Liturgical History

Saint-Denis, Liturgy, and a Royal Nun

/ Rick Yoder / 1 Comment
StDenis

St. Denys, pray for us! (Source)

Canticum Salomonis has a great little piece on the Sequence of St. Denys. Liturgical nerds will find it of particular interest. It mainly attracts my own attention due to a fascinating tidbit:

Beginning with the new Parisian missal promulgated by the Lord Archbishop François de Harlay in 1684, the neo-Gallican liturgical books that festered in France during the Enlightenment Age altered this sequence to expunge any connection between St Dionysius the Areopagite and St Dionysius of Paris. The Abbey of St-Denys, however, remained firm in defending the Greek origins of its patron, and sung the original text until the Revolution.

I’m unaware of any serious scholarship so far that has plunged into the liturgical dynamics of the Revolution – though certainly, the Gallicans, Jansenists, and Cisalpines all had ideas about liturgical reform. What an intriguing project a deeper study might be. Perhaps John McManners has looked at it all already, and I simply haven’t gotten to that part of his famous and positively rococo two-volume study, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France.

Madame Louise, Prioress of Saint-Denis. (Source)

Saint-Denis was an important place in the 1780’s. Madame Louise, daughter of Louis XV and aunt of Louis XVI, entered the Carmel of Saint-Denis while her father was still alive. As Sister Thérèse de Saint-Augustin, she eventually rose to the rank of Prioress. Saint-Denis thus became a center of the Parti Dévot, the most conservative (some would say reactionary) part of the French court and church. It’s hardly surprising that the great Abbey there would likewise remain a bastion of liturgy that might otherwise be regarded as “superstitious” or “backwards” by the more radical portions of the French church.

A Startling Passage out of Peter Anson

/ Rick Yoder / 4 Comments
GnosticVestments

“Gnostic Catholic” vestments from Third Republic France. Note in particular the episcopal vesture at right. (Source)

In Peter Anson’s remarkable volume, Bishops at Large: Some Autocephalous Churches of the Past Hundred Years and their Founders (1964), we learn of many episcopi vagantes and their kindred spirits. It seems that several of these strange fellows dabbled (or more than dabbled) in the occult. Many also coupled that occultism with an interest in ancient heresies, which they sought to resurrect. In a chapter on the succession from René Vilatte, we stumble across a shocking little paragraph:

Mgr. Giraud and most of the priests and layfolk of the Gallican Church, even if not Gnostics themselves, were closely associated with them. Gnosticism was very much in the air fifty or sixty years ago. Even the Benedictine monks of Solesmes felt it worth their while to study what are known as the ‘Magic Vowels’ used in Gnostic rites and ceremonies. In 1901 they published a book entitled Le chant gnostico-magique. (Anson 309)

What an extraordinary claim. The monks of Solesmes, Dom Prosper Gueranger’s own sons, publishing studies of Gnostic chants! Dear readers, do any of you have any information on this bizarre note? I have been able to find evidence, however scanty, that the book Anson mentions was indeed published. But it surely must count as one of the rarest volumes in the assembled miscellanea of liturgical history. I would appreciate any leads whatsoever. Might some of my liturgically minded friends have any clue? Whatever comes of it, there is no doubt a very interesting story lurking behind this utterly unique publication.