Unxerunt Salomonem

Yesterday evening, the antiphon at the Magnificat for first Vespers of the 7th Sunday after Pentecost was Unxerunt Salomonem, which irresistibly brings to mind Handel's magnificent coronation anthem Zadok the priest…

Sadoc the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon king in Gihon: and going up glad, they said: May the king live for ever. (3 Kings 1:45; cf. 1:39,34,31)

First Vespers of Pentecost, O.P.

Using a nice mediæval Office has its pleasing surprises – such as tonight (it's but six o'clock and dark, for winter is here in Tasmania already, at the end of a sunny but freezing cold day of -1 to 12°C), when I first lit up the six candles atop the little book case before my prie-dieu, and readied myself to read First Vespers of this greatest feast, the Advent of the Holy Ghost: for it transpires that in the Dominican Breviary, both Vespers of Pentecost (and throughout its Octave) have but three psalms, not the usual five.  

In this, Whitsuntide parallels Easter Week according to the Rite of the Friars Preachers, when from Easter Sunday evening to Easter Friday evening, for those six days of the New Creation in Christ our Risen Lord, Psalms 109, 110 and 111 are read daily.  Just so, as I now discover, first this night we begin Pentecost with Psalms 145, 146 and 147 – for all these are Laudate psalms, and the Dominicans keep the common mediæval practice of singing only such psalms for first Vespers of all feasts (but including Psalms 112 and 116 first, to make up the usual five) – and then for the six Vespers of Whit Sunday through to Whit Friday evening, Psalms 109, 110 and 111 are sung each night.  Again we celebrate six days of the New Creation in God's Spirit!

I was very taken by certain significant lines in this Hour.  For a start, I give due thanks to the Holy Ghost for enlightening me (as I humbly hope He did) as to the deeper sense of the Little Chapter, Factus est repente (Acts ii, 2): for when we read that the Spirit "filled the whole house where the Apostles were sitting", do we not see that this "house" is the Church of the Living God, and that house only wherein sit "the Apostles" and their successors, the Pope and his brother bishops?  (The Breviary supplies the word Apostoli, "[the] Apostles", to make sense of this single verse; in the original, it simply says "they", evidently referring back two verses to Acts i, 26, which mentions the Apostles.)

Secondly, in the Vesper hymn Beata nobis gaudia, the Church sings in supplication, Te nunc, Deus piissime, Vultu precamur cernuo, Illapsa nobis cælitus Largire dona Spiritus – "Thee now, most kindly God, we pray Thee, bowing [Thy] Face down [to us], to grant unto us the infalling Gift of the heavenly Spirit" (or so I roughly read it).  Be it so!

First Vespers of Septuagesima - O.P. Responsory &c.

As is the custom when a new book of Scripture is about to be begun at Matins, at first Vespers to-night the Dominican Rite inserts a Responsory from the set of Historia (as they are called) for that book – Genesis:

(Genesis ii, 1 & cf. ii, 2; Genesis i, 31a.)

R/.  Igitur perfecti sunt cæli et terra et omnis ornatus eorum: complevitque Deus die septimo opus suum quod fecerat: * Et requievit † Ab omni opere quod patrarat.  V/.  Viditque Deus cuncta quæ fecerat: et erant valde bona. * Et requievit.  Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. † Ab omni opere quod patrarat.

(R/.  So the heavens and the earth were finished and all the furniture of them: and on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made: * And he rested † From all his work which he had done. V/.  And God saw all the things that he had made, and they were very good. * And he rested.  Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. † From all his work which he had done.)

Vespers pre- and post-1912

As all men know, Pope St Pius X did two very daring things: 

• first, he caused a change to the traditional order of reception of the sacraments - not of set purpose but because he desired to encourage all frequently to partake of Holy Communion, and so ordered that all children having reached the age of reason could communicate - as the age for Confirmation remained what it had been previously, in most countries it transpired that children began making their first Holy Communion before being confirmed; 
• second, he had the weekly order of reciting the psalmody in the Divine Office rearranged - so that nearly all the psalms were recited only once in the week (rather than some being repeated every day), and thereby shortening the Office, while ensuring, by a change of the rubricks, that on most days (other than the great feasts) the ferial psalms were said, so that each week most of the Psalter was prayed (by the growth in the number of feasts over the centuries, which took their psalms from the Common, many psalms allotted to ferial days were hardly ever said).

Whatever of the first concern, the second I think, over all - beware, those besotted with the ancient Roman cursus psalmorum! "Rome has spoken..." and all that - to have been beneficial.  

For a start, rather than daily reading the long Psalm 118 at the  Little Hours, and having twelve psalms to get through each night at Matins, it was decided to reduce Matins to nine psalms or portions thereof, and to redistribute the surplus psalms over Prime, Terce, Sext and None, moreover making each of those Hours somewhat shorter than before.  

This to be honest made the Little Hours much more interesting, and reduced the fatigue of the Night Office - certainly I enjoy the daily variation at Prime, Terce, Sext and None (unfortunately, the lengthy and highly repetitive nature of Psalm 118 still can make these Hours difficult on Sundays and feasts, I find), and given that I find even nine psalms or parts thereof rather tiring, I hate to imagine how twelve full psalms would seem.  The reforms reduced the length of Matins on most days by half, or even by two-thirds!

(That said, it is said that an angel appeared to one of the Desert Fathers to reveal that twelve was the right number of psalms for Matins.  Then again, I'm not a holy hermit!)

I will leave aside the changes made to Lauds for a later post...

As for Compline, I do wish that it hadn't been changed, and had remained invariable - Psalms 4, 90 and 133 are supremely suitable for the Hour.  As it is, on ferias other psalms, redistributed from Matins, were introduced, which rather destroyed one beauty of Compline: that it could be said from memory in darkness just before retiring for the night.  (Benedictines retained both their ancient invariable Compline, and the lovely custom of singing it in choir entirely unlit, but for a candle burning before the image of Our Lady, to which all turned at the end to sing her anthem.)

But my real interest is Vespers, pre- and post-1912.

Vespers had always consisted of five psalms each day, taken in order from Psalms 109 to 147 (except for four: 117, used at Prime or Lauds; 118, used at the Little Hours; 133, at Compline; and 142 at Lauds one morning).  Psalms 1 to 108 were nearly all used at Matins, and some at Lauds, Prime and Compline; Psalms 148 to 150, the Laudate psalms par excellence, were used daily together at Lauds, which was named after them.

Surprisingly little change was made: only five psalms were removed entirely (and employed at Lauds), and four were moved forward by a day, while four were divided into portions:

• Sunday — Pss 109, 110, 111, 112, 113 [unchanged]
• Monday — Pss 114, 115, (116 - moved to Lauds), 119, 120 (plus 121 from Tuesday)
• Tuesday — Pss (121 - moved back), 122, 123, 124, 125 (plus 126 from Wednesday)
• Wednesday — Pss (126 - moved back), 127, 128, 129, 130 (plus 131 from Thursday)
• Thursday — Pss (131 - moved back), 132, (134 - moved to Lauds) 135 (broken into two), 136 (plus 137 from Friday)
• Friday — Pss (137 - moved back), 138 (broken into two), 139, 140, 141
• Saturday — Pss 143 (broken into two), 144 (broken into three), (145, 146, 147 - all moved to Lauds)

One happy consequence of this reform was that the disparity in length of psalmody (measured by the number of verses of the psalms to be recited) between different evenings at Vespers was diminished: before 1912, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday Vespers were all very short, less than half as long as Vespers of the other days - while Thursday evening had a particularly lengthy Vespers, which was cut down to size by the reforms.  By roughly evening the evenings up, it would seem that some good was effected.

In summary, Sunday Vespers remained unchanged, Vespers of Monday through to Friday more or less had two changes each, but remained mainly unchanged, and only Saturday Vespers (first Vespers of Sunday) was markedly affected.

Yes, it will be noticed that it is Saturday Vespers - such as first Vespers of Septuagesima, which I've claimed below can be truly called the start of the Church's Year of Grace - that has been cut down.

Perhaps, pro pia devotione, one could read Psalms 145, 146 and 147 after Saturday Vespers, to experience somewhat of the character of that Hour in its older form.

Eve of Corpus Christi

To celebrate Corpus Christi (well, really to fete my return from New Zealand) I went out for dinner with relatives, which was very pleasant - but this was the agape after the eucharistia, since I braved "lazy Mass" at St Vincent's Hospital first: I call it that because the rather aged clientele not only don't kneel - yes, some may well be unable to (such as the man in the wheelchair!) - but perversely, even though they stand for the Gospel and the Lord's Prayer, they dumbly sit for the Preface.  I stand.

In any case, the celebrant was a devout Franciscan priest who, one could tell, savoured the words of the sacred rites, and in all honesty I found even his use of the Eucharistic Prayer for Various Needs and Occasions quite bearable, seeing as it quite clearly enunciated the Sacrifice being offered up, and so forth (though the more self-reflexive lines about we the Church on our pilgrim way would best be deleted as too subjective and secretly smug).  As I was a little late in arriving (just before the Gospel), I had prayed to myself  in the car the opening parts of the Mass in the EF, Introibo and all that, and in the pause during the Offertory read to myself from my Breviary the Collect of St Margaret and the passage about the Valiant Woman that would have served for an Epistle.  It was good to kneel before the Mystery being enacted, and to come to receive the Body and the Blood.  Refecti Christi corpore et sanguine, te laudamus, Domine!

In thanksgiving, I prayed the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, each twice, the better to savour the words while turning to the Lord Who had come: Benedictus qui venit... Hosanna in excelsis!  After the Liturgy, I knelt before the Tabernacle and said First Vespers of Corpus Christi, which was thanksgiving indeed.

A good day, to-day; praying the Office, the Golden Sequence Veni sancte Spiritus, and even the Rosary on the way home, plus assisting at Mass; abundant consolations.  Lord, preserve me.