Readin', Writin', and Absolute Multitude. Academics 25 February 2021.

What's up with that? Don't I mean 'Rithmetic?

Essay on the Anniversary of the University of Iowa, 25 February 1847.

When it's almost back-to-school time, along with all the sales in the stores, there's also all the usual stuff for sale too about the value of education. Trouble is, there's about as many ideas of what is an education, not to mention of what is its value, as there are kinds of pens, notebooks and clothes in the stores.

So let's start with the good old liberal arts education. We'll look at:

I. How and Where It Started

II. What the Seven Liberal Arts Actually Are

III. The Modern University

IV. How It Fell Apart

V. Where We Are Now

VI. Where We Could Be

and a little concluding note you might enjoy.

I. How and Where It Started.

These days, you may or may not hear that the ideas of liberal arts education, like those of democracy, originated in Greek antiquity.  What you really don't hear these days is that those ideas were not at all what we mean by them now.  In those societies, democracy didn't mean everyone participates, it meant that to participate in democracy, one must have an education adequate to do that, and to have such an education one must not be burdened by having to work; that was done by a slave class. Leisure, not work, is the basis of culture and society; "liberal" comes from the Latin for free, which translated the Greek for not what we think of now, but learning appropriate to the free and non-working class, not the slave class.

"Academy", "academic" and like words come from the school Plato founded in a sacred grove dedicated to Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, called the Akademia. Hekademia originally, actually. It lasted from about 387 BC to 83 BC. Its most famous graduate is a guy named Aristotle.

The Academy was refounded on Platonic philosophy in 410 AD and lasted until closed by the Roman Emperor Justinian I in 529. Well, Eastern Roman Emperor, but the Western Empire was gone, having collapsed in 476. Justinian was out to stamp out anything in the Empire but the state religion, the Catholic Church, defined and established by the Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius and the Western Gratian and Valentinian II in the Edict of Thessalonica on 27 February 380. Which he pretty much did, the Second Council of  Constantinople in 553 saying nothing happens in the church without the emperor. For which reason the 529 closing of the refounded Academy is often called the End of Antiquity.

The scholars of The Academy sought haven in the Persian Sassanid Empire, then when the Persian and Byzantine empires made peace in 532, some of the scholars removed to Harran in what is now southeast Turkey. After the Sassanids lost to the Arabs, by then Islamic, in 651, Harran became the first great centre of Islamic learning as the knowledge of classical antiquity was translated from Greek to Syriac to Arabic.  Meanwhile Europe, where all this stuff came from, was a complete mess. So knowledge that began in Europe was forced out and wouldn't make its way back for a few hundred years.  Helluva guy that Justinian, huh. The Eastern Orthodox think he's a saint, which I suppose makes sense for what's left of his old state church, but unfortunately so do some of us Lutherans.

So The Academy. Its best graduate Aristotle in turn founded the Lyceum in Athens in 335 BC, right beside the temple of Apollo of Light, Apollo Lykeios, hence the name. The Romans trashed it in 86 BC, and at an unknown point thereafter it ceased to be. Its location was rediscovered in 1996, just east of modern downtown Athens. The word Lyceum survives in modern European languages for roughly what we call high school in the US.

Here's how these ideas passed from the end of the ancient world with the fall of the Western Roman Empire to later times in the West. First was a guy named Martianus Capella, who sometime after Alaric, King of the Visigoths (Germanic types), trashed Rome in 410, wrote a book called De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii et de septem Artibus liberalibus libri novem, which means "On the Wedding of Philology and Mercury, and the Seven Liberal Arts, in Nine Books". The first two books are an allegorical love story about how Mercury, the pursuit of learning, actually learns by way of Philology, communicated information, and the remaining seven are textbooks in each of the seven arts we will detail below. The books were largely based on existing ancient works, and the whole thing was pretty much an encyclopaedia of its time, but later, when the knowledge in that system began to show itself lacking, the whole thing started to appear lacking, and scholars now routinely diss him, when what is needed then as now is separating the system itself from its content at any given time.

Which is pretty much what the rest of this post is trying to establish.

Second was a guy named Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, who lived shortly thereafter. His best known work is On the Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione philosophiae), written while awaiting execution by the Arian Western Roman Emperor Theodoric for supposed treason with the Catholic Eastern Roman Emperor Justin. Boethius translated a bunch of ancient Greek works into Latin. In his rather free translation of Nicomachus' book on arithmetic he also set out the liberal arts, giving them the now-familiar trivium and quadrivium names. In his On Music set out the three-fold division of music we shall detail below. His books remained standard authorities in universities for hundreds of years, and the Consolation is one of the most influential books ever written. While not part of the church's general calendar, in some places he is commemorated as a saint, St Severinus, with feast day 23 October.

These days you might hear that the liberal arts were originally seven, the first three being grammar, rhetoric and logic, also known as dialectic, a three-part way known in Latin and consequently to the West as the Trivium (from which our word trivial comes, trivial matters originally being not minor details but what you learn in order to get on to the heavy lifting of reality itself), and the last four being arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, the four-part way called the Quadrivium.

Nice to know, but doesn't tell you a damn thing about what this was all about, though it looks like it does, which is most of the problem understanding this stuff.

II. What the Seven Liberal Arts Actually Are.

Here is the structure of the Seven Liberal Arts.

The Three Part Way, the Trivium.

1. Grammar.

2. Rhetoric.

3. Logic (dialectic).

The Four Part Way, the Quadrivium.

4. Arithmetic. (Absolute Multitude)

5. Music. (Related Multitude)

6. Geometry. (Stationary Magnitude)

7. Astronomy. (Mobile Magnitude)

Again nice to know, but again doesn't tell you a damn thing about what this was all about, though again it looks like it does.  The words you recognise don't mean what we mean now, and what is this multitude and magnitude stuff?  

The Trivium was not grammar, rhetoric and logic exactly as we mean them now, nor even something one studied for its own sake. Rather, it was learning the tools by which one learns anything at all, just as a tradesman learns the tools of his trade before learning how to use them in the trade itself. Basically, Grammar was the study of how thought is written down in symbols (language), Rhetoric was the study of how thought is communicated from one person to another, and Logic was the study of how to think to reach supportable conclusions. Thus a person will be able to write down or speak his own thoughts rather than just let them rattle around in his head (Grammar), evaluate whether the written or spoken thoughts of others are well written down or written to hide or disguise things (Rhetoric), and evaluate his and others thoughts as to whether the content is supportable or based on unsupportable assertions and/or hidden assumptions which are deceptive (Logic).

Here's what the names of the liberal arts in the Quadrivium mean. Once you learned how to study anything at all, the stuff to be studied was divided into two big categories, things that are what they are as combinations of units, and things that are what they are as units that divide into further units. The former were called Multitudes, and further divided into those that are not applied to anything but abstract, which was called Arithmetic, and those that are applied to something, and that is called Music. The latter were called Magnitudes, and further divided into those that do not move, called Geometry, and those that do, called Astronomy.

Arithmetic then simply meant the study of number in the abstract, not applied to anything, just how numbers can be combined and used -- what is generally called mathematics to-day: not arithmetic as we use the word now. Music was using numbers to understand a phenomenon, and was further grouped into three areas: musica mundana, using number to quantify and understand the world outside ourselves, thus including what we generally call to-day physics, chemistry, and the like; musica humana, using number to quantify and understand the world inside ourselves, thus including what we generally call to-day biochenistry, psychology and the like; and finally and at the lowest level, musica instrumentalis, using number to understand the tones and combinations of tones produced by the instruments that produce them, including the human voice, which is what we generally now mean by music.  But, this is only understanding music, the actual making of this kind of music, the lowest, being simply a skill and not needed by an educated freeman but best left to the uneducated.  Ironic: from a skill left to the uneducated, these days, being able to strum a few chords on a guitar and belt out a few words seems to immediately confer that status of prophet, revelator, visionary, and authority on whatever one belts out about.

Education had nothing whatever to do with earning a living or getting ready to do so. When the idea began, work did not ennoble, it debased.  Work was done by a class that, precisely because it had to work, could not possibly have time to learn what one needed to know to participate in democracy or high positions. As the classic education ideas began to take hold in post-Roman Europe, something that is learned for the purpose of making a living, the trades for example, were learned in guilds, not universities, with the interesting twist that the guilds formed first, and universities began by borrowing their ideas of how to organise from them! So show a little respect to the repairman that shows up next time you need one.

So, the Seven Liberal Arts are a system, first for learning how to learn, then for classifying what is to be learned, in order to be educated to fulfill the responsibilites of democracy and high office.

III. The Modern University.

In the original universities, a person who had completed a course of studies in the Seven Liberal Arts, and passed final examinations by his masters (teachers), was awarded the degree Bachelor of Arts.

What does this mean? Not what you would think based on the ordinary current meanings of these words -- the same problem again. "Arts" does not mean painting or sculpture or whatever, but the Seven Liberal Arts. "Bachelor" does not mean an unmarried male, but comes from the Latin baccalaureus, and originally referred to the lowest class of knight, a squire, or apprentice, to a knight, or a knight in the service of another knight. The word itself seems to have come from baccalaris, a man employed on a dairy farm. Bacca was a variant of late Latin vacca, which still survives in Spanish as vaca -- cow. The progress is similar to that of learning a trade in a guild.

A Bachelor could then go on to further study, and then participating in and moderating disputations (disputationes). These were highly formalised debates on the truth of specific propositions, usually based on arguments from appropriate authorities, called argumentum ad verecundiam.  These are inappropiate to syllogistic logic, in which the syllogism is true or false based on its on its correct process and not who does it.  But they are common in informal logic, where, since no-one can be an expert on everything one relies on those who supposedly are experts on this or that thing.  This is the origin of the ad hominum (against the man), which is not name-calling at all, but refuting a statement on the basis that the authority cited is not a credible authority. On such further study and activity, a person would be awarded the degree Master of Arts, the Arts being the Seven Liberal Arts, and "master" deriving from the Latin magister, which looks like master but actually means teacher; one may now teach the Arts.

Luther's so-called "95 Theses" were an invitation to exactly such a Disputation.

A degree was simply a step, in Latin gradus, to becoming a teacher or master, hence the term "graduate", a progression again similar to the trade guilds and still seen in the apprentice, journeyman and master structure of qualification in the trades. Since the masters were teachers, they were also called doctors, from the Latin for "to teach". Over time, since the three higher fields of study were Law, Medicine and Philosophy, masters who went into these fields earned a final doctor degree in them, and the doctoral degree in these higher faculties came to be regarded higher than the master teachers/doctors, eventually becoming the present Bachelor, Master, Doctor hierarchy, with later fields coming under the division of philosophy along with philosophy itself.

The story of the modern universities begins with the schools attached to monasteries, generally Benedictine, real monking monks, not just monked over, preserving some light against the darkness of the times, which times are known as the Dark Ages. Karl der Grosse, known to some as Charlemagne, who forged the first more or less unified state in Europe since the Roman Empire, was crowned Imperator Augustus by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800 at St Peter's Basilica (the old one; the current one is on the same site) to re-establish a Western entity against the still standing Eastern Roman Empire, and thus is considered the Father of Europe. Among his many accomplishments, he encouraged education. With the reforms of Pope St Gregory (died 12 March 604) for learning to include more than liturgy but also theology and canon law, bishops began to establish schools in their cathedral parishes to teach things beyond the monastery schools. Then, with demand far in excess of supply, plus the original town and gown tensions between students and townspeople, which were not pretty with rape and murder not uncommon and often protected by clerical immunity, schools gravitated to big cities.

The word university comes from the Latin phrase "universitas magistrorum et scholarium" which described and denoted these institutions, associations of students and teachers chartered by civil and/or ecclesiastical powers that be in their cities, with degrees granted by the institution itself, at bachelor, master and doctor levels, as distinct from licences or certificates from individual teachers as before, which adapted from the trade guilds the advancement stages of apprentice, journeyman and master onto a model drawn from the madrasahs of the Islamic world. (Notice how all this stuff, from Plato's Academy to the modern university, begins with schools attached to houses of worship? Hmm.)

The first of the modern degree-granting universities, growing out of existing centres of higher education, was established in Bologna (1088), followed by Paris (1160), Oxford (1167) and Cambridge (1209). The final step was recognition by papal bull of a university's autonomy from the city, the church, and each other, meaning non-interference from the state and/or the church (this is what "academic freedom" means, or originally meant) and also that a graduate from one could teach anywhere else jus ubique docendi, with no further examination.

In Bologna, the students ran things, hiring the teachers; in Paris, the church hired and paid the teachers who ran things, and in Oxford and Cambridge, the crown ran things. These differences had major consequences.  All four of the original universities are still around, but in different ways because of this.  Bologna was not a comfortable place for teachers and fell into decline; Paris became the leading university and really the great granddaddy of the modern university but was abolished as such in 1793 by the French Revolution centuries later as part of destroying the ancien regime, the old regime of government and church, though parts of it still survive with historical ties; government sponsorship of Oxford and the later Cambridge (1209) allowed them to survive the replacement of the church with the state Church of England.

Students entered the university at about age 15, and after a six year curriculum in the Liberal Arts, usually with an emphasis on logic, if they passed they graduated a Bachelor of Arts. Courses were not by subject so much as by the authoritative book studied, often from Aristotle, the Bible, or the Thoughts (often called the Sentences, from the Latin title Quattuor libri sententiarum, or Four Books of Thoughts, still reflected in the idea that a "sentence" should express a complete thought) of Peter the Lombard, who taught in the cathedral school at Paris. Having graduated from the Faculty of the (Seven Liberal) Arts one could go into the world, or continue in one of the three other, further, fields of Law, Medicine or Theology, which would take another 12 years or so.

IV. How It Fell Apart.

So what's the point of all this -- I'm into old stuff that isn't the way it is any more and think you should be too? No, and hell no. For as much "old stuff" as I post on this blog, I wouldn't consider any of it worth a ginger snap if it didn't do two things for us now: make where we are a little clearer and more understandable by seeing how we got here, and make where we are a little clearer and more understandable by seeing what was the idea of where we were supposed to be going in the first place.

Here's what happened. New knowledge did not replace invalidated knowledge in the system as it should have, but was confused with the system itself and brought the system itself down, and thus we have the start of our fragmented knowledge and view of learning to-day. This began when difficulties in reconciling Aristotle with Christian doctrine became more and more apparent, and the bishops of Paris issued a series of formal Condemnations, most notably those of 1277 by bishop Etienne Tempier, which had the effect of allowing scientific investigation to proceed without reference to Aristotle the great authority.

Beautifully ironic, especially in view of the nonsense peddled in so many contemporary universities -- scientific freedom from existing authorities in investigation resulted not in spite of the church and its doctrine, but from bishops responding to the inherent problems in expressing doctrine in terms of the prevailing science of the time.

That's great for science, also great for Aristotle since he never thought he wrote the last word on everything, and would be the first to encourage further investigation into everything, but, it also had the effect of making everything previously held now seem possibly wrong or soon to be found out to be wrong, and the further effect of that was immense.

A new direction in thought arose, best summed up in the maxim of the English Franciscan William of Occam, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, or, no more things should be thought to exist than necessary. This was a lex parsimoniae or law of parsimony that brought about a new way of thinking that was skeptical to agnostic.  This new way consciously saw itself as a new way and called itself such, the via moderna or modern way, as opposed to the trivium and quadrivium which became by default the via antiqua or old way. This turned up in every field, in music (as we use the term now) it was called the Ars nova, a term first used by the theorist Phillippe de Vitry in a book by the same name in 1322.

Music that was not monophonic chant but polyphonic, with secular themes being placed over a base of a piece of chant, music in duple time rather than triple reflecting the perfection of the Trinity, music written this way for religious purposes -- such things were utterly revolutionary, and part of the shift in the times that was happening from the arts to theology itself. What a modern irony that some to-day will perform the motets of Machaut, the greatest of ars nova composers, and be thought to be real fuddy duddys, but Machaut himself in his day was thought of as an affront to everything right and proper for worship!

It was into this world turned upside down and inside out that Martin Luther, having graduated from schools that focussed on the trivium, enrolled at 17 in University of Erfurt in the first year of the 16th century, 1501, graduated with a Master degree in 1505, and went on to the Law school following his father's wishes and the usual pattern. He soon dropped out. Questioning everything, positing as little as possible, and so on was all fine, but at what point did it yield reliable results, also known as answers, which is particularly upsetting regarding the claims of Christian doctrine which have some pretty extreme claims of salvation and damnation.

There being no answers, he sought one in what was available, the rigours of the actions of monastic life, to the extent that his superior, Johann von Staupitz, Vicar General of the Augustinian Order in Germany, had him continue an academic career in theology to take his mind off his own salvation, and also spoke to him about the Means of Grace and salvation through the death and resurrection of Christ, which, though Staupitz was no Lutheran and lamented the later breaking of visible church unity, got him put on Rome's Index of Forbidden Books!

V. Where We Are Now.

Seems long ago and far away, but it is into exactly this same world turned upside down and inside out than we are born now, just with better means of communication. Each age along the way seems to think it has started a new age, a new way, a modern way, an Age of Aquarius, an Enlightenment, or whatever, all just simply repeating the confusion of the via moderna with better technology. Likewise our supposedly enlightened modern world, where graduates can't count back change in their minimum wage jobs, or reliably point on the map to where the people came from toward which they have been taught warm inclusive fuzzies, or hear a news report with an ear to whether or not it contains unexamined assumptions from which supposed conclusions are drawn.

Of the four original universities, three are still around right now, namely Cambridge, Oxford and Bologna.  Guess what, all three of them are routinely ranked as among the very best universities in the world now!  And two of them, Cambridge and Oxford, always rank in a superclass by anybody's rankings, always in anybody's top ten.  The other superclass members btw are Harvard, MIT, Stanford and U California-Berkeley.  Harvard has roots in Cambridge and is named for its original benefactor, John Harvard, a Cambridge alumnus.  The third, Bologna, regularly places in the #150-300 range.

The fourth, Paris, was abolished by the French Revolution, but a number of institutions with historical links to it survive that have structured and restructured since 1806 with Napoleon.  After its abolition in the French Revolution, Napoleon on 1 May 1806 centralised all its faculties as the University of France.  This, with some modifications along the way, lasted until the colossal social upheaval of the late 1960s, when amid student riots it was shut down.  President de Gaulle ordered yet another reorganisation, with thirteen successor universities being established.  Amid more unrest, in 2018 two of them (Paris IV and Paris VI) combined to form a new university with an old name, Sorbonne University, which nonetheless uses the date 1257, though it is hardly in any sense the College of Sorbonne founded by Robert de Sorbon, chaplain of King Louis IX in France.  On 20 March 2019 the French government reconstituted something under the name University of Paris, taking two more of the surviving parts of the old University of Paris, Paris Descartes aka Paris V and Paris Diderot aka Paris VII, along with the latter's IPGP, the acronym in French for what in English is Paris Institute of Earth Physics.  This is not a rebirth of the University of Paris in any sense.  Rather, it is the latest in a series of reorganisations of surviving parts of it.  At present then, there are eleven parts of the University of Paris surviving as separate institutions, and remarkably all of them are highly ranked though the University of Paris itself is long gone. 

In fact, there are even older continuously existing institutions which exist now as modern universities but were not founded that way.  Al-Azhar University, in Cairo, much in the news in recent years, was founded as a Shia madrasah by the Fatimid dynasty in 975, became Sunni under the Ayyubid dynasty (the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides taught there in the 12th century) and became a university in 1961 under President Nasser of Egypt.  Arguably the oldest degree-granting institution in the world is the University of al-Qarawiyyin (sometimes given as al-Karaouine) in Morocco, founded as a Sunni madrasah by Fatima (yes, a woman) al-Fihri in 859, when Europe was largely a bloody mess barely held to-gether educationally by the grand and glorious hard-working and uproarious Benedictines, but became a university in 1963 following the independence of the Kingdom of Morocco in 1956 (from France, but hey the Romans ruled it for about 400 years, under the name Mauretania, not the same as the modern Mauritania).

And, topping it all off, Nanjing University was founded in China in 258 by the emperor Sun Xiu (Jing of Wu) as a school for the Confucian Six Arts (man am I tempted to go on about those in comparison/contrast to the Seven Liberal Arts!), and after a TON of bumps along the way became a university in the 20th century, and you know what, STILL hangs in there ranked among the top universities in the world by all major rankings!

"All major rankings" means the QS World University Rankings (QS), the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE), both British, and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) from Shanghai, with US News & World Report lately jumping in with a revised QS ranking.

Recent decades have seen an astounding increase in the ability of thoughts and information to be communicated, starting with mass printing some centuries ago but exploding first with the coming of radio, then TV, and now the Internet and other forms of electronic digital media; and at the same time have seen an alarming decrease in the apparent ability of people to form, communicate and evaluate thoughts and information. Where the ability to smarten up exists to an unprecedented extent, the fact of dumbing down is seen everywhere.

Amid an unprecedented ability to communicate information, people seem to have less information and less ability to critically evaluate information than ever. And this largely not because people are any more smart or stupid than before, but because educators themselves have nearly totally overlooked that the magnificent increase in the media of communication does not invalidate but in fact makes more needed than ever the basic tools for forming, setting forth, and understanding what is communicated.

This general dumbing down of society is not new, it was noticed decades ago, but it has assumed warp speed as the very means of communication develop at warp speed too. One of the earliest, and still best, accounts of this, even more applicable to-day to the means that did not exist when it was written than ever, is an essay called "The Lost Tools of Learning" by Dorothy L Sayers in 1947. She was best known for her detective novels, a genre generally considered "low brow", and that such a magnificent and magnificently educated mind as hers should equally well write best selling detective novels exemplifies what this is all about.

Her essay is online now. You can read it here.

Another, and more recent, modern exposition of these tools of learning is by Sister Miriam Joseph of the Sisters of the Holy Cross at St Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana, called, guess what, "The Trivium". Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2002. Available through Amazon easily.

Added now to the dumbing-down is the idea that has gained hold in academia that it is not a dumbing down but a waking up.  To what?  To seeing the classic ideas and values not as the basis of our culture, society and achievements as previously thought but rather white, male arbitrary standards codified in a system imposed on others through nationalism, colonialism and imperialism resulting in systemic racism and mysogyny.  Political correctness with a rationale.  Ironic in that the origin of the term "politically correct" was within the political left wing, where it was intentionally ironic, as for example Socialists critical of Communists for offering what they presented as correct Socialism, an orthodoxy, whereas truly correct Socialism was not Communist.  It is but a short step to a struggle for who consider their orthodoxy to be truly correct and therefore not an orthodoxy, to being "woke" to the nature of those who are not correct, not accepting the correct orthodoxy, as systemically racist and/or misogynistic and therefore to be cancelled. ie, to apply punitive measures withdrawing support.

Thus in academia do differing ideas become not differing ideas to be discussed, debated, disputed etc. to arrive at the better ideas, but rather, a correct orthodoxy to be enforced with any other ideas, by definition incorrect, and, being woke to their true nature, an evil to be removed or at least suppressed, not by demonstration of the "correct" orthodoxy's correctness.

Exactly the opposite of what a university is supposed to be.  Thus we land precisely in the problem identified so long ago in the past from which we are convinced we have nothing to learn -- quis custodiet ipsos custodies?  Who is the custodian of the custodians?  Who guards the guardians?  Who watches the watcher?  Who corrects the correct?  Who establishes what is correct?  Who decides what is to be cancelled?  It's about power; what prevents the abuse of power even when the intent is good?  What prevents a university from becoming as rigid an enforcer of an orthodoxy as any religious school ever was?

"Woke" is appropriated from African-American Vernacular English, where is commonly used instead of "woken" as the past participle of "wake".  Ironically enough, the use the idea of being awake to express one's socio-political positions comes from Republicans.  Yes Republicans -- in the 1860 campaign of Abraham Lincoln, when some store clerks in Hartford CT began a movement called Wide Awake to encourage voter registration for Lincoln's anti-slavery position.  More ironically, AAVE is often called Black English.  But, English-speaking blacks in England do not speak "Black English", so it is misnamed, it is not common to all blacks who speak English, thus in promoting it as a signal of one's virtue against the "whiteness" of standard English and in non-blacks culturally appropriating the usage "woke" from it, one falls into the very thing against which one is signaling one's virtue, ie, correctness.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?    

VI. Conclusion. Where We Could Be.

So, again, the Liberal Arts are a system for first learning how to learn, the Trivium, then for classifying what is to be learned in order to be educated to fulfill the responsibilities of democracy and high office, the Quadrivium. What had happened was, as some of the knowledge taught within the system was later found to be either incomplete or just false, like what orbits around what, the system itself, and more importantly the overall unity of things which it expressed, also came into question.  Our point here is not at all about going back to the "Music of the spheres", in which the mathematical ratios in tones and in the orbits of the sun and planets around the earth were though to be the same.  It's not about going back to earlier social structures.  And it's not about reading Aristotle, learning Latin, and things like that, and least of all about thinking a glorified "humanities" curriculum largely devoid of the sciences is the liberal arts at all -- though there's good reason to read Aristotle and learn Latin.

In religion, the point of the Lutheran Reformation was not to create a new church or even split the one there was, but to bring back to front and centre the Means of Grace through which salvation is communicated and the message of salvation through the blood of Christ itself -- to paraphrase Luther, making the most clear things about the church what had become the most obscure amid the Roman Empire's confusion. The direction in which the later more general Reformation went, which began even in Luther's lifetime, was as opposed by Luther and Lutherans as the errors of Rome.

In education, perhaps another reformation is needed, not a religious but an educational one.  One where besides what one learns to earn whatever living one earns and to have whatever career one has, in order for society to function, ESPECIALLY a society where all and not just some classes participate, there is a skillset and a basic body of knowledge needed by all, where the tools of learning are actually taught (there's the trivium), where a person is then taught how to handle abstract operations, operations applied to things as they add up, how complicated things break down and how that is applied to things (there's the quadrivium).

That would be education, the basics for participating in our society, open to all now, rather than the latest theories of what is "enlightened" this week, which are handed down as so modern, but amount to no more than secular articles of faith, handed down "ex cathedra" from an authority which, when it takes itself to be such an authority, violates the very parsimony and science it thinks it passes on, as it neither guarantees a correct conclusion nor prevents a false one, and may not even be applicable to a particular field, and, if applied to all fields as a universal principle, thus violates its very definition of parsimony and science!

Oh Yeah, an Addendum.

There was this second cousin of Martianus Capella, with a variant spelling of the last name, Antonius Cappella, who wrote thousands of pieces of music, in a wide array of styles but all vocal, that are still performed to this day. You can spot them easily. They are all identified by the way he signed his name, A Cappella.

OK, I'm just jacking around now. A cappella actually means "from the chapel" and was used to designate purely vocal Renaissance polyphony generally for the church from the later Baroque concertato style which featured alternating vocal and instrumental parts in a piece of music. Oddly enough, we now know those "vocal" motets were often doubled on instruments, but the first modern "musicologists" didn't know that, so singing "a cappella" has come to mean pretty much any music that is singing only, no instruments.

Except for a small school of hard cores, in a city named for its big reeds, Acapulco de Juarez in Mexico, who wouldn't use the reeds for instruments, so the style is also called singing Acapulco. OK I'm jacking around there too.

But for real, I'm happy to say my alma mater, the University of Iowa, from which I got my MA and PhD degrees, the last I looked ranked #160 in the USNWR rankings, in the 201-250 band in THE, 421 in QS, and in the 201-300 band in ARWU.  Not too shabby for a relative newcomer only organised 25 February 1847 in what had just become a state only 59 days before! It is also listed among the "Public Ivies", a list of 30 public US institutions considered to offer an educational level comparable to the "Ivy League" schools. And I'm also happy to say that Luther thought the plays of Terence, after whom I was named IRL, were excellent for children's learning.

And what's an "alma mater"? Hoo boy. It's Latin for "nourishing mother". In the Roman Empire it meant the Mother Goddess, Venus, the Roman version of Aphrodite, who was called Venus genetrix, Mother Venus. In the Roman Church this became adapted to Mary, Jesus' mother, as Mater dei genitrix. As an academic reference it has been used since the 1600s and comes from the phrase "alma mater studiorum", which means nourishing mother of studies. It's from this that we get the Latin term "alumnus" (male) or "alumna" (female), plural "alumni", meaning "one(s) who is/are nourished", as in educated.

In 2000 it was adopted as the motto of, guess who, the oldest modern university, the University of Bologna, right on the heels of the 1999 signing of the Bologna Declaration signed there by the ministers of education of 29 European countries, which while aiming at a greater standardisation of European higher education, seems to do so from the standpoint of corporations and the World Trade Organisation (WTO)-- cutting costs, getting a job. getting competitive -- meaning, winning against or at least getting your slice of the pie with other players , etc, exactly what education is not.

Oy.

Textual Note: This post is a complete revision of my original similarly titled one, incorporating additional material from 2009 and new material in 2010, then revised here and there in 2011 and 2013 - 2021.

22 February. The Confession of St Peter. On Chairs, Guardians, Noble Lies and Pious Fictions Too.

Huh?  Didn't we have The Confession of St Peter on 18 January?

Well, yes we did, but it's a really bad idea, in back of which are some even bigger bad ideas.  And those even bigger bad ideas affect our situation now way beyond church feasts of interest to church-goers and not even all of them.  

Here's the deal.  The current LCMS listing in Feasts and Festivals for 18 January as the Confession of St Peter rightly celebrates that the Rock is the Confession, not Peter and not an office of his supposed successors, aka popes.  But, the feast is not and never has been of the confession of St Peter but of the chair of St Peter in Rome, a completely different idea to be explored in this post, and the correct emphasis on a confession rather than a chair is not well served by revisionism.

Here's why 22 February is a much better choice for the confession, which brings up stuff that leads to why there was a Reformation at all.

On Chairs.

OK, what's up with "chair" and "confession".  First, chair.  The Latin original word is cathedra.  Hey, that's close to "cathedral".  Yes it is, because a cathedral is a church where the cathedra (chair) of the local presiding overseer is located.

OK, what's a presiding overseer?  In many church bodies these overseers are called "bishops".  The German cognate (English being a Germanic language basically) is Bischoff.  That comes through earlier forms as a vernacular use of a late Latin corruption, "biscopus", of the Latin word episcopus, which transliterates the same word in Greek and means an overseer or supervisor.  Originally it referred to civic officers with responsibility for watching over something.  The NT used the word to refer to those with similar responsibility for Christian communities.

So the cathedra (chair) is where the episcopus (overseer) sits for formal proceedings, and is a sign and symbol of his authority as overseer.  Thus a bishop's chair is the seat, literally and figuratively, of his authority.  Every bishop has a formal chair (cathedra) in a chair-church (cathedral).  So, a church called "cathedral" that is not the location of a bishop's chair is no cathedral at all but just using the name because it sounds impressive.

There's another word for chair in Latin, and that is sedes, from the verb "to sit".  We get the English word "sedentary" from that, and also the word "see", meaning the place or area of authority of the sitter on the chair.  So the area of a bishop's jurisdiction is called his "see", that to which his authority from his "chair" extends.

You may have heard the phrase "ex cathedra", which means "from the chair".  This is associated with the bishop of Rome, whose nickname is "pope".  That word derives from "papa" as the spiritual father of the flock entrusted to his care.  The term is applied to several bishops actually, but most famously to the bishop of Rome.  This is where all this confession and chair stuff gets confused.

On Peter.

The Catholic Church, which is the entity defined by, and made the state religion of, the Roman Empire with the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD, and not to be confused with the catholic church of the creeds, holds that in Matthew 16:18-19 Christ establishes Peter and his successors as the ones with visible earthly headship of the church.  Mark 3:16 and 9:2, Luke 22:32 and 24:34, John 21:15-17 and I Corinthians 15:5 are also cited in this regard.  Here is the Matthew passage in the English Standard Version:

¹³ Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” ¹⁴ And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” ¹⁵ He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” ¹⁶ Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” ¹⁷ And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. ¹⁸ And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock^[b] I will build my church, and the gates of hell^[c] shall not prevail against it. ¹⁹ I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed^[d] in heaven.” ²⁰ Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ.

The ESV footnote to verse 18 explains the word-play here:  "The Greek words for Peter and rock sound similar".  More exactly, "Peter" comes from the Latin Petrus, which transliterates the Greek Petros, which makes a proper name of petros, which means a stone or rock.  "Peter" was not at the time a personal name in Greek; that came later in veneration of Peter, who was the first so named.  But, the Greek word in the next part is not petros, but petra.  This is why the footnote says they sound similar and does not say they are the same word.

So petros, petra, what's the difference?  Well, petros means a stone or rock; petra means a rock formation like a ridge or cliff or ledge, AND, a stone that is used in building.  And that's where the controversy begins.  What's the rock formation, or building stone -- Peter, because he was first to confess, and because he was the first one to whom it was revealed that Jesus is the Anointed One (Christ) of God, or is it the confession itself?

After Jesus' death (and resurrection) Peter eventually left Jerusalem and went to Antioch, a major city at the time, in what is now the southern tip of Turkey just off the Mediterranean Sea.  After leading the church there, he went to Rome itself to lead the church there, and was executed under Emperor Nero.  All the pious biographical summaries tell you that.  There was a lot more going on though, and when you know what that is, it makes a difference.  Here's what's usually left out.

Nero didn't have Peter executed only because he was a bad guy who hated Christians.  Peter was executed by Emperor Nero in 64 AD following the great fire that destroyed most of Rome.  There's a reason for that.  Nero had become emperor in 54 and was coming up on his ten year anniversary in power (called dies imperii) when the fire broke out.  Most Romans thought Nero had the fire started himself, to clear land on the Palatine Hill to have a big gold house built for himself, but Nero blamed the despised Christians (we're a few hundred years away from the Empire adopting Christianity) and accordingly executed lots of them, including Peter and Paul, who was there too. 

And he did build that gold house!  It's called the Gold House, well ok, Domus Aurea, and it was spectacular.  But like Nero himself, it came to a bad end.  Nero's excesses were too much for even the Romans, who never did anything on a small scale, and a damnatio memoriae (damnation of memory) was issued in which physical signs of his existence were destroyed or altered.  WRT the Domus Aurea, just 40 years after it was built, it was filled with earth and built over: the Baths of Titus, Vespasian's Flavian Amphitheatre (which you may know as the Colosseum), the Baths of Trajan and Hadrian's Temple of Venus and Rome were all built on the grounds. 

Somewhere in the 15th Century a guy in Rome fell through a cleft into something and found himself right in the middle of all these frescoes in the place, which on the one hand had a profound effect on later Renaissance art -- Raphael and Michelangelo had themselves lowered into it to study the art -- but on the other hand brought exposure to moisture leading to decay.  The visible ruins are still there but keep falling apart.  It closed due to safety problems in 2005, reopened in 2007, closed again in 2008, then a huge dining room with a rotating ceiling like the sky (powered by slaves) was found in 2009 but more stuff collapsed in 2010.  In 2018 a highly decorated vaulted room some 15 feet high was accidentally discovered by restoration workers after nearly two millennia. 

One enduring irony is that Nero was the first to put mosaics on ceilings instead of floors. When discovered in the Renaissance this innovation of Christian-despising Nero became a feature of church decoration.  Another enduring irony: many lower class Romans liked Nero, because he spent tons of money on food and entertainment on them despite the economic effect, and after his suicide in 68 AD a popular legend arose that someday he would return (Nero Redivivus) and give stuff away again.  At least three fake "Neros" tried to assume power that way.  The legend persisted for centuries; Augustine mentions it as current in his City of God in 422 AD. 

This effect is exactly the sort of thing Juvenal (Latin:  Decimus Junius Juvenalis) decried in his Satire X around 100 AD, about 30 years after Nero's death, in the famous phrase "panem et circenses", bread and circuses.  It's from this that the country in The Hunger Games is called Panem.  Circus, as meant now, derives from the Latin word but is not what it meant then.  Circus was more than a Barnum and Bailey sort of a thing, but it was the greatest show on earth at the time.  The word circus derives from circle.  The "circle" is the performing area, not actually circular but oblong.  Huge spectacles were staged in them, even recreated naval battles, for public entertainment.  So, translating Juvenal's phrase for meaning, it's food and entertainment. 

This was also about 125 years after the end of the Roman Republic on 16 January 27 B.C. when the Senate proclaimed Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, as Augustus, a new title.  The root word means one who increases, and is thus venerable or majestic; it's where we get our adjective "august", and the name of the Roman sixth month, which was renamed after him and we still use.  His full title was Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus. 

Huh?  OK, means "commander Caesar son of the deified one".  "The deified one" was Julius Caesar.  The Senate had declared him a god on 1 January 42 B.C, after his death by assassination on 15 March 44 B.C., the first such action by the Senate.  "Son" is because he was the adopted son of Julius Caesar.  "Commander" (imperator) was a title given victorious Roman generals, but it became a title for ruling; it's where we get our words emperor, imperative, imperial etc.  Though many features of the Republic continued, real power was not in them.  The Romans had traded the dignity and freedoms of the Roman Republic for the Empire, based on who would give them stuff ("food and entertainment") for free, i.e., paid for with someone else's money via the government. 

Gee, isn't it great politicians no longer campaign for office based on what they'll have the government give you free, that is, paid for with money the government takes from someone else?  (Cough.)  Gee, isn't it great we no longer support candidates based on what they say they'll get the government to give us?  (Wheeze.)  You can read more about the long-lasting effects of the morphing of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire in the post "The Founding of the City" for 21 April.

No surprise that later in the same Satire Juvenal says rather than the wrong, or wrongly exaggerated, desires expected from one's own efforts or appropriated from the efforts of others, such as power and wealth, one should desire mens sana in corpore sano, a sound mind in a sound body.  And no surprise he warns in another Satire (VI, to be exact) of the dangers of a government so powerful.  Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?  -- who guards the guards themselves, or, who watches the watchers?

Holy crap, watchers -- didn't we talk about watchers at the start, maybe all this stuff is going to tie to-gether and not be just Past Elder poking around in old stuff!  Maybe it'll come full (wait for it) circle!

Oddly enough, the phrase in Juvenal is in the context of those watching over the marital fidelity of women -- those who watch may be corrupted themselves, so who watches them?  Maybe they keep quiet about things, being paid off; maybe they themselves are the corrupters so of course they keep quiet.  It's not known for sure if the lines are from Juvenal or were later interpolated, and it really doesn't matter since the context is clear. And beyond the specific matter of marital fidelity, the phrase is used to express a problem known all the way back to Plato's Republic, namely, what prevents the abuse of power, what prevents power from being abused even when originally exercised for good?

Plato's answer was, the guardians will be their own guardians against abuse and corruption by what is called the "noble lie" in politics and the "pious fiction" in religion.  That is, a myth of a religious or political (or both) nature told by an elite that doesn't actually believe it but uses it for the purpose of establishing or maintaining the greater good.  Hmmm.

On Chairs of Peter.

18 January is actually one of two feasts of chairs of St Peter.  22 February is the other one and it's older.  The Calendar of Philocalus, done in 354 and starting with 311, lists it but not the January one.  The Martyrologium Hieronymianum, from the 800s, lists both but, in what appears to be a later interpolation, assigns the February one to Antioch, where Peter first had a chair before he went to Rome.  Both were celebrated in or around Rome with actual chairs.

22 February was celebrated in Rome itself.  St Ennodius, Bishop of Pavia (Magnus Felix Ennodius, died 17 July 522), in his "Libellus pro Synodo" describes in some detail the use of the chair Peter used by the Bishop of Rome, popularly called "Pope" and held to be the successor of Peter, when conferring Confirmation on recently baptised converts on 22 February.

18 January was celebrated on the Via Salaria.  What's a Via Salaria?  The name means Salt Way (as in road).  The path of the road predates the road itself and even Rome itself, starting as a trade route for the pre-Roman Sabines looking for salt at the mouth of the Tiber.  This was a key element in what emerged as Roman, as the Sabines, some sooner, some later in the Republic, blended with the locals.  Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome and successor to Romulus the legendary founder of Rome (and from whom it is named) was a Sabine.  In rural areas parts of the road, and ruins of several bridges along it, are still there!

On the Via Salaria is the Catacomb of Priscilla.  The site was originally a quarry.  Early sources describe this as where Peter baptised (ubi Petrus baptizabat).  It became a cemetery for Christians, its remote location suiting what were then outcasts.  Who's Priscilla?  A common Latin name, here that of a woman from the gens Acilia married to the consul Acilius, who after she became Christian was ordered executed by Emperor Domitian, the 11th Roman emperor, assassinated 18 September 96 A.D.  The site continued to be burial grounds for some time, including popes, and, containing much artwork to adorn it, including the first known paintings of Mary, from the early 200s.  In one of them she's breastfeeding infant Jesus btw.

Around 600 Pope Gregory the Great, who commissioned work on the calendar we use now, also commissioned an Abbot Johannes to gather oils from lamps that burned at the burial sites of early Christian martyrs, and the list of them at the cathedral at Monza says one of them has oil from the chair "ubi prius sedit sanctus Petrus", from the chair where St Peter first sat, and the Martyrologium Hieronymianum says the same of the site, "qua primo Rome petrus apostolus sedit".

So both these feasts were all about Peter and his chair, both literally and as a sign of his authority.  Tertullian, writing in about 200 in "De praescriptione baereticorum", says to visit the churches founded by the Apostles in many of which their chairs are still there, and mentions Rome specifically.  OK I translated:  it's Percurre ecclesias apostolicas, apud quas ipsæ adhuc cathedræ apostolorum suis locis præsident. Si Italiæ adjaces habes Romam.  About 50 years later, after Pope Fabian died, St Cyprian describes the situation as both the authority and chair itself of Peter being vacant:  Cum locus Fabiani, id est locus Petri et gradus cathedrae sacerdotalis vacaret.

So yeah, it's all about chairs and authority, not confession.  So where are these chairs now?  That's where the fun starts.  The one at the Via Salaria is gone.  The Goths trashed Rome in 410, and on the way there trashed everything leading to Rome, and the Via Salaria was one of the routes there.  Which was also the case when Germanic types similarly trashed Rome in the 500s and 600s.  Somewhere in there, that chair took the gas.

The other chair is said to be enclosed in a reliquary (place where relics are held) designed to encompass it by the great artist Bernini and finished in 1653.  It's in St Peter's Basilica in Rome.  Is the chair inside the reliquary the actual chair St Peter used?  Well there is a beat up wooden chair in there, that is clearly not just a regular chair but a carrying chair used by a person in authority.  It was taken out and photographed in 1867.

Story is, this is the chair used by Peter himself.  It was preserved in a church built on the site of the home of the couple Paul mentions as co-workers in his letters (epistles), Priscilla and Aquila.  Holy crap, lots of Priscillas!  Well it was a common name.  It's the diminutive form of Prisca.  Christian services were held in their home, including baptisms, with Peter.  She was Roman, Jewish in background, converted to Christianity, was tortured and executed under Emperor Claudius.  He was the fourth emperor and the one before Nero, who was his grand nephew and adopted son and who along with the Senate ordered him considered a god after his death.  Nearly all sources contemporary with him say his death was by poisoning from his current wife, but may have been a consequence of the many symptoms contemporaries also noted, often thought to have been polio but more recently cerebral palsy.  This is the Claudius of the famous Robert Graves books.

There is a church on the site of their home, called Santa Prisca.  Supposedly her remains are in the church.  The site, whether it was or was not their home, was indeed the site of a temple to Mithras, whose cult was popular in Rome, and the temple was built about 200 A.D. on the site of Emperor Trajan's town house built about 95 A.D.  The Mithraeum was not excavated until the 1950s.  There was indeed a Christian place of worship alongside it.  Story is, with Christianity now OK, Pope Damasus moved a chair believed to be the chair of St Peter from that location to Rome.

OK who's Damasus?  You can read more about him in the post "Roman Empire/Church, East/West/Holy" for 16 January on this blog; here we'll only say he was "pope" at the time the Roman Empire issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD, which said that in the Empire's clemency and moderation all nations which it rules should hold to the faith brought to Rome by Peter and faithfully conserved in Damasus and that only those who do may be called Catholic Christians and those who don't shall not even be called churches but heretics and are subject to such consequences as God and/or the Empire shall choose to inflict.

Noble lie, pious fiction?  In any case, a magnificent reliquary for what was held to be the chair of St Peter was designed and built by the great sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini.  When a Barberini family member became Pope Urban VIII in 1623, Bernini was put in charge of architecture for the new basilica  -  you know, the one being subsidised in part by the sale of indulgences to which this loudmouth German friar loudly objected -- to replace the old St Peter's Emperor Constantine (aka the Great) had built.  Much of how the Vatican looks now is the result, including the reliquary for the chair.

In its own time the renovation of the Vatican was controversial.  Among other things, the new stuff was in part built by raiding material from the ruins of the real Roman stuff, so much so that a saying was common -- quod non fecerunt barbari fecerunt Barberini, what the barbarians didn't do the Barberinis did.

In one part of the reliquary is an image of Charles the Bald (Karolus Caluus).  Whozat?  A "Roman" emperor, from the later "Roman" Empire whose resurrection was begun by Charlemagne in 800.  Charles the Bald was Charlemagne's grandson.  He ruled as Charles II as Holy Roman Emperor from 875 to 877 when he died at age 54.  He wasn't bald btw.  No contemporary references describe him that way, nor as particularly hairy either so it wasn't an ironic name.  The reference was to this:  all the land available was already promised by his dad (Louis the Pious, Charles the Great's son) to his older brothers so he was "bald", no land, but through civil wars and treaties he ended up emperor.

Know why that image is there?  Because the chair that's in there is not the chair used by St Peter at all, but one given as a gift by Emperor Charles II (the "bald") to Pope John VIII in 875!  Well, old Charles was known to cozy up to bishops as a hedge against the corruption of secular rulers, and who better than the successor to St Peter the rock on whom the church is built and all.

Are You KIDDING Me?  Oh Yeah, Confession.

What?  After ALL this chairs stuff and the authority based off it, the one's been gone for hundreds of years and the other, the only actual chair around, well, the original is gone too and something else has been there since 875 as if it were the original!?!?!

Is Past Elder just bashing "Roman Catholic Church" again?  Well,  the Vatican itself even says the chair in there is a gift from Charles the Bald right on its site!   http://www.vaticanstate.va/content/vaticanstate/en/monumenti/basilica-di-s-pietro/interno.paginate.2.html   And in a huge ornate church, the new St Peter's Basilica, to replace the old one built by Emperor Constantine the Great, the whole renovation project financed in part by the sale of indulgences, part of which was Rome's part of the take for Albrecht von Brandenburg being allowed to sell them to pay off the huge loans he took from the Fuggers, the pre-eminent money and power brokers of the time, who took over from the Medicis, to pay his way into being made the Elector and Archbishop of Mainz (the electors elected the Holy Roman Emperor)!

Noble lies, pious fictions and who's watching the watchers all over the place!  Just the sort of thing that got that loudmouth German friar loudmouthing (that's Martin Luther, in case you missed it).  This Catholic Church is not at all the catholic church of the creed it professes, and a reformation was needed.

You can read much more about that on other posts on this blog, but in the context of this post, why, in view of the scandalous to bogus history of the whole chair thing, would the reformed church preserve either of these feasts, both of them bound up from the start with the authority of the "bishop" of Rome?

Because underneath the crap is the confession, you are the Christ, the son of the living God.  This is the petra, the foundation stone, on which Christ's church is built, and, just as with the first guy Simon, who got renamed after it, "flesh and blood"  does not reveal this to a person, but the Father who is in heaven.  IOW, faith is the work of the Holy Spirit and not human effort of thought or action; or as we say, sola fide, by faith alone, sola gratia, by grace alone, sola scriptura, by scripture alone.

Accordingly Loehe, so influential in the formation of our synod, left St Peter's Chair at Rome on 18 January and St Peter's Chair at Antioch on 22 February, without attempting a "correction" and unrevised from what it had been for a millennium.  The text stands on its own, and as so often, the "Lutheran" difference with Rome being not so much in what we do but in how and why we do it.

Or one could do what THE Lutheran Hymnal (1941) did, which is, list neither.

But get this.  Pope John the Destroyer, aka John XXIII, removed the Chair of Peter at Rome feast on 18 January altogether in 1960, and also demoted the 22 February Antioch one. These changes survive in the hunk of dung 1962 Roman Missal, which is now the "extraordinary form" of the Roman liturgy, as bogus a sham of the Roman liturgy up to the 1960s as the "ordinary form" the novus ordo is after it.  Speaking of which, the novus ordo of Vatican II did away with the feast, and combined it with the feast of St Peter's Chair at Antioch on 22 February.

(22 February, ironically, became the dies natalis of Godfrey Diekmann OSB, one of the great influences on the novus ordo and the entire council.  And I might add one of the most magnificent personalities I have known.  You can read more about that in the post "Hold on to the Hype" for 11 October, the date of the opening of Vatican II.)

So Rome, having missed the point about the confession altogether, eliminates the feast in one of its calendars and combines it with a similar feast in which it similarly misses the point in its other calendar!  How typically RCC.  But what of us?  In our current worship book, which in so many ways adopts and adapts the Vatican II novus ordo for Lutheran use, much like the co-wo crowd also tries to adapt and adopt another non-Lutheran form and give it a Lutheran substance, we list the 18 January one Rome dropped, but as the "confession" not the chair, though the only reason the feast exists at all was about the chair, and we don't even list the 22 February one they kept.

You know what?  There's real good reason to keep the 22 February one, but as usual, not exactly what the RCC thinks it is.  You know where that 22 February date came from and why it's the date for the older and original of these two chair-feasts?  Here's why, it's because tradition has it that 22 February is -- ready for this -- the day on which Peter, what, sat on a chair of authority somewhere?  No, the date he made the confession!

Do we know 22 February was actually the day Simon spoke his confession of faith and got renamed Peter?  No.  Is it in the Bible?  No.  Does that mean drop it?  No.  Why not?  Because again, we Lutherans aren't a "If it ain't in the Bible we ain't doing it" bunch, but "If it contradicts the Bible we ain't doing it" bunch.  Peter's confession is in the Bible.  The day it happened is human legend, yes, but, that the commemoration of it was on 22 February is demonstrable.

What a magnificent irony, that he who was born in the reign of one the government declared the son of a god is actually the Son of God!  And unlike Nero, will return, and not to distribute food and entertainment from the government, not just to restore the freedom and dignity of the Roman Republic or any other government, not just to attain a sound mind in a sound body, not just to establish a "people of God" or even a church as "body of Christ", but to complete the dignity of children and heirs of God in eternal life with Him!

The entire effort and meaning of the Lutheran Reformation, as distinct from "the Reformation", is not to form a new church but to reform the only church there is, the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, from the accretions laid on and over it, both historically and presently, by the Catholic Church created by the Roman Empire.  And there is no more telling example of those accretions, making what should be the most obvious things about the church the most obscure, than the obscuration of the confession of Peter by all this pious nonsense about his chairs and authority.

And no better way to do it than by celebrating the confession on the day when the confession was actually part of the celebration, 22 February, actually in there all along amid all the accretions of which we are now free.

Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God.  Revealed first to Simon, but then to each and every one in exactly the same way, this confession that is the founding stone of the church, not by "flesh and blood", human effort to attain it, but by God the Father in heaven.  Sola gratia sola fide sola scriptura.  By grace alone, by faith alone, by Scripture alone.