LATIN AND LITURGY

 

Strangely enough, at the outset of its long history, the Roman mass was in Greek, the common language of the cosmopolitan Mediterranean. Latin was not fully adopted until the second half of the fourth century. The Canon or Eucharistic Prayer remained in Greek for a while even after the first part of the mass was celebrated in Latin, the local vernacular. In fact, North Africa had a Latin liturgy before the capital of the Empire. Apart from the related Roman and African liturgies, there was another family of Latin liturgies, including the Ambrosian Rite in Milan and Northern Italy, and the Gallican rite in France, the immediate source for many prayers and practices originally imported from Eastern (Byzantine and Syrian) traditions.

Circumstances conspired to give the Roman rite its dominant position. Paradoxically, the final collapse of the Roman Empire in the West during the fifth century had positive consequences for the Church, as afterwards it remained the sole representative of ancient Roman civilisation in half of Europe, making it attractive to the various largely pagan peoples, which had established new kingdoms on the territory of the Empire. The popes’ strategy, the only realistic one in the circumstances, was to cultivate and convert them. The policy was successful in the first place with the Franks, who had settled in the Northern part of what had been Gaul, giving it their name, France (baptism of King Clovis c 495 AD). The culmination of the church’s policy came among the monuments and ruins of ancient Rome on Christmas Day in 800 AD, when Pope Leo III placed an imperial crown on head of Clovis’ greatest successor as ruler of this  once 'barbaric’ Germanic people which had once helped to bring about the collapse of the Roman Empire. As he listened to the acclamation, we can imagine the pride and satisfaction the new Emperor Charlemagne (768-814) must have felt at being the recognised successor of the great men responsible for the city and its achievements. It must also have been a moment of satisfaction to the pope who had just crowned the King of the Franks Emperor as successor to the Caesars, as it symbolised and guaranteed the position of the church in a world without security. It also marks the end of the transition from the ancient to the medieval world.

The Roman mass as we  know it owes its distinctive character to the combination of the typically conservative,  restrained traditional Roman style of liturgy with the more expressive Eastern style, usually imported via the Latin liturgy of Gaul/France, always much more open than Rome to Eastern influences, possibly because the South of France was originally Christianized by missionaries from Asia. The Gallic liturgy gets its name from the name of the territory in Latin Gallia ‘Gaul’, later called France, from the Franks, the Germanic tribe who conquered most of it later. It was the immediate source of all of the significant single items inserted into the framework of the Roman mass after 700 AD, such as the Confiteor (11th century), Gloria (12th century as a regular part of the Roman mass), Credo (11th century), and Agnus Dei (7th century) Individual freestanding items such as these as could be inserted into the existing  framework of the mass  without disturbing the overall pattern by filling places in the text referred to as ‘soft spots’ (for example where there was a procession but no accompanying prayers, as was true at that time of the opening of the mass)

There is reliable information on the mass from the sixth century on because copies of the liturgical books have survived. The term ‘liturgical books’ is used because at this stage there was no overall missal: for example, the readers, the deacon, and the choir each had a book containing only the items in the proper (changing parts of the mass) pertaining to them. The celebrant had a sort of script with ‘stage directions’ called the Ordo missae for coordinating the contributions of all the participants. There are Orders of the Mass bearing the names of two popes of the late fifth century, Leo I (440-461) and Gelasius (492-496) and of Gregory I a century later (559-604). The earliest complete Ordines date from the seventh century, but incorporate older material. Pope Gregory the Great also gave his name to the restored form of liturgical singing, still known as Gregorian chant. He moved the Pater Noster to its present, prominent position, immediately after the end of the Canon, and is personally credited with finalising the Canon, probably first written down in the fourth century, having up to then been improvised. The need for dogmatic consistency in the disputes over the identity and person of Jesus in the fourth and fifth centuries was one of the factors leading to it being committed to writing

Like all the peoples who converted from paganism in Western Europe, the Franks had adopted the prestigious Latin liturgy, rather than a translated version in their own Germanic language.  When the extremely active churches of Gaelic Ireland (conversion from c 430) and Anglo-Saxon England (re-Christianised during the sixth century) in their turn sent out missionary monks all over Europe, they brought with them the Latin liturgy and language they had themselves recently received. The Latin language itself was renewed in the eighth century on  the Emperor Charlemagne’s initiative, making it a suitable vehicle for the administration both of the church and of his Empire, as well as the law, learning, theology and education. The Frankish kings were eager to have the Roman liturgy installed as standard on their territory.  In response to a request, sets of liturgical books were sent from Rome in the eighth century, but they were examples of the papal liturgy and so not particularly suited to an ordinary parish mass in what was still an overwhelmingly rural society, so the liturgy had to be adapted. In the eleventh century the resulting Frankish liturgy returned to Rome and merged with the Roman liturgy to form a composite ‘Franco-Roman’ Latin liturgy.  Klauser sums up what this imported element gave the Roman liturgy:  where it was short, simple and austere, the imported elements meant longer prayers and chants, an injection of emotion, and a greater use of symbolism and ritual. This included, for example, such features as the literally dramatic liturgies for Holy Week:  on Palm Sunday, the acting-out of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem amid crowds waving palm leaves; the veneration of the cross on Good Friday and the Easter Vigil with the paschal candle representing the risen Christ, all of which are still current. [1]

A change in the focus of the mass had begun as early as the fourth and fifth century.  Awe and even fear came to characterise attitudes to the liturgy, and the sacrifice of Jesus the theology of the Eucharist. These developments were encouraged by the increased stress on the divinity of Jesus during the dispute with the Arians, who denied it. The result was an enhanced sense of the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament, and with it of the holiness of the moment, it was brought about, the Consecration. The mass became primarily what Jungmann refers to as the mystery of God’s coming to men.[2]  From that flowed a sense of the priest as a man set apart, because he was entitled to handle and consecrate the bread and wine. Holy Communion was then seen above all as a means of individual grace, and lay people too became anxious about their worthiness to receive the sacrament, with the paradoxical result that they started to stay away from the altar. Similar concerns lie behind the insertion of prayers by the priest seeking reassurance that he was a fit person to celebrate the mass. The ‘silent Canon’ also came from the East, probably from Syria and initially to France, expressing a sense of the holiness of the mystery being enacted on the altar. Although the Emperor Justinian tried to prevent its arrival in Rome (565), by the ninth century, the Canon had progressed even there beyond being spoken softly to being recited in silence. The picture was completed by the people being effectively excluded from the chants of the mass by the growing complexity and length of the music, made possible by the presence of a schola, or professional clerical choir housed in choir stalls located in the sanctuary between the congregation and the altar. When the Canon was due to begin, the choir could still be singing a setting of the Sanctus.[4]

Although the Roman Missal of 1570 is often referred to as the Missal of Pius V, its content was not new at all. It was largely based on the existing and influential fifteenth-century version of the missal current at the papal court. This derived from the ancient Romano-Frankish liturgies of the ninth and tenth centuries, which in turn had incorporated and consolidated even older material.[1] The radical aspect of the reform lay in the ruling by Pope Pius V that it was to be the sole permitted missal throughout the Latin Church and that nothing in either the text or rubrics of the mass was to be changed except by papal decision.  Local missals differed from the new standard Roman missal, usually in relatively minor ways.  As Monti points out, and his book illustrates, local traditions such as the distinctive Holy Week customs in Spain lent colour to the mass without compromising its unity, because the basic form of the Roman mass served as a common template.[2] Nonetheless, from this point on the only exceptions allowed were to be regional rites older than 200 years.