MASTER of the HILDEGARD CODEX









Source.

GOSPELS of HENRY the LION



The Gospels of Henry the Lion (Evangeliar Heinrichs des Löwen) was illuminated at Helmarshausen Abbey for Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony (1142-1195), cousin of Frederick Barbarossa.

The manuscript went to Prague in the late fourteenth century in the reign of Emperor Charles IV, where in 1594 it was given a new cover, commissioned by the dean of the cathedral, Georg Barthold Pontanus von Breitenberg. This is decorated with silver reliefs of the four evangelists and a crystal box containing relics of St Mark and the saintly King Sigismund.

BOG BUTTER


Bog Butter in the Cork Butter Museum

More about bog butter: here, here, here, here and here.

CRKVA SVETOG SAVE

PULPIT in the VIENNA STEPHANSDOM

GREAT CLOCKS of CHRISTENDOM ~ PART XX


In the cloister of Bebenhausen Monastery.


In Cologne.


Delacorte Clock in New York City ~ Central Park. The animals march in circles as nursery rhyme tunes play.


In Nevers Cathedral.


In Sion


In Uppsala Cathedral. Built by Petrus Astronomus in 1506 and destroyed by fire in 1702.

See also parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, *, *, *, *

On NOVELTY

What is genuinely an innovation has a distinct and different identity. This comes about in a being in virtue of having a distinct and different principle or principles. Innovation in ecclesiastical tradition, therefore, is something which does not have the Church as its Mother and the Deposit of Faith as its origin; it is something which therefore must exclude what has come before, and that is why Nicea [II] anathematizes all who despise and reject what is already included in ecclesiastical tradition.

- Source.

SIGN at CLEAR CREEK MONATERY



During my retreat at Clear Creek Monastery in August, I worked on this sign. I lettered the "Construction Site" and "Mass" boards, and painted them.

The PASSION of JOAN of ARC



Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer.

The BOG, the BATMOBILE and the TRIDENTINE MASS







This post sponsored by the Village of Volo Board of Tourism.

MODERN CULTURE is NOT NEUTRAL

Rev. James V. Schall:

[quote]

The study of Tracey Rowland on the relation of culture to Thomism and more particularly to the adequacy of the treatment of culture in Gaudium et spes of Vatican II, however, causes me to reaffirm this position about incompatibility of modern culture and Catholicism but to look at its problematic in quite a new way. I understand that the spirit of renewal has, in effect, insisted that the project be one, wherever possible, of accommodating Catholicism to modernity. It has not been seen, as perhaps it should have been, as a profound critique of modernity itself by Catholicism. Rowland shows quite clearly that serious deficiencies in intellectual acumen were present within Catholicism and in the minds of many fathers in Vatican II. Gaudium et spes’ understanding of how its basic teachings related to a cultural milieu, infused, as it was, with unattended to and alien philosophic premises, was at least innocent, when not positively faulty and erroneous...

What is argued by Rowland is not that Catholic theological and philosophical principles are not in fact directly pertinent to the crisis of both liberalism and post-modernity, but that these principles have not been argued well within the Magisterium or by many of the theologians and philosophers who claim to be following its terms. Not realizing the depths to which a living culture can be penetrated by religious or philosophic principles or ways of acting that prevent any understanding of transcendent principles, an intelligent understanding of Catholicism, using such cultural principles, would be impossible.

The subsequent enthusiasm to conform to or open oneself to modern culture, so much associated with Gaudium et spes, was not, therefore, a project without serious danger to any future of a Catholic culture, let alone to the proper understanding of Catholicism embedded within any culture, even those outside the modern Western orbit. These latter cultures are now themselves increasingly related to modern ideas and practices often summed up, rather naively, under the vague and over-used term globalization. Hence, this analysis of culture has become not merely a problem of the Western tradition, but also it has become a missionary problem in which, as in the case, say, of liberation theology, its very terminology was rooted in this same philosophical problem of culture as articulated in specifically modern philosophy.

The central thesis of this most erudite and well-argued book is, contrary to many assumptions of the Fathers at Vatican II, that modern culture is not neutral but replete with customs, laws, ideas, and assumptions that either are difficult or impossible to reconcile with classical Catholic orthodoxy. This conclusion means that the famous project of opening the Church to specifically modern culture did not and could not result in any new evangelization or success in making Catholicism more acceptable to the modern mind. In fact, this opening to modern culture undermined many of the basic assumptions by which understanding and living the faith was possible. The conversion did not go from modernity to Catholicism, but from Catholicism in modernity, even though many of the words used were traditional ones with a specific theological meanings if understood in their proper contexts.

[end quote]

Read the rest of this essay here.

EVEN MONTY PYTHON KNOWS IT



Interview with Terry Jones:

Colin Covert: You write that our view of mediaeval life is unduly grim because historians maligned the period. It's easy to see why a nobleman might want to burnish his image by commissioning a writer to vilify a predecessor, but who would benefit from a campaign to disparage an era?

Terry Jones: A very interesting question. Well, in the first place, it would have been the thinkers of the Renaissance, who wanted to establish a break with the past. They also wanted to establish their own sense of importance by belittling what had gone before. This then gets taken up by the promoters of Renaissance culture who are keen to establish its supremacy over the mediaeval world - particularly since the Renaissance is a backward-looking movement which harks back to the classical world rather than establishing something new.

In the 20th and 21st century, Renaissance values have been adapted to fit the modern capitalist world. The whole myth that there was no sense of human individuality before the Renaissance is part of this attempt to make the present day seem the culmination of human progress, which I don't think it is.

CANTIGAS de SANTA MARIA



Two excellent, thorough websites devoted to this Galician cycle of 420 devotional songs composed at the Court of King Alfonso X of Castile in the second half of the 13th century:

The Oxford Cantigas de Santa Maria database
Cantigas de Santa Maria at the SCA Minstrels page

The PAPA LUIGI SYNDROME



Rev. John Parsons:

[quote]

Catholic orthodoxy at the end of the 17th century preserved a healthy respect for the papacy, without indulging in any papal personality cult of the 19th and 20th century kind. Still less was there any notion then that a pope could abolish the traditional Roman Rite of Mass or Office, or sanction pagan worship in Catholic churches; and the very idea of a modernization of the Church would have been unintelligible.

All this was true because western culture was still spontaneously traditional. It was the rationalism of the 18th century that instituted the divorce between a relativised past and a progressivist present. Rapid advances in historical scholarship from the late 17th century onward and the ever-accelerating explosion in secular knowledge and technological innovation from the 18th century, have relativised much of what seemed absolute. Rationalist critiques of tradition have been the favourite project of the enlightened intelligentsia from the late 18th century, and the utopian violence of the French Revolution was the logical outcome. In the Church an analogous spirit of rationalist enlightenment connects Scipio de Ricci and his synod at Pistoia, with Annibale Bugnini and his liturgical reform.

The disappearance of spontaneous traditionalism in the West, and the advance of outright unbelief, put devout Catholics and the papacy under increasing pressure in the nineteenth century. When the Christian restoration began in 1814 with the liberation of the Pope and the restoration of the Papal States and the Jesuits, the old structure of Christendom lay in ruins. The great religious orders had almost completely perished, the network of Catholic universities had been largely destroyed, the collegiate churches with their libraries and endowed chapters of canons had vanished, and with these losses had gone the theological faculties with all their financial and intellectual endowments. It was this array of institutions which had provided the social supports for Catholic liturgical life, theological production and public piety in previous centuries. After 1830 the renewed march of secularism overthrew or hamstrung the Catholic monarchies, and instituted militantly anti-Catholic regimes in many hitherto Catholic countries. This led to the selection of bishops passing from the local government to the Roman Curia, centralizing the selection of the episcopate in a way it had never been centralized previously. In this context, Catholic forces, seeing their societies secularised, turned more and more towards the papacy as providing the immediate norm for Catholic life and the focal point of Catholic identity. It was at that period that the average pious Catholic became an Ultramontane in the sense defined above; something he had never been in the Ages of Faith, when all the world was Catholic.

Instead of being the summit of the pyramid of Christian society, of which the base was a spontaneous Catholic traditionalism theologically justified by the permanent presence of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of the faithful in every age, the papacy was made, from the time of Gregory XVI onwards, to carry the whole burden of the maintenance of Catholic tradition, among a Catholic population which, in Europe, was in the process of apostasizing from the faith, and closing its heart to the Holy Spirit. It was as if the pyramid had been inverted, and the foundations of a restored Christendom were to rest on the authority of a papacy isolated in the face of a hostile world. To change the image, when the great forest of Catholic Christendom was cut down, except for the tallest papal tree, that remaining tree stood out in a lonely prominence that was unimaginable in the pontificate of Innocent XII.

In that sense, Pio Nono could truly say Io sono la tradizione, because he had become, by default, the principal upholder and last defender of Christendom. From the fall of Rome in 1870 to the proclamation of aggiornamento in 1959, the papacy and the Church cut a splendid, embattled figure, defying the modern world and ostensibly keeping the guns of Christian tradition blazing. The danger was that it was a tradition now maintained by papal fiat and bureaucratic decree, and thus dangerously exposed to any shift or ambiguity in Vatican policy.

And the rest, as they say, is history...

[end quote]

Read the rest of this excellent essay here.

STILL IMAGES FROM FAUST

Some stills from the 1926 film directed by F.W. Murnau, which I watched recently. I generally despise motion pictures, but I am able to appreciate the inventiveness and charm of early silent films and some animation. I remain highly suspicious of the talkies.











Several factors in the late 1920s - the emergence of the big Hollywood studios and the refinement of psychologically manipulative editing methods, both assisted by the introduction of sound, destroyed whatever potential the medium had for producing truly meaningful art. Since then, the cinema has been a blight upon culture, producing nothing valuable enough to justify its existence.

EAGLE LECTERN



Eagle lectern with adjustable height. Reproduced as a copperplate engraving in Ornament of the Middle Ages by Karl Heideloff.

ST. OLAV FRONTAL

This informative website details the reconstruction of the 14th century St. Olav altar frontal:

To celebrate the 1000 years anniversary of the christening of Iceland, Norway's gift to Iceland was a replica of Haltdalen stave church. In addition the gift included a reconstruction of the St Olav frontal, one of the most important of Norway’s surviving works of art of the High Middle Ages.

To achieve the best possible likeness, the reconstruction has been executed using the same kinds of materials and techniques as the original. The work was greatly facilitated by two factors: the original’s relatively good condition, and the knowledge acquired through numerous in-depth studies. The frontal is exhibited in the museum of the Arch Bishop's Palace in Trondheim.

The original frontal:



And the reconstruction:

CONGRATULATIONS



To Frank and Rachel Avila, wed 29 September 2007 at St. John Cantius Church in Chicago.

LUCY SHAW CAKES

A few weeks ago, I posted a new bookplate I drew for a baby boy named Columba. It shows his patron saint rebuking the Loch Ness monster, an incident recorded by St. Adamnan in the 7th century.

Columba's mother Lucy is a wonderful baker, and for his christening party, she created the same scene in sugar paste:





Among the other fine cakes pictured on her blog are several featuring saints:

St. Pius V

St. Joan

St. Mary

St. Francis

St. Rita

OLD ST. PETER CHURCH in CHICAGO



Old St. Peter Church in Chicago. This is the church that was replaced by St. Peter in the Loop.