I removed three sites from my "Lutheran Sites" element of my sidebar. Reason being, they are not there any more. I have no idea what happened to bring this about. Anyone knowing anything about why these three went down, please comment!
Consensus, at
http://www.consensuslutheran.org/index.php
Law and Gospel by C.F.W. Walther, at
http://www.issuesetc.org/resource/archives/cfwwalther.htm
Sacred Meditations by Johann Gerhard, at
http://www.christsaginaw.com/webdocs/Sacred%20Meditations%20-%20John%20Gerhard%20-%20Johnston.pdf
11 October 2009
05 October 2009
On Daily Devotional Stuff.
Growing up RC, I had almost literally unlimited resources available for things to use for daily prayer, from pamphlets and booklets in the back of church to prayer books and on and on. My choice was a Lives of the Saints, not the big bleeding Butler one, but a handbook size volume drawn from it with a saint per page per day basically, drawn from the church calendar.
If you got to know the right priest, you might find out that the church actually has this whole round of daily devotional stuff all day every day, and it's called the Divine Office. Or since the Revolution, er, Vatican II, the Liturgy of the Hours. It's actually part of the public worship of the church just as much as Mass, though you never saw it in an ordinary parish, though the priests had to pray it individually.
Generally this stuff is done by religious orders, particularly monks. The Franciscan sisters who staffed the hospital in whose chapel I served 0600 Mass for years chanted Matins beforehand. Later I went to a college run by the best monking monks, not merely monked over, since ever the monking world monked its first monkery, the SOBs, I mean OSBs, the Order of St Benedict (Ordo Sancti Benedicti actually, and actually it's not technically an order, but that's for another time).
The abbey church was also a parish church, and the public was welcome at all the office hours prayed there. Not only that, but for Sunday Vespers students were allowed to participate right along with the monkeys in the stalls. So, being a music major, and my theory teacher in college being also the Abbey organist and director of the Abbey schola cantorum, and thinking I might just take up monking myself, there I was.
However, the Revolution was in full swing, and Father was relieved of his university and monastic assignments by the powers that be after my sophomore year, and sent to parish work far, far, away. He was replaced for liturgy by a committee of a guitar-playing sociology professor, a guitar-playing German professor, and a guitar-playing theology professor. My senior year yearbook has a picture of them carrying on like you'd think they were all ablaze or something, with the caption "We need a new church -- with no pews!"
Such was the Revolution. They kept a close eye on this Concordia Seminary in St Louis MO, everyone rooting for developments there to pull the oppressed, repressed, suppressed and depressed LCMS out of the late Middle Ages and into the world of post Vatican II "renewal" like other churches. Except me.
I continued to use my Lives of the Saints, but no longer any reference to the office hours. Then I finally bailed from Christianity altogether in 1973 -- thinking of course that RC was Christianity in its full, true, and original form, and since that had imploded, no point in looking at wannabes, though I wished the poor bleeders trying to stay the course in LCMS well.
The Christian mistake, as I saw it then, did not invalidate the OT, as I called it then, and for the next 23 years I used for daily study the Law (torah) and Prophets and Writings (haftorah) selections in the Ashkenazi tradition for the Sabbaths and Festivals given in the legendary Hertz Chumash -- which among other things nails the historical-critical thing I was taught right to the wall, and remains one of my three "study" Bibles to this day.
On 15 December 1996, through I process I won't detail here but can only be the work of the Holy Spirit, I professed the Lutheran faith in a WELS parish. And being from then to now a big fan of the Little Catechism -- you kinda gotta be if you're gonna make that profession and mean it -- undertook morning and evening prayer, and prayer at meals for that matter, just like it suggests in the LC, with "whatever my devotion may suggest" being at the time the daily Meditations, a WELS publication similar to the LCMS Portals of Prayer I use now.
Luther's Morning and Evening Prayers from the LC struck me as pretty much everything has in Lutheranism as laid out by the Lutheran Reformers themselves -- straight up, uncomplicated and to the point, with a very straight up, uncomplicated and to the point message of the Gospel itself. Absolutely perfect for daily private devotions, not public prayer of the church in parishes or monasteries, for those who live in households, not ordered religious communities. For those who like a little more verbiage and something closer to a formal order, there are short orders available in our hymnals and study and reference Bibles from CPH.
I'm all for the Divine Office as part of the public prayer of the church along with the Divine Service. The thing about it is, this is public, not private, community, not individual, prayer. There is benefit from prayerful study or studious prayer of it. I would certainly not discourage anyone from that. One of the annual posts of my Blogoral Calendar is on the Divine Office to help foster appreciation of just that. But one is not praying the Divine Office in this way any more than one is participating in the Divine Service by studying or praying it at home.
To this day, I see nothing better for those who live in households for personal, private devotions than what the LC suggests, with something like Portals of Prayer, or what I have used since its publication, the selections from Walther called God Grant It, or what I just recently got, Bo Giertz' To Live With Christ. If you're LCMS you've got an LC and there's Portals of Prayer available in the vestibule of any parish worthy of the name, so you're all set. If not, you can get the LC for $10.25 and Portals of Prayer for $9/year; God Grant It is $19.99 and To Live With Christ is $8.00 on sale from $20.49; all at Concordia Publishing House.
So then, it's simple: the Sign of the Cross, the Creed, the Our Father, and if you choose, and I would recommend you choose, a daily reading from Portals of Prayer or God Grant It or To Live With Christ, and the Morning or Evening Prayer as applies. Five, maybe ten minutes, can stretch to more if you want or can.
Then go to your work or your sleep -- do not attempt both at once, as it annoys employers and spouses respectively -- joyfully and in good cheer!
If you got to know the right priest, you might find out that the church actually has this whole round of daily devotional stuff all day every day, and it's called the Divine Office. Or since the Revolution, er, Vatican II, the Liturgy of the Hours. It's actually part of the public worship of the church just as much as Mass, though you never saw it in an ordinary parish, though the priests had to pray it individually.
Generally this stuff is done by religious orders, particularly monks. The Franciscan sisters who staffed the hospital in whose chapel I served 0600 Mass for years chanted Matins beforehand. Later I went to a college run by the best monking monks, not merely monked over, since ever the monking world monked its first monkery, the SOBs, I mean OSBs, the Order of St Benedict (Ordo Sancti Benedicti actually, and actually it's not technically an order, but that's for another time).
The abbey church was also a parish church, and the public was welcome at all the office hours prayed there. Not only that, but for Sunday Vespers students were allowed to participate right along with the monkeys in the stalls. So, being a music major, and my theory teacher in college being also the Abbey organist and director of the Abbey schola cantorum, and thinking I might just take up monking myself, there I was.
However, the Revolution was in full swing, and Father was relieved of his university and monastic assignments by the powers that be after my sophomore year, and sent to parish work far, far, away. He was replaced for liturgy by a committee of a guitar-playing sociology professor, a guitar-playing German professor, and a guitar-playing theology professor. My senior year yearbook has a picture of them carrying on like you'd think they were all ablaze or something, with the caption "We need a new church -- with no pews!"
Such was the Revolution. They kept a close eye on this Concordia Seminary in St Louis MO, everyone rooting for developments there to pull the oppressed, repressed, suppressed and depressed LCMS out of the late Middle Ages and into the world of post Vatican II "renewal" like other churches. Except me.
I continued to use my Lives of the Saints, but no longer any reference to the office hours. Then I finally bailed from Christianity altogether in 1973 -- thinking of course that RC was Christianity in its full, true, and original form, and since that had imploded, no point in looking at wannabes, though I wished the poor bleeders trying to stay the course in LCMS well.
The Christian mistake, as I saw it then, did not invalidate the OT, as I called it then, and for the next 23 years I used for daily study the Law (torah) and Prophets and Writings (haftorah) selections in the Ashkenazi tradition for the Sabbaths and Festivals given in the legendary Hertz Chumash -- which among other things nails the historical-critical thing I was taught right to the wall, and remains one of my three "study" Bibles to this day.
On 15 December 1996, through I process I won't detail here but can only be the work of the Holy Spirit, I professed the Lutheran faith in a WELS parish. And being from then to now a big fan of the Little Catechism -- you kinda gotta be if you're gonna make that profession and mean it -- undertook morning and evening prayer, and prayer at meals for that matter, just like it suggests in the LC, with "whatever my devotion may suggest" being at the time the daily Meditations, a WELS publication similar to the LCMS Portals of Prayer I use now.
Luther's Morning and Evening Prayers from the LC struck me as pretty much everything has in Lutheranism as laid out by the Lutheran Reformers themselves -- straight up, uncomplicated and to the point, with a very straight up, uncomplicated and to the point message of the Gospel itself. Absolutely perfect for daily private devotions, not public prayer of the church in parishes or monasteries, for those who live in households, not ordered religious communities. For those who like a little more verbiage and something closer to a formal order, there are short orders available in our hymnals and study and reference Bibles from CPH.
I'm all for the Divine Office as part of the public prayer of the church along with the Divine Service. The thing about it is, this is public, not private, community, not individual, prayer. There is benefit from prayerful study or studious prayer of it. I would certainly not discourage anyone from that. One of the annual posts of my Blogoral Calendar is on the Divine Office to help foster appreciation of just that. But one is not praying the Divine Office in this way any more than one is participating in the Divine Service by studying or praying it at home.
To this day, I see nothing better for those who live in households for personal, private devotions than what the LC suggests, with something like Portals of Prayer, or what I have used since its publication, the selections from Walther called God Grant It, or what I just recently got, Bo Giertz' To Live With Christ. If you're LCMS you've got an LC and there's Portals of Prayer available in the vestibule of any parish worthy of the name, so you're all set. If not, you can get the LC for $10.25 and Portals of Prayer for $9/year; God Grant It is $19.99 and To Live With Christ is $8.00 on sale from $20.49; all at Concordia Publishing House.
So then, it's simple: the Sign of the Cross, the Creed, the Our Father, and if you choose, and I would recommend you choose, a daily reading from Portals of Prayer or God Grant It or To Live With Christ, and the Morning or Evening Prayer as applies. Five, maybe ten minutes, can stretch to more if you want or can.
Then go to your work or your sleep -- do not attempt both at once, as it annoys employers and spouses respectively -- joyfully and in good cheer!
25 September 2009
St Michael's Day / Michaelmas, 29 September 2009.
This was a pretty big day for centuries, and still is contained in our LCMS calendar. Phillip Melanchthon even wrote a poem for the day which became a hymn, "Lord God, To Thee We Give All Praise", or "Dicimus grates tibi summe rerum" in his Latin original, yes, Latin, which is hymn 254 in The Lutheran Hymnal, or, I suppose it won't hurt to say, 522 in LSB.
Here's why the big deal.
Michael is one of the angels, and is mentioned by name in three books of the Bible, Daniel, Jude and Revelation aka the Apocalypse.
In Daniel, Gabriel, another leading angel, tells Daniel that Michael is his helper in defending the Jews, this wrt Daniel's prayer that the Jews be able to return to Jerusalem (Daniel 10) and later (Daniel 12) Michael is again identified as he who stands up for "the sons of thy people", the Jews, who will do so in the final battle at the end of time. This is the only time he is mentioned by name in the Hebrew Bible.
It is not the only time he appears, depending on who you listen to. Some say he is the "captain of the host of the Lord" in the Book of Josue, or Joshua, 5:13-15, but some say this cannot be since he accepted worship and only God can do that. So some then say the figure was actually a disguised appearance of God himself, and some say (like my historical-critical Scripture profs in college) that that is what "angels" are anyway, not separate beings but muted references due to piety for God himself so Man can stand the interaction.
Rabbinic tradition variously credits him with being the angel who rescued Abraham from Nimrod's furnace, who protected Sarah from being defiled as Abraham's sister as Abraham tried to protect her by calling his sister and not wife, who told Sarah she would have a son, who brought the ram provided by God for Abraham to substitute for that son Isaac in sacrifice, who was the angel who wrestled with Jacob, with being the angel who spoke to Moses in the burning bush and later taught Moses the Law, on and on, including things in writings not in the Hebrew Bible such as protecting Adam and Eve after the Fall and teaching him how to farm.
This role of protector and defender was passed on to the early Christian church, among so much else in Judaism, not just in these stories, but he is mentioned twice in the New Testament.
In the Letter of Jude, verse 9, he argues with Satan over Moses' body, also a Jewish theme, keeping the Moses' body hidden so reverence would be directed to God and not misplaced hero worship (saint veneration?) and in the Book of Revelation, or The Apocalypse, chapter 12, Michael is given a similar role in the last battle at the end of time as he had in the revolt of the angels in heaven at the beginning, as military leader of the forces of good.
There are many other legends of Michael's intervention on behalf of Christians in history, of which we will mention two as particularly noteworthy. He is said to have worked with the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, and a celebration on 8 November became the main feast of St Michael in the Eastern Church. Also he is said to have appeared over the mausoleum of Hadrian in Rome to answer the prayers of Pope St Gregory the Great in 950 that a plague in Rome stop, after which the mausoleum, destroyed by the Visigoths and Goths but rebuilt as a papal fort and residence, was called Castel Sant'Angelo, Church of the Holy Angel, and still is to this day.
It was connected by a fortified covered passage, the Passeto di Borgo, to St Peter's Basilica by Pope Nicholas II (pope from 25 November 1277 to 22 August 1280), to provide an escape route for the popes, which turned out handy for Pope Clement VII.
There's a story. Clement had allied with French forces to offset the power of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, he to whom the Augsburg Confession was presented, and Charles' army had defeated them in Italy. However, there was no money to pay the soldiers, and it is never ever a good idea to mess with military payroll then, now, or ever. In this case, the troops figured well hell, there's all these riches in Rome, let's go there and take them, which is exactly what they did, about wiping out the Swiss Guards on 5/6 May 1527, the "Sack of Rome". Clement made it out to Castel Sant'Angelo but became a prisoner there and eventually surrendered on 6 June.
Neither the HRE Charles nor Martin Luther approved of this, but it did have the practical effect of curbing papal power, with a lot of money and land changing hands, over the Holy Roman Empire. Luther saw Christ's providence in this, saying that the Emperor who persecuted the Lutheran Reformation for the Pope ends up himself having to destroy the Pope. Might just be something to that. To commemorate the fight put up by the Swiss Guards, new ones have their swearing-in on 6 May to this day.
The Passeto and Castel sant'Angelo still exist, the latter now as an Italian national museum, and has a HUGE statue of St Michael on top of it. Not surprisingly, so much intrigue having played out in it historically, it is the headquarters of the "Illuminati" in the fictional "Angel and Demons" by Dan Brown of da Vinci Code fame, now playing at your local theatres.
St Michael has thus become the patron of guardians of various kinds, from policemen to the sick. Western church writings speak of his feast from at least the 6th century, and other observances based on other appearances and legends arose elsewhere. But 29 September as the Feast of St Michael is among the oldest observances in the Western calendar.
We ain't done! Michaelmas has all sorts of stuff attached to it. For centuries, it was a holy day of obligation -- you gotta go to Mass. As the Germans were Christianised, St Michael took the place of Wotan, and you will find St Michael chapels in the mountains, previously sacred to Wotan, there to this day. Michaelmas is also one of the four Quarter Days in Mother England: Lady Day 25 March, Midsummer Day 24 June, Michaelmas 29 September, Christmas 25 December.
What the hell is a Quarter Day? These are four days roughly equivalent to the two equinoxes and two solstices, when business and legal dealings need to be settled -- rents and bills are due (the rent thing is still often followed in England), judges had to visit outlying areas to make sure no matters go on unresolved, servants and labourers are hired so employment isn't up in the air, stuff like that. This is big stuff, coming from the Magna Carta itself of 1215, when the barons secured against the king, John at the time, the principle that no-one's right to justice will be sold, denied, or delayed.
Ever gone to a job fair resume in hand to meet prospective employers? You're right in the tradition of Michaelmas! At harvest's end, on the day after Michaelmas labourers would assemble in the towns for just that purpose with a sign of the work they do in their hands to get employment for the next year. Such events came to be called Mop Fairs, from those seeking employment as maids showing up with a broom in hand, a resume to show the prospective employer what work they could do.
Pay your taxes due in April? You're right in the tradition of the Quarter Days! Hell, Lady Day was the first day of the calendar year until the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, and when taxes were due. The English tax year still starts on "Old" Lady Day, 6 April.
Oh btw, the lady in Lady Day is Jesus' mother Mary, and the day is more widely known as the Feast of the Annunciation, commemorating the announcement by Gabriel to Mary that she would bear Jesus, nine months before his birth 25 December, Julian refers to Julius Caesar who set the old calendar, and Gregorian refers to Pope St Gregory who modified it into what we use to-day.
In England, the modified more accurate Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1752, and on 3 September in the old Julian Calendar it became 14 September in the new Gregorian calendar. Many were confused by this, thinking they had lost 11 days of their lives, leading to protests in the streets. Michaelmas was the first big deal to happen after the change, leading some to say that since we lost 11 days, Michaelmas is really 10 October in the new calendar, which is then "Old" Michaelmas Day.
A lot of the resistance to the Gregorian calendar came from it being done by a pope -- it was actually the work of Aloysius Lilius, and Gregory made it official 24 February 1582 in the papal bull "inter gravissimas", named as is the custom in many places from its first couple of words, which here mean "among the most serious" -- and changing to it was taken in many Protestant countries as a deference to papal power.
Michaelmas was also the start of winter curfew, which lasts until Shrove Tuesday, with bells being rung at 2100 hours to signal the curfew, which is literally lights out, "curfew" meaning "cover the fire", put out the household fires and lamps.
Michaelmas is also called Goose Day, goose is eaten for the meal, coming from the practice of those who couldn't pay their rent or bills on the Quarter Day offering a goose instead to the landlord. There's an old rhyme -- He who eats goose on Michaelmas Day, shan't money lack his debts to pay.
It also started the new term, Michaelmas term, at Oxford and Cambridge. Still does!
It is also the day when peasants on manors elected their new reeve. What the hell is a reeve? A serf elected by the other serfs to manage the land for the landowner nobleman, the lord. A reeve of an entire shire was a shire-reeve. What the hell is a shire? That's what counties were called before the Norman Conquest, county being the name of the land controlled by a count in continental Europe where the damn Normans came from. Bunch of old stuff lost in history? Got a sheriff in your county? It's exactly why the chief law enforcement officer of your county is called a sheriff, a contraction over time of shire reeve.
So there's stuff from this all around our modern life. And now, maybe, one more. Back to the legends about St Michael, one of them is, when he kicked Satan out of heaven, which was on 29 September story goes, Satan fell to earth and landed in a bunch of blackberry thorns, which totally ticked him off so he cursed the fruit of the bush, stomped on them, breathed fire on them, spat on them and just generally went nuts. This curse renews every Michaelmas Day, so, what ever you do, DO NOT pick or eat blackberries after Michaelmas!
Which in our age opens a whole new question -- if you have a Blackberry phone, can you use it after Michaelmas Day?
Aren't saint's days just a riot? A little bit of something real -- there really is a St Michael the Archangel and he really is the military commander of God's forces, stands ready with all the faithful angels to help and protect you, and will function as such on the End Time -- a whole lot of legend, leading to some pretty amazing history, both of which have left common elements large and small on life to-day.
Here's why the big deal.
Michael is one of the angels, and is mentioned by name in three books of the Bible, Daniel, Jude and Revelation aka the Apocalypse.
In Daniel, Gabriel, another leading angel, tells Daniel that Michael is his helper in defending the Jews, this wrt Daniel's prayer that the Jews be able to return to Jerusalem (Daniel 10) and later (Daniel 12) Michael is again identified as he who stands up for "the sons of thy people", the Jews, who will do so in the final battle at the end of time. This is the only time he is mentioned by name in the Hebrew Bible.
It is not the only time he appears, depending on who you listen to. Some say he is the "captain of the host of the Lord" in the Book of Josue, or Joshua, 5:13-15, but some say this cannot be since he accepted worship and only God can do that. So some then say the figure was actually a disguised appearance of God himself, and some say (like my historical-critical Scripture profs in college) that that is what "angels" are anyway, not separate beings but muted references due to piety for God himself so Man can stand the interaction.
Rabbinic tradition variously credits him with being the angel who rescued Abraham from Nimrod's furnace, who protected Sarah from being defiled as Abraham's sister as Abraham tried to protect her by calling his sister and not wife, who told Sarah she would have a son, who brought the ram provided by God for Abraham to substitute for that son Isaac in sacrifice, who was the angel who wrestled with Jacob, with being the angel who spoke to Moses in the burning bush and later taught Moses the Law, on and on, including things in writings not in the Hebrew Bible such as protecting Adam and Eve after the Fall and teaching him how to farm.
This role of protector and defender was passed on to the early Christian church, among so much else in Judaism, not just in these stories, but he is mentioned twice in the New Testament.
In the Letter of Jude, verse 9, he argues with Satan over Moses' body, also a Jewish theme, keeping the Moses' body hidden so reverence would be directed to God and not misplaced hero worship (saint veneration?) and in the Book of Revelation, or The Apocalypse, chapter 12, Michael is given a similar role in the last battle at the end of time as he had in the revolt of the angels in heaven at the beginning, as military leader of the forces of good.
There are many other legends of Michael's intervention on behalf of Christians in history, of which we will mention two as particularly noteworthy. He is said to have worked with the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, and a celebration on 8 November became the main feast of St Michael in the Eastern Church. Also he is said to have appeared over the mausoleum of Hadrian in Rome to answer the prayers of Pope St Gregory the Great in 950 that a plague in Rome stop, after which the mausoleum, destroyed by the Visigoths and Goths but rebuilt as a papal fort and residence, was called Castel Sant'Angelo, Church of the Holy Angel, and still is to this day.
It was connected by a fortified covered passage, the Passeto di Borgo, to St Peter's Basilica by Pope Nicholas II (pope from 25 November 1277 to 22 August 1280), to provide an escape route for the popes, which turned out handy for Pope Clement VII.
There's a story. Clement had allied with French forces to offset the power of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, he to whom the Augsburg Confession was presented, and Charles' army had defeated them in Italy. However, there was no money to pay the soldiers, and it is never ever a good idea to mess with military payroll then, now, or ever. In this case, the troops figured well hell, there's all these riches in Rome, let's go there and take them, which is exactly what they did, about wiping out the Swiss Guards on 5/6 May 1527, the "Sack of Rome". Clement made it out to Castel Sant'Angelo but became a prisoner there and eventually surrendered on 6 June.
Neither the HRE Charles nor Martin Luther approved of this, but it did have the practical effect of curbing papal power, with a lot of money and land changing hands, over the Holy Roman Empire. Luther saw Christ's providence in this, saying that the Emperor who persecuted the Lutheran Reformation for the Pope ends up himself having to destroy the Pope. Might just be something to that. To commemorate the fight put up by the Swiss Guards, new ones have their swearing-in on 6 May to this day.
The Passeto and Castel sant'Angelo still exist, the latter now as an Italian national museum, and has a HUGE statue of St Michael on top of it. Not surprisingly, so much intrigue having played out in it historically, it is the headquarters of the "Illuminati" in the fictional "Angel and Demons" by Dan Brown of da Vinci Code fame, now playing at your local theatres.
St Michael has thus become the patron of guardians of various kinds, from policemen to the sick. Western church writings speak of his feast from at least the 6th century, and other observances based on other appearances and legends arose elsewhere. But 29 September as the Feast of St Michael is among the oldest observances in the Western calendar.
We ain't done! Michaelmas has all sorts of stuff attached to it. For centuries, it was a holy day of obligation -- you gotta go to Mass. As the Germans were Christianised, St Michael took the place of Wotan, and you will find St Michael chapels in the mountains, previously sacred to Wotan, there to this day. Michaelmas is also one of the four Quarter Days in Mother England: Lady Day 25 March, Midsummer Day 24 June, Michaelmas 29 September, Christmas 25 December.
What the hell is a Quarter Day? These are four days roughly equivalent to the two equinoxes and two solstices, when business and legal dealings need to be settled -- rents and bills are due (the rent thing is still often followed in England), judges had to visit outlying areas to make sure no matters go on unresolved, servants and labourers are hired so employment isn't up in the air, stuff like that. This is big stuff, coming from the Magna Carta itself of 1215, when the barons secured against the king, John at the time, the principle that no-one's right to justice will be sold, denied, or delayed.
Ever gone to a job fair resume in hand to meet prospective employers? You're right in the tradition of Michaelmas! At harvest's end, on the day after Michaelmas labourers would assemble in the towns for just that purpose with a sign of the work they do in their hands to get employment for the next year. Such events came to be called Mop Fairs, from those seeking employment as maids showing up with a broom in hand, a resume to show the prospective employer what work they could do.
Pay your taxes due in April? You're right in the tradition of the Quarter Days! Hell, Lady Day was the first day of the calendar year until the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, and when taxes were due. The English tax year still starts on "Old" Lady Day, 6 April.
Oh btw, the lady in Lady Day is Jesus' mother Mary, and the day is more widely known as the Feast of the Annunciation, commemorating the announcement by Gabriel to Mary that she would bear Jesus, nine months before his birth 25 December, Julian refers to Julius Caesar who set the old calendar, and Gregorian refers to Pope St Gregory who modified it into what we use to-day.
In England, the modified more accurate Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1752, and on 3 September in the old Julian Calendar it became 14 September in the new Gregorian calendar. Many were confused by this, thinking they had lost 11 days of their lives, leading to protests in the streets. Michaelmas was the first big deal to happen after the change, leading some to say that since we lost 11 days, Michaelmas is really 10 October in the new calendar, which is then "Old" Michaelmas Day.
A lot of the resistance to the Gregorian calendar came from it being done by a pope -- it was actually the work of Aloysius Lilius, and Gregory made it official 24 February 1582 in the papal bull "inter gravissimas", named as is the custom in many places from its first couple of words, which here mean "among the most serious" -- and changing to it was taken in many Protestant countries as a deference to papal power.
Michaelmas was also the start of winter curfew, which lasts until Shrove Tuesday, with bells being rung at 2100 hours to signal the curfew, which is literally lights out, "curfew" meaning "cover the fire", put out the household fires and lamps.
Michaelmas is also called Goose Day, goose is eaten for the meal, coming from the practice of those who couldn't pay their rent or bills on the Quarter Day offering a goose instead to the landlord. There's an old rhyme -- He who eats goose on Michaelmas Day, shan't money lack his debts to pay.
It also started the new term, Michaelmas term, at Oxford and Cambridge. Still does!
It is also the day when peasants on manors elected their new reeve. What the hell is a reeve? A serf elected by the other serfs to manage the land for the landowner nobleman, the lord. A reeve of an entire shire was a shire-reeve. What the hell is a shire? That's what counties were called before the Norman Conquest, county being the name of the land controlled by a count in continental Europe where the damn Normans came from. Bunch of old stuff lost in history? Got a sheriff in your county? It's exactly why the chief law enforcement officer of your county is called a sheriff, a contraction over time of shire reeve.
So there's stuff from this all around our modern life. And now, maybe, one more. Back to the legends about St Michael, one of them is, when he kicked Satan out of heaven, which was on 29 September story goes, Satan fell to earth and landed in a bunch of blackberry thorns, which totally ticked him off so he cursed the fruit of the bush, stomped on them, breathed fire on them, spat on them and just generally went nuts. This curse renews every Michaelmas Day, so, what ever you do, DO NOT pick or eat blackberries after Michaelmas!
Which in our age opens a whole new question -- if you have a Blackberry phone, can you use it after Michaelmas Day?
Aren't saint's days just a riot? A little bit of something real -- there really is a St Michael the Archangel and he really is the military commander of God's forces, stands ready with all the faithful angels to help and protect you, and will function as such on the End Time -- a whole lot of legend, leading to some pretty amazing history, both of which have left common elements large and small on life to-day.
24 September 2009
The Lutheran Study Bible.
My copy of The Lutheran Study Bible, or TLSB as it looks like will be its functional name, arrived yesterday, and I gotta tell ya, this is an absolutely amazing product! I would encourage anyone reading to go to the widget for it on the sidebar to the left and order it if you haven't already. It's just that good.
As to why it's that good, most of my favourite blogs have already reviewed it in some detail, so rather than go all over that again here, also go to the sidebar on the left, and click on the blogs in my "Daily Read Lutheran Blog List" where you will find excellent reviews.
I think for just reading the Bible, as distinct from study, I'll continue to use my Concordia ESV Deluxe Reference Edition, because the pages are mostly Bible text and are thicker and easier to turn. But for study and reference, wow, TLSB is just astoundingly good!
LCMS has its problems indeed, but if we can produce a study Bible like this, somewhere some of us are doing something right, and the people involved in producing this study Bible are definitely doing something right. Get it!
As to why it's that good, most of my favourite blogs have already reviewed it in some detail, so rather than go all over that again here, also go to the sidebar on the left, and click on the blogs in my "Daily Read Lutheran Blog List" where you will find excellent reviews.
I think for just reading the Bible, as distinct from study, I'll continue to use my Concordia ESV Deluxe Reference Edition, because the pages are mostly Bible text and are thicker and easier to turn. But for study and reference, wow, TLSB is just astoundingly good!
LCMS has its problems indeed, but if we can produce a study Bible like this, somewhere some of us are doing something right, and the people involved in producing this study Bible are definitely doing something right. Get it!
22 September 2009
Jonah / Jonas. 22 September 2009.
Jonas is great! Forget the belly of a whale stuff. How about a prophet that doesn't want to be a prophet, runs away so he won't have to be, but that doesn't work and he can't escape God, then goes ahead and is a prophet, then gets upset that it worked! Not the kind of guy you put in books that are supposed to be sacred, bellies of whales or no bellies of whales, unless you're not making this stuff up.
Jonah is not commonly commemorated in the Western church calendar, but our beloved synod LCMS does on 22 September, the same date as the Eastern church commemorates him (which can also be 5 October depending on whether you use the Julian or Gregorian calendar).
Here's the deal. God tells Jonas to go to Nineveh and tell them their city will be destroyed if they don't repent of their evil ways. What's the big deal about that? Well, Nineveh is the capital of Assyria, and Assyria is the country who wiped out ten of the twelve Jewish tribes, the Biblical Israel, in 722 BC so bad they're still called the "Lost Tribes of Israel".
Jonas doesn't want them to repent and be spared, he hates them and wants them destroyed. Why would God offer a chance to the people who wiped out ten of the twelve tribes he called out? Makes no sense, and Jonas wanted no part of it, so he takes off in the other direction by boat to Tarshish.
So God sends a big storm at sea, and the pagan sailors figure one of their gods must be mad at them for something. But God makes it so even their lot-casting shows it's not them, it's Jonas. They confront him and he admits it, saying their only hope is to throw him overboard, which they don't really want to do, but realising it's their only hope, do it.
Enter the whale. Well, big fish, the Bible says; it never says whale nor is it certain whether the fish is one of the ones existing, like maybe a whale, or one created by God for the purpose of Jonas. And the answer doesn't even matter. The point is, he is conveyed to land after three days, and goes to Nineveh and delivers God's message.
Then the real miracle in the book happens. They actually listen and repent! From the king on down, the whole nation repents, starts fasting and stuff like that. God sees this and averts the destruction, and Jonas is not happy about it. He goes out of the city and takes up a good vantage point to see the destruction. It doesn't come but God causes a plant to grow to give him some shade, then the next day has a worm take it down, and now Jonas is really mad at the whole deal, thinks God was gonna forgive them anyway and just wants God to kill him.
Then God gives him the lesson -- what are you all mad about? Upset that I didn't destroy Nineveh, and did destroy the plant? Well guess what, you didn't bring that plant about, I did, and if you're mad about a plant that wasn't even yours why should I not be concerned about a city of thousands of people who don't know right from wrong, and animals too? Get over yourself.
This short book teaches some of the most radical stuff in the Hebrew Bible. Most obviously, that God accepts repentance, but more than that, God accepts repentance from everyone, not just Jews with whom the covenant of the Law of Moses was made, but Gentiles too, all people. And more than that (which Christians typically miss) that this universal care of God should not be grudged by the people of the covenant to everyone else.
For which reason the Book of Jonah is read in its entirety on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, at the afternoon service, called minha, which in Christian usage became Vespers. The Torah portion for this service is Leviticus 18, a moral chapter about who you shall and shall not sleep with, and the haftorah, or related reading from the Prophets, is the Book of Jonah.
Holy crap, what's all that about? Isn't Jonah just about prefiguring the three days Jesus was in the tomb, isn't it all about Jesus and we can leave all this Jewish stuff behind? Well, that would be fine except Jesus didn't leave all this Jewish stuff behind, he fulfilled it, and if you don't know what it is, you won't likely get what the fulfillment is either.
Also part of the haftorah, read right after the Book of Jonah, is Micah 7:18-20. In Jonah, everybody acts better than the Jews -- the pagan sailors act better than Jonah, and the Assyrians actually repent whereas after prophet after prophet the Jews had not, had only superficially, had relapse after relapse.
On top of that, God doesn't even require the Assyrians to come under the Law of Moses or convert to anything, but simply adhere to the universal morality he set forth to all Man in the Seven Noahide Laws in Genesis 9 and ratified again in Acts 15, of which sexual morality, the subject of the Torah portion on Yom Kippur minha, is traditionally number the fourth.
Then Micah brings the focus to the people of the Covenant, not all Man, but the Jews. "Who is a God like unto Thee" is not in terms of a show of power, but of mercy, passing by the sins of the remnant of his heritage, whose "anger" is not of his nature but rather mercy in which he delights, and to which he will be faithful, casting sin as if into the depths of the sea, not to come back again as did the prophet Jonas but to stay there, even as was promised to Abraham the first Jew.
And so it came to pass in Jesus, like Jonas overcome by the sinfulness of Man whether under the covenant of the Law of Moses or the covenant with all Man under Noah (Noe), thrown into the depths for three days, and after being the full and final Day of Atonement on Good Friday came forth on Pascha with the message and the reality of repentance and forgiveness to all Man, not to be begrudged to any one.
And that's the sign of Jonah.
Jonah is not commonly commemorated in the Western church calendar, but our beloved synod LCMS does on 22 September, the same date as the Eastern church commemorates him (which can also be 5 October depending on whether you use the Julian or Gregorian calendar).
Here's the deal. God tells Jonas to go to Nineveh and tell them their city will be destroyed if they don't repent of their evil ways. What's the big deal about that? Well, Nineveh is the capital of Assyria, and Assyria is the country who wiped out ten of the twelve Jewish tribes, the Biblical Israel, in 722 BC so bad they're still called the "Lost Tribes of Israel".
Jonas doesn't want them to repent and be spared, he hates them and wants them destroyed. Why would God offer a chance to the people who wiped out ten of the twelve tribes he called out? Makes no sense, and Jonas wanted no part of it, so he takes off in the other direction by boat to Tarshish.
So God sends a big storm at sea, and the pagan sailors figure one of their gods must be mad at them for something. But God makes it so even their lot-casting shows it's not them, it's Jonas. They confront him and he admits it, saying their only hope is to throw him overboard, which they don't really want to do, but realising it's their only hope, do it.
Enter the whale. Well, big fish, the Bible says; it never says whale nor is it certain whether the fish is one of the ones existing, like maybe a whale, or one created by God for the purpose of Jonas. And the answer doesn't even matter. The point is, he is conveyed to land after three days, and goes to Nineveh and delivers God's message.
Then the real miracle in the book happens. They actually listen and repent! From the king on down, the whole nation repents, starts fasting and stuff like that. God sees this and averts the destruction, and Jonas is not happy about it. He goes out of the city and takes up a good vantage point to see the destruction. It doesn't come but God causes a plant to grow to give him some shade, then the next day has a worm take it down, and now Jonas is really mad at the whole deal, thinks God was gonna forgive them anyway and just wants God to kill him.
Then God gives him the lesson -- what are you all mad about? Upset that I didn't destroy Nineveh, and did destroy the plant? Well guess what, you didn't bring that plant about, I did, and if you're mad about a plant that wasn't even yours why should I not be concerned about a city of thousands of people who don't know right from wrong, and animals too? Get over yourself.
This short book teaches some of the most radical stuff in the Hebrew Bible. Most obviously, that God accepts repentance, but more than that, God accepts repentance from everyone, not just Jews with whom the covenant of the Law of Moses was made, but Gentiles too, all people. And more than that (which Christians typically miss) that this universal care of God should not be grudged by the people of the covenant to everyone else.
For which reason the Book of Jonah is read in its entirety on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, at the afternoon service, called minha, which in Christian usage became Vespers. The Torah portion for this service is Leviticus 18, a moral chapter about who you shall and shall not sleep with, and the haftorah, or related reading from the Prophets, is the Book of Jonah.
Holy crap, what's all that about? Isn't Jonah just about prefiguring the three days Jesus was in the tomb, isn't it all about Jesus and we can leave all this Jewish stuff behind? Well, that would be fine except Jesus didn't leave all this Jewish stuff behind, he fulfilled it, and if you don't know what it is, you won't likely get what the fulfillment is either.
Also part of the haftorah, read right after the Book of Jonah, is Micah 7:18-20. In Jonah, everybody acts better than the Jews -- the pagan sailors act better than Jonah, and the Assyrians actually repent whereas after prophet after prophet the Jews had not, had only superficially, had relapse after relapse.
On top of that, God doesn't even require the Assyrians to come under the Law of Moses or convert to anything, but simply adhere to the universal morality he set forth to all Man in the Seven Noahide Laws in Genesis 9 and ratified again in Acts 15, of which sexual morality, the subject of the Torah portion on Yom Kippur minha, is traditionally number the fourth.
Then Micah brings the focus to the people of the Covenant, not all Man, but the Jews. "Who is a God like unto Thee" is not in terms of a show of power, but of mercy, passing by the sins of the remnant of his heritage, whose "anger" is not of his nature but rather mercy in which he delights, and to which he will be faithful, casting sin as if into the depths of the sea, not to come back again as did the prophet Jonas but to stay there, even as was promised to Abraham the first Jew.
And so it came to pass in Jesus, like Jonas overcome by the sinfulness of Man whether under the covenant of the Law of Moses or the covenant with all Man under Noah (Noe), thrown into the depths for three days, and after being the full and final Day of Atonement on Good Friday came forth on Pascha with the message and the reality of repentance and forgiveness to all Man, not to be begrudged to any one.
And that's the sign of Jonah.
13 September 2009
Why I Am Not A TDP Or LSB User.
Introduction And Warm Up Act.
OK, right off the bat: The title of this post is a parody of Bertrand Russell's essay "Why I Am Not A Christian", published in 1927 with related essays in a book of the same name. My fondness for irony and parody in writing -- no doubt derived from quotation technique in Jazz improvisation, and bolstered by the sheer fun of it all in the writing style of Friedrich Nietzsche, the only philosopher worth reading -- sometimes leads those under the influence of stultified studies from tedious teachers who have made prose, well, prosaic, to misunderstand prose that is not "prosaic".
I also think the writers for Bugs Bunny were absolute geniuses, and my first Victor Borge concert changed my life, or at least my piano playing. Call it Borge blogging.
Perhaps I will expand on all that in a future post, possibly titled "Why I Post Such Good Posts". Oh Judas in the scriptorum, there is is again -- a parody of a section title from Nietzsche's Ecce Homo called "Why I Write Such Good Books", the irony being that such a post would not be on why I think my posts are good.
But now to the present matter. The reason for the Russell parody in the title of this post is that, among a good many of those with whom I agree on pretty much everything else about what we unfortunately have to call these days "confessional Lutheranism" to distinguish it from the non-Lutheran Lutheranisms that abound, not using Treasury of Daily Prayer (TDP) and/or Lutheran Service Book (LSB), while it may not call into question one's Christianity, does call into question one's grounding in confessional Lutheranism, particularly as these two books are often rallying points for the cause of confessional Lutheranism. Blows your street cred.
Damn, there it is again -- a long convoluted sentence in standard English followed by a short one in colloquial English; fun to write, I do it a lot. Also longer paragraphs in standard English followed by short ones in colloquial English, which this will no longer be if I don't stop now. But I digress. Now I continue.
What is "Vatican II For Lutherans"?
Why I am not a TDP or LSB user is summed up in the phrase I use a lot "Vatican II For Lutherans". What it is that is summed up in the phrase has not always come across on the blogs. Here is what it does not mean: the Divine Service and the Divine Office as found in LSB and TDP are just rehashes of the novus ordo that came out of Vatican II.
Now, some, not all, some of it in fact is. There is a lectionary and church year calendar in LSB and calendar in TDP that derive from, and would not exist without, the three-year lectionary and revised church calendar of the novus ordo of Vatican II. Vatican II For Lutherans, regarding the lectionary, took the following path: it begins with the Ordo lectionem missae of Vatican II produced in 1969 and taking effect in 1970, then in 1983 several groups of non-Catholic churches and the RCC itself produced the Revised Common Lectionary, which after a trial period was published in 1994, which in turn has been slightly modified by many churches for their particular use, including our beloved synod the LCMS.
Well Judas H Priest on a committee, what's so wrong with that? Ain't no lectionaries and church year calendars in Scripture! We're free! Just give me Jesus, man, and don't trample on my Christian Freedom with all this crap. Now, if you're revving up for a less colloquial audience, you will want to change "crap" to "adiaphora" to refer to non-essentials it's best not to get all that caught up in lest you lose sight of the essentials -- "indifferent things" literally from the Greek.
The Original Adiaphora.
Here's what's wrong with that. For starters, "adiaphora" is not Greek for "doesn't matter" or "who cares". It actually isn't even a Christian concept. It comes from the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece. "Stoic" itself has come to mean "indifferent" in popular usage, but that isn't what either stoic or indifferent is at all. The Stoics' main concern was how to live so that your inner life is not dictated by what happens to you in the external world. They saw the world as a matter of reason, physics and ethics. These were the main things in life. They saw the study of them as the way to avoid the errors in reason which lead to disruptive and destructive emotions that make you miserable over what happens in life when in fact it may only be what you think is happening in life.
This is not anti-emotion; rather, it was to free one from destructive emotions based on incorrect judgements so one could enjoy emotions associated with well-being and peace of mind having corrected one's judgements by reason and brought them into alignment with reality, the totality of which is God.
Man, even the word for peace of mind has gotten all twisted around on this "indifferent" thing. The word for peace of mind was apatheia, yup, the ancestor of our word "apathy" and didn't mean apathy in our sense at all, but rather being free of pathos (plural pathe), the destructive emotions resulting from incorrect perceptions, and also propathos or pure instinctual reactions, to enjoy the eupathos (plural eupatheia) emotions that come from perceptions that align with reality. A-pathetic is not indifference but being free of destructive emotions whose opposite is eu-pathetic or constructive emotions.
So what was adiaphora? Those things that are not part of reason, physics and ethics and are not in and of themselves destructive or constructive but could go either way depending on how you're doing with what is part of reason, physics and ethics in getting free of pathos and enjoying eupathos -- like getting rich, neither good nor bad in itself, but can go bad in a person who is, well, pathetic, literally, or go for good in a person who is a-pathetic in the literal sense above.
How The Idea of Christian Adiaphora Started.
It's easy to see how all this could be used by Christians. The term "logos" itself is the biggest thing, starting from Heraclitus (whom Nietzsche btw regarded as the only philosopher worth reading) who used it to denote the fundamental order of the universe, then became the root of our word logic as the idea of rational speaking in the Sophists and Aristotle, but with the Stoics became the divine that is immanent, present throughout the whole universe, which Philo took into Jewish thought, then become theos, God, himself and Jesus as the Word (logos) of God in St John and early Christian apologists.
Both Stoicism and Christianity too emphasised a progress from the passions of the world to something clouded by those passions (God as creator and an afterlife though not being Stoic ideas, lest it be thought I am saying Christianity is just Stoicism with Jesus; for that matter the logos thing does not mean that either, Arius getting carried away with the idea that it did and the church had to define how it didn't at Nicea).
Christian concern about adiaphora is often held to begin with St Paul's answer in First Corinthians chapter 8 to the question of whether one can or cannot eat meat that had been sacrificed to pagan idols. However, in that passage, while stating that one is no better or worse for eating or not eating such meat per se, he is far from saying "doesn't matter" or "who cares" but also states that those who eat it do not use their freedom to do so in a way that becomes a problem for others who do not eat it. It does matter, we are to care, and the criterion is not that eating or not eating is forbidden or commanded, but what we Lutherans typically call good order in the church.
This whole adiaphora thing really got rolling with the Reformation. Poor old Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, he to whom the Augsburg Confession was originally presented, tried to keep the same lid over both Lutherans and Protestants by a series of measures, the first being the Augsburg Interim -- the "interim" being until a church council could be called to settle the matters -- which allowed for priests to marry and Communion to be given in both kinds (being bread AND the fruit of the vine, not just bread) but otherwise restoring Roman practice. Since that compromises the justification by faith alone thing, although Melancthon was willing to go along with it pretty much everybody else wasn't, unwilling to compromise an essential, THE essential, teaching for a therefore false unity. That lead to the Leipzig Interim, which Melancthon also pursued, wherein Lutheran churches could hold their beliefs but would hold the Roman line in worship, which ticked everybody Catholic and Lutheran alike right off, Catholics seeing the measure as usurping the church's authority and Lutherans split between those who supported it (the Phillipists, after Melancthon's first name) and the "real Lutherans" (Gnesio-Lutherans) who didn't, the whole thing resulting in a war whose conclusion was the principle cuius regio eius religio, whose the rule his the religion, meaning the local ruler decided what was to be followed, and Lutherans resolving it among themselves with the "second Martin", Chemnitz, in the Formula of Concord of 1577, wherein the adiaphora were identified as things like church ritual, which is neither commanded not forbidden in Scripture, but again not in a "doesn't matter" or "who cares" sense but as distinguished from the doctrine of justification by faith alone which we believe IS laid down by Scripture.
So, if we think this adiaphora worship wars stuff is bad now, well, it is but it's been a hell of a lot worse.
Didn't This Post Start Out To Be About Why I Don't Use TDP or LSB?
The only reason I bring all this old stuff is the only reason I ever bring up old stuff -- not for its own sake but for the contribution it makes to understanding what we are even talking about, where we are and how we got there, toward where we ought to go. To me, the old stuff has no other "sake" than that, which is a huge one.
There is something common to all these uses of adiaphora, whether it's the Stoics concerned about reason, physics and logic, the first Christians trying to explain, to themselves as well as others, who and what Jesus is, or the Reformation trying to explain what exactly needs to be reformed and who is going to do it. The story of all of these I bring up here to illustrate that adiaphora is not a matter of who cares or doesn't matter. Be it the example of getting rich with the Stoics, eating meat sacrificed to idols with St Paul, or church rites in the Reformation, these are things that can go either way, for good or bad, not essentials in themselves but completely dependent as to whether they go good or bad on the essentials, and if they go bad are a source of great harm to those essentials, therefore, they are hardly, though not essential, a who cares or doesn't matter kind of thing. In that sense, there are no "indifferent" things.
Neither Commanded Nor Forbidden in Scripture.
This phrase does not mean, for Lutherans anyway and we're the ones who wrote it, "if it ain't in Scripture we ain't doing it". It also doesn't mean, as adiaphora never has since well before we took up the term, "who cares" or "it doesn't matter". It relates to things that can go either way, good or bad, therefore they do matter and we must care.
Our Lutheran principle is, if it contradicts Scripture we ain't doing it. Being commanded or forbidden in Scripture is not the only source of a good idea, it is rather the only source of a good idea that is divine. The care and concern that we take about ideas that are not divine is entirely based on their effect of being for good or bad on the ideas that are divine. And this care and concern, as we said before, we typically call good order in the church.
This whole business about rites and ceremonies in the church is all about that. God commanded in the Law rites and ceremonies in the Temple. He hasn't commanded bupkis about rites and ceremonies since. But he does command care and concern for our fellows, he does speak against doing things that may be OK in and of themselves but are not helpful to the common good, good order in the church, the touchstone always being what he has commanded or forbidden.
So in and of itself, there is no rite, lectionary or calendar that is essential and any number of them that are legitimately possible. The thing is, that does not mean any rite, lectionary or calendar is fine, nor that any possible one is a good idea or even OK. For about 1500 years, three fourths of its elapsed history to date, the Western church has used a lectionary and calendar that goes back to the influence of St Jerome, a rite for the Divine Service that goes back to the influence of St Gregory, and an order for the Divine Office that goes back to St Benedict, not once delivered unchangeable for all time, but in a continuous and organic development over many places and times with many variations. The Eastern church has a similar story.
The point of all of it being good order in the church. Yet what do we see to-day?
Good Order In The Church.
Well, the Eastern church didn't have Vatican II so there we see about the same. But in the West, and for us Lutherans, completely at odds with the idea stated in our confessions of for the most part retaining the ceremonies previously in use simply reformed to exclude what contradicts the Gospel, we see nearly everywhere a lectionary and calendar derived from the model of 1960s Rome, and an approach to service books derived from the model of 1960s Rome as well.
What happened here? Was there no Reformation? Does Rome still really run things just a little less forcibly than before?
What did our Lutheran fathers do? Ride out the "interim", then when Rome sought to put some order to things at Trent say "Well there you go, now let's get a commission going to implement this ourselves"? No, and in the words of the great theologian Chris Rock, Hell No. They stuck by our aim of preserving and defending the liturgy, by continuing the ceremonies previously in use corrected not by the overall liturgical agenda of some movement but simply to remove what contradicts the Gospel. This is why we could continue to benefit from Luther's sermons and liturgical writings, all of them from before Trent, and why we could benefit from centuries of others' sermons and liturgical writings since.
So why would one break from that and start a completely new thing? Actually we could end the post right here, with the answer that there is no answer, there is no reason to break with that and start a completely new thing, and continue with what the church has continued with for centuries heading to millennia. Except we didn't do that; something else already happened.
What Happened Instead.
Sometimes it's all laid up to Dom Prosper Gueranger, OSB, (1805 - 1875) who founded Solesmes Abbey and worked long and hard to bring a participation with understanding of the liturgy to ordinary people. Well hell, all the revisionists say that, and thereby try to justify themselves in doing things Dom Prosper of blessed memory never ever had in mind. Such as a complete revision of the liturgy offering all kinds of options. He in fact promoted the popular use of Gregorian Chant, and as to reform, proposed little by way of change and worked to reforming people rather than the liturgy.
The so-called Liturgical Movement took it much further. While it began within the Roman church, it became involved with the Ecumenical Movement, and not incidentally, the historical-critical method of Biblical criticism. The so-called "Higher Criticism" originally meant the work of scholars at the University of Tuebingen. Well guess who was one of the early ones involved in that -- Phillip Melancthon! The movement took shape with Ferdinand Christian Baur, morphed into a general approach to Scripture as maybe the revealed word of God but also a human document capable of being studied like other human documents, began at this same time to have followers offering a radically different view of Jesus and the New Testament, particularly David Strauss (1808 - 1874) in The Life of Jesus (1846) and Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 = 1872) in The Essence of Christianity (1854) then Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus (1863). Tuebingen continues to this day to have notable alumni, for example Hans Kueng and Joseph Ratzinger, the latter operating these days under the name Pope Benedict XVI.
All of these movements, while distinct, share characteristics typical of the age, whose proponents two centuries later still think are cutting edge. And that is, that much if not most of what we have thought before about Christianity, and the divisions over it in the Reformation, were essentially products of ignorance from which we can now emerge with the discovery of sources lost to previous ages and methodology inspired by the Enlightenment and Rationalism to evaluate them. Thus, in doctrine maybe Scripture doesn't say what we thought it said, in ecclesiology, maybe church isn't exactly what either Catholics or Protestants have thought, and in liturgy, maybe our worship is much farther from the worship of the apostolic age than either Catholics or Protestants have thought. Thus began the impetus to change doctrine or resist change, change church structures or resist change, and change liturgy or resist change.
And that's where we are right now, still working all of this stuff out.
Here's The Problem.
At Trent, the Roman church sought to end the problem, end the "interim" with the appropriate council, in liturgy revising the Roman liturgy to both provide a single use throughout the church ending the confusion of variations all over the place, and at the same time preserve the liturgy from the doctrinal errors of the reformers, by restoring the liturgy to the original form and essence of the apostles and the early "Fathers". Thus the Roman Missal of Pope Paul V in 1570 (the Roman church officially names liturgy by the name and date of the pope who authorised it).
The Mass of Pope Paul V of 1570 did not, any more than any of the others, stay once delivered and never changed. It was revised just 34 years later by Pope Clement VIII, and 30 years after that by Pope Urban VIII, on through to my own lifetime, in 1955 Pope Pius XII making extensive changes to the liturgy for Holy Week, and finally by Pope John XXIII in 1962.
"Finally" because at Vatican II something altogether different was done. From a confluence of trends from the Liturgical Movement, the Ecumenical Movement and the Higher Critical Movement discussed above, it seemed the Paul V liturgy, also called the Tridentine Rite, could not due to the limitations of its time fulfill its own goals of restoring worship to the form and nature of the Apostles and the Fathers, and an entirely new order, not a revision of the existing order, was constructed -- new Mass, or rather Masses, new calendar, new lectionary, the works.
Well Judas H Priest on a committee, what's so wrong with that?
Yeah I know, we asked that way back up there somewhere. Then we said "For starters". It's just my way of saying by parallel construction that we're now ready for the enders, so to speak.
Conclusion.
You know, a guy could look at all this and say hey, liturgy is a pretty broad term for something that has changed and changed again at various hands for centuries and centuries, so the changes at our hands in our time simply take their place in that unfolding story. After all, there's no revealed liturgy, and as long as it's grounded in Jesus and Scripture, it's OK.
That would be so nice. But it would ignore some huge, essential things.
1. Adiaphora, from the Stoics to the 21st Century LCMS, are not matters of indifference in the sense of "who cares" or "doesn't matter", but in fact, precisely because they are neither good nor bad in themselves, neither commanded nor forbidden, can, and WILL, go either way, and therefore require serious attention for the sake of good order in the church, the building up of the brethren and the spreading of the message, which IS something commanded in Scripture and therefore good in itself.
2. What was the liturgical aim of the Lutheran Reformers? To restore the liturgy to the form and nature of the Apostles and the Fathers? No, that was Trent, not us. To restore the liturgy to the form and intent of the Apostles and the Fathers, crafting a new whole with tools they did not have and therefore produced faulty restorations of the form and intent of the Apostles and Fathers which if retained at all can be at most alongside our new whole? No, that was Vatican II, not us. Our aim, stated in our Confessions, was to invent no new liturgy any more than to invent a new Christianity, but conserve, zealously guard and defend, the ceremonies previously in use, pruning only by the criterion of whether something contradicts the Gospel, faithful to the tradition handed on in the actual experience of the church and not to some imagined lost ideal. That is an entirely different agenda. There is no point in a Lutheran version of a non-Lutheran agenda. Actually, there can't even be such a thing, try as we may to produce one.
3. Not only that, the "reforms" of Vatican II were a conscious and intended break with the past. Was this the liturgical aim of the Lutheran Reformers? No. They wanted to correct the abuses of the past, and in doing so demonstrate our continuity with the past, that in this aspect too we are not some new idea or church but the same one. Dropping a centuries long development with an associated centuries long preaching tradition does not demonstrate continuity with that. Rather, it expresses, intended or not, continuity with the heterodox churches doing this Vatican II style thing in our time in line with the various modern movements (Liturgical, Ecumenical, Higher Critical) discussed above.
4. Having done that, though, can we not use both it and what came before, having the best of the new and the old, and in line with our belief that rites and ceremonies need not be the same everywhere? Well, before even getting to that, as stated in Points Two and Three the "new" is not in line with the aim of the Lutheran reformers, so there is no "best" to be desired. But if one were to proceed anyway, what is the result? That rites and ceremonies need not be the same everywhere for one thing primarily addresses the legitimacy of our efforts to reform liturgy apart from the supposed authority of Rome, and for another, consistency at least within a given area was desired, for the sake of the good order stated in Point One. A situation where in one parish it's this calendar but in another it's that calendar, here this Divine Service "setting" there that Divine Service "setting", here these readings and there those readings, etc, all drawn from between the covers of the same book, in no way corresponds to the varied development of liturgy over time and place; rather, it simply reflects the judgement of whoever determined what goes between the two covers, and mistakes variety over time and place for variety within a given time and place. Which is why the historic liturgies, say those associated with St Gregory in the West or St John Chrysostom in the East, evidence nothing of "Way To Pronounce Absolution A, Way To Pronounce Absolution B; Gloria but here's something else you can do too; here's this "setting" but here's some others too; here's a cycle of Scripture readings but here's another one too; here's a calendar of observances but here's another one too" etc, on through our relatively late The Lutheran Hymnal of 1941. The modern ones, including ours, do, Vatican II style.
5. And once that happens, or rather, since that has happened, it only invites endless discussion of that judgement. The covers of such a book settle nothing, can settle nothing, about the "worship wars" since the covers themselves do not uphold the historic liturgy but are limits imposed on "what else too", leaving the judgement as to what else too forever open to question -- since we look East, or to Rome, or cut and paste from this or that past order like kids playing mix and match dress-up in their parents' closets, why not look to Willow Creek or other places drawing good numbers to services too? And why would they not ask that question: we now already have "contemporary worship" that places liturgy that proceeds from an agenda different than ours alongside our historic worship, that tries to supply a Lutheran content to a non-Lutheran agenda, and with that, it is no longer the zealous guarding and defending of the mass of our Confessions but simply a competition among various ideas of what "contemporary worship" will be allowed too, with LSB and TDP, despite the best intentions, being part of the problem they seek to address.
And that is why I am not a TDP or LSB user.
OK, right off the bat: The title of this post is a parody of Bertrand Russell's essay "Why I Am Not A Christian", published in 1927 with related essays in a book of the same name. My fondness for irony and parody in writing -- no doubt derived from quotation technique in Jazz improvisation, and bolstered by the sheer fun of it all in the writing style of Friedrich Nietzsche, the only philosopher worth reading -- sometimes leads those under the influence of stultified studies from tedious teachers who have made prose, well, prosaic, to misunderstand prose that is not "prosaic".
I also think the writers for Bugs Bunny were absolute geniuses, and my first Victor Borge concert changed my life, or at least my piano playing. Call it Borge blogging.
Perhaps I will expand on all that in a future post, possibly titled "Why I Post Such Good Posts". Oh Judas in the scriptorum, there is is again -- a parody of a section title from Nietzsche's Ecce Homo called "Why I Write Such Good Books", the irony being that such a post would not be on why I think my posts are good.
But now to the present matter. The reason for the Russell parody in the title of this post is that, among a good many of those with whom I agree on pretty much everything else about what we unfortunately have to call these days "confessional Lutheranism" to distinguish it from the non-Lutheran Lutheranisms that abound, not using Treasury of Daily Prayer (TDP) and/or Lutheran Service Book (LSB), while it may not call into question one's Christianity, does call into question one's grounding in confessional Lutheranism, particularly as these two books are often rallying points for the cause of confessional Lutheranism. Blows your street cred.
Damn, there it is again -- a long convoluted sentence in standard English followed by a short one in colloquial English; fun to write, I do it a lot. Also longer paragraphs in standard English followed by short ones in colloquial English, which this will no longer be if I don't stop now. But I digress. Now I continue.
What is "Vatican II For Lutherans"?
Why I am not a TDP or LSB user is summed up in the phrase I use a lot "Vatican II For Lutherans". What it is that is summed up in the phrase has not always come across on the blogs. Here is what it does not mean: the Divine Service and the Divine Office as found in LSB and TDP are just rehashes of the novus ordo that came out of Vatican II.
Now, some, not all, some of it in fact is. There is a lectionary and church year calendar in LSB and calendar in TDP that derive from, and would not exist without, the three-year lectionary and revised church calendar of the novus ordo of Vatican II. Vatican II For Lutherans, regarding the lectionary, took the following path: it begins with the Ordo lectionem missae of Vatican II produced in 1969 and taking effect in 1970, then in 1983 several groups of non-Catholic churches and the RCC itself produced the Revised Common Lectionary, which after a trial period was published in 1994, which in turn has been slightly modified by many churches for their particular use, including our beloved synod the LCMS.
Well Judas H Priest on a committee, what's so wrong with that? Ain't no lectionaries and church year calendars in Scripture! We're free! Just give me Jesus, man, and don't trample on my Christian Freedom with all this crap. Now, if you're revving up for a less colloquial audience, you will want to change "crap" to "adiaphora" to refer to non-essentials it's best not to get all that caught up in lest you lose sight of the essentials -- "indifferent things" literally from the Greek.
The Original Adiaphora.
Here's what's wrong with that. For starters, "adiaphora" is not Greek for "doesn't matter" or "who cares". It actually isn't even a Christian concept. It comes from the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece. "Stoic" itself has come to mean "indifferent" in popular usage, but that isn't what either stoic or indifferent is at all. The Stoics' main concern was how to live so that your inner life is not dictated by what happens to you in the external world. They saw the world as a matter of reason, physics and ethics. These were the main things in life. They saw the study of them as the way to avoid the errors in reason which lead to disruptive and destructive emotions that make you miserable over what happens in life when in fact it may only be what you think is happening in life.
This is not anti-emotion; rather, it was to free one from destructive emotions based on incorrect judgements so one could enjoy emotions associated with well-being and peace of mind having corrected one's judgements by reason and brought them into alignment with reality, the totality of which is God.
Man, even the word for peace of mind has gotten all twisted around on this "indifferent" thing. The word for peace of mind was apatheia, yup, the ancestor of our word "apathy" and didn't mean apathy in our sense at all, but rather being free of pathos (plural pathe), the destructive emotions resulting from incorrect perceptions, and also propathos or pure instinctual reactions, to enjoy the eupathos (plural eupatheia) emotions that come from perceptions that align with reality. A-pathetic is not indifference but being free of destructive emotions whose opposite is eu-pathetic or constructive emotions.
So what was adiaphora? Those things that are not part of reason, physics and ethics and are not in and of themselves destructive or constructive but could go either way depending on how you're doing with what is part of reason, physics and ethics in getting free of pathos and enjoying eupathos -- like getting rich, neither good nor bad in itself, but can go bad in a person who is, well, pathetic, literally, or go for good in a person who is a-pathetic in the literal sense above.
How The Idea of Christian Adiaphora Started.
It's easy to see how all this could be used by Christians. The term "logos" itself is the biggest thing, starting from Heraclitus (whom Nietzsche btw regarded as the only philosopher worth reading) who used it to denote the fundamental order of the universe, then became the root of our word logic as the idea of rational speaking in the Sophists and Aristotle, but with the Stoics became the divine that is immanent, present throughout the whole universe, which Philo took into Jewish thought, then become theos, God, himself and Jesus as the Word (logos) of God in St John and early Christian apologists.
Both Stoicism and Christianity too emphasised a progress from the passions of the world to something clouded by those passions (God as creator and an afterlife though not being Stoic ideas, lest it be thought I am saying Christianity is just Stoicism with Jesus; for that matter the logos thing does not mean that either, Arius getting carried away with the idea that it did and the church had to define how it didn't at Nicea).
Christian concern about adiaphora is often held to begin with St Paul's answer in First Corinthians chapter 8 to the question of whether one can or cannot eat meat that had been sacrificed to pagan idols. However, in that passage, while stating that one is no better or worse for eating or not eating such meat per se, he is far from saying "doesn't matter" or "who cares" but also states that those who eat it do not use their freedom to do so in a way that becomes a problem for others who do not eat it. It does matter, we are to care, and the criterion is not that eating or not eating is forbidden or commanded, but what we Lutherans typically call good order in the church.
This whole adiaphora thing really got rolling with the Reformation. Poor old Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, he to whom the Augsburg Confession was originally presented, tried to keep the same lid over both Lutherans and Protestants by a series of measures, the first being the Augsburg Interim -- the "interim" being until a church council could be called to settle the matters -- which allowed for priests to marry and Communion to be given in both kinds (being bread AND the fruit of the vine, not just bread) but otherwise restoring Roman practice. Since that compromises the justification by faith alone thing, although Melancthon was willing to go along with it pretty much everybody else wasn't, unwilling to compromise an essential, THE essential, teaching for a therefore false unity. That lead to the Leipzig Interim, which Melancthon also pursued, wherein Lutheran churches could hold their beliefs but would hold the Roman line in worship, which ticked everybody Catholic and Lutheran alike right off, Catholics seeing the measure as usurping the church's authority and Lutherans split between those who supported it (the Phillipists, after Melancthon's first name) and the "real Lutherans" (Gnesio-Lutherans) who didn't, the whole thing resulting in a war whose conclusion was the principle cuius regio eius religio, whose the rule his the religion, meaning the local ruler decided what was to be followed, and Lutherans resolving it among themselves with the "second Martin", Chemnitz, in the Formula of Concord of 1577, wherein the adiaphora were identified as things like church ritual, which is neither commanded not forbidden in Scripture, but again not in a "doesn't matter" or "who cares" sense but as distinguished from the doctrine of justification by faith alone which we believe IS laid down by Scripture.
So, if we think this adiaphora worship wars stuff is bad now, well, it is but it's been a hell of a lot worse.
Didn't This Post Start Out To Be About Why I Don't Use TDP or LSB?
The only reason I bring all this old stuff is the only reason I ever bring up old stuff -- not for its own sake but for the contribution it makes to understanding what we are even talking about, where we are and how we got there, toward where we ought to go. To me, the old stuff has no other "sake" than that, which is a huge one.
There is something common to all these uses of adiaphora, whether it's the Stoics concerned about reason, physics and logic, the first Christians trying to explain, to themselves as well as others, who and what Jesus is, or the Reformation trying to explain what exactly needs to be reformed and who is going to do it. The story of all of these I bring up here to illustrate that adiaphora is not a matter of who cares or doesn't matter. Be it the example of getting rich with the Stoics, eating meat sacrificed to idols with St Paul, or church rites in the Reformation, these are things that can go either way, for good or bad, not essentials in themselves but completely dependent as to whether they go good or bad on the essentials, and if they go bad are a source of great harm to those essentials, therefore, they are hardly, though not essential, a who cares or doesn't matter kind of thing. In that sense, there are no "indifferent" things.
Neither Commanded Nor Forbidden in Scripture.
This phrase does not mean, for Lutherans anyway and we're the ones who wrote it, "if it ain't in Scripture we ain't doing it". It also doesn't mean, as adiaphora never has since well before we took up the term, "who cares" or "it doesn't matter". It relates to things that can go either way, good or bad, therefore they do matter and we must care.
Our Lutheran principle is, if it contradicts Scripture we ain't doing it. Being commanded or forbidden in Scripture is not the only source of a good idea, it is rather the only source of a good idea that is divine. The care and concern that we take about ideas that are not divine is entirely based on their effect of being for good or bad on the ideas that are divine. And this care and concern, as we said before, we typically call good order in the church.
This whole business about rites and ceremonies in the church is all about that. God commanded in the Law rites and ceremonies in the Temple. He hasn't commanded bupkis about rites and ceremonies since. But he does command care and concern for our fellows, he does speak against doing things that may be OK in and of themselves but are not helpful to the common good, good order in the church, the touchstone always being what he has commanded or forbidden.
So in and of itself, there is no rite, lectionary or calendar that is essential and any number of them that are legitimately possible. The thing is, that does not mean any rite, lectionary or calendar is fine, nor that any possible one is a good idea or even OK. For about 1500 years, three fourths of its elapsed history to date, the Western church has used a lectionary and calendar that goes back to the influence of St Jerome, a rite for the Divine Service that goes back to the influence of St Gregory, and an order for the Divine Office that goes back to St Benedict, not once delivered unchangeable for all time, but in a continuous and organic development over many places and times with many variations. The Eastern church has a similar story.
The point of all of it being good order in the church. Yet what do we see to-day?
Good Order In The Church.
Well, the Eastern church didn't have Vatican II so there we see about the same. But in the West, and for us Lutherans, completely at odds with the idea stated in our confessions of for the most part retaining the ceremonies previously in use simply reformed to exclude what contradicts the Gospel, we see nearly everywhere a lectionary and calendar derived from the model of 1960s Rome, and an approach to service books derived from the model of 1960s Rome as well.
What happened here? Was there no Reformation? Does Rome still really run things just a little less forcibly than before?
What did our Lutheran fathers do? Ride out the "interim", then when Rome sought to put some order to things at Trent say "Well there you go, now let's get a commission going to implement this ourselves"? No, and in the words of the great theologian Chris Rock, Hell No. They stuck by our aim of preserving and defending the liturgy, by continuing the ceremonies previously in use corrected not by the overall liturgical agenda of some movement but simply to remove what contradicts the Gospel. This is why we could continue to benefit from Luther's sermons and liturgical writings, all of them from before Trent, and why we could benefit from centuries of others' sermons and liturgical writings since.
So why would one break from that and start a completely new thing? Actually we could end the post right here, with the answer that there is no answer, there is no reason to break with that and start a completely new thing, and continue with what the church has continued with for centuries heading to millennia. Except we didn't do that; something else already happened.
What Happened Instead.
Sometimes it's all laid up to Dom Prosper Gueranger, OSB, (1805 - 1875) who founded Solesmes Abbey and worked long and hard to bring a participation with understanding of the liturgy to ordinary people. Well hell, all the revisionists say that, and thereby try to justify themselves in doing things Dom Prosper of blessed memory never ever had in mind. Such as a complete revision of the liturgy offering all kinds of options. He in fact promoted the popular use of Gregorian Chant, and as to reform, proposed little by way of change and worked to reforming people rather than the liturgy.
The so-called Liturgical Movement took it much further. While it began within the Roman church, it became involved with the Ecumenical Movement, and not incidentally, the historical-critical method of Biblical criticism. The so-called "Higher Criticism" originally meant the work of scholars at the University of Tuebingen. Well guess who was one of the early ones involved in that -- Phillip Melancthon! The movement took shape with Ferdinand Christian Baur, morphed into a general approach to Scripture as maybe the revealed word of God but also a human document capable of being studied like other human documents, began at this same time to have followers offering a radically different view of Jesus and the New Testament, particularly David Strauss (1808 - 1874) in The Life of Jesus (1846) and Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 = 1872) in The Essence of Christianity (1854) then Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus (1863). Tuebingen continues to this day to have notable alumni, for example Hans Kueng and Joseph Ratzinger, the latter operating these days under the name Pope Benedict XVI.
All of these movements, while distinct, share characteristics typical of the age, whose proponents two centuries later still think are cutting edge. And that is, that much if not most of what we have thought before about Christianity, and the divisions over it in the Reformation, were essentially products of ignorance from which we can now emerge with the discovery of sources lost to previous ages and methodology inspired by the Enlightenment and Rationalism to evaluate them. Thus, in doctrine maybe Scripture doesn't say what we thought it said, in ecclesiology, maybe church isn't exactly what either Catholics or Protestants have thought, and in liturgy, maybe our worship is much farther from the worship of the apostolic age than either Catholics or Protestants have thought. Thus began the impetus to change doctrine or resist change, change church structures or resist change, and change liturgy or resist change.
And that's where we are right now, still working all of this stuff out.
Here's The Problem.
At Trent, the Roman church sought to end the problem, end the "interim" with the appropriate council, in liturgy revising the Roman liturgy to both provide a single use throughout the church ending the confusion of variations all over the place, and at the same time preserve the liturgy from the doctrinal errors of the reformers, by restoring the liturgy to the original form and essence of the apostles and the early "Fathers". Thus the Roman Missal of Pope Paul V in 1570 (the Roman church officially names liturgy by the name and date of the pope who authorised it).
The Mass of Pope Paul V of 1570 did not, any more than any of the others, stay once delivered and never changed. It was revised just 34 years later by Pope Clement VIII, and 30 years after that by Pope Urban VIII, on through to my own lifetime, in 1955 Pope Pius XII making extensive changes to the liturgy for Holy Week, and finally by Pope John XXIII in 1962.
"Finally" because at Vatican II something altogether different was done. From a confluence of trends from the Liturgical Movement, the Ecumenical Movement and the Higher Critical Movement discussed above, it seemed the Paul V liturgy, also called the Tridentine Rite, could not due to the limitations of its time fulfill its own goals of restoring worship to the form and nature of the Apostles and the Fathers, and an entirely new order, not a revision of the existing order, was constructed -- new Mass, or rather Masses, new calendar, new lectionary, the works.
Well Judas H Priest on a committee, what's so wrong with that?
Yeah I know, we asked that way back up there somewhere. Then we said "For starters". It's just my way of saying by parallel construction that we're now ready for the enders, so to speak.
Conclusion.
You know, a guy could look at all this and say hey, liturgy is a pretty broad term for something that has changed and changed again at various hands for centuries and centuries, so the changes at our hands in our time simply take their place in that unfolding story. After all, there's no revealed liturgy, and as long as it's grounded in Jesus and Scripture, it's OK.
That would be so nice. But it would ignore some huge, essential things.
1. Adiaphora, from the Stoics to the 21st Century LCMS, are not matters of indifference in the sense of "who cares" or "doesn't matter", but in fact, precisely because they are neither good nor bad in themselves, neither commanded nor forbidden, can, and WILL, go either way, and therefore require serious attention for the sake of good order in the church, the building up of the brethren and the spreading of the message, which IS something commanded in Scripture and therefore good in itself.
2. What was the liturgical aim of the Lutheran Reformers? To restore the liturgy to the form and nature of the Apostles and the Fathers? No, that was Trent, not us. To restore the liturgy to the form and intent of the Apostles and the Fathers, crafting a new whole with tools they did not have and therefore produced faulty restorations of the form and intent of the Apostles and Fathers which if retained at all can be at most alongside our new whole? No, that was Vatican II, not us. Our aim, stated in our Confessions, was to invent no new liturgy any more than to invent a new Christianity, but conserve, zealously guard and defend, the ceremonies previously in use, pruning only by the criterion of whether something contradicts the Gospel, faithful to the tradition handed on in the actual experience of the church and not to some imagined lost ideal. That is an entirely different agenda. There is no point in a Lutheran version of a non-Lutheran agenda. Actually, there can't even be such a thing, try as we may to produce one.
3. Not only that, the "reforms" of Vatican II were a conscious and intended break with the past. Was this the liturgical aim of the Lutheran Reformers? No. They wanted to correct the abuses of the past, and in doing so demonstrate our continuity with the past, that in this aspect too we are not some new idea or church but the same one. Dropping a centuries long development with an associated centuries long preaching tradition does not demonstrate continuity with that. Rather, it expresses, intended or not, continuity with the heterodox churches doing this Vatican II style thing in our time in line with the various modern movements (Liturgical, Ecumenical, Higher Critical) discussed above.
4. Having done that, though, can we not use both it and what came before, having the best of the new and the old, and in line with our belief that rites and ceremonies need not be the same everywhere? Well, before even getting to that, as stated in Points Two and Three the "new" is not in line with the aim of the Lutheran reformers, so there is no "best" to be desired. But if one were to proceed anyway, what is the result? That rites and ceremonies need not be the same everywhere for one thing primarily addresses the legitimacy of our efforts to reform liturgy apart from the supposed authority of Rome, and for another, consistency at least within a given area was desired, for the sake of the good order stated in Point One. A situation where in one parish it's this calendar but in another it's that calendar, here this Divine Service "setting" there that Divine Service "setting", here these readings and there those readings, etc, all drawn from between the covers of the same book, in no way corresponds to the varied development of liturgy over time and place; rather, it simply reflects the judgement of whoever determined what goes between the two covers, and mistakes variety over time and place for variety within a given time and place. Which is why the historic liturgies, say those associated with St Gregory in the West or St John Chrysostom in the East, evidence nothing of "Way To Pronounce Absolution A, Way To Pronounce Absolution B; Gloria but here's something else you can do too; here's this "setting" but here's some others too; here's a cycle of Scripture readings but here's another one too; here's a calendar of observances but here's another one too" etc, on through our relatively late The Lutheran Hymnal of 1941. The modern ones, including ours, do, Vatican II style.
5. And once that happens, or rather, since that has happened, it only invites endless discussion of that judgement. The covers of such a book settle nothing, can settle nothing, about the "worship wars" since the covers themselves do not uphold the historic liturgy but are limits imposed on "what else too", leaving the judgement as to what else too forever open to question -- since we look East, or to Rome, or cut and paste from this or that past order like kids playing mix and match dress-up in their parents' closets, why not look to Willow Creek or other places drawing good numbers to services too? And why would they not ask that question: we now already have "contemporary worship" that places liturgy that proceeds from an agenda different than ours alongside our historic worship, that tries to supply a Lutheran content to a non-Lutheran agenda, and with that, it is no longer the zealous guarding and defending of the mass of our Confessions but simply a competition among various ideas of what "contemporary worship" will be allowed too, with LSB and TDP, despite the best intentions, being part of the problem they seek to address.
And that is why I am not a TDP or LSB user.
07 September 2009
It's Fall -- What Happened to Sukkoth? 2009.
Well, it's sort of Fall, or Autumn if you insist -- Labor Day is the unofficial start of Fall, the official one is 1718 hours EDT on 22 September 2009. Sukkoth begins at sunset, the start of the Biblical day, on 2 October this year 2009, 15 Tishrei in the Jewish calendar. So what's my point? Here's the deal.
The background is that Past Elder, the blog, commenced operations 22 February 2007. In my posts about Holy Week, Easter and Pentecost, I mentioned that the Christian pattern of yearly worship derives from the Jewish one.
In my second year, I took to posting a few posts again, revised here and there, that relate to our cycle of observances of major parts of our faith in the church year, and also the civil calendar, calling it the "blogoral cycle" as a play on terms like "sanctoral cycle" for the saint's days in the church year.
The blogoral cycle takes particular note of how our church year comes from and fulfills the cycle of observances in the Jewish calendar. However in Fall, where the Jewish calendar is FULL of stuff, the Christian church calendar has -- NOTHING, precisely where, if it indeed comes from and fulfills the Jewish cycle, one would expect it to be full of stuff too!
What's up with that? Here's the 2009 version of my post about it.
In the religion God delivered to the Jews in the Old Testament, he commands three major festivals: 1) Pesach or Passover; 2) Shavuot or Pentecost, also called Weeks; 3) Sukkot, called Tabernacles or Booths. These three are the Shalosh Regalim, the Three Pilgrim Festivals where all Jews go to Jerusalem.
And in the Fall, in addition to Sukkot, before it there is the High Holidays, more properly the Yamim Noraim or Days of Awe, which are the Ten Days of Repentance from Rosh Hashanah, so-called Jewish New Year, through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year, commanded in the Law of Moses, then Sukkoth itself, which runs seven days, then the Eighth Day, Shemini Atzeret, when normal living indoors resumes and Simchat Torah, Rejoicing in Torah, is held with the conclusion of the annual reading through of Torah and starting it right over again and dancing that often goes on for hours.
In some of the other posts, we saw Passover transformed by Christ at the Last Supper, or Last Seder, into what we call Holy Communion, the new and eternal testament of his body and blood, and ratified by his Death and Resurrection which we celebrate as an event in time on Good Friday and Easter. Then we saw God himself count the commanded Omer and transform the celebration of the giving of the Law at Sinai at Pentecost by the giving of the promised Holy Spirit to the Apostles, which we celebrate as an event in time on the day also called Pentecost.
Then, what -- the whole thing seems to fall apart!! Where's the transformed Rosh Ha-Shanah, where's the transformed Days of Awe, where's the transformed Yom Kippur, where's the transformed Sukkoth, where's the transformed Eighth Day and Rejoicing in Torah? Where's the dancing?
Nowhere, it seems. The Christian calendar is entirely absent of such things. Fall, full of observances in Judaism, comes and goes with nothing until the secular Thanksgiving and then Advent which is a time of preparation for Christmas. So does the parallel fall apart here, or perhaps show itself to be irrelevant anyway if it exists at all? Just give me Jesus, man.
No. Consider how Jesus gives himself. Christ has himself become our atonement, that to which the Day of Atonement led. The "Day of Atonement" is the historical Good Friday, once for all. Rosh Ha-Shanah too, the day on which creation was completed and God judges each person for the coming year, has been fulfilled in God's having re-created lost Man by making justification possible because of the merit of Christ's sacrifice. That is how we are now inscribed, not just for the coming year but for eternity. So these two are absent because they have served their purpose and been fulfilled.
But what of Sukkot? At Sukkot, one lives, or at least takes one's meals, in a temporary structure called a sukkah in Hebrew -- a booth, a tabernacle, not in one's actual home. This is to remember the passage of the people after the Passover and Pentecost to the Promised Land. Zechariah (14:16-19) predicts that in the time of the Messiah the feast will be observed not just by Jews but by all humanity coming to Jerusalem for its observance. That would be a pretty big event. It ain't happening. And a transformed Sukkoth in the Christian calendar ain't even happening either. So what is the deal here?
Consider. Christ is our Passover, in whose blood we are washed and made clean, and the Holy Spirit has empowered the spread of this Good News beginning on that Pentecost recorded in Acts. But the end of the story, unlike the arrival in the Promised Land, has not happened. The real Promised Land is not a piece of geography but heaven itself, the ultimate Jerusalem. So, there cannot be a Christian Sukkoth because we are still in our booths, as it were, not in our permanent homes, still on our pilgimage to the Promised Land, and what Zechariah saw is happening as "the nations", all people, join in this journey given first to the Jews and then to all Man, the Gentiles.
Our Sukkot is our life right now, in our "booths" or temporary homes on our way to heaven! So this feast awaits its transformation, and that is why it is absent. The first two of the "pilgrimage festivals", the Shalosh Regalim, have been transformed, into the basis of not just our calendar but our life and faith itself, but the third will be heaven itself, toward which we journey as we live in our booths here on the way.
While we do not, therefore, have a certain observance of a transformed Sukkot in our calendar, being in our booths presently, we do have something of it as we go. Our nation, and others too, have a secular, national day of Thanksgivng at the end of harvest time, preserving that aspect of thankfulness for our earthly ingathering of the fruits of our labour. And in the final weeks of the Sundays after Trinity, we focus on the End Times in our readings, the great ingathering that will be for all nations when our Sukkoth here is ended, not just at death personally but finally at the Last Day.
As a comment to last year's version of this post, "orrologion", an Orthodox blogger, observed that "In the Orthodox Christian tradition the Transfiguration fills the place of Sukkot. Fruits are blessed and it commemorates Peter's offer to build three booths for Christ, Moses and Elijah". In the Eastern observance the "Blessing of the First Fruits" does give it a harvest connexion, but, Sukkoth is not about first but last fruits. And, in the Transfiguration we see Jesus' fulfillment of the Law (Moses) and the prophets (Elijah), and the appearance of all three persons in God, as he is about to go to Jerusalem for the Crucifixion, Death, and Resurrection.
Related to that, the Feast of the Transfiguration is celebrated in both the Eastern and the Western church on 6 August. The West had the feast, but only settled on this date in 1456, when the Kingdom of Hungary broke the Siege of Belgrade and forced the Islamic Ottomans back. News of the victory made it to Rome on 6 August, and in view of its importance Pope Callixtus III put the Transfiguration in the general Roman church calendar on this date.
We Lutherans do not follow this, but follow a tradition which places the Transfiguration on the last Sunday after Epiphany, placing the event where it is in the course of Jesus' life followed by the Gospel readings of the traditional church cycle. The military connexion of 6 August would be odd for a harvest feast. In our times however it has found a significance which is altogether spooky, which I have never heard anyone East or West mention.
6 August is also the anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons, Hiroshima. It puts in stark contrast the world and God: one can approach a transfiguration by God shown in this event, or one can approach a transfiguration by Man shown in Hiroshima -- salvation is of the Lord.
At my wife's funeral, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the secular Sukkoth, in 1997, the pastor concluded the sermon by saying: A few days ago most of us celebrated a thanksgiving that lasted one day, but Nancy began one that lasts an eternity.
So is the promise to us all. And that's what happened to Sukkot. And also to the rejoicing and dancing, not for hours, but eternity!
The background is that Past Elder, the blog, commenced operations 22 February 2007. In my posts about Holy Week, Easter and Pentecost, I mentioned that the Christian pattern of yearly worship derives from the Jewish one.
In my second year, I took to posting a few posts again, revised here and there, that relate to our cycle of observances of major parts of our faith in the church year, and also the civil calendar, calling it the "blogoral cycle" as a play on terms like "sanctoral cycle" for the saint's days in the church year.
The blogoral cycle takes particular note of how our church year comes from and fulfills the cycle of observances in the Jewish calendar. However in Fall, where the Jewish calendar is FULL of stuff, the Christian church calendar has -- NOTHING, precisely where, if it indeed comes from and fulfills the Jewish cycle, one would expect it to be full of stuff too!
What's up with that? Here's the 2009 version of my post about it.
In the religion God delivered to the Jews in the Old Testament, he commands three major festivals: 1) Pesach or Passover; 2) Shavuot or Pentecost, also called Weeks; 3) Sukkot, called Tabernacles or Booths. These three are the Shalosh Regalim, the Three Pilgrim Festivals where all Jews go to Jerusalem.
And in the Fall, in addition to Sukkot, before it there is the High Holidays, more properly the Yamim Noraim or Days of Awe, which are the Ten Days of Repentance from Rosh Hashanah, so-called Jewish New Year, through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year, commanded in the Law of Moses, then Sukkoth itself, which runs seven days, then the Eighth Day, Shemini Atzeret, when normal living indoors resumes and Simchat Torah, Rejoicing in Torah, is held with the conclusion of the annual reading through of Torah and starting it right over again and dancing that often goes on for hours.
In some of the other posts, we saw Passover transformed by Christ at the Last Supper, or Last Seder, into what we call Holy Communion, the new and eternal testament of his body and blood, and ratified by his Death and Resurrection which we celebrate as an event in time on Good Friday and Easter. Then we saw God himself count the commanded Omer and transform the celebration of the giving of the Law at Sinai at Pentecost by the giving of the promised Holy Spirit to the Apostles, which we celebrate as an event in time on the day also called Pentecost.
Then, what -- the whole thing seems to fall apart!! Where's the transformed Rosh Ha-Shanah, where's the transformed Days of Awe, where's the transformed Yom Kippur, where's the transformed Sukkoth, where's the transformed Eighth Day and Rejoicing in Torah? Where's the dancing?
Nowhere, it seems. The Christian calendar is entirely absent of such things. Fall, full of observances in Judaism, comes and goes with nothing until the secular Thanksgiving and then Advent which is a time of preparation for Christmas. So does the parallel fall apart here, or perhaps show itself to be irrelevant anyway if it exists at all? Just give me Jesus, man.
No. Consider how Jesus gives himself. Christ has himself become our atonement, that to which the Day of Atonement led. The "Day of Atonement" is the historical Good Friday, once for all. Rosh Ha-Shanah too, the day on which creation was completed and God judges each person for the coming year, has been fulfilled in God's having re-created lost Man by making justification possible because of the merit of Christ's sacrifice. That is how we are now inscribed, not just for the coming year but for eternity. So these two are absent because they have served their purpose and been fulfilled.
But what of Sukkot? At Sukkot, one lives, or at least takes one's meals, in a temporary structure called a sukkah in Hebrew -- a booth, a tabernacle, not in one's actual home. This is to remember the passage of the people after the Passover and Pentecost to the Promised Land. Zechariah (14:16-19) predicts that in the time of the Messiah the feast will be observed not just by Jews but by all humanity coming to Jerusalem for its observance. That would be a pretty big event. It ain't happening. And a transformed Sukkoth in the Christian calendar ain't even happening either. So what is the deal here?
Consider. Christ is our Passover, in whose blood we are washed and made clean, and the Holy Spirit has empowered the spread of this Good News beginning on that Pentecost recorded in Acts. But the end of the story, unlike the arrival in the Promised Land, has not happened. The real Promised Land is not a piece of geography but heaven itself, the ultimate Jerusalem. So, there cannot be a Christian Sukkoth because we are still in our booths, as it were, not in our permanent homes, still on our pilgimage to the Promised Land, and what Zechariah saw is happening as "the nations", all people, join in this journey given first to the Jews and then to all Man, the Gentiles.
Our Sukkot is our life right now, in our "booths" or temporary homes on our way to heaven! So this feast awaits its transformation, and that is why it is absent. The first two of the "pilgrimage festivals", the Shalosh Regalim, have been transformed, into the basis of not just our calendar but our life and faith itself, but the third will be heaven itself, toward which we journey as we live in our booths here on the way.
While we do not, therefore, have a certain observance of a transformed Sukkot in our calendar, being in our booths presently, we do have something of it as we go. Our nation, and others too, have a secular, national day of Thanksgivng at the end of harvest time, preserving that aspect of thankfulness for our earthly ingathering of the fruits of our labour. And in the final weeks of the Sundays after Trinity, we focus on the End Times in our readings, the great ingathering that will be for all nations when our Sukkoth here is ended, not just at death personally but finally at the Last Day.
As a comment to last year's version of this post, "orrologion", an Orthodox blogger, observed that "In the Orthodox Christian tradition the Transfiguration fills the place of Sukkot. Fruits are blessed and it commemorates Peter's offer to build three booths for Christ, Moses and Elijah". In the Eastern observance the "Blessing of the First Fruits" does give it a harvest connexion, but, Sukkoth is not about first but last fruits. And, in the Transfiguration we see Jesus' fulfillment of the Law (Moses) and the prophets (Elijah), and the appearance of all three persons in God, as he is about to go to Jerusalem for the Crucifixion, Death, and Resurrection.
Related to that, the Feast of the Transfiguration is celebrated in both the Eastern and the Western church on 6 August. The West had the feast, but only settled on this date in 1456, when the Kingdom of Hungary broke the Siege of Belgrade and forced the Islamic Ottomans back. News of the victory made it to Rome on 6 August, and in view of its importance Pope Callixtus III put the Transfiguration in the general Roman church calendar on this date.
We Lutherans do not follow this, but follow a tradition which places the Transfiguration on the last Sunday after Epiphany, placing the event where it is in the course of Jesus' life followed by the Gospel readings of the traditional church cycle. The military connexion of 6 August would be odd for a harvest feast. In our times however it has found a significance which is altogether spooky, which I have never heard anyone East or West mention.
6 August is also the anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons, Hiroshima. It puts in stark contrast the world and God: one can approach a transfiguration by God shown in this event, or one can approach a transfiguration by Man shown in Hiroshima -- salvation is of the Lord.
At my wife's funeral, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the secular Sukkoth, in 1997, the pastor concluded the sermon by saying: A few days ago most of us celebrated a thanksgiving that lasted one day, but Nancy began one that lasts an eternity.
So is the promise to us all. And that's what happened to Sukkot. And also to the rejoicing and dancing, not for hours, but eternity!
29 August 2009
Readin', Writin', and Absolute Multitude. Academics 2009.
What's up with that? Don't I mean 'Rithmetic?
Back To School -- Oy!
When it's almost back to school time, along with all the sales in the stores there's 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 1) How and Where It Started, 2) What the Seven Liberal Arts Actually Are, 3) The Modern University, 4) How It Fell Apart, 5) Where We Are Now, 6) Where We Could Be, and a little concluding note you might enjoy.
I. How and Where It Started.
You don't hear much about it these days, but the ideas of liberal arts education, like democracy, originated in Greek antiquity, in societies where those who were going to participate in democracy, and have such an education as to do that, were not 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, and a liberal art originally meant not what we think of now but something appropriate to the free 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 -- Aristotle.
The Academy was refounded on Platonic philosophy in 410 AD and lasted until closed by the Roman Emporer 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 but the state religion, "Christianity", in the Empire, 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 sought haven in the Persian Sassanid Empire, and 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, now 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, while Europe, where all this stuff came from, was a complete mess. Helluva guy that Justinian, huh. The Eastern Orthodox think he's a saint, which I suppose makes sense for his old state church, but unfortunately so do some of us Lutherans.
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 ceased to be. Its location was rediscovered in 1996, just east of modern downtown Athens. The word 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 communicated information, Philology, and the remaining seven are textbooks in each of the seven arts we will detail below. They were largely based on existing ancient works, and the whole thing was pretty much an encyclopaedia of its time, which, when that knowledge 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 the content of 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 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.
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 too, trivial matters being those you learn 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)
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 math to-day. 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 only mean by music, except, it includes only the understanding part, the actual making of this kind of music being simply a skill and not included for its own sake but 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. When the idea began, work did not ennoble, it debased, it 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. Later, trades, something learned for the purpose of making a living, were learned in guilds, not universities, with the interesting twist that guilds formed first and universities began by borowing 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, it's 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.
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 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. rather than 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.)
Thus 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, the church (the proverbial "academic freedom") and also that a graduate from one could teach anywhere 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, the crown did. These differences had major consequences. 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 in the French Revolution centuries later; government sponsorship of Oxford and the later Cambridge (1209) allowed them to survive the replacement of the church with the state Church of England.
A student 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 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 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.
Which was great for science, but also had the effect of making everything previously held now seem possibly wrong or soon to be found out to be wrong.
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, and 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 the via antinqua 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 of 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 -- utterly revolutionary, and part of the shift in the times 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 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, 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.
Those first universities are still around right now. US News & World Report puts out school rankings annually, one for the US, but one world-wide based in turn on the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings. This would be then a list of the top universities in the world, 400 in all. In the rankings for 2010, published 18 June 2009, the very first university in the modern sense, University of Bologna, founded 1088, is still among the best in the world, coming in at #192. Oxford and Cambridge even better, coming in at #4 and #3 respectively! (BTW, who's #1 and #2? Harvard and Yale, respectively.) The University of Paris, though it was abolished per se by the French Revolution, has a number of institutions with historical links to it, some of them using the locational name Sorbonne, and several of them are ranked.
For that matter, if one wants to look beyond the modern degree-granting university to institutions of higher education generally, arguably the oldest degree-granting institution is one of those madrasahs, now the University of Al-Karaouine, in Morocco, dating from 859, when Europe was a bloody mess barely held to-gether educationally by the grand and glorious hard working and uproarious Benedictines. Along the lines of universities not originally universities in the modern sense, the line goes back much further, to Nanjing University, which is now a modern university but was founded in China in 258, and after a ton of bumps along the way you know what, STILL hangs in ranked #143 in the world!
Recent decades have seen an astounding increase in the ability of thoughts and information to be communicated, starting with mass printing some time ago but exploding first with the coming of radio, then TV, and now the Internet and other forms of 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 lost sight of this, 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, 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 exemplfies what this is all about.
Her essay is online now. You can read it here: http://web.archive.org/web/20040415041359/http://redeemerclassical.org/lost_tools.php
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.
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. It's 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, reading Aristotle, learning Latin, or anything like that -- though there's good reason to do the last two. What 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.
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 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.
Perhaps another reformation is needed, not a religious but an educational one, where the tools of learning are actually taught, where a person is then taught how to handle abstact operations, operations applied to things as they add up, how complicated things break down and how that is applied to things. Perhaps 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, violates the very parsimony and science it thinks it passes on, as it neither guarantess 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, violates its very definition!
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, ranks #219 worldwide, not too shabby for a relative newcomer only organised 25 February 1847 in what had just become a state only 59 days before! 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 morphed into Mary, Jesus' mother, Mater dei genitrix. As an academic reference it comes from the phrase "alma mater studiorum", which means nourishing mother of studies. 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 -- read, winning against or at least getting your slice of the pie with other players -- etc.
Oy.
(Textual Note: This post is a complete revision of my earlier similarly titled one, also incorporating my immediately prior one plus additional material.)
Back To School -- Oy!
When it's almost back to school time, along with all the sales in the stores there's 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 1) How and Where It Started, 2) What the Seven Liberal Arts Actually Are, 3) The Modern University, 4) How It Fell Apart, 5) Where We Are Now, 6) Where We Could Be, and a little concluding note you might enjoy.
I. How and Where It Started.
You don't hear much about it these days, but the ideas of liberal arts education, like democracy, originated in Greek antiquity, in societies where those who were going to participate in democracy, and have such an education as to do that, were not 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, and a liberal art originally meant not what we think of now but something appropriate to the free 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 -- Aristotle.
The Academy was refounded on Platonic philosophy in 410 AD and lasted until closed by the Roman Emporer 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 but the state religion, "Christianity", in the Empire, 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 sought haven in the Persian Sassanid Empire, and 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, now 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, while Europe, where all this stuff came from, was a complete mess. Helluva guy that Justinian, huh. The Eastern Orthodox think he's a saint, which I suppose makes sense for his old state church, but unfortunately so do some of us Lutherans.
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 ceased to be. Its location was rediscovered in 1996, just east of modern downtown Athens. The word 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 communicated information, Philology, and the remaining seven are textbooks in each of the seven arts we will detail below. They were largely based on existing ancient works, and the whole thing was pretty much an encyclopaedia of its time, which, when that knowledge 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 the content of 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 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.
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 too, trivial matters being those you learn 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 Trivium was not grammar, rhetoric and logic exactly as we mean them now, nor even something learned for its own sake, but 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, evaluate whether the written or spoken thoughts of others are well written down or written to hide or disguise things, 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.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 math to-day. 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 only mean by music, except, it includes only the understanding part, the actual making of this kind of music being simply a skill and not included for its own sake but 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. When the idea began, work did not ennoble, it debased, it 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. Later, trades, something learned for the purpose of making a living, were learned in guilds, not universities, with the interesting twist that guilds formed first and universities began by borowing 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, it's 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 a guild learning a trade.
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 (argumentum ad verecundiam), which 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 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, and which is the origin of the ad hominum (against the man), which refutes a statement on the basis that the authority cited is no authority at all. 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 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. rather than 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.)
Thus 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, the church (the proverbial "academic freedom") and also that a graduate from one could teach anywhere 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, the crown did. These differences had major consequences. 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 in the French Revolution centuries later; government sponsorship of Oxford and the later Cambridge (1209) allowed them to survive the replacement of the church with the state Church of England.
A student 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 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 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.
Which was great for science, but also had the effect of making everything previously held now seem possibly wrong or soon to be found out to be wrong.
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, and 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 the via antinqua 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 of 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 -- utterly revolutionary, and part of the shift in the times 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 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, 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.
Those first universities are still around right now. US News & World Report puts out school rankings annually, one for the US, but one world-wide based in turn on the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings. This would be then a list of the top universities in the world, 400 in all. In the rankings for 2010, published 18 June 2009, the very first university in the modern sense, University of Bologna, founded 1088, is still among the best in the world, coming in at #192. Oxford and Cambridge even better, coming in at #4 and #3 respectively! (BTW, who's #1 and #2? Harvard and Yale, respectively.) The University of Paris, though it was abolished per se by the French Revolution, has a number of institutions with historical links to it, some of them using the locational name Sorbonne, and several of them are ranked.
For that matter, if one wants to look beyond the modern degree-granting university to institutions of higher education generally, arguably the oldest degree-granting institution is one of those madrasahs, now the University of Al-Karaouine, in Morocco, dating from 859, when Europe was a bloody mess barely held to-gether educationally by the grand and glorious hard working and uproarious Benedictines. Along the lines of universities not originally universities in the modern sense, the line goes back much further, to Nanjing University, which is now a modern university but was founded in China in 258, and after a ton of bumps along the way you know what, STILL hangs in ranked #143 in the world!
Recent decades have seen an astounding increase in the ability of thoughts and information to be communicated, starting with mass printing some time ago but exploding first with the coming of radio, then TV, and now the Internet and other forms of 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 lost sight of this, 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, 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 exemplfies what this is all about.
Her essay is online now. You can read it here: http://web.archive.org/web/20040415041359/http://redeemerclassical.org/lost_tools.php
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.
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. It's 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, reading Aristotle, learning Latin, or anything like that -- though there's good reason to do the last two. What 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.
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 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.
Perhaps another reformation is needed, not a religious but an educational one, where the tools of learning are actually taught, where a person is then taught how to handle abstact operations, operations applied to things as they add up, how complicated things break down and how that is applied to things. Perhaps 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, violates the very parsimony and science it thinks it passes on, as it neither guarantess 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, violates its very definition!
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, ranks #219 worldwide, not too shabby for a relative newcomer only organised 25 February 1847 in what had just become a state only 59 days before! 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 morphed into Mary, Jesus' mother, Mater dei genitrix. As an academic reference it comes from the phrase "alma mater studiorum", which means nourishing mother of studies. 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 -- read, winning against or at least getting your slice of the pie with other players -- etc.
Oy.
(Textual Note: This post is a complete revision of my earlier similarly titled one, also incorporating my immediately prior one plus additional material.)
27 August 2009
Where are the universities now?
On 22 April 2009 I posted "Readin', Writin' and Absolute Multitude. Lyceum 2009", about the whole idea of higher education since ancient Greece. So where is it now?
This time of year, a lot of school rankings come out, and I got interested to check them out. A very often used one is published by US News and World Report. There's two actually, one worldwide, and the other for the US. The latter is broken down into various categories, making it hard to just flat out rate them -- of course, flat out rating them is hard too, and some say impossible -- so I'll stick to the worldwide one, dated 18 June 2009, which is in turn based on the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings. This would be then a list of the top universities in the world, 400 in all.
I guess we like top ten lists, so here's the first ten, in order: Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, Cal Tech, Imperial College London, University College London, U Chicago, MIT and Columbia.
The highest ranking institution in continental Europe is ETH Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, founded 1854, at #24. However, the highest ranking institution outside of the present or former British Empire or Commonwealth is the University of Tokyo, founded 1877, at #19.
The original universities in the modern sense, mentioned in the earlier post, are still hanging right in there. The oldest university, from which we even get the word university, University of Bologna, founded 1088, is still hanging in there, ranked among the finest in the world at #192. Good show, old girl!
It's a little hard tellin' from there. The University of Paris may be next oldest, founded 1160 or maybe a little before, but then again it doesn't matter as the University effectively ceased to exist with the French Revolution. Some time later it was revived, sort of, now supposedly is an association of thirteen universities, but that only dates from after student strikes in the late 1960s, and is reorganising again, so while several of the current thirteen are ranked, it's not exactly the old University of Paris.
Oxford may be the second oldest anyway, depending on what you take as its founding date. 1167 is often given, but there was teaching before that at least since 1096, however it really took off in 1167 when King Henry II banned English students from going to University of Paris. It's holding up pretty well though, #4 in the world. Cambridge rounds out the list, being founded in 1209, though there was teaching there before that, by Oxford scholars upset that the town actually hung scholars for murder -- "Academic freedom" was supposed to cover that -- and is still hanging in at #3.
So, of the current top ten, two (Oxford and Cambridge) are among the very first six universities, and of those six three still directly survive, and not only survive, two of them (Oxford and Cambridge) are in the top ten now, and the third, the oldest and first (Bologna), is STILL among the ranked, and of the other three, one (University of Paris) has several ranked later institutions with historical links to it, and the other two have historical links to the unranked University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.
Well, what the hell. All these resulted from applying structural elements from the trade guilds to models from Islamic schools anyway, the madrasahs, which like their later Christian counterparts grew out of schools attached to houses of worship. The oldest of those Islamic schools, and arguably then the oldest degree granting institution in the world, is the University of Al-Karaouine, in Morocco, dating from 859, when Europe was a bloody mess barely held to-gether educationally by the grand and glorious hard working and uproarious Benedictines.
The madrasahs did not grant degrees from the institution itself, but rather licences granted by each specific teacher, and if one looks away from the institutional degree that characterises the modern university, the line goes back much further to Nanjing University, now a modern university but founded in China in 258 and after a ton of bumps along the way you know what, STILL hanging in ranked #143 in the world!
I'm happy to say my alma mater, the University of Iowa, from which I got my MA and PhD degrees, ranks #219 worldwide, not too shabby for a relative newcomer only organised in 1847 in what had just become a state only the year before!
This time of year, a lot of school rankings come out, and I got interested to check them out. A very often used one is published by US News and World Report. There's two actually, one worldwide, and the other for the US. The latter is broken down into various categories, making it hard to just flat out rate them -- of course, flat out rating them is hard too, and some say impossible -- so I'll stick to the worldwide one, dated 18 June 2009, which is in turn based on the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings. This would be then a list of the top universities in the world, 400 in all.
I guess we like top ten lists, so here's the first ten, in order: Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, Cal Tech, Imperial College London, University College London, U Chicago, MIT and Columbia.
The highest ranking institution in continental Europe is ETH Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, founded 1854, at #24. However, the highest ranking institution outside of the present or former British Empire or Commonwealth is the University of Tokyo, founded 1877, at #19.
The original universities in the modern sense, mentioned in the earlier post, are still hanging right in there. The oldest university, from which we even get the word university, University of Bologna, founded 1088, is still hanging in there, ranked among the finest in the world at #192. Good show, old girl!
It's a little hard tellin' from there. The University of Paris may be next oldest, founded 1160 or maybe a little before, but then again it doesn't matter as the University effectively ceased to exist with the French Revolution. Some time later it was revived, sort of, now supposedly is an association of thirteen universities, but that only dates from after student strikes in the late 1960s, and is reorganising again, so while several of the current thirteen are ranked, it's not exactly the old University of Paris.
Oxford may be the second oldest anyway, depending on what you take as its founding date. 1167 is often given, but there was teaching before that at least since 1096, however it really took off in 1167 when King Henry II banned English students from going to University of Paris. It's holding up pretty well though, #4 in the world. Cambridge rounds out the list, being founded in 1209, though there was teaching there before that, by Oxford scholars upset that the town actually hung scholars for murder -- "Academic freedom" was supposed to cover that -- and is still hanging in at #3.
So, of the current top ten, two (Oxford and Cambridge) are among the very first six universities, and of those six three still directly survive, and not only survive, two of them (Oxford and Cambridge) are in the top ten now, and the third, the oldest and first (Bologna), is STILL among the ranked, and of the other three, one (University of Paris) has several ranked later institutions with historical links to it, and the other two have historical links to the unranked University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.
Well, what the hell. All these resulted from applying structural elements from the trade guilds to models from Islamic schools anyway, the madrasahs, which like their later Christian counterparts grew out of schools attached to houses of worship. The oldest of those Islamic schools, and arguably then the oldest degree granting institution in the world, is the University of Al-Karaouine, in Morocco, dating from 859, when Europe was a bloody mess barely held to-gether educationally by the grand and glorious hard working and uproarious Benedictines.
The madrasahs did not grant degrees from the institution itself, but rather licences granted by each specific teacher, and if one looks away from the institutional degree that characterises the modern university, the line goes back much further to Nanjing University, now a modern university but founded in China in 258 and after a ton of bumps along the way you know what, STILL hanging in ranked #143 in the world!
I'm happy to say my alma mater, the University of Iowa, from which I got my MA and PhD degrees, ranks #219 worldwide, not too shabby for a relative newcomer only organised in 1847 in what had just become a state only the year before!
20 August 2009
St Monica and Vatican II For Lutherans. 27 August 2009.
We Lutherans -- that is, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, insofar as the name has not been removed or hidden so people don't think we're some kind of frozen chosen, maintenance rather than missional mentality, wannabe Catholics stuck in a Eurocentric liturgical straight-jacket for worship rather than ablaze to bring you to a critical event and get you all on fire with our praise band -- are about to celebrate the Feast of St Monica on 27 August.
Thing is, the Feast of St Monica is 4 May.
Huh? Who cares? What difference does that make? And who is and why bother about this Monica anyway? The last Monica anyone heard about was Lewinsky! Besides, it's all adiaphora, right, why trample on my Christian Freedom with all this dead weight from the past?
Monica was the mother of St Augustine. Geez, whozzat? Well, arguably the most influential Christian theologian ever. We'll leave whether that was for better or worse, as well as biographies, to your searches or Wikipedia. Except for this part: Augustine was quite non-Christian, anti-Christian really, and a celebrated figure in his time, and his conversion was brought about by the example and prayers of his Christian mother, Monica, which is why the church honours her.
When the church sets up a day in honour of someone, the traditional practice is to choose the day on which the person died, if known, since that is the day they were born into eternity. St Augustine's date of death, his heavenly birthday, is 28 August 430, so 28 August is his feast.
St Monica's feast day was not a part of the overall observance of the Western Church for about three-fourths of its elapsed history to date, until about the time of the Council of Trent in the Sixteenth Century. However, it was long observed by the Augustinian Order. Geez, whazzat?
The "Augustinian Order" is a rather motley assortment of religious associations rather than a clear cut single entity -- in this way rather like my guys, the Benedictines -- all of them tracing their origin to St Augustine and his rule of life, or regula in Latin. That's what it literally is to be regular -- you live under a regula, or rule. Readers here may have heard of one such Augustinian. Guy named Martin Luther. Anyway, in the Augustinian Order but not the church as a whole there was, besides the observance of the feast of St Augustine on 28 August, another one whose focus was his conversion to Christianity, which conversion in turn influenced the entire church.
This Augustinian feast, the Feast of the Conversion of St Augustine, was/is celebrated on 5 May. So they celebrated the single biggest human factor in bringing about that conversion, the example and prayers of his mother, St Monica, the day before, 4 May. The Conversion feast never did make it into the overall Roman Calendar, and when St Monica's did, since her date of death is not known, the traditional Augustinian date was retained, 4 May. Simple.
Until the Revolution. Er, Vatican II.
One of the stated aims of the "liturgical reform" at Vatican II was to pare down the historical hodgepodge of stuff into something more straightforward and accessible. So they effectively banned the old stuff and came up with an entirely new order (novus ordo), sporting four "Eucharistic Prayers", several new options for other key parts of the Mass, a new lectionary of readings spread out over three years, and a new calendar -- a new hodgepodge crafted from an even wider spread of historical sources! Oh well, it was the 1960s after all. I guess you gotta make allowances for that.
One small item in this was relocating the Feast of St Monica to 27 August, the day before the feast of her son. There's a logic to that. And as far as the institution of Christ and fidelity to Scripture goes, you can celebrate the Feast of St Monica on 4 May, 27 August, any other day, or not at all.
However, it's not the 1960s any more. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to learn or be taught that we honour St Monica because of her example, particularly her example of the power of persistent prayer, in the conversion of her pagan son, who went on to be one of the church's greatest saints, and we do so on 4 May because in the religious order that looks to her son as their patron saint they had long celebrated it on 4 May, the day before they celebrated the conversion of their patron on 5 May. And to stay connected to and become a part of that ongoing history by leaving it there rather than turning one's back on all that and relocating it.
Sorry, Roman dudes. There already was a liturgical reform. It was to pare down all right, but in view of what contradicts Scripture, not our ideas of what makes something more "accessible", and to zealously guard and defend the worship of the church's existing order, not invent a new one. It's called the Lutheran Reformation. You're a few centuries late to the party. If the Roman hierarchy and associated academics are going to busy themselves with something other than preaching Christ and him crucified, and along the way explain the history of this movement, let them put off the period clothes, get married and raise a family and learn something of real benefit to their fellow man, like heating and air conditioning repair.
Yet, we and other Christian bodies now fall in line with them as if there had been no Reformation! The 1960s Roman novus ordo, with emendations and adaptations, is now the common property of pretty much all other heterodox Christian denominations with liturgical aspirations, rather than the traditional order of the Western Church.
And "our beloved synod" falls into line too, even those parts of it trying to remain true to our Confessions in the Book of Concord. We moan and groan why other parts of our beloved synod seem to be heading off on all sorts of tangents, or rather, variations on the tangent of chasing after the success in attracting numbers of the American suburban "evangelical" megachurches that will drive you with purpose and give you your best life now.
We wonder how our people could be taken in by these false hopes and promises, yet, why should our people not wonder why these are not also valid options when we set before them as confessional "options" modelled after 1960s Rome equally with our common catholic history, this historical mass and that Vatican II For Lutherans mass, this historical lectionary and that Vatican II For Lutherans lectionary, this historical calendar and that Vatican II For Lutherans calendar. Why not listen to Willow Creek and Saddleback and Lakewood too? Why should they not think it's all about options, personal preference, all OK? We let something in through the back door then wonder why it comes knocking at the front!
Even in a small matter like when a saint's day is observed the whole rotten Roman mess in the church is revealed, and its adoption/adaptation by other church bodies!
St Monica gave St Augustine physical birth, but her greatness for which we honour her is not that but in her role in his spiritual birth in this life. Therefore she is better honoured by leaving her day where it is for the reason it is there, or better yet finally inserting the Conversion into the Calendar, rather than moving it from a day which does have inherent reference to her to the day before her son's feast, which does not.
Once again, the calendar, lectionary and ordo of Vatican II all miss the mark, even of its own intended reform, the product not of the Christian church but one denomination headed by an office bearing the marks of Anti-Christ -- regardless of its current occupancy by a nice and learned German guy -- and now the common property of all heterodox liturgical churches in the West, utterly irrelevant to Christ's Church and therefore should be utterly irrelevant to Lutherans.
Right along with Saddleback, Willow Creek and Lakewood, Rome no less than they offers "contemporary worship" whose forms derive from and express a content that is not ours and rejects ours, derived from an agenda that is not ours and rejects ours, and therefore into which our content does not fit nor should we try to make it fit, and abandon that part of our mission which is to zealously guard and defend the mass, for the most part retaining the ceremonies previously in use, when we do.
Thing is, the Feast of St Monica is 4 May.
Huh? Who cares? What difference does that make? And who is and why bother about this Monica anyway? The last Monica anyone heard about was Lewinsky! Besides, it's all adiaphora, right, why trample on my Christian Freedom with all this dead weight from the past?
Monica was the mother of St Augustine. Geez, whozzat? Well, arguably the most influential Christian theologian ever. We'll leave whether that was for better or worse, as well as biographies, to your searches or Wikipedia. Except for this part: Augustine was quite non-Christian, anti-Christian really, and a celebrated figure in his time, and his conversion was brought about by the example and prayers of his Christian mother, Monica, which is why the church honours her.
When the church sets up a day in honour of someone, the traditional practice is to choose the day on which the person died, if known, since that is the day they were born into eternity. St Augustine's date of death, his heavenly birthday, is 28 August 430, so 28 August is his feast.
St Monica's feast day was not a part of the overall observance of the Western Church for about three-fourths of its elapsed history to date, until about the time of the Council of Trent in the Sixteenth Century. However, it was long observed by the Augustinian Order. Geez, whazzat?
The "Augustinian Order" is a rather motley assortment of religious associations rather than a clear cut single entity -- in this way rather like my guys, the Benedictines -- all of them tracing their origin to St Augustine and his rule of life, or regula in Latin. That's what it literally is to be regular -- you live under a regula, or rule. Readers here may have heard of one such Augustinian. Guy named Martin Luther. Anyway, in the Augustinian Order but not the church as a whole there was, besides the observance of the feast of St Augustine on 28 August, another one whose focus was his conversion to Christianity, which conversion in turn influenced the entire church.
This Augustinian feast, the Feast of the Conversion of St Augustine, was/is celebrated on 5 May. So they celebrated the single biggest human factor in bringing about that conversion, the example and prayers of his mother, St Monica, the day before, 4 May. The Conversion feast never did make it into the overall Roman Calendar, and when St Monica's did, since her date of death is not known, the traditional Augustinian date was retained, 4 May. Simple.
Until the Revolution. Er, Vatican II.
One of the stated aims of the "liturgical reform" at Vatican II was to pare down the historical hodgepodge of stuff into something more straightforward and accessible. So they effectively banned the old stuff and came up with an entirely new order (novus ordo), sporting four "Eucharistic Prayers", several new options for other key parts of the Mass, a new lectionary of readings spread out over three years, and a new calendar -- a new hodgepodge crafted from an even wider spread of historical sources! Oh well, it was the 1960s after all. I guess you gotta make allowances for that.
One small item in this was relocating the Feast of St Monica to 27 August, the day before the feast of her son. There's a logic to that. And as far as the institution of Christ and fidelity to Scripture goes, you can celebrate the Feast of St Monica on 4 May, 27 August, any other day, or not at all.
However, it's not the 1960s any more. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to learn or be taught that we honour St Monica because of her example, particularly her example of the power of persistent prayer, in the conversion of her pagan son, who went on to be one of the church's greatest saints, and we do so on 4 May because in the religious order that looks to her son as their patron saint they had long celebrated it on 4 May, the day before they celebrated the conversion of their patron on 5 May. And to stay connected to and become a part of that ongoing history by leaving it there rather than turning one's back on all that and relocating it.
Sorry, Roman dudes. There already was a liturgical reform. It was to pare down all right, but in view of what contradicts Scripture, not our ideas of what makes something more "accessible", and to zealously guard and defend the worship of the church's existing order, not invent a new one. It's called the Lutheran Reformation. You're a few centuries late to the party. If the Roman hierarchy and associated academics are going to busy themselves with something other than preaching Christ and him crucified, and along the way explain the history of this movement, let them put off the period clothes, get married and raise a family and learn something of real benefit to their fellow man, like heating and air conditioning repair.
Yet, we and other Christian bodies now fall in line with them as if there had been no Reformation! The 1960s Roman novus ordo, with emendations and adaptations, is now the common property of pretty much all other heterodox Christian denominations with liturgical aspirations, rather than the traditional order of the Western Church.
And "our beloved synod" falls into line too, even those parts of it trying to remain true to our Confessions in the Book of Concord. We moan and groan why other parts of our beloved synod seem to be heading off on all sorts of tangents, or rather, variations on the tangent of chasing after the success in attracting numbers of the American suburban "evangelical" megachurches that will drive you with purpose and give you your best life now.
We wonder how our people could be taken in by these false hopes and promises, yet, why should our people not wonder why these are not also valid options when we set before them as confessional "options" modelled after 1960s Rome equally with our common catholic history, this historical mass and that Vatican II For Lutherans mass, this historical lectionary and that Vatican II For Lutherans lectionary, this historical calendar and that Vatican II For Lutherans calendar. Why not listen to Willow Creek and Saddleback and Lakewood too? Why should they not think it's all about options, personal preference, all OK? We let something in through the back door then wonder why it comes knocking at the front!
Even in a small matter like when a saint's day is observed the whole rotten Roman mess in the church is revealed, and its adoption/adaptation by other church bodies!
St Monica gave St Augustine physical birth, but her greatness for which we honour her is not that but in her role in his spiritual birth in this life. Therefore she is better honoured by leaving her day where it is for the reason it is there, or better yet finally inserting the Conversion into the Calendar, rather than moving it from a day which does have inherent reference to her to the day before her son's feast, which does not.
Once again, the calendar, lectionary and ordo of Vatican II all miss the mark, even of its own intended reform, the product not of the Christian church but one denomination headed by an office bearing the marks of Anti-Christ -- regardless of its current occupancy by a nice and learned German guy -- and now the common property of all heterodox liturgical churches in the West, utterly irrelevant to Christ's Church and therefore should be utterly irrelevant to Lutherans.
Right along with Saddleback, Willow Creek and Lakewood, Rome no less than they offers "contemporary worship" whose forms derive from and express a content that is not ours and rejects ours, derived from an agenda that is not ours and rejects ours, and therefore into which our content does not fit nor should we try to make it fit, and abandon that part of our mission which is to zealously guard and defend the mass, for the most part retaining the ceremonies previously in use, when we do.
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