not what it could be, and we come up with ways to fix it.  The NASB translation gives it pretty well:  Why are the nations in an uproar, and the peoples devising a vain thing?  We try to make sense of our situation and based on the sense we see devise answers and solutions, which may for a time seem good but in time lead to more or further problems.  We have some sense of this, and it's expressed in Winter Solstice celebrations and in much else too, but "Christmas" provides an entirely different answer than they do.

That answer is summed up in words written by Phillips Brooks, an Episcopalian priest in Philadelphia, who wrote a poem for his church in 1868 which Lewis Redner, a local realtor who was the parish organist, set to a tune he heard on awakening in the night and harmonised earlier the morning it was to be rehearsed. Neither of them thought it would be anything after that year's service, but it has become among the most popular of Christmas hymns or carols.  The line goes:

The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee to-night.

That's it.  We call this coming of God into Man's flesh the Incarnation, from the Latin that means exactly that, to become in the flesh. To be born. For which another word is Nativity, from the Latin to be born. That's actually the liturgical name for this feast, not Christmas, the Nativity.  Christ comes into Creation, into the flesh, is born into our world, on three levels: his historical birth in the flesh as a human baby, his spiritual birth in the hearts and souls of those justified by faith because of Christ, and his eternal birth or generation from the Father in the Godhead.

Consequently, the church celebrates a mass for each of these three, as it prepared for them in Advent.

The First Mass of Christ's Mass, at midnight.
The Historical Birth in Bethlehem.
Introit Psalm 2:7. Psalm verse 2:1.
Collect
O God, Who hast made this most sacred night to shine forth with the brightness of the true Light, grant, we beseech Thee, that we may enjoy His happiness in heaven, the mystery of whose light we have known upon earth.
Epistle Titus 2:11-15.
Gospel Luke 2:1-14.

The Second Mass of Christ's Mass, at dawn.
The Spiritual Birth in the Believer.
Introit Isaiah 9:2,6. Psalm verse 92:1 Septuagint, 93:1 Hebrew.
Collect
Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that we, who are filled with the new light of Thy Incarnate Word, may show forth in our works that which by faith shineth in our minds.
Epistle Titus 3:4-7.
Gospel Luke 2:15-20.


The Third Mass of Christ's Mass, during the day.
The Eternal Generation in the Trinity.
Introit Isaiah 9:6. Psalm verse 97:1 Septuagint, 98:1 Hebrew.
Collect
Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that the new birth of Thine only begotten Son in the flesh may deliver us who are held by the old bondage under the yoke of sin.
Epistle Hebrews 1:1-12.
Gospel John 1:1-14

May I take this opportunity to wish all who visit this blog Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Fröhliche Weinachten!

O What's an Antiphon 2019.

"Antiphon" is a word transliterated from Greek words that mean "opposite voice". What does this mean? Or for you non-Lutherans, what does that mean?

The Original Antiphon.

Well, originally, which is to say in ancient Greek music theory, it means something sung on both a given pitch and also an octave higher, like C and the next C on a piano. That's antiphonia, as distinct from symphonia, singing in unison, or paraphonia, singing on a pitch and a fifth higher, like C to G on a piano.

Doesn't seem to describe what we mean by antiphon, does it? So how did we get from what the word actually meant to the various things we mean by it now?

What Happened Next.

It all starts with the Psalms.  They aren't just texts, they're lyrics, all that survives of musical compositions whose music is lost. They have a parallelism in structure that suggests they may well have been performed by alternating singers or groups of singers. As Christian worship emerged from the synagogue, that's exactly how the Psalms were done, performed by alternating choruses. Oh well then there you go, alternating choruses so they called them antiphons, right?

Not right.  They were not called antiphons from the alternating choruses, but because the adult males were joined by boys who sang an octave higher than the adult males, hence it was called antiphonia, just like the term means.

Then, by about the 300s, they started adding another verse, generally a related Scripture verse, to each Psalm.  This verse was sung by all before, and generally after, each Psalm verse or two. Next, in time, "antiphon" doesn't have a bloody thing to do with octaves that it really means, but is associated with the idea of two alternating choruses singing back and forth.  And also, the added prefatory text and tune began to be called antiphon all by itself.

So now we have two new meanings of the word that have nothing to do with the original meaning, except that they arose from a performing unit that was organised according to the original meaning.  Confused? It gets worse, or better, as you may see it. Next, books containing the texts to the sung parts of the Mass came to be called antiphonales, and books containing texts to the spoken part of the Mass were called lectionaries, literally, stuff that is read, not sung. Then, antiphonale came to mean a book of chants for the Divine Office (Matins, Vespers, Compline etc) as distinct from a graduale, a book of the chants for Mass.

Four new meanings, none of them the original!  Enough to drive you nuts, right, or at least reach for the St Louis Jesuit stuff and call it good, huh? A word that means at the octave means alternating choruses except when it means added prefatory verses unless you mean the book containing the sung parts of the Mass except if you mean the book of chants for Divine Office. Don't worry, took me a while to catch on too.

Some say antiphonal singing of the Psalms started with St Ignatius of Antioch, who was an Apostolic Father and traditionally is said to have been a student of St John the Apostle. It really only caught on in the Western Church with St Ambrose, who compiled an antiphonale, yeah that word again and here with a different meaning yet, that being a collection of stuff suitable for antiphonal, as in alternating choruses, singing.

The "O" Antiphons.

OK. Now to the "O" antiphons -- antiphon here in the sense of the prefatory text itself. There are various versions in various places going back centuries, so far back that my man Boethius seems to mention the practice.  Boethius was born the same year, 480, as St Benedict, founder of the grand and glorious Order of St Benedict, the SOBs, I mean OSBs.  They are the founders of the wider even grander and gloriouser "Benedictine tradition" found cited in all the recruiting material of universities sponsored by the Benedictines, like the one I graduated from. (A false comparative and a dangling participle in the same sentence: we Benedictines may not always follow the rules but we know what the hell they are.)

Boethius died in 524 or 525, depending on who's counting. It would have been later except the Western Roman Emperor, Theodoric the Great, who was an Arian Christian, had him executed on grounds of treason for conspiring with the Eastern Roman Emperor, Justin I, who was orthodox and catholic, as distinct from Orthodox and Catholic in the later sense.  (We all know Boethius would be Missouri Synod Lutheran to-day, right?)  While he was awaiting execution Boethius wrote his most famous work, On the Consolation of Philosophy. You can read a lot more about all this in a post I added in 2011, called Boethius, Terence, Wheel of Fortune, now posted annually a little before 23 October, the feast of St Boethius in some places. Why is my namesake Terence, who'd be my patron saint except he ain't a saint or even Christian, in there? Because he had a lot to say about Fortuna, the goddess who is the "fortune" in Rota Fortuna, or Wheel of Fortune, that Boethius takes up.  But I digress.

OK Now the "O" Antiphons.

Some form or another of "O" antiphons have been around for almost the entire history of the church.  The Biblical basis is Isaiah 7:14, which, in case you're a little rusty, is the famous verse "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel" (English Standard Version 2001).

This verse is held to be prophecy of the Messiah and Jesus as its fulfillment.  By Christians.  In Hebrew, what is rendered as "virgin" is the (transliterated) word "almah", which is the sixth of seven stages of growing up ("elem" is the male form), and denotes a young female past puberty and marriageable, presumably a virgin since unmarried.  In the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Bible for Jews who spoke Greek, the common language of education, commerce, etc in the world they knew in the two or three centuries before Christ, and which was later adopted by the Christian church, the Greek word used to translate almah is (transliterated) "parthenos", and means virgin.

Hey wait a minute, ain't there a big ancient Greek temple by that name?  Yeah, sort of.  That's the Parthenon, it's in Athens and was the temple of the city's patroness, the goddess Athena, one of whose epithets (a descriptive nickname) is Parthenos, applied to Athena as she had no husbands, consorts or lovers, and a parthenon is where a parthenos lives.

There's a big and long-standing controversy about whether parthenos really translates almah, and also whether the prophecy has any application beyond telling Judah's King Ahaz that before this woman's son is grown he will have defeated his enemies (this is about eight centuries before Jesus).  But that's not the subject here so I won't even bring it up.  Well, except to say it relates to the Biblical basis for the O Antiphons that is.

Anyway, of the various versions of the O Antiphons it was the Benedictines who arranged what has become the standard one.  This happened at the Floriacum, aka Fleury Abbey, in France, founded around 640, enjoyed the patronage of Charles Martel and Charlemagne as a school, and is still in operation, one of the few monasteries that survived the French Revolution.  The pattern is, a different antiphon each day at Vespers from 17 through 23 December, right up to Christmas Eve. Each one starts with a salutation of Christ by the vocative particle "O" and a verse on one of attributes in Isaiah Christians consider to apply to the Messiah, culminating in God-with-us, Jesus. In order, they are:

O Sapientia (Wisdom), from Isaias 11:2-3;
O Adonai (Lord), from Isaias 11:4-5;
O Radix Jesse (Root of Jesse), from Isaias 11:1 and 10;
O Clavis David (Key of David), from Isaias 22:22;
O Oriens (Morning Star), from Isaias 9:2;
O Rex gentium (King of the Nations), from Isaias 9:6 and 2:4;
O Emmanuel (God With Us), from Isaias 7:14.

Who's Isaias?  Relax, it's Isaiah, in the English form derived from the Septuagint in Greek rather than the Hebrew.  When I was younger, before the Revolution, er, Vatican II, we used those forms, and since we just got into all this Greek stuff well hey.

OK now look here  --  it's Advent, right, and late in it, and about to be Christmas, so, starting with the last antiphon, from the day before Christmas Eve, go back each day and put the first letter of each attribute of Christ to-gether and what do you get? Ero cras, that's what. Latin, and guess what that means in English -- I will be (there) to-morrow! Benedictines man, are we good or WHAT!   Some say it's coincidental, since other versions do not have it or any acrostic, but the one that's become standard, this one, does, and lemme teya, I came up with those guys, and nuttin like that happens coincidentally around Benedictines.  Ever.

The whole series sums up the Advent preparation then concludes it, right down to a Psalm-like acrostic in the titles!

Never heard of such a thing? Sure you have. We sing it all the time! No monks or Vespers needed (though if you're fortunate enough to be in a parish that has Vespers, don't miss it, no monks needed for Vespers!).  The popular Advent/Christmas hymn "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" (often sung in Latin as Veni, veni Emmanuel, and for God's sake don't say WAYNE-ee, it's VAY-nee) is a composite of the whole O Antiphon series!  The hymn text is of obscure origin, paraphrases of the O Antiphons date back to the 800s, and a translation of it by John Mason Neale, an Anglican "priest" and all around helluva a guy, was paired with a pre-existing tune also of obscure origin, resulting in the hymn as we have it now, by Thomas Helmore in 1851.

O what an antiphon!  Enjoy!

Hell Yes There's A Santa Claus. 6 December 2019.

6 December is the feast of Bishop St Nicholas of Myra. Yeah, jolly old St Nick, except Myra is not at the North Pole, but was a town in Lycia which was in what is now the southwestern coast of Turkey.

Huh?  Howdya get from Turkey to the North Pole?  Howdya get from a pastor to a guy flying around in the sky with presents?  Hey, that's just for openers, there's way more!  Settle back, this is gonna be fun.

From pastor to a guy in the sky.

The guy in the sky with presents has nothing to do with Nicholas of Myra.  That is an adaptation from old Germanic folklore, the Wild Hunt (Wilde Jagd), in which during Yule, a feast around the Winter Solstice, the gods rode, distributing good and/or bad, in most versions led by Odin (Woden, Wotan) on his eight-legged horse, Sleipnir.  So there you go, long-bearded guy, leading a bunch of guys, in the sky, from the North, on flying animals.

Gotta tell ya, my favourite version has the leader of the Wild Hunt being a Brythonic king, Herla, who spends about three centuries on the "other side" and comes back to find all these Angles and Saxons around and wonders what's up with that.  This is from Gaulterius Mappus (English: Walter Map) in C12, in his work De nugis curialium, distinctio prima (On the Trifles of the Courtiers, part one).  He was an English courtier himself, went to the University of Paris, and heard a lot of "trifles" in a lot of courts.  Hey, the Romans left so the Brythons hadda do something to keep order so they invited us!  Us Angles anyway, the Saxons can speak for themselves.

This Germanic folklore is also the origin of characters associated with Santa Claus.  In North America it's generally nice elves, but in Germanic versions the bad stuff got individuated into Krampus, a demon-like guy who shows up the night before 6 December (Krampusnacht) to jack around with (in varying degrees depending on which version) bad kids, or more recently starting in 1850 in Holland, Zwarte Piet, Black Pete, said to be a Moor (remember, Spain ruled the Netherlands in the past), who began more Krampus-like but is now an amusing assistant and helper.

"Nick"names.

OK "everybody knows" that "Santa Claus" has his origins in the stories about St Nicholas.  For example the nickname "St Nick", or "Santa Klaus".  Nicknames in some languages come from the last rather than the first part of a given name, so in German Nikolaus becomes Klaus rather than as in English Nicholas becomes Nick.  What about the "santa"?  That comes from the Latin sanctus, as a noun meaning a saint, or in German, Sankt.  So, we have an English version of a German nickname for St Nicholas, Sankt Klaus, morphing through a West Germanic (read: Dutch) variant Sinterklaas into "Santa Claus" in English.

Hey, nickname, Nick, the whole idea comes from the particular nickname Nick maybe, right?

Wrong.  A logical guess, but logic though always consistent with itself is not always consistent with reality.  "Nickname"  comes from ekename, meaning "another name", which became nekename in Middle English, which is "nickname" now.

There, you're already set for some seasonal fun with friends!  Bring this up, and when you do, don't call "St Nick" a nickname, call it a hypocorism, or hypocoristic.  Huh?  OK OK, there's three kinds of nicknames, hypocorisms, diminutives and monikers.  The first reflects a bond between the parties, the second reflects smallness as a sign of either affection or contempt, the third are nicknames that become names in themselves, for example someone whose given name is Frank, not as a nickname for Francis as it originally was. But be careful how you have this kind of fun.  Done in a wrong way, you may be taken for a uselessly overeducated pompous crashing bore (a cruder two-syllable word beginning with "a" may also be used) and we wouldn't want that.

Nicholas of Myra.

Anyway, also "everybody knows" that he went around giving anonymous gifts to kids, either tossing them over the transom (that's a window over a door, used for ventilation, hardly ever see them now) into their shoes left by the door, or tossing them down the chimney (don't see many of them now either) into the stockings hung by the fireplace to dry, from which we get the tradition of putting shoes out or hanging stockings to get gifts from a guy who goes around.

But, what was his point in doing that, so there'd be kids like you see in the commercials, waking up in nice homes and being all happy with getting new stuff for Christmas?

Hell no. So who is this guy?  OK, Nicholas was born 15 March 270 in Patara, Diocese of Asia.  Huh?  Isn't a diocese a church thing?  No it isn't; that came later and is still around.  Patara was a town on the southwestern coast of what is now Turkey.  It was named from its legendary founder Patarus, a son of Apollo, and was a major seaport and centre of Apollo worship complete with an oracle of Apollo almost as important as the one at Delphi.  It's mentioned in Acts 21:1-3 as a port on the travels of Sts Paul and Luke.  "Diocese" is the name of administrative units of the Roman Empire created by Emperor Diocletian -- he liked the word because it sounds like his name -- and the Diocese of Asia, Dioecesis Asiana in Latin, lasted from 314 to 535 when Emperor Justinian (boy has that guy got a story but it's covered elsewhere on this blog) abolished it.  The area was Helenistic (read: Greek) in language and culture.

St Nicholas came from a wealthy family, lived in nearby Myra, and as a pastor gave pretty much all his inheritance away to help poor children and families. And particularly, in those days, poor girls without a dowry likely would not end up wives and mothers in nice households, and likely would end up as prostitutes. So the gifts had a real serious practical edge to them, to help turn lives around by giving them a start their circumstances or parents couldn't.

So what's a dowry?  Well, ever heard of paraphernalia?  Probably brings to mind assorted odds and ends, or gear related to something else, or, (yeah I know, too many ors) if you have a certain background, bongs and pipes and roach clips and stuff, but the word originally refers to part of a dowry.  Great - what's a dowry?  If you've been fed the revisionist "politically correct" crap passed off as education these days, it may call to mind money and/or property that a wife brought along with herself to be the property of her new husband.  Actually, it was quite the opposite.

Dowry, the word, derives through older forms of English and French from the Latin word dos and its older Greek cognate dosis, gift, and in Greek this specific type of gift or dosis was called pherna.  Dowries are a universal custom in human history dating back to earliest records anywhere.  While specifics vary from time and place to time and place, it is a gift (donatio) of inheritance given between the living (inter vivos) as opposed to because of the death (mortis causa) of the donor.  In this case, from the bride's family to both the groom and/or his family and to the bride herself.  Some of it is to help with the establishment of the new family unit, so that all of the financial burdens of marriage (onera matrimonii) don't fall all on the husband and/or his family, and yes, that could be a source of misuse.  But the rest of it remained the wife's only, and was to insure that she would not be left financially helpless should the new husband and family treat her poorly or victimise her.  Precisely the opposite of the modern misconception.

That part of the dowry, dos in Latin and pherna in Greek, that was hers and not either the husband's or in-common property is called the parapherna, which means "beyond the pherna (dowry gift)" in Greek, which Latin retained, with the plural paraphernalia.  So that's what a dowry is and how it functions, and what paraphernalia is.  Yeah, I suppose if she had some good pipes they stay hers.

Anyway, the same guy who did this -- whaddya wanna call it, outreach, winning souls, meeting needs -- also was at the Council of Nicaea at a time when it seemed the whole church was heading into the heresy of Arianism. That was the belief that Jesus as Son of God was neither equal to God the Father nor co-eternal with Him, as the doctrine of the Trinity maintains.  And what did the council do, say wow look at how those Arians connect with people and attract them, maybe we should quit worrying about all these doctrinal barriers we put up and preach and worship more like they do but with our content, as some "Lutherans" do now with current popular heterodoxies?

Hell no, again.  St Nick was among the most vocal standing for the catholic faith (not to be confused with the Catholic Faith) against Arianism and Arius (the "bishop" who was its main proponent and from whom it is named) himself, which led to the formulation of the Nicene Creed we confess at mass (not to be confused with Mass). So next time someone says we gotta get rid of all this hang up on doctrine and liturgy and get with the mission field and outreach, take a bloody clue from St Nick.

Or from Wilhelm Löhe, whose half-fast Lutheran church body found him just not quite with it and stuck him in a little town in Bavaria, from which he arranged spiritual and temporal missionaries all over the world and worked mightily for authentic Lutheran liturgy and doctrine, whose good effects are bearing fruit to this day.

Funny thing is, there's about as much myth and stories about St Nicholas himself as there is about Santa Claus, or Father Christmas, as he is more commonly called in Mother England.

Before we get to that, and as a prelude to it  -- the original Father Christmas had nothing to do with any of this.  He is a personification of Christmastime merrymaking and feasting, not associated with children or gifts etc.  During the years of Puritan control in the mid-1600s, Christmas and other festivals such as Easter were abolished and forbidden, and he took on a symbolism of prior good times.  Then after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, he came back but not to much notice as people were little inclined to want memories of Puritanism, and neither he nor Christmas itself were a big deal in England until the C19 Victorian era when Sir Walter Scott and others brought back a desire for lost truly English culture.  Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843) was not the treasured tradition it is now, but something new and atypical that was a huge influence in restoring something old as typical again.  "The Ghost of Christmas Present" is shown in an illustration as essentially Father Christmas -- dressed in green.  At the same time the US Santa Claus came into the mix with the transatlantic travel, and A Visit from St Nicholas, from 1823 in the US, was published in England in 1853.  For the rest of that century and into the next, the two figures either appeared separately, or, Father Christmas took on more and more of the US Santa Claus' characteristics.  In recent decades "Father Christmas" and "Santa Claus" are pretty much different names for the same figure, not that the original Father Christmas who has nothing to do with the American Santa Claus, its European origins, or St Nicholas himself, is forgotten.

Santa Claus and Father Christmas are as originally unconnected as St Nicholas and Santa Claus! 

On the Arius thing, some say Nicholas slapped Arius and was thrown in jail for it, whereupon Jesus and Mary appeared to him, loosened his chains, gave him a copy of the Gospels and a bishop's stole (omophorion) respectively, and when the Emperor (Constantine, no less) heard of it released him and reinstated him, but others say this was a vision to Constantine directly, and some say to all the "bishops" at the Council.  Nicholas was at the council, he's 151st on the list of those attending, and he did strenuously champion the catholic faith, but, the slapping Arius thing has no basis other than legend.  Not well attested, as they say.  So no, it's not "Slap a Heretic Day".

On the gifts thing, some versions of the story say it was at one time for a poor man with three daughters, some say it was three times as each daughter grew up, some say it was through an opened window, and some say the third time the dad was waiting to see who was doing this so Nick tossed it down the chimney and it fell in the girl's stockings hung by the fire to dry, but other versions say the dad found out who it was only to be told by him to be grateful to God, not him personally.

After his death.

Not to mention that after his death even the real St Nick got caught up in commercialism. He was buried in Myra, and it is said that every year his remains exude what is called myrrh, a rose-smelling watery liquid, to which miracles are attributed. It was a very popular, and profitable, site for pilgrimages.  But by 1087 Myra was overtaken by Sunni Muslim powers, the Seljuk Turks (you didn't think this Islamic thing was anything new, did you).  The Eastern Roman (aka Byzantine) Empire was pretty much losing control of Asia Minor generally at this time, and so his remains were removed to Bari, in Italy on the southern Adriatic coast, which had been under Byzantine control but had been taken by the Lombards and Normans.

Stories disagree whether the remains were removed by pious sailors to whom St Nick himself appeared telling them to keep the saint's remains under Christian control, or by pirates looking to sell them for a big profit.  Probably pirates, but let's call them entrepreneurs, sounds better.  In any case, they only took the big pieces, and those arrived in Bari on 9 May 1087.

Good for the local pilgrimage industry!  The Venetians wanted in on the action, and during the First Crusade (1095-99), originally called to repel the Seljuks, sailors scooped up the fragments and brought them to Venice, started saying his remains were actually brought to Venice, with only an arm left in Bari, and built a big church about it which is still there. An examination in the 1950s revealed the skeleton in Bari is intact. In 2005 British analysis of measurements from that examination showed that Nicholas was right about five feet six inches tall.  In 2012, scientific examination of both sets of remains verified they are from the same skeleton.

And the myrrh secretions continue in Bari. Vials of it are for sale (of course) and have been taken all over the world, sometimes in the belief that they can work miracles.  The secretions may be from the body, or, may be from the marble itself, since the tomb is below water level in the harbour town, and seeps by capillary action.

On 28 December 2009 the Turkish government announced it will seek the return of the remains from the Italian government, to Demre, the modern town near Myra's ruins.  Restoration and excavation have been going on since Tsar Nicholas I of Russia began it in 1863 at St Nicholas Church in Demre, built in 520 on the site of Nicholas' church.  In 2017, Turkish archaeological excavations revealed frescoes detailing his life and what may well be the grave from which the raiders took his remains.  More work is planned.  While both St Nick's stated wish to be buried there and the questionable removal of his remains are noted, it has been noted too that it would be real good for that descendant of the pilgrimage industry, tourism.

Indeed there is both a statue of St Nicholas and "Santa Claus" in town!  In 2000, the Russian Federation, then barely a decade old following the end of the Soviet Union, in recognition of the longstanding veneration and importance of St Nicholas in Russia, donated a new bronze statue of him for the St Nicholas Church in Demre.  But in 2005 the town's mayor removed it for a statue of Santa Claus, more recognisable for tourists.  After Russian protests, the statue was relocated but on a smaller pedestal near the church.  Turkey now allows Eastern Orthodox liturgy to be celebrated there, which it is on 6 December.

So when do I get my presents?

For centuries on end, the custom in many areas has been, and in some places still is, to exchange gifts, or at least give gifts to children, on 6 December, the Feast of St Nicholas, in honour and imitation of his well-known gift-giving.  So what happened that it's Christmas Eve now?  The Reformation, that's what.  Among the many things needing reform was excesses relating to the saints and relics thereof, so Luther proposed the Christkind, Christ-child, to refocus on Christ as the gift-giver and for whom the mass (masses, actually, but that's covered in other posts) in celebration of his birth are from what Christmas, Christ's Mass, is named.  Well intended, but the infant Jesus no more goes around delivering presents than St Nicholas does.

Later non-Lutheran reformations did away with saints days altogether.  Of course, Christkind won't deliver gifts if you stay up and wait for it, so you gotta go to bed.  The custom caught on in Catholic areas as well, and remains in some areas.  Overall, the main effect is, it relocated getting gifts from St Nicholas' Day to Christmas or Christmas Eve, that's where that came from.  Also, Kris Kringle -- that's a mispronunciation of Christkind and its diminutive Christkindl, that's heard sometimes as a name for, guess who, Santa Claus, not Christ.  This is also the origin of "Secret Santa", a custom found in workplaces and other places.

Lately, even in Germany "Santa Claus" is taking over, as Weinachtsmann from American-style advertising.

Conclusion.

What does this mean, a Lutheran might ask. A bunch of saint stuff coming out of the decadence and corruption against which the Reformation stood? Or does it show that be it St Nicholas or Santa Claus, the whole thing is simply story and myth, elaborated by a culture as a means of transmitting certain values, and religion is just culture and myth taking themselves way too seriously?

Or, is it that the stories and myths are taken way too seriously and their point is lost? We can get all caught up in whether it was three daughters on three times, or three daughters on one time, through a window opening or down the chimney into stockings, whether Jesus and Mary came with the Gospel book and the omophorion to Nick himself or in a vision to the Emperor or came anywhere to anyone, whether he struck Arius at all.

Point is, none of that is the point. Somewhere in there is a pastor from a wealthy background who, in response to the gift of salvation through faith in the merits of Christ that God had given him, was a steward of the gifts God had given him.  Good works because we are saved, not in order to be saved.  Somewhere in there is a pastor who wanted the gratitude for the gifts given through him to be directed to Christ who is the gift of God who saves, and not to an abstract value such as "being a good person", or to himself, neither of which saves. And somewhere in there is a pastor, call him "bishop" or whatever you want, who stood fast for the truth of Jesus as God and Man by faith in the merits of whose death and resurrection we are saved (the Gospel).

Hell yes, Virginia, there's a Santa Claus. It's you, me, us, St Nick and the whole communion of saints. So get out there because you're saved and do something for somebody in a tight spot, and stand for the pure Christian faith and worship confessed in our Confessions, among which is the Nicene Creed btw, instead of all the bogus feel-good happy-clappy crap and Vatican II wannabeism.

Hold Fast To Hype. 4 December 2019.

Preface.

It is fitting indeed and just, right and helpful unto salvation -- oh wait, not that kind of preface, but it is dignum et justum to say I did not write what follows this preface. It is an article by Patrick Marrin of the National Catholic Reporter, with copyright given. It is, or at least was, also published online here. I am posting the text, typos and all.  The article refers to an accompanying story, and that is also given.  The accompanying story is an address given by Godfrey Diekmann OSB in 1997.

Who is that and why should I care?  Godfrey was a leading figure, both in the movements in the decades before Vatican II that led up to it, and at Vatican II itself where he was a peritus.  What's that?  "peritus" in Latin means skilled or expert, and in church usage it's a noun meaning an expert in theology appointed by the Vatican Secretary of State to attend and advise a church council.

It was my inestimable privilege to have known Godfrey, a stunning accomplishment of the human spirit and a professor and Benedictine extraordinaire, even if he was, IMHO, wrong about damn near everything.  I'm actually much more in awe of his much lesser known brother Father Conrad, whose World Lit (Homer, the Greek tragedians, Virgil, Dante and Cervantes, I suppose to-day we would say Western Lit, though Conrad also offered a wonderful class on haiku which I also took) classes, though at 0800 on Minnesota Winter mornings, were among the singular experiences of my life.

Father Godfrey was born into eternity on 22 February 2002.  There's some real irony here.  Godfrey was a champion of "collegiality" and 22 February, in the new order to which Godfrey was such an influence, is now in the Roman Calendar the Feast of the Chair of St Peter.  I suppose it might have been fitting etc. to post this on that date.  Formerly, 18 January was the Feast of the Chair of Peter at Rome and 22 February was the Feast of the Chair of Peter at Antioch.  The novus ordo abolished the former and combined it with the latter.

Either way, it's all about chairs, as in seats of authority.  Yet our beloved synod, ever ready to engage in Vatican II for Lutherans, in its current worship book reinvents the 18 January date as being about the confession of St Peter and ignores the 22 February date though that is the date traditionally associated with St Peter delivering his confession!  This blog disentangles the well-intended but misguided the story of these feasts on that date, along with much else that comes from it, in the post "22 February.  The Confession of St Peter.  On Chairs, Guardians, Noble Lies and Pious Fictions Too."

So, 22 February is taken with much bigger stuff.  It might be even more fitting to post this on 11 October, the anniversary of the opening of Vatican II in 1962.  That was my original intent.  But, on 1 October 2019 I took a bad fall in the rain, with injury to the right shoulder, at first expected to heal with immobilization but examination by an orthopaedist revealed more extensive damage requiring a hemiarthroplasty, which was done 10 October 2019.  So I was a bit taken up at the time.  What to do?  Well, 4 December 1963 is the promulgation date of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.  This is the document of Vatican II most directly affecting not just Catholics but non-Catholics as well, particularly those like ourselves (LCMS) who historically retain liturgy.

It is this document that both summed up the drift of the preceding decades of the "liturgical movement" and resulted in a wholesale change to the previous liturgy in the promulgation of what is often called the novus ordo, though that is not its actual name.  Liturgical rites are named for the pope under whose authority they are promulgated, thus, it is the Mass of Paul VI.  He promulgated it on 3 April 1969 and it was to take effect with the beginning of the church year, the First Sunday of Advent, of that year, but, he was so unhappy with the text prepared for it that that didn't happen until a revision came out the following year, which is why one sees both 1969 and 1970 as its date.

Novus ordo means "new order" in Latin, which though that is not its name describes exactly what it is, a new order.  The bumbling around its initial appearance is but openers for no end of bumbling around in the decades since, which continues unabated to the present re both the Latin typical text and translations thereof.  The only thing that Magnum Principium, "The Great Principle" in Latin, Pope Francis' document of 3 September 2017, really clarifies is that bumbling around following Vatican II is now the irreversible norm of the Catholic Church.  The extent to which this bumbling around is completely antithetical to the reforms of the Lutheran Reformation is detailed in this blog's post for 25 June, the anniversary of the presentation of the Augsburg Confession.

I would not now give a ginger snap -- or, in the magnificent phrase now nearly entirely absent from usage, a popefig -- about all this except for its woeful effect on Lutherans, distancing them (ie, us) from their heritage as it has with Catholics, all the while presenting a pastiche that looks traditional superficially but in reality is an intentional break with the very tradition it claims to renew.  There's more to tradition than wearing vestments, following a church-approved order and talking about Jesus.  Both the article and the accompanying story are expressly clear about something I heard daily in those heady days, that this is a real and intended break yet one that is not really a break at all, but a return to and a renewal of something that had been increasingly obscured in the last millennium and a half.

Sounds a lot like an acknowledgement of what we call the Babylonian Captivity of the Church and the Reformation, doesn't it?  Yes, it does.  I refer the reader again to this blog's post for 25 June for a fuller discussion; here, the main points which show this to be quite something different than what we are about.

1.  Constantine did not decide in 313 to advance Christianity as the state religion.  This is a reference to the Edict of Milan (Edictum Mediolanensa) of February 313.  The edict exists in two versions, that of Lactantius, a scholar who was tutor to Constantine's son Crispius, whom Constantine ordered hanged in 326 and shortly thereafter had his stepmom Fausta executed by immersion in boiling water, which was not a Roman method of execution but was a technique of abortion, suggesting an adulterous relationship and pregnancy, and that of Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea.  For one thing, the two versions are not at all the same.  For another, Lactantius' version is not in the form of an edict.  For another, far from making Christianity the state religion, it simply granted Christianity legal status, and ordered reparations made for recent persecutions.  For yet another, it wasn't even specifically about Christianity, it grants legal status to any and all religions found in the Empire!  The advancement of Christianity as the state religion did not come from Constantine but in the joint declaration of the co-emperors (Gratian, Valentinian II and Theodosius I) on 27 February 380 with the Edict of Thessalonica (Cunctos populos) defining what is and is not the Catholic Church and making it the state religion.

2.  Nowhere in our Lutheran Confessions is there anything even remotely like a concept or sense of reversing 1,600 years (well, at the time the Confessions were written it would have been about 1,100 years) of bad development, jumping over centuries to restore and renew a lost purity of New Testament and Patristic (the "fathers" of the first few centuries of church history) times.  This idea of some sort of lost ideal in the early church, whose purity is to be recovered and restored, is entirely a churchy version of an endemic Romantic fiction of C19 in which the "Liturgical Movement" began, a "noble church" as the ecclesiastical expression of the "noble savage".  Noble savage, btw, is a phrase often associated with Rousseau, but, he never used it; it comes from John Dryden much earlier, in his play published in 1672 The Conquest of Grenada -- I am as free as nature first made man / Ere the base laws of servitude began / When wild in woods the noble savage ran.  "Savage" at the time did not have its common pejorative connotation now, but quite the opposite, a sense of free, unrestrained, even superior for not being held back by later imposed norms.

3.  What our Confessions do state, in complete contrast to the above, is continuity with the past, warts and all, and re the warts, removing them by the criteria of, not a model of a lost past, but whether it contradicts anything in Scripture.  Wrt to worship, our Confessions repeatedly point out that our services are NOT a new order but for the most part the ones previously in use.  Godfrey makes an anonymous reference to Pius XII's encyclical Mystici corporis Christi (Of the Mystical Body of Christ) of 29 June 1943, yet omits anything about it not concerned with the liturgical movement, resulting in an emphasis both misplaced and misunderstood.  1943 -- the insistence on the value of each human life to the Church carries over to society, in contrast to Nazi Germany's Aktion T4 programme of killing of those with mental or physical disabilities or those of races or cultures deemed inferior, or as we put it now, insufficient quality of life.  Also, while the encyclical is clear that the Church is not composed of an active clergy dispensing the sacraments and a passive laity receiving them, it is also clear that this life happens within the visible structure established for it by Christ, namely, the Pope as head and the bishops in communion with him.

4.  This in turn led to one of the great bumblings-around since the council.  The encyclical says the mystical body of Christ is the Catholic Church.  Is, or in Latin, est.  Lumen gentium, "Light of the nations" in Latin, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church as it is called, in its eighth paragraph says instead that the Church subsists in (Latin, subsistit in) the Catholic Church.  Many critics of Vatican II have seen this as the Catholic Church backing off from its former self-understanding.  For decades now the Catholic Church has put forth explanations how these two different statements are the same.  Guess what, they are the same, and guess further what, that is not good news though it sounds like it.  Subsistit in simply means that the church of Christ is only fully found within the visible structure of the Catholic Church, though elements of the Catholic Church sufficient for salvation can and are found outside its visible structure.  IOW, we Lutherans and others are saved by those elements of the Catholic Church which can exist outside the Catholic Church and which we do not deny, such as Baptism.

5.  If Godfrey et hoc genus omne want to lament the phrase "people of God" overshadowing "body of Christ" they need look no further than right here, not at est and subsistit in.  Mystici corporis and Lumen gentium do not use the same nouns for what is supposedly the same in the verbs.  Mystici corporis says the body of Christ is the Catholic Church.  Lumen gentium says the Church, not "the body of Christ", subsists in the Catholic Church.  Oh, but church and body of Christ are the same thing, one might say. Indeed they are, but look at why that is.  The Church is what it is because of each member's baptism into the life of God, says Lumen gentium in chapter two, which thus forms them into not the Old Testament people of God but a new people of God.  IOW, the body of Christ and the people of God are equivalent terms for one thing created by one source, baptism.  If they are not equivalent terms, two nouns for the same thing, then est and subsistit in cannot be equivalent verbs, two verbs for the same thing.  The documents themselves bear that out.

6.  This bumbling is the fons et origo by which Pius XII's encyclicals, not just Mystici corporis, are stood on their heads.  Mediator Dei (Mediator of God, 20 November 1947) both champions the sacraments and liturgy as mediating the life of God to the members of the Church and warns against the effects of trying to encourage this participation by applying to liturgy the Romantic fiction discussed above thinking one has recovered some lost past purity, an effort he calls liturgical archaeologism.  Yet it is just this liturgical archaeologism that is the modus operandi celebrated below of the novus ordo.  Lex orandi lex credendi, the law of praying is the law of believing, says the maxim derived from Prosper Aquitanus, a student of Augustine.  The original goes ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi, that the law of praying establish the law of believing, which in Catholic hands is sometimes used to establish doctrine on liturgy, yet this is contradicted both by the principle of sola scriptura, by Scripture alone, is doctrine determined, and by Pius XII himself in Mediator Dei, saying that the proper distinction between faith and liturgy (so to speak!) is expressed by lex credendi legem statuat supplicandi, the law of belief establishes the law of prayer.

Point being, as you pray so shall you believe, and as you believe so shall you pray.  It works both ways.  If you pray in a manner devised out of a liturgical archaeologism, a Romantic fantasy of having jumped over a millennium and one half of loss of purity, so shall you believe about the faith, the church, the works.  And, if you have faith that includes such a Romantic fantasy, so shall you change the liturgy, the church, the works.  The latter is how the novus ordo and all the rest came to be, first in the Catholic Church and then in other churches or parts thereof who adopt and adapt it.  The former is the ongoing effect once the latter has become the norm.  And the greatest irony here of all is that this is entirely inconsistent with and false to the much vaunted idea of a body, which does not stay the same but grows, the same organism in later stages as in earlier ones, not jumping back to earlier stages but moving forward in organic continuity.

In the case of the mystical body of Christ this organic growth is both promised and guaranteed by Jesus (lo, I am with you always etc.) through the Holy Spirit.  Which is why there was, and is, a Babylonian Captivity not a Babylonian Extinction, why real liturgical reform proceeds within the organic continuity of the Body of Christ, the Church, as our Confessions state, normed by what is inconsistent with Scripture not with a Romantic fantasy about a distant past.

It's bad enough that for Catholics Vatican II makes normative exactly what Pius XII in Mystici corporis, Mediator Dei and for that matter Humani generis showed to be dangers to and dissent from Catholicism, and presents a contemporary pastiche that looks traditional, being made up of this and that from here and there, something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue (literally, in the case of Advent), but is anything but traditional and dismisses three-fourths of the elapsed development of the body of Christ the Church.  But that is their problem.

Our problem is when we follow suit and likewise, without meaning to or even recognising it, we incorporate this intended break with the Church's organic development in which our Confessions so proudly demonstrate we stand, by adopting and adapting the novus ordo pastiche model of a lex orandi that is quite at odds with our confessed lex credendi, thus no less than the cowo crowd trying to infuse Lutheran content into a concept of worship not meant to contain it. 

In this way is our lex credendi subtly altered and compromised.  Novus ordo?  Bogus ordo.  Sacrosanctum concilium?  Sacrorectal concilium.  Better that we stand with our Lutheran principles of reform, within the organic development of the church, the body of Christ, preserving the usual ceremonies, for the most part similar to the ones previously in use, and for the sake of good order in the church the traditional lectionary.

Mr Marrin's article, and "accompanying story" to which he refers, follows.  

Diekmann says hold fast to hope - Vatican II figure Godfrey Diekmann

Vatican II participant appeals for restored priorities, transformed lives

Vatican II, regarded by some as one of the most revolutionary councils in church history, is now the subject of video retrospectives and historical overviews that pronounce who won, or where the pendulum has come to rest. If anyone is watching or reading, the easiest verdict is that the council is fading in both time and influence, its prophets either gone or all but silent.

With at least one notable exception.

Even at 90, Benedictine Fr. Godfrey Diekmann carries his 6-foot-3-inch frame straight and tall behind the aluminum walker he is pushing swiftly down the long monastic corridor at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn. His face -- large, sculpted and serene -- glows above his black turtleneck.

He is a man on a final mission, made all the more urgent by a doctor's verdict last August that he could die or be incapacitated at any moment by a, host of heart troubles that have left him too fragile for any further medical remedy.

Diekmann, regarded by many as one of the giants of the American church and a key participant in the work of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), has been using his borrowed time since Benedict August to reassert that the most important goal of the Second Vatican Council was to recover for everyone full and confident access to an intimate life with God through Jesus Christ. The key to opening up the institutional church to this life was to restore an understanding of the church as the body of Christ. This single reform held revolutionary implications for every aspect of the church's governance, worship, spirituality and mission. (See accompanying story.)

The body of Christ

For Diekmann this is no worn cliche but Christianity's best-kept secret, a startling revelation conveyed in the prayer offered daily during the preparation of the wine at Mass: "By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity."

In his 63 years teaching patristics -- the rich treasury of writings from the first centuries of the church -- Diekmann has struggled to convey to his students the meaning of the patristic adage: "He became human that we might become divine."

"My main point in teaching was to make my students realize what Christianity is -- that it's not just being good with the grace of God helping us, but it means real transformation, that you are sharing the divine nature. This must be taken seriously.

"What does it mean to say that we are members of the body of Christ?" Diekmann asked. "It means that in some absolute, almost contradictory way, we are sons and daughters of God, and not just as a figure of speech. The very fact that we casually keep on talking about being adopted children of God is proof that obviously we don't have the faintest idea what this is about, because adopted, by itself, in present usage, can only mean a matter of the law.

"We acknowledge that Christ, of course, is the tree Son of God. But we are now also tree sons and daughters of God, but by a gift -- by adoption -- and this is actually sharing the life of God. That is a staggering thing, and for many Catholics it is completely new."

For Diekmann, these "glad tidings" so exceed the claims of ordinary religion, are so stunning in their implications, even theologians fail to comprehend them. The language of Western philosophy has never been able to adequately express what the Eastern church has always celebrated through symbol, music and ritual in its liturgy, Diekmann said.

For all the controversy that swirled about Vatican II, this is what it was basically about -- to re-animate the church and its members as the body of Christ.

Diekmann believes that we cannot overstate the importance of this restored ecclesiology and must not allow it to languish. It was the soul of the 40-year pastoral liturgical movement that helped prepare the church for the Vatican Council, and it is the one image of the church that has the power, lacking in other images, to inspire us to embrace the gospel's call to become participants in the life of God.

Resistance to the council

The main source of conflict during and after Vatican II was that the ecclesiology being displaced, a highly centralized and hierarchical model based on Robert Bellarmine's image of the church as a "perfect society," was well entrenched in 1959 when Pope John XXIII surprised everyone by convening the council.

The pre-Vatican II church most older Catholics remember, enshrined by the Council of Trent in 1563 and bolstered by Vatican I in 1870, was a proud if isolated medieval cathedral/fortress at the height of its triumphalist stature. The Catholic church was the oldest, largest, wealthiest, authoritarian institutional religion on earth. For many, it was also divinely ordained, infallible and changeless.

Diekmann shares the view held by many church historians that such a structure was rooted not in the New Testament but in Emperor Constantine's decision in 313 to advance Christianity as the state religion. The church went from being a countercultural force and catalyst to being guardian of the status quo. Bishops became territorial, or diocesan, governors, a corruption of their original servant roles and a blow to collegiality, or shared authority among all bishops. "From the time of Constantine until Vatican II, you had an uninterrupted development of clericalism and centralization," Diekmann said. By unplugging this ecclesiology, the Catholic church set a bold precedent for institutional change worldwide.

The laity, the Catholic church's now nearly 1 billion adherents, had the most to gain by the council's recognition that baptism entitles every member of the church to "conscious, full and active participation" in the worship and life of the church. Every Christian shares in the risen life and redemptive activity of Christ -- priest, prophet and king -- through the use of his or her own charisms.

Diekmann recalls the speech given by Cardinal Leo Suenens during the council on the charisms flowing from baptism: "Each one by baptism has his own charism and contributes something to the church, first of all to the local church, or ecclesia, to which you belong, and then to the entire church. In God's plan you are indispensable. This is terribly important -- the importance of laity of themselves."

The idea of lay charisms was little understood at the time of Suenens' speech in the 1960s, even as the idea of the body of Christ was rejected by some in the 1920s as too dangerous, too much like the Protestant idea of the "priesthood of the faithful."

While many council reforms are coming more slowly than supporters had hoped, Diekmann the historian believes in taking the long view. What the council adopted in principle still needs to be fully implemented: "But the momentum of 1,600 years cannot be reversed in a mere generation," Diekmann cautioned. "The doctrinal foundations have been firmly placed by Vatican II, and, contrary to increasingly pessimistic evaluations, the substructures of renewal are being placed, often by trial and error if not by official initiative."

Even apparent crisis and controversy can be interpreted positively. The shortage of ordained clergy, for example, has opened the way for non-ordained men and women to serve as parish administrators and has prompted creative extensions of the sacramental work of Christ through lay leadership and outreach. Diekmann said he is joyful in the freedom of the Spirit evident in such adaptive situations. He points to early church writings as an untapped treasury of solutions and models for today's needs. The revolution will continue; there is no turning back. The full application of Vatican II's vital ecclesiology will come because it is the will of the Holy Spirit.

Astonishing series of miracles

Diekmann's confidence is rooted in his own experience at Vatican II, where he served as a member of the preparatory commission for the document on the liturgy. The council was for him and many other witnesses an astonishing series of miracles -- unforeseen events, opportune moments, dramatic interventions and come-from-behind victories that advanced the daring new ecclesiology, first in the liturgy document, then into the debate on the nature of the church itself.

One Protestant observer and close friend of Diekmann, the late Albert Outlet of Southern Methodist University, expressed amazement at the council's dramatic reversal of 1,600 years of church history: "My conviction is that never before in the entire history of Christianity has there been such an obvious intervention of the Holy Spirit as there has been here," Outlet said.

There were setbacks as well. The one Diekmann regards as doing the most damage to the intended impact of the council was the misapplied emphasis given to the phrase "the people of God" in the aftermath of the council.

An Old Testament designation, the phrase was used as the title of Chapter Two of the "Constitution on the Church," and there only to indicate that the whole church is more important than any one part, including the pope or the bishops. Unfortunately, it was later received widely as the operative image for the church, supplanting the body of Christ.

This led to de-emphasis of the most important message flowing from the council. The bold assertion of divine life through baptism, real incorporation into God's own nature, was conveyed as only a special closeness to God within the fellowship of the church. What the council had powerfully proclaimed it failed to effectively teach.

Liturgical buzzword

The idea of fellowship, or koinonia, became the buzzword of many liturgical reformers eager to replace the formal, vertical, divine worship in the old liturgy with the new, theologically horizontal and less formal celebration of a meal with the human Jesus in community. The result was a false evaluation of the transcendent and immanent dimensions of the liturgy. The former emphasis on transcendence became a one-sided stress on immanence -- we become pals with God. Both dimensions are essential. This misunderstanding created divisions within the reform effort and became a source of untold confusion and criticism in the wake of the council, and this has continued to distract and delay implementation of its deeper purposes.

For now, Diekmann is less interested in arguing than in appealing for an openness to the life that is meant to flow freely through the church to each member of the body of Christ. Any structure that blocks that life limits ministry within the church and blocks the urgent mission of the church to proclaim the gospel to the whole world.

As Diekmann anticipates his own face-to-face encounter with God, he has seized every opportunity to alert others to his concern that the gospel of divine life is not reaching the church or the larger world clearly and fully.

When Cardinal Joseph Bernardin attended graduation ceremonies at St. John's University in June of 1996, just months before his death, he asked to see Godfrey Diekmann.

"Before Mass he called for me. He said, `You know I'm sick and I'm not sure I can finish with the Mass. I don't want to just make conversation, but I asked for you so you could tell me what is closest to your heart.' And for 35 minutes I talked about being sons and daughters of God, how that is the essence of Christianity, how that is the glad tidings. He took all of that it in, he listened. Then he said, `You are perfectly correct that we haven't done enough to make that clear.'"

In recent interviews and letters to his many friends, Diekmann's long story of the miracle of the council is being distilled to a kind of mantra he seems intent on proclaiming until the time silence, claims him:

"Baptized Christian, remember of whose body you are a member."

By PATRICK MARRIN Special to the National Catholic Reporter Collegeville, Minn.

COPYRIGHT 1999 National Catholic Reporter

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

[Here is the "accompanying story". It is also online here.]

"Christian, remember your baptism" - 1997 address from Fr Godfrey Diekmann

These remarks were delivered by Fr. Godfrey Diekmann as part of a panel discussion at St. John's School of Theology, Collegeville, Minn., on April 17, 1997. Panelists were asked to speak about the meaning and purpose of the Second Vatican Council and on the state of the reform and renewal in today's church.

Cardinal [Leo] Suenens [of Belgium] stated that Vatican Council II was a council about ecclesiology, about the nature and activities of the church. I believe most theologians would agree. So I suppose the first question that comes to mind is what is the church?

It may come as a surprise to many to discover that Vatican Council I in 1870 and Vatican Council II have given radically different answers to that question. For more than three centuries before Vatican II, the accepted answer would have been that of Robert Bellarmine: The church is a society. There are two perfect societies, that of the church and of the state. That's not a very spiritually inspiring definition, is it? It is a definition in fact which a priori excludes the very possibility of collegiality. It was only in the 1920s that a new, or rather, the biblical, Pauline and patristic understanding of the church, began to surface again in the Western church. And it became the leitmotif of the pastoral liturgical movement, namely, the church as the body of Christ.

The body of Christ. Too bad it was called mystical body of Christ. At that time many were put off by the word mystical: What has that got to do with me? Perhaps at the present time the term would be welcomed.

The concept of church, or body of Christ, only gradually gained acceptance. It was a very sensitive subject. We had to be very careful in speaking of it, or printing an article about it in Orate Fratres or Worship [magazine], principally because, I suppose, of our post-Reformation nervousness about the priesthood of the laity, of the faithful. Only with Pius XII's encyclical on the mystical body in 1943 did it gain respectability. Let me quickly enumerate five of its most inspiring and revolutionary implications.

1. Every baptized Christian is an active, co-responsible member of the body having a distinctive contribution to make. This became the Magna Carta of the laity, the basis of active participation in the liturgy and the great movements of the time; the Jocists, the Family Life Movement, the Catholic Worker.

2. Collegiality: Bishops are not vicars of the pope. They, too, are vicars of Christ. The diocese is not just a geographical division of the universal church; it is the local church, united to all other churches, and in a most special way to Rome, the church of the pope. The bishop's leadership is made manifest above all in the celebration of the Eucharist.

3. The presences of Christ: Not only in the eucharistic bread and cup but "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them." This involved a long overdue rethinking of sacraments. Sacraments are not just external signs to confer grace, that terribly mechanistic, automatic understanding of the sacraments that created rightful scandal among our Protestant friends. Sacraments are not things, they are acts. They are acts of Christ. Christ is in our midst, continuing to send the Holy Spirit for the upbuilding of the church.

4. The recovery of the resurrection of Christ as redemptive: We in the West for some 500 years at least had put almost exclusive emphasis on Christ's passion and death as effecting our redemption. How bad the situation was is clear from the fact that [F.X.] Durrwell's book on the resurrection as redemptive, published in 1960, just a few years before the council, created heated controversy. But the apostle Paul said, "Christ died for our sins and rose for our justification," that is, that we might have life, Christ's life.

No wonder Augustine could cry out, "We are sons and daughters of the resurrection, and Alleluia is our song?

5. And what is that life of Christ? It is the life of the risen Christ. It is divine life. We are sons and daughters of God, not by nature but by gift. This is the essence of the Christian glad tidings. To quote a patristic cliche, "God became human that we might become divine." Or, as St. Leo the Great tells us, "Christian, remember your dignity." And that thought, I submit, constitutes the one and only school of Christian spirituality of the biblical and patristic period. There are dozens of schools of spirituality at the present time. This is the only one that I could recognize in the writings of the early church: "Christian, remember who you are," or equivalently, "Christian, remember your baptism."

I should, by right, add a sixth point. Since Vatican II, a new situation has arisen, a rightful demand to achieve and to put into effect the equality of male and female. In this question, also, the doctrine of the body of Christ, as expressed, for example, in Galatians 3, or 1 Corinthians 12, the body of Christ concept gives us the strongest and clearest biblical warrant for urging the radical equality of men and women. You all know the famous passage: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free person, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).

In conclusion, therefore, let me say, the topic of our discussion is the renewal of the church. Those of us who are old enough will remember what an exhilarating and enriching period of spiritual renewal were the several decades of the pre-Vatican II liturgical movement, a movement inspired by the doctrine of the body of Christ. It was a voyage of ever new discoveries. When all is said and done, Vatican II was a church-wide effort to effect spiritual and structural renewal by that same doctrine.

I submit that it is a complete misunderstanding of the council to think that the concept "people of God" was meant to replace that of the "body of Christ," as largely happened after the Vatican Council II. The chosen people of the Old Testament, the Jews, were already spoken of as the people of God. The new dispensation offers something gloriously new, the people of God have become the family of God, true sons and daughters of God.

The term "people of God" was used as the heading of Chapter Two of the document on the church chiefly to pick out, to give prominence to, one important aspect of the body of Christ, namely, that the entire body is more important than any of its members, even pope and bishop, and that applies also to the teaching of infallibility. The total body is greater than its parts.

In a word, renewal of the church according to the council demands of necessity the recovery in the popular minds and perhaps in that of theologians the biblical and patristic understanding of the church as the body of Christ. "Baptized Christian, remember of whose body you are a member."

COPYRIGHT 1999 National Catholic Reporter

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group