Undusted Texts

Christ is risen! A translation is always a balancing act between an ungrammatical, too-strict word-for-word replacement and a new work merely "inspired by" the original text.  I've always loved the way John Dryden describes the issue in his essay "Ovid and the Art of Translation."   Dryden defines three distinct styles of translation: "metaphrase, or turning an author word by word, and line by line, from one language into another"—about which he later says, "'Tis much like dancing on ropes with fettered legs: a man may shun a fall by using caution; but the gracefulness of motion is not to be expected"—"paraphrase, or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense; and that too is admitted to be amplified, but not altered," and finally "imitation, where the translator (if now he has not lost that name) assumes the ...

The Canon for the Third Sunday of the Great Fast , the Sunday of the Veneration of the Cross, comes as a shock.  We know Sundays are always mini-Paschas, celebrations of the Resurrection, even in the depths of the Fast. (So they always have full canons, rather than the penitential three-ode canons found during weekdays, for which the  Triodion  is named.)  We have continued to sing the resurrectional hymns from the Octoechos throughout the Fast.  Yet the Canon for this week hits us with unbridled Paschal joy, for the ikoi come from the great Paschal Canon that we gloriously shout out during Paschal Matins. The Cross is the great reverser: through the Cross, a Person bearing the deathless divine nature dies; through the Cross, we deathbound men gain deathlessness. So perhaps we should not be surprised that the Cross brings a burst of joy in the middle of the somber Fast, just as its feast on September 14 is a day of fasting n the midst of the year's longest gap b...

 For ease of reading, I have consolidated three prior posts from Jean Gerson ( Letters on the Espousals of Mary and Joseph , Office of the Espousals , and Matins Readings for the Espousals ) into a single PDF.       Direct Download  

The Byzantine tradition has some beautiful prayers for absolution at the end of the Mystery of Confession or Penance, but I have had trouble finding them online, so I have copied them out here. The simplest, and probably most common, prayer is the following: May our Lord and God, Jesus Christ, through the grace and mercies of His love for us all, forgive you all your transgressions.  And I, an unworthy priest, by His power given to me, forgive and absolve you from all your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  However, the original Byzantine prayer of absolution is the following: God, who forgave David the evil deeds he confessed through Nathan the prophet, who forgave Peter his denial when he wept bitterly, who forgave the sinful woman who shed tears on his feet, and who forgave the publican and the prodigal, may this same God, through me, a sinner, forgive you (Name) both in this age and in the age to come, and make you stand u...

I have added a number of old papers to my website.  One of them, "The Marriage Liturgy and the Married Life," is an interesting reflection based on the Byzantine Rite of Crowning; it certainly wasn't for a class, and I don't think I ever attempted publication of it.  (In connection with this essay, one might want to peruse my undergraduate thesis, "The Symbolism of the Mystery of Crowning." )  Most of the rest are old school papers, mostly from my graduate courses: "Θεία νύξ: The Mystical Union as Unknowing in St. Gregory of Nyssa and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite" (2012)  "The History and Legacy of Photios I, Patriarch of Constantinople" (2014) "The Exegetical Principles of Joseph Ratzinger" (2014) "The Spirituality of St. Hildegard of Bingen" (2015) "The Effects of Liturgy on Culture" (2016)  Finally, I have rescued from the abyss of the Internet my very first published writing, "The Best Meani...

This is a digitized VHS copy of the Episcopal Ordination and Enthronement Liturgy of Bishop John Michael Kudrick, TOR, as Bishop of Parma.  The Liturgy was celebrated on July 10, 2002, at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Parma, OH.  Bishop Kudrick served as Bishop of Parma from 2002 until his resignation in 2016.  

 This is a digitized VHS copy of the Enthronement of Archbishop Basil M. Schott, OFM, as Metropolitan Archbishop of Pittsburgh.  It took place on July 9, 2002, at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Munhall, PA.  Basil Schott (1939-2010) served as Bishop of Parma from 1996 to 2002, and then as Metropolitan of Pittsburgh from 2002 until his death from lymphoma in 2010.  

It is a strange thing in the Byzantine Rite that our services for the holiest days of the year are often so liturgically ordinary .  In so many ways, they resemble the same service—Vespers, Matins, a Liturgy—that we might hold on any day of the year.  Holy Thursday has its propers and its long Gospel, but, otherwise, it is like a Vespers and Liturgy we might hold on any feast.  Holy Friday is, again, simply Vespers with an extra Gospel reading, until the unique and beautiful procession with the Shroud and the rite of entombment.  And the Paschal Liturgy is just a Liturgy, though with every possible hymn replaced with "Christ is risen!" This is not the case with every service: Holy Wednesday adds an anointing service in the middle of the Pre-Sanctified Liturgy.  The Matins services stretch their structure to the breaking point, with the Twelve Gospels of Holy Friday, the Lamentations of Holy Saturday, and the unique and glorious remix of Resurrection Matins. The ...

 Introduction The Byzantine Rite's Vespers for Great and Holy Friday ends with a beautiful and solemn procession with the shroud, with has an image of the dead Jesus lying in the tomb; the procession ends by placing the shroud in a replica tomb.  The faithful then approach the tomb—traditionally, on their knees—to venerate the shroud.    Below is a description of this procession, which I wrote in 2015.  At the time, my parish was housed in the basement of a former convent; as we walked through the darkened halls with the shroud, we would pass an old mural of a deer in the forest ("As the hart panteth after the fountains of water, so my soul panteth after thee, O God" (Ps 42:1, Douay-Rheims)).  This is my literary recollection of this experience. Great and Holy Friday  For that night, we were outside the gates of Jerusalem, accompanying a bloodied corpse. That Missouri basement faded away as the penumbra enwrapped us and angels’ wings carried us to that...

For more details on Jean Gerson's idea for a Feast of the Espousals of Mary and Joseph, to be hold on the Thursday between the Third and Fourth Sundays of Advent, see my recent post , quoting some of his letters.  For the other texts of the Office Gerson wrote for this proposed feast, see this older post .  What I translate here are the Matins readings Gerson wrote for this office.   In the Tridentine Divine Office, the Office of Matins was generally equivalent to the modern Office of Readings; however, while the Office of Readings can be read at any time of day, Matins was a midnight office (though its name means "morning").  The traditional arrangement of readings was three groups (Nocturns), each consisting of three readings.  For a normal day, these would consist Psalms or portions of Psalms; on feast days, or during certain liturgical seasons, some or all of these Psalms would be replaced by other readings (maybe Epistles; maybe lives of the saints; ma...

  Wedding of Joseph and Mary, from St. John the Baptist Basilica in Berlin, Germany    Earlier this year, I translated the main text of an Office that Jean Gerson (1363-1429) composed for a Feast of the Espousals of Mary and Joseph. Here, I summarize two letters he wrote promoting such a feast.    Letter of August 13-17, 1400 In this letter, Jean Gerson discusses his proposal for a Feast of the Marriage ( conjugium ) of Mary and Joseph: " It has pleased divine wisdom (who reaches from end to end strongly, disposes all things sweetly (Wis 8:1)) to, in these last times, incline the hearts of many to teach that the virginal (so Jerome calls it) marriage of the just Joseph and Mary should be venerated with the solemn cult of the Church, and to promote its devotion.They are moved (so I deem) by the Gospel’s word, excellently and often preaching the prerogatives with which that just Joseph shone. They are moved by the honor and love of his most blessed wife, who ca...

  Hail to you, Cross,  joying of Christians!  Hail to you, Cross,  crushing of tyrants!  Hail to you, Cross, firming of faithful! Hail to you, Cross, comfort of faithful! Hail to you, Cross, firming of martyrs! Hail to you, Cross, victory's weapon! Hail to you, Cross, throne of the King! Hail to you, Cross, sign of salvation! Hail to you, Cross, O shining light! Hail to you, Cross, sword of the Spirit! Hail to you, Cross, fountain of grace! Hail to you, Cross, storehouse of goods! Hail to you, Cross, to age upon age!   Nota Bene: This litany is adapted from a Coptic liturgical text; see Service of the Deacons: Rites and Hymns of the Liturgies and Services of the Coptic Orthodox Church (Coptic Orthodox Diocese of the Southern United States, 2010), 255-256.   Adaptation ©202 4 Brandon P. Otto .  Licensed via CC BY-NC.   Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credi...

One of the many fairly-obscure groups in the Roman Curia is the Office for Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff.  Though it has earlier roots—Pope Pius IV gave certain rights to the Masters of Our Ceremonies in 1563—it was officially instituted as a curial College by Pope Benedict XV in 1917; after Vatican II, in the course of various curial reshuffles, it became an office instead of a college .  (The Office provides a history of itself, but only in Italian .)  As its name suggests, its main role is in arranging the pope's liturgical celebrations, preparing their booklets, keeping records of them, etc.  So one can consult their online archive , going back to 2000, for lists of papal liturgical celebrations and their causes, sometimes with pictures, sometimes with bits of homilies, sometimes with videos, sometimes with PDFs of the full booklets handed out during the celebration. Yet, along with the minutiae and the bookkeeping, the Office has also prepared...

  There is an appeal in simplicity, in sparseness, in the few beautiful things of a Japanese teahouse, the joyful tidiness of Marie Kondo; this is the “classical” beauty, of bare white marble, free of pigments. (A historically inaccurate view of those once-garishly-painted Roman statues, but an accurate account of how they live today.) Taken to its extreme, there are the starkly nude walls of a Calvinist church, of “thou shalt not make unto thee any grave image” distilled to its highest proof, of (paradoxically) angelism incarnate. Yet, like most things, when not taken to such an extreme, there is a truth in simplicity and sparseness. This denuding, for instance, is a key to meditation, of any kind, from the clearing of the mind prior to lectio divina , to the imageless noetic prayer of the Greek Fathers, to—again, an extreme—the absolute mind-emptiness of Buddhist meditation. There are times when distractions must be cleared away, when a well-swept room is needed for focus. ...

  Introduction Jean Gerson (1363-1429) was a prolific and highly influential French scholar and theologian, especially while serving as the Chancellor of the illustrious University of Paris.  (I previously translated a small portion of one of his sermons on St. Nicholas, under the title "False Hopes and Immortality." )  Amidst his copious sermons and his harsh critiques of popular poems (notably the Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun), Gerson had a special devotion to St. Joseph.  Part of this devotion included an attempt to establish a Feast of the Nuptials (or Betrothals) of Mary and Joseph.  Though Gerson's attempt failed, there eventually was a Feast of the Espousals of Mary (lacking Gerson's Josephite emphasis) which enjoyed a sizable popularity, usually celebrated on January 23.  For a history of the Feast and a discussion of its underlying theology, see Michael P. Foley, "The Feast of the Espousals of Mary and Joseph," New ...