Author: Roger Pearse

The origins of Ash Wednesday

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Ash Wednesday, the dies cinerum, is the name used in English for the first day of Lent, the 40-day period of fasting that, in the medieval church, precedes Easter.  The Catholic and Anglican churches celebrate it by a church service of repentance, at which the people are marked with ashes, and this has become popular among even free churches.  But what is the origin of this curious custom?

In 23 places in the bible,[1] we find a custom of public penance for sin, “in sackcloth and ashes”, in various places in the Old Testament such as Esther 4:3.  Jesus also alludes to it in Mt. 11:21 and Lk. 10:13.  It then appears also in the Fathers, such as Tertullian.  But this is not tied to any date.  There is no trace of a connection to Lent, nor to the date that would later become known as Ash Wednesday, because neither existed.

Many early modern books, when talking about Ash Wednesday, refer to the canons of the council of Agde, the Concilium Agathense (AD 506), in Visigothic Spain.  The reason is a false claim in the 12th century law book, the Decretum of Gratian (below), which was repeated by Cardinal Bellarmine.  Canon 15 does indeed refer to public repentance in sackcloth, i.e. a hair-shirt (cilicium).  Here is the text as given by Mansi, VIII, p.327:[2]

XV.  Penitentes tempore, quo penitentiam petunt, inpositionem manuum et cilicium super capita a sacerdote (sicut ubique statutum est) consequantur. Si autem comas non deposuerint, aut vestimenta non mutaverint, abiciantur et nisi digne penituerint, non recipiantur. Juvenibus etiam penitentia propter aetatis fragilitatem non facile committenda est. Viaticum tamen omnibus in morte positis non est negandum.

Let penitents, at the time when they seek penitence, obtain the laying-on of hands and sackcloth on the head from the priest (just as has been decreed everywhere).  But if they have not shaved their heads or changed their clothes, let them be thrown out and unless they shall repent properly, let them not be received.  Also penitence shall not be imposed lightly on juveniles on account of the weakness of their age.  However the viaticum shall not be denied to those on the point of death.[3]

But there is no evidence that this has anything to do with the start of Lent (“in capite ieiunio”),[4] and there is no mention of ashes.  Indeed Lent did not begin on Ash Wednesday during the 6th century.  At the time of Gregory the Great (d. 604) the beginning of Lent was on the following Sunday.  Our first witness that four days had been added, allowing the Lent to commence on the Wednesday, is the Old Gelasian Sacramentary contained in MS Vatican reg. lat. 316.  (I have written about this here, with links to sources, editions and the manuscript.)

Two other sources for the use of ashes in the 7-8th century are also not what they seem.

The first is a paragraph beginning “In capite quadragesimae” in something called the Capitula Theodori (not the same as the Paenitentiale pseudo-Theodori, CCSL 156B).  Supposedly the work of Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury (d. 690 AD), and therefore 7th century, it is in fact a collection of material of 10th century Frankish origin.[5]  It was printed from a manuscript by J. Petit in 1677, and in his version, c. 11 (here), the priest lays hands on the penitent, sprinkles holy water, then ashes, and then places sackcloth on his head.  Tellingly, the text printed by Petit is exactly the same as that given below as “chapter 64” in Gratian.  [Update 21/6/2023: the real source for this appears to be the 10th century author Regino of Prum, Libri duo de synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclesiasticis, canon 295, online here.  See the comments below].

The second is book 3 of the homilies of the Venerable Bede (d.735).  Bede did compose two books of Homilies on the Gospels (= CPL 1367), each containing 25 homilies.  But the old editions of the works of Bede contain a total of 140 homilies, the remainder as an additional “third book” of Homiliae Subdititae, arranged into liturgical order.  Some of the latter have a rubric for Ash Wednesday (dies cinerum), such as book 3, 37 “in die Cinerum” (PL 94:349), 38 “in fiera quinta post Cinerum” (PL 94:350), 39, 40, and 99.[6]  The modern CCSL edition by Hurst has no material referring to ashes, and it seems that all the homilies in “book 3” are spurious.[7]

Our first real evidence for the celebration of Ash Wednesday, where ashes are involved, is in the 9th century.  At this period we have manuscripts of service books which contain this.  It is the Gregorian sacramentaries – out of the various service books of the period – which label the Wednesday in question as “In capite jejunii”, i.e. the “Start of the Fast”, and the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica states that “The phrase dies cinerum appears in the earliest extant copies of the Gregorian Sacramentary”[8].  These manuscripts are 9th century.  The Gelasian sacramentary indicated the date; but by the start of the 9th century it seems that the earlier penance in sackcloth and ashes has become attached at some point to the start of Lent.   The same liturgical material is repeated in Regino de Prum’s book on at the start of the 10th century also, and his words reappear in later pontificals, which are service books for the use of bishops.[9]  This type of ritual is found in medieval liturgical texts right down to the renaissance.

This public penance – open penance for open crimes – meant that the sinner appeared in sackcloth and ashes on the first day of Lent, and was expelled from the church until Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday.  The idea behind this was that sins – such as burning down a nunnery, or overtly living in sin – which were known to everyone, could only be healed by a penance made in a similarly public manner.  Public crimes required public penance.  Private failings could be confessed privately.[10]

But even in the 9th century, descriptions of actual public penance are rare,[11] even though public penance, in sack-cloth and ashes, is found in in Anglo-Saxon liturgical manuscripts of the 10-11th centuries, such as penitentials.[12]

It is in the 10th century that we find our first evidence of the Lenten custom of a general imposition of ashes on the whole congregation as part of the Ash Wednesday service.  The origin of this seems to be a mid-10th century monastic reform in England, led by Bishop Aethelwold, who in 970, with the backing of King Edgar, issued a Regularis Concordia for all the English monks.  This for the first time included a general imposition of ashes for the monks.[13]  The modern custom, for the whole congregation, is attested in a sermon for Ash Wednesday by Aethelwold’s disciple, Aelfric of Eynsham.  The sermon was written in Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin,[14] and reads:

On Wednesday, widely across the earth, priests bless clean ashes in church, just as it is established, and afterwards place them upon men’s heads, that they may have in mind that they came from earth, and afterwards will return to dust, just as the Almighty God said to Adam after he had transgressed against God’s command, “Through labours you shall live and through sweat you shall eat your bread on earth, until you afterwards return to the same earth from which you came, because you are dust, and to dust will return.

Likewise in his Letter for the Monks of Eynsham, Aelfric writes as follows:

Quarta feria Capitis Ieiunii, nona decantata, abbas ornatus stola benedicat cineres et imponat capitibus singulorum, quia legimus in veteri et in novo testamento paenitentes semetipsos cynere aspersisse, demonstrantes humanam naturam esse reversuram in pulverem ob culpam prime preuaricationis. . . . Eant tunc ad processionem reliquas antiphonas decantando. Venientes vero ad ecclesiam quo eunt, cantent antiphonam de ipso sancto et dominicam orationem, flexis genibus, et psalmum ‘Ad te levavi oculos meos’ cum precibus et oratione. Incipiant tunc cantores letaniam revertentes ad matrem ecclesiam et induant se ministri ad missam.

On Ash Wednesday, after None has been sung, the abbot, vested in a stole, shall bless ashes and put them on the heads of each and every person, because we read in the Old and New Testaments that penitents dusted themselves with ashes, showing that human nature would return to dust, on account of guilt for [man’s] primordial transgression . . . They shall then go to the procession singing the remaining antiphons. When they reach the destination church, they shall sing the antiphon of its saint and then, kneeling, the Lord’s Prayer, and the psalm “To thee I have lifted up my eyes”, with the preces and the collect. Then the cantors shall begin the litany as they [all] make their way back to the mother church, and the ministers shall vest for mass.[15]

This is our Ash Wednesday ritual.  It would appear that it originates in England in the 10th century, and that it is the creation of Aethelwold and Aelfric.

The earlier idea of public penance and restoration by the bishop did not disappear, even in England.  As well as the service books of the 10-11th century, it is still expressed by Wulfstan of York (d.1023), in a sermon in Anglo-Saxon:

And there are some men also who rightly must in this holy time be expelled from the church community for high sins, just as was Adam from the community of angels when he forsook the great joy in which he dwelt before he sinned . . . Dear men, on Wednesday, which is caput ieiunii, bishops expel in many places out from the church for their own need those who have made themselves highly guilty in open sins. And afterwards on Thursday before Easter they re-enter the church, those who zealously during Lent atone for their sins, just as one instructs them. Then bishops read the absolution over them, and pray for them, and with that alleviate their sins through God’s great mercy. And that is a needful practice, but we do not observe it as well as we should in this land, and it is very necessary that one zealously have it in practice.[16]

It seems that both rituals were still “on the books” in this period.  Wulfstan’s last sentence perhaps explains why the modern ritual arose: the old penance rite was unpopular, and not well observed.

Princeton: Princeton University Library, Kane 13, leaf of a Gradual (same as Kane 12); initial M beginning Introit of Mass for Ash Wednesday (Italian, late 15c.).  Via here.

The material for an Ash Wednesday service of public penance continues to be recorded in other service books from Northern Europe, such as the Romano-German Pontificale (= PRG), and these continue in use until the end of the middle ages.  In the 12th century Gratian’s Decretum, in Distinctio 50 (text online here), we find that chapter 62 is a quote from Augustine, followed by:

Gratian. Haec autem penitentia quomodo inponenda sit in Agatensi Concilio legitur, in quo sic statutum est:

This is followed by chapter 63, which is merely a quotation of the canon of the Council of Agde, “Penitentes tempore quo penitentiam”, above.  But then the start of chapter 64 begins “Item ex eodem.”, “Likewise from the same” – which is not true -, and then the description of public penance [Update: by Regino of Prum] also found in the Capitula Theodori above:

In capite quadragesimae omnes penitentes, qui publicam suscipiunt aut susceperunt penitenciam, ante fores ecclesiae se representent episcopo civitatis, sacco induti, nudis pedibus, uultibus in terram demissis reos se esse ipso habitu et uultu protestantes. Ibi adesse debent decani, id est archipresbiteri parrochiarum et presbiteri penitencium, qui eorum conuersationem diligenter inspicere debent, et secundum modum culpae penitenciam per prefatos gradus iniungere. Post hec eos in ecclesiam introducat, et cum omni clero septem penitenciae psalmos in terram prostratus cum lacrimis pro eorum absolutione decantet; tunc resurgens ab oratione, iuxta quod canones iubent, manus eis inponat, aquam benedictam super eos spargat, cinerem prius mittat, deinde cilicio capita eorum operiat, et cum gemitu et crebris suspiriis denunciet eis, quod sicut Adam proiectus est de paradiso, ita et ipsi pro peccatis ab ecclesia abiciuntur; postea iubeat ministris, ut eos extra ianuam ecclesiae expellant, clerus uero prosequatur eos cum responsorio: “In sudore uultus tui uesceris pane tuo, etc.” ut, uidentes sanctam ecclesiam pro facinoribus suis tremefactam atque commotam, non paruipendant penitenciam. In sacra autem Domini cena rursus ab eorum decanis et eorum presbiteris ecclesiae liminibus represententur.

On the first day of Lent, all penitents, who either then were admitted to penance, or had been admitted before, were to present themselves to the bishop, before the doors of the church, clothed in sackcloth, barefooted, and with eyes fixed on the ground, confessing themselves guilty, both by their habit and their looks; and this was to be done in the presence of the deans or arch-presbyters of the parishes, and the penitential presbyters, whoso duty it was to examine diligently their conversation, and to enjoin them penance, according to the measure of their faults, by the degrees of penance that were appointed. After this, they introduced them into the church, where the bishop, with all the clergy, falling prostrate on the ground, sang the seven penitential psalms, with tears, for their absolution. Then the bishop, rising from prayer, gave them imposition of hands, sprinkled them with holy water, threw ashes upon their heads, and covered their heads with sackcloth, declaring, with sighs and groans, that, as Adam was cast out of Paradise, so they for their sins must be cast out of the church. Then the bishop commanded the inferior ministers to turn them out of the church doors; and all the clergy followed them, using this responsory, ‘ In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread; for dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.’ And all this was done to the end that the penitents, observing how great a disorder the holy Church was in by reason of their crimes, should not lightly esteem of penance.[17]

We may wonder to what extent this ritual was much observed in practice, even in the time of Gratian.

The English celebration of Ash Wednesday proved popular.  It becomes increasingly common from the 11th century even in Europe, and then is introduced into canon law at the council of Beneventum in 1091, presided over by Pope Urban II.  In the canons of this council, canon 4 decrees that all Christians should receive ashes at the beginning of Lent.  Mansi, vol. 20, col. 739 (here):

Nullus omnino laicus post diem Cineris et Cilicii a quo caput jejunii dicitur, carnibus vesci audeat.  Et omnes, tam clerici, quam laici, viri quam mulieres, die illo cinerem supra capite sua accipiant.

No layman whatsoever after the day of ashes and cloth of goat’s hair, from which the beginning of Lent takes its name, shall dare to eat meat.  And everyone, whether clergy or lay, men or women, on that day shall receive ashes on their head.

Likewise in Rome in the 12th century, we find a pontifical – a service book for a bishop – that simply omits the old public penance ritual altogether.  In the (unofficial) Pontificale Romanum Saeculi XII (=PRS) almost the entire old ritual for Ash Wednesday was omitted, retaining only the general confession and distribution of ashes:[18]

Interim ponit romanus pontifex vel sacerdos cineres super capita virorum ac mulierum.

Meanwhile the Roman pontiff or priest places ashes on the heads of the men and the women.[19]

The imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday remains part of the Roman Catholic liturgy even today.  But in the English-speaking world it came to a sudden halt at the Reformation. The Ash Wednesday ceremony of ashes was forbidden by a royal proclamation on 6 February 1548,[20] and explicitly banned in the 1549 prayer-book. Thereafter it was unknown in England.

In the 19th century the Anglo-Catholic movement started to import many Roman Catholic practices into Anglican worship, although not without fierce opposition.  A google search suggests that the Ash Wednesday ritual was still being introduced into some cathedrals in the middle of the 20th century.  The liturgy used was borrowed from the Roman Catholics.  Ash Wednesday became popular during the second half of the 20th century.  The imposition of ashes only reappeared in the official Anglican liturgy as recently as 1986.[21]

To conclude, the date and ceremonies and even the name of Ash Wednesday are tightly connected to the Catholic liturgy for Lent.  The celebration of the day as the beginning of Lent is not attested earlier than the 8th century.  The imposition of ashes seems to be an English innovation of the 10th century, adapting an earlier ritual for public penance in sackcloth and ashes that had proven unpopular.  It disappeared in England during the 16th century.  The custom was introduced once more in the English-speaking world in the 20th century in High Church rituals, and became generally accepted only within the last 50 years.

Update (12 March 2022): Twitter user @Albertojr555 kindly drew my attention to the witness of the Gelasian sacramentary to the date of Lent, noted by Joseph Abrahamson on his blog διαθηκη here.  I have updated the post accordingly.

Update (21 June 2023): A kind correspondent has pointed out that the Capitula of ps.Theodore is in reality a passage in the Duo Libri of Regino of Prum.  I’ve added details in a comment below.

Share
  1. [1]Collected here.↩
  2. [2]Mansi, vol. 8, p.323 ff.  Online here.↩
  3. [3]Translation mine.↩
  4. [4]In fact Bellarmine tells us that he couldn’t find the latter words either!  He does give a nice list of patristic writers on penance: R. Bellarmino, Opera Omnia 4, p.497: De controversiis: de poenitentia, lib. I, cap. 22.  Online here.↩
  5. [5]Thomas Pollock Oakley, English Penitential Discipline and Anglo-Saxon Law in Their Joint Influence (2003), p.109.  Online here.↩
  6. [6]Online here.↩
  7. [7]So Jean Leclercq, “Le IIIe livre des Homélies de Bède le Vénérable”, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 14 (1947), pp. 211-218.  JSTOR.  I was unable to read most of this, but the conclusion is clear, and echoed in the CPL.↩
  8. [8]Online here↩
  9. [9]edited in PL 78, co. 437.↩
  10. [10]Bedingfield, “Public Penance in Anglo-Saxon England”, p.235 and n.36: Aelfric: “Qui publice peccaverit publice arguatur et publica paenitentia purgabitur. Et si hoc occulte fecerit et occulte ad confessionem venerit, occulte ei penitentia imponatur.”↩
  11. [11]Bedingfield, p.227.↩
  12. [12]Bedingfield, p.229, n.20: : “The relevant texts… are the pseudo-Egbert Penitential, the Old English Handbook for the Use of a Confessor, the Old English translation of the Rule of Chrodegang, the sermons of Wulfstan, several entries in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 190 (one of the manuscripts traditionally referred to as ‘Wulfstan’s Commonplace Book’), and an unedited homily, Cameron B3.2.9, also found in CCCC 190.”↩
  13. [13]I have not been able to access this, but the statement is found in Bedingfield, p.224 and n.4.↩
  14. [14]Ælfric’s Lives of Saints I, ed. W. W. Skeat, EETS os 76 and 82 (London, 1881 and 1885; repr. 1966), p. 262↩
  15. [15]B. Bedingfield, “Public Penance in Anglo-Saxon England”, Anglo-Saxon England 31 (2002), 223-255.↩
  16. [16]Quoted by Bedingfield from The Homilies of Wulfstan, ed. D. Bethurum (Oxford, 1957), pp. 234–5.↩
  17. [17]A.H. Grant, The Church Seasons: Historically and Poetically Illustrated, (1869) p.156-7, here.  For some reason he changed the tense from present to past, but I have left it alone.↩
  18. [18]The evolution of this liturgy is described in detail by Mary Mansfield in The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France (1995) (Google Books preview here), although the discussion seems unaware of the Aelfric material and thus supposes that this is a 12th century novelty.  On p.181 she gives the text of the PRS.↩
  19. [19]PRS XXVII.5. p.209↩
  20. [20]Christopher Haigh, The English Reformation Revised, CUP (1987), p.120.↩
  21. [21]Nigel Yates, Liturgical Space: Christian Worship and Church Buildings in Western Europe 1500-2000, Ashgate (2008), p.153.↩

Pachomius, “Instruction concerning a spiteful monk” – now translated by Anthony Alcock

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There is a text preserved in a Coptic manuscript which is thought by some to be the work, or partly the work, of the Egyptian monastic leader Pachomius.  Dr Anthony Alcock has kindly prepared a new translation of the work, from the text printed by E. A. Budge in Coptic Apocrypha in the Dialect of Upper Egypt (1913), p.146-176.  He has made this available to us online, under the title of: Instructing an angry monk at Tabennêse.  It’s here:

The text was printed from a single parchment manuscript, discovered at the monastery of S. Mercurius at Edfu.  It is now British Library Oriental 7024.  The text is on folios 18r-49v.  The colophon dates it to AD 985.[1]  The work was edited again by L. T. Lefort, Œuvres de S. Pachôme et de ses disciples, CSCO 159, (with French translation CSCO 160) (1956), p.1-24.  But this I have not seen.  The original work was certainly in Coptic, but at least two manuscripts of an Arabic translation are known.  Lefort made use of one, and the other was discovered recently by Khalil Samir.  Other Arabic manuscripts probably exist, or so I learn from A. Veilleux &c, Pachomian Koinonia: Instructions, Letters and other writings of Salnt Pachomius and his disciples, vol. 3 (1982) which also includes an English translation (online at Alin Suciu’s site here).

The manuscript attributes the work to Pachomius, but there is some disagreement among scholars, or so I learn from Ulla Tervahauta &c, Women and Knowledge in Early Christianity, p.255 n.18 (preview here).  There is more discussion at Carolyn Schneider, The Text of a Coptic Monastic Discourse On Love and Self-Control (2017), p.79 f. (preview here).  No doubt any Coptic monastic text might drift into being attributed to Pachomius, whoever the original author.   Lefort was the first to note that the work includes a long section from Athanasius’ On Charity and Continence, quoted without attribution.

Thank you Dr Alcock!

Share
  1. [1]So this page.↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Last week, on Ash Wednesday, I happened to read some crazy claim by a neopagan that Ash Wednesday derived in some weird way from Woden (!).  Since then I have been working on a post about the origins of Ash Wednesday, and specifically the imposition of ashes.  It’s been a long and weary haul, as I have to work with Dark Ages sacramentaries, but I’m gradually getting there.  Yesterday I discovered the old DACL encyclopedia article on Cendres, which is proving very useful.  It is interesting to see that modern scholarly literature is often unaware of it.  I hope my own article will be done by the end of the week.

March 5 was St Piran’s Day, and I wrote something about that yesterday.  But doing so caused me to retrieve the Latin text of the Vita of St Piran. This was published by Capgrave in Nova Legenda Anglie, at some remote date, and this in turn was nicely reprinted and edited by Horstman in 1901.  Looking at it, I felt that old urge, and fired up Abbyy Finereader 15, and scanned the 9 pages.  Today I finished correcting this to produce a Latin text.  The orthography is dreadful, and a real barrier to the non-specialist.  I’ve corrected some of it in the Word document.

On a whim I pasted it into Google Translate.  I was astonished – but delighted – to find that I got back something very readable indeed:

Google Translate on the Life of St Piran

The translation engine for Latin is clearly going great guns.  There are a few mistakes, but not many at all.  If this is now the standard for medieval Latin, then we all need to get out there and start using it and start producing cleaned-up translations of medieval saints’ lives.  My own hitherto faint urge to translate the Life of St Piran has just received a boost.  On Thursday I might well take a look at doing this.

Share

A modern confusion between St Piran, and the “Saint” Pir who died while drunk

Posted on by Roger Pearse

March 5th is St Piran’s Day.  St Piran was a celtic saint who probably lived around 500 AD.  In recent years there has been increased media interest in St Piran, as the symbol of Cornwall.  The Cornish flag is called “St Piran’s flag.”  I suspect most of this stuff is from incomers, and that it leaves the native Cornish feeling rather bemused.  But celebrations were reported by the BBC here, but with a curious claim included:

According to the legend St Piran lived for 200 years, meeting his death when he fell down a well drunk.

This remarkable claim can be found in a number of places around the web.  But it is not to be found in the medieval Life of St Piran,[1] which merely tells us that he came from Ireland and founded a monastery in North Cornwall, at Perranzabuloe, where he died.

The story instead relates to a “saint” Pir (or Piro, Pyr, or Byr, or Pyrrus), although I have found no evidence that anybody ever considered him a saint.  Instead he was the abbot of a Celtic monastery.  He lived on Caldey Island in the Bristol Channel at some point during the 5th century.  We learn from Gerald of Wales that he owned the island, which was known as Yns Pir (= “Pir’s Island”), and also a “castle” on the coast in Wales.  From the Itinerary through Wales, book 1, chapter 12 (here):

The castle called Maenor Pyrr, that is, the mansion of Pyrrus, who also possessed the island of Chaldey, which the Welsh call Inys Pyrr, or the island of Pyrrus, is distant about three miles from Penbroch.

What we know of the man comes from the Life of St Samson (here), who had the misfortune to be one of Pir’s monks.

20. … Now there was, not far from this monastery, a certain island I recently inhabited by one, an eminent man and holy priest, Piro by name. In this island I too have been, and it was with him, I say, that St. Samson wished to sojourn, but he greatly feared, as I have already said, lest he should offend his chief.

21. … And there he (Samson) was in such wise received by the same abovementioned priest Piro. an old man already advanced in years, as if he had the appearance of an angel of God sent down from heaven.

23. … However, while they were lamenting and mistrusting the one the other, St. Piro delighted now spoke as follows : “ Behold Samson whom you have sought with so much fatigue of travel ; now , what you have to tell , tell me.”…

36. Indeed not long afterwards an unexpected thing happened. One dark night the same Piro took a solitary stroll into the grounds of the monastery, and what is more serious, so it is said, owing to stupid intoxication. fell headlong into a deep pit. Uttering one piercing cry for help, he was dragged out of the hole by the brothers in a dying condition, and died in the night from his adventure. And it came to pass when the bishop heard of it, he made all the brothers to remain just where they were and spend the night together; and then, having assembled a council, after Mattins, all the men of this monastery, with one accord, chose St. Samson to be abbot. And when he submitted (to be abbot), though not willingly, he trained the brothers gently to the proper rule. And while he held the primacy in this place, which was not more than a year and a half, the brothers regarded him as a hermit rather than as a member of an order of monks. And consequently, amidst feasts of plenty and flowing bowls, he made a point of fasting always from food and drink. Of vigils there is no need to say anything, inasmuch, as I have already stated, he never at any time allowed his body to rest in bed.

The bishop was a certain Dubricius, or Dyfrig in Welsh.  He seems to have been one of those decent, hard-working men who, in the middle of an immense disaster to society, too vast to be prevented, try somehow to keep things going by whatever means possible.  If Pir owned the island, then it is no wonder that he became “abbot” of the Celtic monastery.  No doubt Dubricius felt that the drunkeness of Pir and his monks was secondary to establishing a secure base in bad times.

There is an amusing modern version of this story on a blog here by Jay King which I think deserves wider circulation:

Abbott Pyr of Ynys Byr,
In his cups fell in the well.
By the time they fished him out
He was dead and gone to hell.
His brother monks without complaint
Canonized their peer a saint.
And so to heaven he arose
At least that’s how the story goes.

But in truth there is no evidence of any canonisation.

The medieval Life of St Piran itself is of no value, or so I learn from Gilbert Doble’s account in part 4 of his collected The Saints of Cornwall.  In fact it is an arrant fraud, in that it is identical to the Irish Life of St Ciaran of Saighir, but with the names changed.  Indeed St Ciaran was unlucky enough to be pirated, not once, but twice: the Life of the Breton saint Sezni is also a copy of the Life of St Ciaran which has undergone the same process.  This sort of thing was a natural consequence of the medieval church services, which expected that a portion of the life of a saint should be read out during the commemoration on his saint’s day.  The abbey of Exeter came to own St Piran’s oratory, and therefore must commemorate the saint.  No doubt some canon of Exeter was instructed to produce one.

The Life of St Piran had more adventures to undergo.  It was collected in the late middle ages by a certain John of Tynmouth, who wrote down somewhat abbreviated versions of a good many saints’ lives in the west country.  These in turn were published in Capgrave’s Nova Legenda Angliae.  A 1901 reprint edition of this, edited by Carl Horstman, is online.  But there is a Gotha manuscript of the Life of St Piran, containing a longer ending not found in the Capgrave text.  This ending is the only part of the Life to have historical value, and records that at the time the sands were encroaching upon the oratory at Peranzabuloe.

St Piran’s flag.

I don’t know if the modern interest in St Piran will extend so far as to translate his Life into English.  But let us hope so.  In the meantime, we can reject this legend of his death.

Share
  1. [1]Horstmann, Carl. “De Sancto Pirano Episcopo Et Confessore.” In: Nova Legenda Anglie. Vol. II. Re-edited from the 1516 Edition of Wynkyn de Worde. Oxford: The Clarendon Press (1901), pp. 320-328.  Download here.↩

Did Pope Gregory the Great add four days to Lent?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Here’s a story that you can find in many places on the internet.  The season of Lent is 40 days of fasting.  This is why it is called Quadragesima, in the West.  So Lent must start on the Sunday which is forty days before Easter.  But it is also the rule that fasting is not allowed on Sundays, so there are only 36 actual days of fasting in Lent.  To resolve this,  we are told, Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604 AD) added 4 days to the start of Lent, which means that it begins on what is today known as Ash Wednesday.

Is it true?  What are the sources for this?

The only source that I have found that addresses it is a footnote in a very old 1774 text by Alban Butler.  This gives three sources which are relevant,[1]:

  • Gregory (d.604), Homilies on the Gospels, homily 16, cap. 5.  (See here for information about text and translation.)
  • Ratramnus of Corbie (d.868), Contra Graecorum opposita Romanam ecclesiam infamantium, libri quattuor (Against the slanders of the Greeks opposing the Roman church. text: PL 121:223-346, here; an original French translation by JesusMarie.com, 2016, is here.)
  • 9th century manuscripts of the so-called Gregorian family of “sacramentaries”, service books.
  • Ca. 700, the “Old Gelasian Sacramentary”, i.e. the manuscript Vatican reg. lat. 316.

There may well be other sources from the 9th century that verify that by that time Lent began on Ash Wednesday, but these are not known to me.

Gregory, Forty Gospel Homilies, Homily 16, is luckily online here.  From chapter 5:

5. Since there is harmony between the reading of the day and the liturgical time – we have indeed heard that our Redeemer practiced abstinence for forty days, and at the same time we begin the holy quarantine – we must examine carefully why this abstinence is observed for forty days. Moses, to receive the Law a second time, fasted forty days. Elijah in the desert abstained from eating forty days. The Creator of men himself, coming among men, did not take food for forty days. Let us also try, as far as we can, 3 to afflict our flesh by abstinence in this annual time of the Holy Quarantine.

Why is the number forty set for abstinence, if not because the Decalogue finds its perfection in the four books of the Holy Gospel? Likewise, in fact, that ten multiplied by four gives forty, we observe the commandments of the Decalogue to perfection by the practice of the four books of the Holy Gospel.

We can also give another interpretation to this number: our mortal body subsists by four elements, and it is by the pleasures of this body that we oppose the precepts of the Lord. But these are prescribed to us by the Decalogue. Therefore, since the desires of the flesh make us despise the commandments of the Decalogue, we should mortify this flesh forty times.

Here is yet another possible explanation of this holy quarantine: from today until the joys of the solemnity of Easter, it will pass six weeks, which is forty-two days. Since six Sundays are withdrawn from abstinence, there are only thirty-six days of abstinence left. To mortify thirty-six days in a year which counts three hundred and sixty-five, it is a little to give to God the tithe: having lived for ourselves during the year he granted us, we mortified ourselves in abstinence for our Creator during the tenth of this year.

So, dear brothers, since the law commands you to offer [to God] the tithe of all things (see Lev 27:30), try to offer him also the tithe of your days. May each one macerate himself in his flesh to the measure of his strength, mortify his desires and annihilate his shameful concupiscences, in order to become, in the words of Paul, a living host (Rm 12: 1). Man is a host at once living and immolated when, without leaving this life, he causes the carnal desires to die in him. Satisfied flesh has dragged us into sin; that mortified flesh brings us back to forgiveness. The author of our death [Adam] transgressed the precepts of life by eating the forbidden fruit of the tree. It is therefore necessary that, having lost the joys of paradise by the fact of food, we should endeavor to reconquer them, as far as we can, by abstinence.

That does indicate that the church in his day was observing 36 days of actual fasting.

Yet Ratramnus testifies that in his day the Roman church did not fast on the Sundays, leaving 36 fast days, which they corrected by adding 4 days.  This meant starting Lent on the Wednesday.  This from Book 4, chapter 4, via Google Translate:

IV. Let’s move on to what they blame us for about Lent. We abstain neither from meat like them, for eight weeks, nor from cheese and eggs for seven weeks, as is their custom. They speak as if, apart from that of the Romans, all the Eastern and Western churches followed their custom. It’s the opposite that is true. In both Eastern and Western churches, diversity is the rule, as we have already demonstrated. Some fast for seven weeks before Passover, except Sunday. Other six. Others started fasting before the seven weeks. So there are some who fast six weeks before Easter, others seven, others eight and even nine.

Let these censors name those who follow or imitate them! Certainly not the Romans who fast every day of the week, except Sundays, for six weeks before Passover! …

The gospel and the law teach us that the duration of Lent is forty days.  For we read in the Gospel that the Savior fasted continually for forty days and forty nights.  It is written in the Old Testament that Moses fasted twice for the same number of days and nights.  Once before receiving from God the decalogue of the law;  another time, after the transgression of the people had induced them to smash the tables of the law.  When Elijah was fleeing the wrath of Jezebel, he walked in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights, until he came to the mountain of God, Oreb.  From this comes the custom of the Church to fast for forty days.  All the churches of Christ apply to celebrate the quadragesimal fast with this number.  But since not everyone agrees on the number of weeks,  inevitably there is a disparity in the days.  It is a fact that, for the duration of Lent, all keep to the number forty;  but not everyone fasts every day of the week.  For there are some who only eat on Sunday;  others do not fast on Saturday or Sunday.  There are even some who do not fast on Fridays.  By not fasting on Sunday, even if they fast every other day of the week, they do not reach the number forty.  They are four days away.  Hence it is that, wanting to fast for forty days, they do not fast, before Easter, for six weeks, but seven weeks, although in six weeks there are forty-two days and not forty.  If we subtract the six Sundays from the forty days, there remain thirty-six days of fasting.  To reach the number forty,  four days must be added in the seventh week.  It therefore follows that Lent lasts seven weeks and not six weeks.  But, in the seventh week, only four days are fasted, which are added to the thirty-six to complete the number forty. …

The reproaches of the Easterns are therefore completely unfounded, because what they do in eight[2] weeks – fasting only five days a week – Westerners do in six, adding four days from a seventh week.

There are some errors in the last paragraph of the French, which I have notified to the translator, so let’s give the Migne text (col. 320 A):

Hac de causa Graeci non habeat quid Romanis objiciant super septimanarum disparilitate, quoniam quod illi in octo hebdomadibus faciunt, per singulas hebdomadas quinis non amplius diebus jejunantes, hoc tam Romana, quam Occidentalis Ecclesia, sex hebdomadibus perficere noscuntur; superadditis quatuor diebus hebdomadis septimae.

There are the Gregorian sacramentaries.  I don’t really know very much about these, but I have seen statements to the effect that these include material for the dies cinerum, the day of ashes, i.e. Ash Wednesday, and therefore testify to the four-day extension.

Finally we have another old service book, the so-called “old Gelasian” sacramentary, which is preserved in a Vatican manuscript with the shelfmark Vat. reg. Lat. 316.  This dates to around 700 AD.  Wilson’s edition is here.  On p.15, we find, at the foot of the page, in section XVII, prayers for “Quinquagesima usque ad quadragesimam” – the week in which lent now starts.  At the bottom we find:

In Ieiunio.  Prima Statione.  Feria iv.  Inchoata ieiunia, quaesumus, Domine, …

On the (Lenten) Fast.  First Station.  Wednesday.  The fast having being begun, we seek, O Lord,…

The manuscript is here.  The relevant material is at the foot of folio 16r (there seems no way to link directly to the page):

Ms. Vatican reg. lat. 316, f.16r (bottom)

The day of the week is clearly part of the original text.

I was not aware of this custom of labelling the days of the week in this way – Monday = feria secunda, Tuesday = feria tertia, etc – but this image shows that in 700 AD the fast began on the Wednesday of Quinquagesima.

Unless there is evidence to the contrary – and surely there has been work on this since 1774? – then we have no evidence of action by Gregory to add extra days during the 6th century.  A century later the Gelasian sacramentary witnesses to the addition of four days.  Another hundred years later, in the 9th century we find that the Greeks are sneering at the wimpy Latins for not fasting as long as themselves, and a retort demonstrating that the latter had a longer Lent than in the days of Gregory.

Update (12 March 2022) : Twitter user @Albertojr555 kindly drew my attention to the witness of the Gelasian sacramentary, noted by Joseph Abrahamson on his blog διαθηκη here.  I have updated the post accordingly.

Share
  1. [1]Alban Butler, The Moveable Feast, Fasts, and Other Annual Observances of the Catholic Church,  (1774) p.197, n. Here.: “For though six weeks make forty-two days, yet the Western churches excepted out of the fast all the Sundays, which make six days; and the Eastern Churches, both the Sundays and Saturdays. (Cassian. Collat. xxi. c. 14.) Hence it is clear that Lent consisted of thirty-fix days of fast, and of forty or more of abstinence. Those who made it less, or fasted the weeks alternately, were either hereticks or loose livers, unless the weakness of their health required such a dispensation. S. Gregory the Great defines the fast of Lent to have only comprised thirty-six days, the six Sundays being excepted as to the fast (Hom. 16. in Evang. n. 5. T. i. p. 1494.) To make the fast of forty days, four were added soon after, of which Ratramnus (l. 4. contra Graecor. Opin. c. iv. T. 2. Spicileg. p. 121.) and others are vouchers. From this time, not the first Sunday, but the foregoing Wednesday, is in the West the Head of the Fast. The Greeks, to make up for the Saturdays and Sundays which they do not fast, make their Abstinence from flesh of eight weeks; that from eggs and cheese of seven weeks. (Ratramn. ib. p. 123.) For the Greeks never fast on any Saturday in Lent except on Easter Eve.”↩
  2. [2]There is an error in the French translation here, but the PL col. 320 A says “in octo hebdomadibus”.↩

Robert Bellarmine, Opera Omnia volumes at Google Books

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday I needed to look up something in the works of counter-Reformation writer Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (a.k.a. Roberto Bellarmino), about whom I know nothing very much.  I found it very difficult to do so using a Google search.

It turns out that there is an Opera Omnia, which was reprinted in Paris by Louis Vivès in 1870-4, and the volumes are on Google Books.  So I thought that I would give some links here.  The description of contents comes from Worldcat.

Note that the Controversies volumes are divided up into sections covering individual topics, which are sometimes referred to without indicating that they form part of De Controversiis.  So I have linked the table of contents for these volumes.

I believe that there are also some old 17th century English translations of some of his works.  I don’t have information on what these might be, however.

I see, on the other hand, that an amazing gentleman named Ryan Grant is publishing a translation of the entirety of De Controversiis through Mediatrix Press.  Information about this is here.  I suggest that Catholic readers may wish to donate as he suggests on that page, in return for volumes, to help the project along.  Very worthwhile.

Note:  I find in Wikipedia here a list of the “controversies” covered in De Controversiis:

  1. The Word of God
  2. Christ
  3. The Pope
  4. Councils
  5. The Members of the Church
  6. The Church Suffering
  7. The Church Triumphant
  8. The Sacraments in General
  9. Baptism and Confirmation
  10. The Sacrament of Eucharist
  11. Penance
  12. Extreme Unction, Orders, and Matrimony
  13. The Grace of the First Man
  14. The Loss of Grace
  15. Grace and Free Choice
  16. Justification
  17. Good Works

Share

The March Poems in the Chronography of 354

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A number of manuscripts contain an image for March.  But here again it is the Vatican Barberini manuscript that gives us the 4-line poem, the tetrastich:

Cinctum pelle lupae promptum est cognoscere mensem
Mars olli nomen, Mars dedit exuvias.
Tempus vernum haedus petulans et garrula hirundo
indicat et sinus lactis et herba virens.

Know the month clothed with the wolf’s pelt;
Its name is Mars, and Mars gave us the skins.
The springtime brings the unruly kid, and the chattering swallow,
And the pail of milk, and the greening grass.

These items are depicted in the image, as we shall see.

The 2-line poem (= distich) is also present, one line under the left-hand page, one under the right:

Condita Mavortis magno sub nomine Roma
non habet errorem: Romulus auctor erit.

Rome was founded under the great name of Mars
There is no mistake. Romulus will be the founder.

The images show a consistency for once: a figure dressed in skins, holding a goat, standing on greenery, with pails of milk and a swallow, with characteristic forked tail.  A butter churn is to the left, and above it metal tools that perhaps relate to cheese-making (or so I am told!)

The 16th century Vienna manuscript 3416 (online here) gives us this, clearly redrawn, image:

Vienna 3146, f. 4v – March

The 17th century R1 manuscript, Vat. Barb.lat.2154B (online here) gives us this, with the tetrastich and the first line of the distich:

Vatican, Barberini lat. 2154B, f.18 – March

As before, the offline Brussels MS. , f.201, gives us an image mid-way between the two:

Brussels MS 7543-7549, f.201 – March

(For more information on this series of posts, please see the Introduction to the Poems of the Chronography of 354).

Share

The February Poems in the Chronography of 354

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The month of February has a number of illustrations.  In the Vatican Barberini manuscript, the 4-line poem (tetrastich) appears written down the side.  Here it is:

At quem caeruleus nodo constringit amictus,
quique paludicolam prendere gaudet avem,
daedala quem iactu pluvio circumvenit Iris:
Romuleo ritu februa mensis habet.

And he whom the cerulean cloak wraps (ties up) with a knot,
And who delights to chase the marsh-dwelling fowl,
He whom the skilful Iris/Rainbow pelts with a rain shower;
This month by the Romulean ritual has the feast of purification.

The 2-line poem (= distich) is also present.  Each distich consists of a hexameter at the foot of the left-hand page, and a pentameter at the foot of the right-hand page.  Here it is:

Umbrarum est alter quo mense putatur honore
pervia terra dato manibus esse vagis.

The second is of the ghosts, in which month it is believed,
That, after sacrifice has been made, earth is accessible to wandering spirits

The images show a figure, hunting with an eagle, while a vessel pours down water onto an Ibis.

The 16th century Vienna manuscript 3416 (online here) gives us this, evidently redrawn, image:

Vienna 3146, f. 3v – February

The 17th century R1 manuscript, Vat. Barb.lat.2154B (online here) gives us this, with the tetrastich and the first line of the distich, so I’ve made the picture somewhat larger:

Vatican, Barberini lat. 2154B, f.17 – February

Divjak and Wischmeyer give us an image from the important (but offline) Brussels manuscript 7543-49:

Brussels MS 7543-7549, f.201 – February

The gender of the figure must have been somewhat hard to determine in the original – Vienna has treated it as female, Rome as male, while the Brussels manuscript shows one that could be either.  The kantharos  vessel pours down upon the crane, or possibly an ibis.  A fish and some squids appear to the right.  The figure holds an eagle.

(For more information on this series of posts, please see the Introduction to the Poems of the Chronography of 354).

Share

The January Poems in the Chronography of 354

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Each month in the Chronography of 354 consists of a two-page spread.  On the left there is an illustration of the month, on the right a calendar of days and festivals and anniversaries.

For the month of January the 4-line poem (= tetrastich) is preserved only in manuscripts of the Anthologia Latina.  Here it is:

Hic Iani mensis sacer est, en aspice ut aris
Tura micent, sumant ut pia tura Lares.
Annorum saeclique caput, natalis honorum
Purpureis fastis qui numerat proceres.

This month is sacred to Janus; Lo! See on the altars
How the incense glitters, how the Lares accept the pious incense.
It is the start of years and time, the birthday of the offices
Which the nobles enumerate in their purpled calendars.

The 2-line poem (= distich) is present, thankfully.  Each distich consists of a hexameter at the foot of the left-hand page, and a pentameter at the foot of the right-hand page.  Here it is:

Primus, Iane, tibi sacratur ut omnia mensis
Undique cui semper cuncta videre licet.

The first month is sacred to you, Janus, like everything;
From both sides it is possible for him always to see everything.

But there is a twist here: the first line is different in two of the manuscripts, R1 and R2.  Instead the first line reads:

Ianus adest bifrons primusque ingreditur annum…

Two-faced Janus is here, and first begins the year…

It seems to be taken for granted in the literature that the illustration and the hexameter in R1 and R2 are not genuine; but renaissance compositions.

The 16th century Vienna manuscript 3416 (online here) is the only one that has twelve images in it.   But these have clearly been redrawn by someone who fancied himself as an artist.  Here is the one for January (f.2v, image 15):

Vienna (Vindobonensis 3416, f.2v) – January

The 17th century R1 manuscript, Vat. Barb.lat.2154B (online here) image, f.16, seems more authentic in style, and is within the original border.

R1 (Vat. Barb. lat. 2154B, f.16r) – January

The only month illustration in R2 (available online in a scanned microfilm here) is as follows:

R2 (Vat. lat. 9135, f.224r, p.288 in the viewer) – January

R1 and R2 are the same image, copied at the same time.

The figures in V and R1 are both making a sacrifice with incense, but there the similarity ends.

(For more information on this series of posts, please see the Introduction to the Poems of the Chronography of 354).

Share

An Introduction to the Poems of the Chronography of 354

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m going to do a little series of twelve posts, one per month, on the poems in an ancient text, the Chronography of 354.  Let me first say something about that book.

In 354 AD, perhaps as a gift for New Year’s Day, an otherwise unknown Roman nobleman named Valentinus received a  very splendid present.  It was a luxury book, containing a series of useful official-type documents: lists of consuls, months, a calendar, lists of church festivals and much more.  It is known today as the Chronography of 354.

These were all useful, but what made it special was the full-page illustrations that filled it.  These were made by a famous artist named Furius Dionysius Filocalus.  They included portraits of “our emperors” – a sour-looking Constantius dropping coins from his hand, and his nephew, the luckless Gallus, executed later that year.  Each month of the calendar had a facing picture depicting some aspect of the month or the seasonal activities.

The book itself seems to have survived to around 800 AD, when copies were made.  A mass of partial copies of these copies have reached us, all more or less unsatisfactory.  Some contain some of the images.  Some are text only.  Modern editions are all rather unsatisfactory too.  It is a hard text to edit, in fairness. It is curious that, even today, the only publication that gives the newcomer an idea of the work as a whole, in order, is the version that I compiled for my own website (here) in 2006.

Part VI of the work, the calendar, may be found here. For each month, on facing pages, there is an illustration, within an ornate frame – and then opposite, the various days and events of the month.  Here is the picture for February, from a renaissance manuscript, printed in the 19th century:

Chronography of 354 – illustration of February

There are two elements to this picture that I did not engage with back in 2006, since they are most likely not original.  To the right, drawn clumsily down the side, is a four-line poem, a tetrastich.  Underneath, in majuscule, is half of a two line poem or distich – the second line appears underneath the facing page.

I intend to do a short series of posts here, dealing with the tetrastichs and distichs.  It would be nice to deal with them month by month, just as they appear in the manuscripts of the Chronography.

Now for a bit of bibliography.

Since 2006 an excellent study has appeared by Richard Burgess, “The Chronograph of 354: Its manuscripts, contents and history”, Journal of Late Antiquity 5 (2013), 345-396. This includes a convincing discussion of the tetrastichs and distichs.

The following year there appeared a mighty two-volume attempt at a modern edition and commentary: J. Divjak & W. Wischmeyer, Das Kalenderhandbuch von 354: Der Chronograph des Filocalus, Vienna: Holzhausen (2014).  Generously, the publishers have since made it available for free download: vol.1, and vol. 2.  This is no small blessing.

The new book was reviewed harshly by Burgess, and it seems as if the task of handling so much data perhaps overwhelmed the editors, as much as it overwhelms the reader.  But they edit the tetrastichs and distichs and even – very wisely – provide them with German translations.  So I intend to make use of their efforts.

Since 2006 a bunch of the manuscripts have come online and are accessible, particularly at the Vatican.  This also is a blessing, and I hope to use some of this material.

There is a mass of scholarly literature on every aspect of the Chronography, but most of it I have not read.  My purpose here is to make these texts better known.

Let’s talk a bit about how these texts actually come to us.

The distichs were edited by A. E. Housman, as a poem of twenty-four lines, who pronounced it to be pure “Augustan” in style.  The verses are perhaps 1st century.

The tetrastichs are said to be fifth-century, but I’m not sure on what basis.  But, although they are transmitted to us with the Chronography, they also circulated independently and have reached us in that way also, as part of the Latin Anthology.  The content of the poems seems to describe pictures in a calendar, but not always the pictures that we have.

The manuscript tradition of all this material is rather tangled, but a few details (from Burgess) may explain why the tetrastichs and distichs are thought to be later.

All but one of the extant manuscripts of the Chronography derive from a now lost Luxemburg manuscript of the 9-10th century which comes to light in 1560.  This is given the siglum “L”.  It was copied from Valentinus’ original book (siglum “O”).  The Luxemberg manuscript clearly had the tetrastichs and distichs, at least by the time that renaissance copies were made from it.

But the Luxemburg manuscript was not the only copy made from “O”.  It seems that St Gall 878 (= “S”), which contains only text from various parts of the work, was also copied directly from “O” in the 830s.  The copyist of “S” included the distichs, but he did not copy the tetrastichs.  This suggests that the tetrastichs were not present in “O”.

Neither the tetrastichs nor the distichs fit into the ornate graphic design of the framework of the ancient original.  They are tacked on the side and the bottom of the page.  This suggests again that neither is original.  The distichs are present in a clear rustic capitals, and were probably added in antiquity.  They do not relate to the text in any way, however.  The tetrastichs were added in a sloppy way, which might even be as late as the renaissance.  But they do relate in some ways to the illustrations.

I think that’s more than enough detail for now.  One problem with writing about the Chronography is that you always feel the urge to add more detail.  And then more.  Almost nobody who has written about this has resisted this temptation, with the result that the publications are very dense and unreadable.  Divjak and Wischmeyer almost drowned in the mass of data!  I shall try to do better, but those wanting more information must refer to the sources above.

I will post this and the first two months, since we’re a bit late with starting this.  I hope to post the other months at the start of each month.  For each month I will give the tetrastich and the distich.  Since the tetrastich often refers to the ancient image for the month, I will include this also.

Share