Septuagesima With the Ambrosian Rite … and the Rite Brought to Canterbury by S Augustine

Two short posts by Fr Hunwicke looking at the pre-Tridentine Liturgy of today's Feast.

From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment

In 2020, the CDF took action. Interested readers will know that this dicastery then had the role of the nice old Sacred Congregation of Rites with regard to the Authentic Form of the Roman Rite. And there is a bonus: their intervention caused fury to some "liturgist" called Grillo. His view is that it is wrong  to make any alterations to the Authentic Form because it is already crystalised into immutable obsolescence. How do we know that it is so crystalised? Because it has not been changed ... a fine-rate example, yes, of a circular argument? 'Modern' liturgists are never happier than when whizzing endlessly round on a Victorian fairground roundabout.

The CDF changes (which were all optional) related to Prefaces (and, in a separate Decree, to the Calendar). Introduction of more prefaces had been encouraged by Benedict XVI in Summorum Pontificum. And, indeed, by indult certain additional prefaces of eighteenth century French origin ('Gallican') had already long been used within the SSPX and elsewhere. So what did the CDF do?

It consulted.

In one of its consultation documents, it had included a neo-'Gallican' preface for Advent. And also a preface for the Gesima Sundays. But in its final Decree, it omitted these two prefaces (but dropped a hint that this did not preclude the possible granting of other prefaces). The change, it explained, was because the spirit of the Authentic Use in the twentieth century had become inimical to additional  seasonal prefaces (All the new twentieth century prefaces had been for feasts, or requiems, not for seasons).

The rest of this post concerns the Septuagesima preface which the CDF had tentatively proposed but then abandoned.

This is an old preface tinkered with in the 1970s when it was included in the Novus Ordo. It is the Preface for Septuagesima Sunday in the Ambrosian Rite (I have before me the 1712 edition) and in the Bergamo Sacramentary; in the Leofric Missal, the old Pontifical Book of the Archbishops of Canterbury (which probably preserves readings in the books which S Augustine brought with him to Canterbury), it is provided for the last Sunday after Epiphany. It appears also in other early sacramentaries.

So it does belong to this season of the year. 

My only problem with it is that the Novus Ordo took liberties with the ancient texts. Same old story ...

Novus Ordo Praefatio III de Dominicis per Annum.

VD ... omnipotens aeterne Deus: Ad cuius immensam gloriam pertinere cognoscimus ut mortalibus tua Deitate succurreres; sed et nobis provideres de ipsa mortalitate nostra remedium, et perditos quosque unde perierant, inde salvares, per Xtm Dnm nostrum.

I first started thinking about this ... you know how it is  ... because I couldn't think of the answer to a rather obvious question which a III Former could probably spot: why are the subjunctive verbs put into Historic Sequence (i.e. Imperfect Subjunctives)? I still haven't shifted this log-jam in my mind ...

In despair, I ended up, as one does, looking at the Verona Sacramentary, also called the Leonine Sacramentary, which I suspect has the earliest known version of this preface (at the beginning of  October). Basic differences are these: for the "pertinere cognoscimus" VS simply had "pertinet"; and the subjunctive verbs were in the Perfect Subjunctive: "succurreris ... provideris ... salvaris".

Well, that solves my problems about Sequence of Tenses, doesn't it. These nice healthy perfect subjunctives seem already to have mutated into imperfects in the Sacramentarium Bergomense and the 'Gregorian' Missal. [Salvaris is by a common syncope for salvaveris. One source, incidentally, has its knickers in a real twist: it reads succurras.]

Are we to interpet the Verona Sacramentary version as "It pertains to your ginormous glory that you have succoured ... have provided ... have saved ...?" This seems to me to make better sense and grammar than the (I suspect) subsequent alterations. It is, indeed, roughly how current ICEL actually translates the formula.

I floated this question once before in a rather different form, and was blessed with very good comments, which I retain below this revised version.

More on the Ambrosian Septuagesima

So here is a version, cleaned up, from the ms sources, of the Preface I discussed yesterday:

VD ... Ad cuius immensam pertinet gloriam ut non solum mortalibus tua deitate* succurreris; sed et de ipsa etiam mortalitate nostra nobis remedium provideris, et perditos quosque unde perierant, inde salvaris; Per.

[Crudely and literally: It is very meet and right ... to whose great glory it pertaineth that not only didst thou come to the aid of mortals with thy Godhead, but also, from our own very mortality didst provide for us a remedy, and didst save the lost whomsoever from that place whence they perished.]

It has all the terse elegance, all the avoidance of ostentatious verbosity, which we associate with the best formulae in the old Roman Sacramentaries; perhaps it ... even ... who knows ... has a whiff of S Leo about it. (Edmund Bishop neatly compared the concision of the Roman Pentecost Preface with a 'Gothic' Pentecost preface which rambled on for eighty lines.)

The erudite Marist Fr Anthony Ward (so badly treated under this pontificate) adduced S Ambrose De Sac 2:17; S Leo Sermo 22; 1; and Chromatius of Aquila Sermo 19:7, from the last of whom I offer a brief passage in translation.

Christ "sustained evil things, but gave good things in return; he received death, but gave life. Not without cause he was crucified in this place where the body of Adam is said to be buried. So, therefore, Christ is crucified where Adam had been buried, that thence life might work where first death had worked, so that from death life might rise again. Death through Adam, life through Christ."

You see how typologically suitable such material is to the Genesis themes which we revisit in the Divine Office at this time. You will remember the significance of the iconography, Eastern and Western, of the skull at the foot of the Cross of Calvary, and the figure of Christ rescuing Adam and Eve from Hell in the 'Anastasis' Ikon.

*Footnote: there is an intriguing textual variant which could be 'original': pietate for deitate. Majuscule P and D can easily be confused. But the (1712) Ambrosian Missal, and the English Leofric Missal, give the text I have printed, except that its verbs are imperfect subjunctives (and Leofric omits the et).