By Derek Olsen
As a student of how the Scriptures have been interpreted through the ages, the reconstruction of early medieval liturgies is one of my tasks. And this task is much more complicated than it might first seem. One of my constant concerns arises from the basic technology of manuscripts—hand-written texts. The process of copying is never a simple one and scribes are sometimes known to be creative in curious ways… To make a long story short, the reality of copied manuscripts means that we can never properly speak in generalities about medieval this or that—we can only talk in terms of particulars. This is what the texts show us was done at a given place and a given time.
The manuscript technology problem wouldn’t be so bad were it not for the division of our sources. I’m never just trying to find one book. When I pull together the pieces of a tenth-century Mass, I need to collect materials from at least five different books! And, if I intend to construct a reasonable picture of the lengthy Night Office where the most liturgical exposure to Scripture occurred, I must consult no less than eight different kinds of sources, hoping and praying that I can draw together materials from roughly the same time and place that exist within the same strand of liturgical tradition.
It’s a complicated task: sacramentaries and tropers, antiphoners and collectors, each book having its own materials, its own internal logic and—quite often—no sign of how they are intended to relate one to another. As the liturgies proceed, sometimes a word or two scribbled in a margin will give me an indication of how a scribe thought the next portion of the liturgy will start, so I constantly scan the sides of pages looking, hoping, for clues. I breathe a sigh of relief as I move to later sources. Especially when dealing with materials from cathedrals or other communities of canons (non-monastic priests who lived in groups) the more I move into the eleventh century and beyond the more I find the fore-runners of today’s breviaries and missals where all of the texts are conveniently gathered into one place. It makes my job so much easier—but at the same time, I feel a note of sadness.
Why the multiplication of books? Why so many different pieces to juggle? The answer is actually quite simple. According to the early medieval scheme, each set of participants had their own book that contained the material they needed. So the celebrant would have his sacramentary, the cantor would have his troper, the choir, their gradual, the deacon his Gospel-book, and so on and so forth. Unlike me in my modern pew juggling a Book of Common Prayer, a hymnal or two, a service leaflet, (and a preschooler) trying to follow all of the parts at once, the liturgy flowed from part and section—going now to the cantor, then to the halves of the choir, passing to the celebrant, then to the choir once again—each liturgical actor having only the pieces they needed to perform their role in the grand dance of the liturgy.
And that’s why the breviaries and the missals make me sad.
They show a shift in the liturgical culture, a movement away from this vision of the whole community gathered in prayer together. The culture and piety of the eleventh and twelfth centuries began to move to individual priests praying masses and offices on their own. Architecturally, altars proliferated in cathedral sanctuaries and side-chapels, each a niche for a priest on his own. And, in so doing, something of the notion of “common prayer” was thereby diminished. Because, from that point, we had to remember rather than see one of the great truths about Christian liturgy.
One of the great liturgical truths is that when we pray, we never pray alone. Even when we are physically alone, our prayer is never solitary but is woven into the greater garland of unceasing prayer that surrounds the throne of God and of the Lamb, the chorus of—as the Book of Revelation shows us—the four living creatures, the twenty-four elders, the choirs of angels, the great throng that none could number and, ultimately, every creature in heaven, on earth, under the earth, and in the seas.
Speaking truthfully, our prayer, our praise, our worship, doesn’t truly begin or end; rather we simply rejoin ourselves to the hymn without end. Like the medieval books, all prayer is local prayer rooted in a particular time, a particular place, yet these prayers are the threads of sound in a greater tapestry that ascends to the Father of Lights, an offering of joy, of pain, of sorrow, and of hope. When I juggle my books in the sanctuary, when I sit with my daughters at bedtime, even when I sit in the early morning with breviary and Raisin Bran, I know I join in the greater liturgy even if I have to strain my eyes and tune my ears to hear it.
Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I need reminding—and the reminders are there. Sprinkled here and there in the liturgies themselves I find the reminders that even when I sing in the car on my commute I never sing alone. The Te Deum reminds me of the “the glorious company of the apostles,” “the goodly fellowship of the prophets,” “the noble army of martyrs” and I recollect and find myself in “the holy Church throughout all the world acclaiming.” Or I locate myself among the mountains and hills, the fruit trees and cedars, the creeping things and wingèd birds of the Psalter.
This is part of what the communion of saints communicates to me: the breadth, the depth, of our praise and worship of the ineffable, the Holy God. It’s what I find in the dusty books of monasteries long since perished and in the parishes down the street from my house. On the lips of my children, and scratched in rusty ink from stylus long since lain down. And the words of Fr. Franz’s hymn come back to my mind: “And from morn to set of sun/ Through the Church the song goes on…”
Derek Olsen is in the final stretch of completing a Ph.D. in New Testament (with a healthy side of Homiletics) at Emory University. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X dad appear at Haligweorc.