Scribal Terror

Rosary timeline

 

• 4th century prayer rope used by the Desert Fathers to count repetitions of the Jesus Prayer
• In the 7th century, St. Eligius (c.588-660) wrote of making a chair adorned with 150 gold and silver nails to aid in the praying of the Psalter of Blessed Mary, which substituted one Hail Mary for each of the Psalms.
• In the early 8th century, Venerable Bede (d. 733) attests that churches and public places in France and England had prayer beads available for the faithful to use.
• c. 1075 Lady Godiva refers in her will to "the circlet of precious stones which she had threaded on a cord in order that by fingering them one after another she might count her prayers exactly" . . .
• A rule for anchorites in mid-12th century England gives directions on how fifty Hail Marys are to be said divided into sets of ten, with prostrations and other marks of reverence.
• It is recorded in 12th century Mary-legends (Marien-legenden) that a certain Eulalia was told to pray five decades slowly and devoutly instead of fifteen decades in a hurry.
• It is recorded by a contemporary biographer that St. Aibert, who died in 1140, recited 150 Hail Marys daily, 100 with genuflexions and 50 with prostrations.
• 1160 Saint Rosalia is buried with a string of prayer beads
• 1214 traditional date of the legend of Saint Dominic's reception of the rosary from the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of the Rosary
• It is recorded of St. Louis of France (1214-70) that "without counting his other prayers the holy King knelt down every evening fifty times and each time he stood upright then knelt again and repeated slowly an Ave Maria."
• Mid-13th century word "Rosary" first used (by Thomas of Champitre, in De apibus, ii. 13), not referring to prayer beads but in a Marian context.
• 1268 A reference to guild of "paternosterers" in Paris in "Livre des métiers" of Stephen Boyleau.
• Early 15th century, Dominic of Prussia, a Carthusian, introduces 50 mysteries, one for each Ave Maria
• c. 1514 Hail Mary prayer attains its current form.
• 1569 Pope Pius V established the current form of the original 15 mysteries
• 1587 A Book on the Rosary entitled Rosario della Sacratissima Vergine Maria by Ven. Luis de Granada is published in Italian, which uses a similar method to the fourth method of the five methods of praying the rosary by St. Louis-Marie de Montfort.
• 1597 first recorded use of the term "rosary" to refer to prayer beads.

"Rosary," Wikipedia;

Why pray?

Eternity is Thine, art Thou ignorant of the things which I say unto Thee? Or seest Thou at the time that which cometh to pass in time?  Why, therefore, do I place before Thee so many relations of things? Not surely that Thou mightest know them through me, but that I may awaken my own love and that of my readers towards Thee, that we may all say, "Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised."  I have already said, and shall say, for the love of Thy love do I this.  For we also pray, and yet Truth says, "Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him." Therefore do we make known unto Thee our love, in confessing unto Thee our own miseries and Thy mercies upon us, that Thou mayest free us altogether, since Thou hast begun, that we may cease to be wretched in ourselves, and that we may be blessed in Thee . . . Confessions, St. Augustine

But again one might ask whether we are to pray by words or deeds and what need there is for prayer, if God already knows what is needful for us. But it is because the act of prayer clarifies and purges our heart and makes it more capable of receiving the divine gifts that are poured out for us in the spirit.  God does not give heed to the ambitiousness of our prayers, because he is always ready to give to us his light, not a visible light but an intellectual and spiritual one:  but we are not always ready to receive it when we turn aside and down to other things out of a desire for temporal things.  For in prayer there occurs a turning of the heart to he who is always ready to give if we will but take what he gives:  and in that turning is the purification of the inner eye when the things we crave in the temporal world are shut out; so that the vision of the pure heart can bear the pure light that shines divinely without setting or wavering: and not only bear it, but abide in it; not only without difficulty, but even with unspeakable joy, with which the blessed life is truly and genuinely brought to fulfillment. On the Lord's Sermon on the Mount, St. Augustine

"Eye Has Not Seen"

We sang it at mass yesterday. Paperclip thought it was a LOLcats hymn.

Nothing new under the sun

Ethan Bronner of the New York Times reports on an interesting archaeological find:

A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

Then he sticks his foot in it  by implying that Christians would somehow find this shocking:

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

Do religion writers even bother to study the religions they report on any more? The New Testament (and Christian tradition in general) is full of prophecies and prefigurations. The whole freaking book of Isaiah for example. Or Hosea. As Michael Barber explains (via Curt Jester):

the idea of a resurrection on the third day flows from Hosea 6:2: "After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up,that we may live before him."

Indeed, Jesus explains to the disciples that his resurrection on the third day would take place in order to fulfill Scripture.

"Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead" (Luke 24:46).

In fact, the New Testament is clear that Jesus came to fulfill the hopes of ancient Israel.

Yet, the New York Times story seems to suggest that this tablet will somehow raise questions about the truth of Christianity. Somehow, for them, the discovery that some ancient Jews expected the messiah to suffer and rise on the third day is problematic for Christianity.

This isn't a question of whether the prophecies and prefigurations are right or not. It's a simple matter of fact that they have always been an integral part of Christian writings. There is no conceivable reason why another one surfacing on a stone tablet would be greeted any differently than all the others.

From factum through techne to faciendum

In Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger characterizes the evolution of the modern world view through the use of a careful distinction between emphasis on "what we have made" -- factum -- to "what we can make" -- faciendum -- by means of the human ability to make -- techne. Factum is the historical approach, the understanding of who and what we are by the understanding of how we got here, essentially the evolutionary approach. Our ability to manipulate what we are is the faciendum, what we might call the transhumanist or cybernetic approach, which takes the evolutionary approach as a given and looks beyond it. (To illustrate, he quotes Marx: "So far philosophers have contemplated the world; now they must set about changing it.")

It might be a little disorienting to think of factum as "what we have  made" rather than simply as "fact." What he means is not so much our artifacts as our ability to perceive, define, and make sense out of the world in the process of manipulating it.

 

Belief is an act of will

I've been reading Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity, an illuminating look into the meaning of belief, which tries to dip underneath the surface of "ecclesiastical language" to make the mysteries of faith stand clearly before us, but not to simplify or "de-mystify" them.

In the beginning of the book, Ratzinger talks about the reality behind the phrase "I believe" in a way that I find very directly speaks to me as a person who every day decides to believe despite the obviousness of any and all arguments to the contrary, and despite the immediate visibility of the abyss beneath my feet on even the best of days.

 

A little thing

He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness]. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God. In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it. But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover,—I cannot tell; for till I am Substantially one to Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss: that is to say, till I be so fastened to Him, that there is right nought that is made betwixt my God and me. It needeth us to have knowing of the littleness of creatures and to hold as nought all-thing that is made, for to love and have God that is unmade. For this is the cause why we be not all in ease of heart and soul: that we seek here rest in those things that are so little, wherein is no rest, and know not our God that is All-mighty, All-wise, All-good. For He is the Very Rest. God willeth to be known, and it pleaseth Him that we rest in Him; for all that is beneath Him sufficeth not us. And this is the cause why that no soul is rested till it is made nought as to all things that are made. When it is willingly made nought, for love, to have Him that is all, then is it able to receive spiritual rest. -- From Revelations of Divine Love by Juliana of Norwich

The illustration above is a manuscript page from the Revelations or Shewings. The one below is a medieval depiction of an anchoress.

Priest fight!

BBC reports:

Israeli police had to break up a fist fight that erupted between Greek and Armenian Orthodox clergymen at one of Christianity's holiest sites.

The scuffles broke out at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on Orthodox Palm Sunday.

Brawls are not uncommon at the church, which is uneasily shared by various Christian denominations.

In this case, witnesses say an Armenian priest forcibly ejected a Greek priest from an area near the tomb of Jesus.

They say the attacker felt the Greek priest had spent too long at the tomb.

When police arrived to break up the fight, some were reportedly beaten back by worshippers using palm fronds.

I'm not sure what to say about police who succumb to palm frond attacks . . .

Amen

Pope Benedict speaks of a "world where self-centeredness, greed, violence and cynicism so often seem to choke the fragile growth of grace in people's hearts." "Fragile growth of grace" expresses it so well. Sometimes I feel like I need to grow a shell over my soul, but that would be cheating.

In defense of Moses' horns

A nicely argued defense of Jerome's much-maligned translation of Exodus 34:29-35 at The Lion and the Cardinal:

The Hebrew word - keren - that Saint Jerome translated into the Latin as "grew horns" means, literally, "grew horns". His supposed mistake was not knowing that the word also has an idiomatic meaning of "emitted rays of light". Modern scholars, looking [at] two possible translations for the word, think: Of course! His face began to radiate! How silly that nobody realized this sooner!