In my last post, I described my search for an edition of the Latin text of Augustine of Hippo’s De civitate Dei to give to my good friend and parish priest.

In the dark days of the Covid-19 lockdowns, when other people were learning to bake break, I learned how to bind books. (For anyone interested in learning, I particularly recommend the YouTube channel DAS Bookbinding, where an Australian bookbinder named Darryn Schneider publishes incredibly generous instructional videos on a huge range of binding techniques. For tools and materials, I can recommend my local Canadian supplier, George Hill & Co.)

So, I decided to make for my friend a copy of the deluxe 1924 edition of De civitate Dei of which I gave some photos in my last post. I downloaded the high-resolution scan from the University of Heidelberg, converted it to black and white text, scaled it for printing on a standard 8.5″x11″ page, and ran it through BookletCreator to generate the layout for printing 17″x11″ sheets to fold into 16-page gatherings for sewing. I printed this on Xerox Bold Digital 24 lb. Ledger paper, in which, which is crucial for bookbinding, the paper grain runs parallel to the short end.

I decided to attempt the eighteenth-century “flexible style” of binding, in which the gatherings are sewn onto thick hemp cords. Here is how the structure is illustrated in Arthur W. Johnson’s Manual of Bookbinding:

Once I had folded all the gatherings with the aid of a bone folder, I marked the text block for the sewing stations where the linen thread would pass through the paper and loop around the hemp cords. I then used a hacksaw to sew channels at these points just deep enough to penetrate the innermost sheet of each gathering.

I didn’t have any “nice” paper large enough to fold into endpapers, so I selected some beautiful handmade linen sheets that a friend picked up for me on a visit to Prague and attached them with a joint of unbleached linen cloth.

I then measured a series of holes spaced 3mm apart along the edges of the folds of the first and last gatherings. This allowed me to reinforce these points with “overcast” sewing.

I then set up my (very) home-made sewing frame with the hemp cords at the required spacings.

After that, it was a matter of sewing the (many!) sections onto the cords. Johnson observes that this sewing method is “difficult, almost laborious.” That was certainly my experience. It took many hours of the afternoon of Christmas Day, when the rest of the family was in a turkey coma.

At this point, I would ideally have trimmed the uneven edges of the text block with a heavy lying press and plough. At this stage in my bookbinding career, however, I didn’t have either of those things. (And as will be evident from the photo below, I didn’t yet have a proper backing hammer either.) I moved on to rounding the spine, which is done by spreading a layer of PVA glue and pulling and, if necessary, hammering the spine into a dome shape.

The next step was “backing,” which involves squeezing the spine between angled boards with metal plates and hammering the spine into a mushroom shape. This leaves room for the cover boards to tuck in under the “shoulders” of the spine. This procedure should also be done with a lying press, but I had to accomplish the same result with vise grips.

At last it was time to think about covers for the book. To get an appropriate thickness for so large a book, I thickened some standard 3mm binder’s board by glueing and pressing on a 1mm layer of strawboard, which I then covered with a layer of white paper to ensure a smooth surface under the eventual leather covers.

In the “flexible style,” the cover boards are pierced with two holes for each of the hemp cords, offset at a 45-degree angle. The loose ends of the hemp cords are rubbed with the dull back edge of a knife until the threads unwind into “slips” that look like little pony tails. Each slip is rubbed with starch paste and twirled into a point that can be inserted into the first hole in the cover and then back out the second hole. Once the cover has been tighened snug to the shoulder of the spine, the ends of the slips are spread out and hammered into the boards, a bit like steel rivets.

At this point, what began as a stack of paper is starting to look an awful lot like a book!

The “flexible style” gets its name from how the cover material is stuck directly to the spine and bends into a concave “U” shape when the book is opened. To sustain that kind of tension and strain, the spine has to be covered with several layers of glued-on material: (1) a strong mesh called “mull”; (2) strips of heavy “kraft paper” between the raised hemp cords; and (3) a strip of leather that is moulded tightly around the raised cords and then rubbed with sandpaper so that it’s flexible, smooth, and ready to receive the outer covering material.

Spine covering layer 1: mull.

At this point, another layer of paper is pasted onto the outside of the cover boards and then sanded down aggressively to level out any “bumps” where the hemp cord slips have been hammered into the boards. The edges are then bevelled with a sharp knife and the corners closest to the spine are “back cornered” to allow room for the leather hinge to bend when the book is opened.

It’s almost time to cover the book with leather. (I actually just use castoffs and sample hides that I pick up cheap at a local fabric outlet store. It would probably be easier to work with “real” book leather from a specialist supplier.)

The leather has to be made thinner along the line of the spine hinges and where it will be “turned in” from the outside to the inside of the cover boards. I didn’t yet have a proper leather paring knife or spokeshave, so I used a razor-blade scraping tool.

When it’s finally time to cover a book with cloth or leather, it all has to be done quite quickly and there’s no good moment to take a picture! Leather is a bit more forgiving: you sponge the outer side with water so that when the inner side is brushed with starch paste it won’t dry out too quickly. Everything gets folded over and carefully smoothed out. At the head and tail of the spine, the leather is folded over a length of cord and shaped with a bone folder to created a “headcap.” Then, the book is held between “tying up boards,” and strings are run along each edge of the raised hemp cords so that the leather doesn’t pull away from the surface as it dries.

Leather stretches when it’s pasted, so the edges of the turn-ins on the insides of the covers will be uneven and need to be trimmed square. The edges of the leather have been pared, but to make sure that there isn’t a pronounced ridge under the endpapers, a layer of card is cut to meet the leather edges and pasted to the board. The book is left to dry under a weight.

Finally, the endpapers are pasted down to the boards. Together with the under-layer of card, the endleaves will dry as they contract, counteracting the opposite pull of the drying leather, which wants to warp the coverboards outwards. Once the endpapers have been pressed smooth to the boards, the covers are held open to dry.

At last, the book was made! I’m always a bit shocked when my books come out looking like actual books.

All that remained was to to compose a Latin gift inscription bookplate and to add a spine label. For the latter, I used portions of the lettering on the title page to create abbreviations for the author and title and inked the letters with a fibre-tipped permanent pigment pen.

My friend liked the book very much. (Or he at least did a good job of pretending he liked it.)

I’ve made progress in my skills since then, and there are several things in this particular book that I’d love to be able to “do over.” But that’s actually part of the fun. Each book I make or repair gives me a chance to try something new or get something right.

A while back, I found out that my friend and parish priest, who is an authority on Augustine of Hippo, did not own a copy of the Latin text of Augustine’s City of God (De civitate Dei). That clearly had to be remedied. But what text should I find for him?

On this question, I found almost everything I needed to know in an article by James J. O’Donnell, “Augustine’s City of God,” which he was commissioned to write in 1983 but which was never subsequently published. (O’Donnell is a great advocate of “open access” scholarship: whenever he can, he makes his publications available for free online, which has sometimes involved “buying back” the rights to a book from his publisher after the original print run has sold out.) What follows is largely a summary of what O’Donnell reports, with links to public-domain scans of each edition when these are available.

The Maurist edition (1685)

The text prepared by the Benedictines of the Congregation of Saint-Maur (the “Maurists”), which appeared in 1685 as the seventh volume of their eleven-volume edition of the complete works of Augustine (1679–1700), superseded all that had come before. (I have not yet succeeded in finding a scan of the original edition, but a 1700 reprint can be consulted in the digital collection of the Bavarian State Library.) The Maurist text was reprinted many times, with annotations by later scholars, and finally in Migne’s Patrologia Latina 41 (1845).

Two modern critical editions have attempted to replace the Maurist text, and but it retains an independent value of its own. The Maurist edition and the critical edition most commonly used today (that by Dombart and Kalb, described below) between them give variant readings from a total of thirty-seven manuscripts, but only four of these manuscripts were collated in both editions. O’Donnell reports that there 394 manuscripts containing all or part of De ciuitate Dei are known to have survived from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (more than even of Augustine’s Confessiones). Writing in 1983, he notes that more manuscripts might become known through the “HUWA catalogue,” viz., Die handschriftliche Überlieferung der Werke des heiligens Augustinus, under the general editorship of Clemens Weidmann. I see that the most recent volume held in the University of Toronto library system (vol. 11) appeared in 2010. 

Hoffmann’s CSEL text

Of the two modern critical texts, the less influential is that in the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL), number 40 (in two volumes), edited by Emanuel Hoffmann:

• vol. 1 (1899), books 1–13
• vol. 2 (1900), books 14–22

The first volume of Hoffmann’s edition received negative reviews when it appeared (e.g., that by P. Lejay in Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature n.s. 50, no. 1 [January 1, 1900]: 165–66). Hoffmann responded indignantly to his critics in the preface to the second volume, but he died before he could see them double down on earlier assessment (e.g., P. Lejay in Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature n.s. 51 [January 7, 1901]: 326–28).

The Dombart/Kalb Teubner text

The other modern edition, which in a revised form holds the field today, is that in the Bibliotheca Teubeneriana, originally edited by Bernhard Dombart and later revised by Alfons Kalb:

1st edition (1863)	vol. 1, books 1–13 vol. 2, books 14–22
2nd edition (1877–92)	vol. 1, books 1–13 (1877) vol. 2, books 14–22 (1892)
3rd edition: vol. 2 1905) revised by Dombart, who died in 1907; vol. 1 (1908) revised by Alfons Kalb	vol. 1 (1908) (requires US IP address) vol. 2 (1905) (requires US IP address)
4th edition (1928–29), revised by Alfons Kalb	vol. 1 (1928) vol. 2 (1929) (still under copyright, no online access)

A so-called “fifth edition” was published in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana in 1981 (and reprinted again, without alteration, in 1993). This is merely a photographic reprint of the fourth edition, enhanced only by the addition of the text of Augustine’s two “Letters to Firmus,” edited by Johannes Divjak, which were inserted as pp. xxxv–xlix in vol. 1. These letters, which give important information about the genesis and early circulation of the text of De ciuitate Dei, were discovered by Cyrille Lambot and first published by him (from two manuscripts) in 1939. Divjak’s texts of these letters are also available in his contribution to the ongoing CSEL edition of Augustine’s works, Epistulae in duobus codicibus nuper in lucem prolatae (CSEL 88, 1981), as Ep. 1A (pp. 7–9) and Ep. 2 (pp. 9–21).

Re-use of the Dombart/Kalb text

The text of the fourth Teubner edition was reprinted without (deliberate) alteration in the Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina (2 vols., CCSL 47–48, 1955):

• vol. 1 (books 1–10) (free one-hour loan from Internet Archive)
• vol. 2 (books 11–22) (free one-hour loan from Internet Archive)

It was also printed, with a facing French translation and copious learned notes, in the Bibliothèque Augustinienne (5 vols., BA 33–37, 1959–60):

• vol. 1 (BA 33), books 1–5
• vol. 2 (BA 34), books 6–10
• vol. 3 (BA 35), books 11–14
• vol. 4 (BA 36), books 15–18
• vol. 5 (BA 37), books 19–22

It was likewise taken as the basis of the Latin text of the Loeb Classical Library edition (7 vols., LCL 411–17), with a facing English translation made by several different scholars. The few verbal departures from Dombart-Kalb introduced by the translators are advertised in the footnotes. The punctuation of the Latin texts was also modified according to English conventions:

• vol. 1, books 1–3 (trans. George E. McCracken, LCL 411, 1957)
• vol. 2, books 4–7 (trans. William M. Green, LCL 412, 1963)
• vol. 3, books 8–11 (trans. David S. Wiesen, LCL 413, 1968)
• vol. 4, books 12–15 (trans. Philip Levine, LCL 414, 1966)
• vol. 5, books 16–18.35 (trans. Eva Matthews Sanford and William McAllen Green, LCL 415, 1965)
• vol. 6, books 18.36–20 (trans. William Chase Green, LCL 416, 1960)
• vol. 7, books 21–22 (trans. William M. Green, LCL 417, 1972)

Such is the state of play as far as critical texts go.

More recent textual scholarship

The study of the text of De ciuitate Dei has not stood still. I came across the following very interesting and useful article (itself in Latin!):

Bengt Alexanderson, “Adnotationes criticae in libros Augustini de civitate Dei,” Electronic Antiquity 3, no. 7 (May 1997), https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ElAnt/V3N7/alex.html

Alexanderson begins by listing numerous typographical errors in the CCSL presentation of the Dombart-Kalb text. He then considers the textual basis of the CCSL/Dombart-Kalb edition, listing a number of preferable readings found in manuscripts that were undervalued by the editors and a number of erroneous readings transmitted by manuscripts treated by the editors as the most reliable (including the most ancient copy, MS V, which contains books 11–16 and was copied in North Africa in the early fifth century!). He concludes that it will probably be impossible to construct a genealogical stemma of the manuscripts, because there has been too much cross-contamination of variant readings. There follows a lengthy list of corrections (and reasons for them) that Alexanderson proposes for emending the CCSL/Dombart-Kalb edition.

An édition de luxe of 1924

O’Donnell does not mention a very interesting (and extremely sumptuous) edition that was published in 1924 in a deluxe format, printed by the monks of Bremen in a limited run of just 385 copies. The text is that of the 3rd Teubner edition (ed. Dombart, completed by Kalb, 1905–8), but with a number of emendations by Carolus Weyman, drawn mainly from the critical apparatus of both Dombart and Hoffmann. These changes are noted in an appendix (Adnotatio critica), with the variant readings of Dombart and Hoffmann marked under the sigla “D” and “H”.

A high-resolution colour scan of copy number 95 (of 385) of this edition has been made freely available by the University of Heidelberg.

There is also one physical copy in Toronto (copy number ), held by our own Graham Library at Trinity College (Rare Book Upjohn-Waldie 1924b S28 fol.). When I perused this copy in person, I took some photos of it beside a 15″ ruler to capture an idea of its grandeur:

From a purely aesthetic perspective, it’s hard to imagine a more pleasing edition of De ciuitate Dei than this one. And the Latin text is perfectly serviceable. The very generous margins are crying out for annotations incorporating Bengt Alexanderson’s emendations. 

So, what do you think I decided to do for my friend? See the sequel!

Over at r/latin on Reddit, someone asked for recommendations of more “advanced” Latin grammars. Partly for my own future reference, here’s the list that I suggested. I hope it may be helpful to anyone looking for such a list who may stumble upon it here.

One-volume Reference Grammars

In my experience, the most comprehensive of the standard one-volume grammars in English is the following:

• Gildersleeve’s Latin Grammar, rev. Lodge et al. (3rd edn, 1895; repr. with new foreword and bibliography, 1989; and with updated bibliography, 1997). 1895 printing accessible at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/gildersleeve-basil-lodge-gonzalez-latin-grammar-1903/page/i/mode/1up

But its terminology is somewhat different from contemporary standards, and, depending on the problem, I may still need to “triangulate” between it and other standard grammars, including the following:

• Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar (1903; re-set edn with new section on metre and prosody by Anne Mahoney, 2000). Hyperlinked HTML version of the 1903 edn at Dickinson College Commentaries: https://dcc.dickinson.edu/grammar/latin/credits-and-reuse
• Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer (rev. Mountford, 1962). Borrowable at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/bwb_P8-ATR-128/mode/1up
• Bennett’s Latin Grammar (rev. edn, 1908). Accessible at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/rosettaproject_lat_morsyn-1/page/n1/mode/1up

More advanced grammars of Classical Latin

When a one-volume reference grammar isn’t enough, I often turn to the following two classics:

• Henry John Roby, A Grammar of the Latin Language from Plautus to Suetonius, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, last revision of vol. 1 1887, and of vol. 2 1889, both repr. 1896). Accessible at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/roby-a-grammar-of-the-latin-language-from-plautus-to-suetonius-5th-ed./
• E. C. Woodcock, A New Latin Syntax (London: Methuen, 1959). Several copies borrowable at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/search?query=woodcock+new+latin+syntax

Also extremely useful are the (very fat!) textbooks that have made available to the world the teaching approach of the late Fr. Reginald Foster, especially because the index to the second volume helpfully cross-references the grammatical constructions that are taught in volume 1 to real-life examples from the letters of Cicero in volume 2:

• Reginaldus Thomas Foster and Daniel Patricius McCarthy, Ossa Latinitatis sola ad mentem Reginaldi rationemque / The Mere Bones of Latin according to the Thought and System of Reginald (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015). Available for purchase through Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Ossa-Latinitatis-Sola-Foster/dp/0813228328/
• ———, Ossium carnes multae e Marci Tullii Ciceronis epistulis / The Bones’ Meats Abundant from the Epistles of Marcus Tullius Cicero, cross-referenced with Daniel Vowels (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2021). Available for purchase through Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Ossium-Carnes-Multae-Ciceronis-epistulis/dp/081323297X/

Two options offering a more historical/linguistic approach are the following:

• James Clackston (ed.), A Companion to the Latin Language (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
• Michael Weiss, Outline of the Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin (Ann Arbor, MI: Beech Stave Press, 2009; 2nd edn 2020).

I have not personally made use (yet) of the following, to which I have online access through my university but which seems prohibitively expensive to buy (probably because each volume is over 1400 pages long):

• Harm Pinkster, The Oxford Latin Syntax, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015–2021).
  • vol. 1 (2015): The Simple Clause.
  • vol. 2 (2021): The Complex Sentence and Discourse.

The Heavies

For really heavy grammatical study, however, no one can beat the Germans, to whom we owe the following multi-volume reference works in the series Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft [“Handbook of Studies in Antiquity”], one for Classical Latin and one for Medieval Latin:

Classical

Manu Leumann, J. B. Hofmann, and Anton Szantyr, Lateinische Grammatik auf der Grundlage des Werkes von Friedrich Stolz und Joseph Hermann Schmalz [“Latin Grammar, Based on the Work of Friedrich Stolz and Joseph Hermann Schmalz”], new edn, 3 vols., Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 2.2 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1972–79):

• vol. 1: Manu Leumann, Lateinische Laut- und Formenlehre [“Latin Morphology and Accidence”], rev. Anton Szantyr (1977). Google Books preview: https://books.google.ca/books?id=JpQ9HS8u3V8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
• vol. 2: J. B. Hofmann, Lateinische Syntax und Stylistik [“Latin Syntax and Style”], rev. Anton Szantyr (1965; corr. repr. 1972; 3rd repr. 2016). Borrowable at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/lateinischegramm0002leum/page/n7/mode/1up
• vol. 3: Fritz Radt and Abel Westerbrink, Stellenregister und Verzeichnis der nichtlateinischen Wörter [“List of Citations and Index of Non-Latin Words”], ed. Stefan Radt and Abel Westerbrink (1979). Google Books preview: https://books.google.ca/books?id=FkX9u5J-twgC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Medieval

Peter Stotz, Handbuch der lateinischen Sprache des Mittelalters, 5 vols., Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 2.5 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1996–2004). All five volumes accessible at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/2.5.5.-p.-stotz-bibliographie-quellenbersicht-und-register-2004/

• vol. 1 (2002): Einleitung: Lexikologische Praxis; Wörter und Sachen; Lehnwortgut. [“Introduction: Lexicographical Practice; ‘Words and Things’ (a technical term for a trend in twentieth-century philology); Loanwords”]
• vol. 2 (2000): Bedeutungswandel und Wortbildung. [“Change in Meaning and Word-Formation”]
• vol. 3 (1996): Lautlehre. [“Morphology”]
• vol. 4 (1998): Formenlehre, Syntax und Stilistik. [“Accidence, Syntax, and Style”]
• vol. 5 (2004): Bibliographie, Quellenübersicht und Register. [“Bibliography, Overview of Sources, and Index”]

Latin Grammars Written in Latin

As for grammars of Latin written in Latin, apart from a few specimens at the introductory level, the ones that I’m aware of were written in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period:

• Scholarly editions of some of these works have appeared in the Brepols Corpus Christianorum series: https://www.brepols.net/products?q=$keyword:grammatici%20latini
• The classic reference edition for many of the older works is Keil’s seven-volume Grammatici Latini. Accessible at the Hathi Trust Digital Library: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002965783

At his unmissable blog “Mutual Enrichment,” Fr. John Hunwicke has reminded us of that fateful day in 1581 when Edmund Campion’s pamphlet (in Latin) against the Protestant Reformation in England appeared on the seats of the audience at the annual “University Act” at Oxford. The title loosely translates as “Ten propositions that Edmund Campion, of the Society of Jesus, has offered to uphold in a debate against his adversaries about the (Catholic) Faith.”

I managed to track down a scan of the original printing, and in a characteristic bout of “productive procastination,” I spent a couple of hours cleaning up the scan to make it as legible as I could and then formatted it for at-home printing: Rationes decem (1581)

In deference to Fr. Hunwicke and his British readers, the resulting pdf is sized for A5 paper. But I’m sure that anyone who finds it here will be able to resize it for printing on whatever paper is desired.

In a great many theological works written (in Latin) from the early modern period down into the twentieth century, there is a casual assumption that readers will understand references to an abbreviated form of an author’s name, plus a volume and page number. If you aren’t part of the assumed audience—the people who just “know”—there won’t be anything like a list of abbreviations or bibliography of works cited to help you out.

For example, a colleague recently asked me to help him translate a (rather racy!) passage from an 1835 edition of St. Alphonsus Liguori’s Theologia moralis, where I encountered an in-text citation that looked like this:

Negant Sanch. l. 9. D. 17. n. 5 et Boss. c. 7. n. 175 et 193. cum Fill. ac Perez …. Sed verius affirmant Spor. de Matrim. num. 498. Tamb. l. 7. c. 3. §5. num. 33. et Diana. p. 67. tr. 7. R. 7. cum Fagund.

That means that some guys named “Sanch., Boss., Fill., and Perez” said “No” to the question under discussion, whereas some guys named “Spor., Tamb., Diana., and Fagund.” said “Yes,” and that, in St. Alphonsus’s view, “more truly” (verius). But who are the writers, and what are the works, that St. Alphonsus is referring to?

Hunting for answers in the venerable 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, I noticed that the entry for one of these theologians cited “Hurter Nomenclator,” and that led me to the following work, which has been made freely accessible at the Hathi Trust Digital Library:

Hugo Hurter (1832–1914), Nomenclator literarius recentioris theologiae catholicae theologos exhibens qui inde a Concilio tridentino floruerunt aetate, natione, disciplinis distinctos, 2nd edn, 4 vols. (Oeniponte [Innsbruck]: Libraria academica Wagneriana, 1892–99).

(“A literary name-identifier for more recent Catholic theology, showing the names of theologians who flourished after the Council of Trent, divided by era, nation, and discipline.”)

• Vol. 1 (1892): Theologiae Catholicae seculum primum post celebratum Concilium Tridentinum, ab anno 1564–1663 [Hathi Trust]
• Vol. 2 (1893): Theologiae Catholicae seculum secundum post celebratum Concilium Tridentinum, ab anno 1664–1763 [Hathi Trust]
• Vol. 3 (1895): Theologiae Catholicae seculum tertium post celebratum Concilium Tridentinum, ab anno 1764–1894 [Hathi Trust]
• Vol. 4 (1899): Theologia Catholica tempore Medii Aevi, ab anno 1109–1563 [Hathi Trust] [index of names for all 4 volumes]

(The fourth volume goes back in time to the Middle Ages.)

There were subsequent third editions of a couple of these volumes, and even a fourth edition of one of them, but those aren’t accessible online.

Hurter covers everybody, but there’s not much on offer in the way of “immediate gratification.” For example, when I looked up “Boss.,” I found fourteen possible names, scattered across all four volumes. But I worked out a fairly quick way of sorting between them. I looked in the (very detailed) table of contents of each volume and checked to see where the page number next to each name fell in the various sub-disciplines of “Theology.”

It didn’t take long to notice that the page number for “Bossio Jo. Barn. it (1665) II, 288” fell in a section of volume 2 devoted to the topic at hand, namely, “Theologia moralis.” Turning to that section, it was only a matter of minutes to work out that St. Alphonsus had to be referring to Giovanni Angelo Bossi (1590–1665) and to his treatise De effectibus contractus matrimonii (1655).

I don’t know how I would have worked that out without Hurter’s Nomenclator!

What I’ll probably do is print out a booklet containing the union index of names from volume 4 and the tables of contents from all four volumes, to speed up the name-hunting process.

Update (April 13, 2024)

I’ve now created a permanent page for this resource under “Other Useful Reference Resources” in the navigation menu. And to make it easier for myself others to use it, I’ve also created, and made accessible for download, two pdf files, one with the whole union index from volume 4, and the other with the tables of contents from all four volumes:

• Union Index
• Tables of Contents

On July 23 I had the great privilege of preaching at the (Anglican) Church of St. John the Evangelist in the picturesque town of Elora, Ontario (a drive of an hour or two west of Toronto). My sermon concluded a fantastic choral Mattins sung by the Elora Festival Singers. I had heard of the Elora Festival before, but had never experienced it. Courtesy of St. John’s, I received complimentary tickets to a brilliant afternoon performance of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos 1 and 5 (the harpsichordist nearly set the place on fire with his virtuosity), with Cantata 140 (Wachet auf), and to an utterly stunning concert (in an empty road salt barn!) by the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge. Most memorable for me, however, was the crisp, flowing Anglican chant psalmody of the Festival Singers under their director, Noel Edison. I have never heard a Canadian choir achieve such a standard — a perfection that would rival even the best English choirs. I am eager to return in the future to hear the celebrated parish choir, which I know only through its recordings.

In exchange for all this, and further generous hospitality, my hosts received the following sermon:

A Sermon Preached at Choral Mattins in the Church of St. John the Evangelist, Elora, Ontario, July 23, 2017

by Jesse D. Billett, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Divinity, Trinity College, Toronto

Appointed Scriptures: Ps. 148, Isa. 55:6–11, Luke 6:37–42

When Canon Hulse kindly invited me to preach at this festival Mattins, he suggested that you might like to hear some stories from my time as a choral scholar in the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, where I sang from 2001 to 2004. At least among people who know about choral music, especially in the English tradition—and I get the sense that today I am among such people—that tends to be the most interesting line on my CV. For three years I sang Evensong day after day in that breathtaking late medieval chapel, with its gravity-defying stone ceiling and vast stained glass windows, in a choir famous around the world for its annual BBC World Service broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve. I was nervous about Canon Hulse’s suggestion, because as a choral scholar I endured a lot of guest preachers who wanted to give their “King’s College sermon,” and talk about the music, and the windows, and the ceiling, and not talk much about Christ or the Christian life. But it occurred to me that my time in King’s College Choir had provided me with some potentially interesting analogies for the Christian life. If I were going to go back to the very beginning, I could tell you about how I got into the choir in the first place. My audition and academic interview were such unmitigated disasters that they would serve as a good illustration of unconditional election and salvation by grace alone! But instead I would like to share with you some parallels between the life of a King’s choral scholar and the Christian life as it is summarized in the fifteen-hundred-year-old classical schema known as the “Threefold Way,” which sees the Christian pass through three stages: the Purgative Way, the Illuminative Way, and finally, the Unitive Way.

First, then, let us look at the Purgative Way. This is the first phase of Christian growth, devoted to getting rid of habitual sins and acquiring virtues in their place. (Today’s second lesson’s teaching about “removing the beam from our own eyes” describes a part of this phase.) As a new choral scholar, I found myself subjected to a level of discipline unlike anything I have experienced before or since. Rule 1: Never, ever, be late. When my future wife Jill and I were courting, I once left her bleeding at the side of the road after she fell off her bicycle, because I couldn’t be late for choir practice. (I still have nightmares in which I’m almost late for choir practice and can’t find my music or my cassock.) Rule 2: Never ask to miss a service or a practice. “You need to go to a funeral? How closely related were you to the deceased?” Rule 3: Never arrive not knowing your music note-perfect. If that means spending several hours a day studying at the piano (as it did for me in my first year), then that’s what you do. Rule 4: If, God forbid, you make a mistake in a service or performance, apologize in person to the director.

People tend to be a bit shocked when I describe this discipline. It all sounds so unreasonable. Yet without this discipline we could never have made music at the level that was expected of us. We knew that an individual lapse in discipline would cause our music to suffer and would let the whole choir down.

The world’s reaction to the Purgative Way in the Christian life is similar. The work of acquiring virtue, the pain of avoiding sinful habits, the humiliation of confessing one’s sins—it all sounds so unreasonable. That is because the world’s idea of a good life falls well short of the Christian life. The Christian life does not consist in “being good” or “nice” or even in “following the teachings of Jesus.” It is, rather, the extension here and now of the very life of Jesus of Nazareth—crucified and risen—in the members of his mystical body, the Church. The life of Christ must take root in me, grow up in me (Gal. 2:20; Eph. 4:15–16). And that life cannot co-exist with sin. The two are incompatible (1 Cor. 10:21; 2 Cor. 6:14ff.; Eph. 5:5). And so ultimately a choice must be made: Christ or myself; Christ or the world. Just as we choral scholars had a vision of musical perfection to which we sacrificed our youthful freedoms, so the Christian chooses Christ and his discipline before all else. “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also,” says our Lord, “he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). I’m not suggesting that you leave your sweethearts bleeding in the ditch to make it to church on time. But you must be ready to sacrifice anything that kills the life of Christ in you. As St. Paul says, “I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:8).

The deeper knowledge of Christ is the goal of the second phase of the Christian life, the Illuminative Way, in which the mind dwells more and more in meditation and contemplation on the mystery of Christ in his incarnation, in his suffering and death, and in his resurrection. (We caught something of this in today’s first lesson: “My thoughts are not your thoughts.” We have to conform our thinking to God’s.) Near the end of my first year in King’s College Choir, I gradually realized that I was no longer struggling just to keep my head above water. Submission to the purgative common discipline had given me a little mental room to consider this music that we were singing, to observe more carefully its craftsmanship. In this I was helped by the notes that previous choral scholars had left in the music copies. Not all of these were serious; some were screamingly funny. This morning we’ve just heard Jonathan Harvey’s luminous anthem “I Love the Lord,” which, you’ll remember, begins with the high voices sustaining a G-major chord for the first few pages. In my King’s copy of that anthem, someone had scribbled out the title “I Love the Lord” and had written, “I Love This Chord.” My favourite was in my copy of the Byrd versicles and responses, where above the priest’s words “Let us pray,” someone had drawn a picture of a head of lettuce with fangs, chasing a mouse (the “prey” of the “lettuce”). I didn’t just follow what others had written, of course. I had my own process of study and discovery, too. We were once preparing to give a concert of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century music from the Eton Choirbook, a repertory both glorious and very difficult. I was struggling terribly. Not with the notes (in accordance with Rule 3, I had faithfully learned those in advance!), but with making architectural sense out of the longer musical phrases. I’ll never forget the moment when it occurred to me that I had to stop trying to sing these lines as if I were Bryn Terfel, and start trying to sing them as if I were a renaissance bass viol. My style of singing had to bend to the innate character of the music. I was still just a beginner, but I was becoming aware that a much deeper level of understanding of the music was possible. We once performed the Penderecki Cherubic Hymn, a wickedly difficult piece (and with lyrics in Old Church Slavonic, if you please!). To be honest, I didn’t know how we were ever going to pull it off. But as we were about to perform it in Evensong, I saw our director of music, Mr. Cleobury, almost transfigured before my eyes. He was able to communicate to us every rhythmic subtlety, every dynamic shading, every entrance, every cut off, the shape of every line, so that all we had to do was follow him. It was the most magnificent display of the conductor’s art that I have ever witnessed. He had entered so deeply into the complexity of the music, that the music had in fact taken possession of him.

The Illuminative Way in the Christian life is something very like that. Trained and disciplined by the Purgative Way, we are ready to enter more deeply into the mysteries of our faith and to be transformed by them. We encounter the Lord in the pages of scripture, guided by the hints and signposts left by his saints who have gone before us. The goal is to be progressively shaped in the image of Christ that we discover there. As St. Paul says, “we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Cor. 3:18). And as St. John says, “we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). To make this sort of progress it helps to have a teacher who knows the way—a bit like an inspired conductor. My one bit of practical advice to all of you today is that if you wish to make progress in the spiritual life, you must have a spiritual director, a father or mother in God who can teach you how to meditate and pray in such a way that you will be progressively transformed into Christ’s likeness. This doesn’t have to be complicated. There is a wonderful story of the Curé of Ars, St. John Vianney, asking an aged agricultural worker who spent a great deal of time in front of the reserved sacrament: “My good father, what do you say to our Lord in those long visits you pay Him every day and many times a day?” “I say nothing to him,” was the reply; “I look at Him, and He looks at me.” The secret is that in looking at Christ we come to love him, and in loving him we are moved to imitate him. (Alfred Monnin, Life of the Curé of Ars, trans. H. E. Manning [London: Burns and Lambert, 1862], pp. 55–56.)

We come now to the final stage of Christian growth, the Unitive Way, in which the desire for God has moved beyond study and technique into a continual state of love and yearning, accompanied by a transfigured view of the world. Concerning this stage, I ought to say very little, because I have so little direct experience of it myself. But in this too, I think that my time as a King’s choral scholar at least taught me what to look out for. You have probably heard elite athletes speak about being “in the zone”: the goalie who makes perfect glove saves on shots he can’t even see for the crush of bodies in front of him; the rock climber who finds the perfect handhold every time exactly where she needs it. It’s a state of responding correctly to the demands of every moment, almost without thinking about it. As a choral scholar, I occasionally experienced something like that while singing. The effort required to get the music right receded into the background, and my mind’s inquiry into the music’s structure and meaning was quieted. Instead, I noticed things like how the light had changed in the chapel with the passage of time, from the darkness of December when the Rubens painting of the Adoration of the Magi was illuminated above the altar, to the brightness of Holy Week when the sun shone through the great east window’s scene of the crucifixion. I felt myself to be part of a great cosmic stream of praise flowing through time and out of time, in silence and in sound—not unlike what was described in today’s psalm, in which sun and moon and dragons and deeps join in the praise of God. I would struggle to describe what it was like. It certainly wasn’t a feeling. It might be accompanied by elevated feelings; but it might also arise in the midst of agony, as in the singing of Rachmaninov’s Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, which inflicts considerable physical suffering on low basses like me! It was more a conviction that I, as part of that music, was fulfilling, for that moment, exactly what I was meant to do with my life.

Judging at least by what I have read about them, Christians in the Unitive Way experience something very similar. They have reached a point where conforming their lives to the will of God has become, not exactly easy, but obvious and intuitive. It is not so much they who respond to the world around them, as Christ who responds in and through them. This unity was the object of the great prayer of Christ: “that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one” (John 17:22). “Without me,” that is, outside of me, “ye can do nothing,” says our Lord (John 15:5). But in unity with him, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Phil. 4:13). This unity is not a “feeling”—still less is it a good feeling, or what the world calls happiness. For this unity is with the one who cried out on the cross, “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?” It is a unity with the life of God himself—a life that is not self-satisfied, but self-emptying. A few years ago, when the diaries of Mother Theresa were published, many were scandalized to learn that for many years she had not felt God’s presence. “So she was a fraud,” many exclaimed. I would suggest, rather, that she had advanced so far into the very life of God that it had become as imperceptible to her as water to a fish. The true keynote of the Unitive Way is not happiness, as such, but joy—the same joy that possessed our Lord himself, “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame” (Heb. 12:12). We can begin to taste the same joy in this life, and we will have it in its fulness in the next, when all things are gathered into one in Christ (Eph. 1:10).

It is the promise of this consummation, the end of the Purgative Way, the Illuminative Way, and the Unitive Way, for which we pray in the collect for this sixth Sunday after Trinity: “O God, who hast prepared for them that love thee such good things as pass man’s understanding: Pour into our hearts such love toward thee, that we, loving thee above all things, may obtain thy promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

Further Reading

Those interested in the stages of Christian development, and how to grow in them, may find it helpful to read Martin Thornton’s Christian Proficiency, recently reprinted by Wipf & Stock. It dwells in particular on the “Illuminative Way,” the stage of what St. Thomas Aquinas and others call “proficients.” On the true nature of the Christian life as the “extension of the Incarnation,” an excellent and compelling summary is Bede Frost, The Art of Mental Prayer (London: SPCK, new edn 1940), part I, chapter 2 (pp. 15–25).

In a few days I will be travelling to Savannah, Georgia, where I have been invited to give a paper at a conference sponsored by the Prayer Book Society of the USA and the Elliott House of Studies, February 16–18, 2017:

Anglicanism: Catholic and Reformed; Revisiting the Reformation Legacy, 1517–2017

A fuller explanation of the purpose and themes of the conference is here. There is also a draft programme of sessions available, but I gather that there have been a few adjustments. I myself am now tentatively scheduled to speak on Friday, February 17, at 1:45pm.

I plan to speak on the Book of Common Prayer as a “catholic” liturgy, arguing that an irreducible (even aggressive) Swiss Protestantism discerned in the book by scholars ever since Bishop and Gasquet’s ground-breaking book Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer isn’t the only, or indeed the obvious, explanation of Cranmer’s work. Rather, a pre-Reformation Erasmian philosophia Christi, giving priority to the simple Gospel message of scripture, found expression in a re-presentation of the Catholic tradition limited by a “biblical compass.”

This made possible the characteristic (and sometimes incoherent) “comprehensiveness” of Anglicanism. But once the continuity of the Prayer Book with Catholic tradition is recognized, the interpretation of the book will depend absolutely on an”ecclesial” reading of Scripture within that tradition. The Prayer Book says no more and no less about worship and sacraments than what scripture says. But scripture, as interpreted by the Church’s collective mind, says a great deal about these things indeed!

UPDATE: An audio recording of my paper at this conference can now be heard here: https://anglicanway.org/2017/05/22/audio-drs-joan-odonovan-george-westhaver-jesse-billet-pbs-conference-2017/

On January 15, 2016, I had the honour of delivering the inaugural Robert Crouse Memorial Lecture in the chapel of the University of King’s College, Halifax. (Gallery of photos.) I never met Fr. Crouse, but his writings have been a great help and inspiration to me in my own work and faith. It was a privilege to spend a few days in the community that was so profoundly shaped by his thought and example.

The title of my lecture was “A Spirituality of the Word: The Medieval Roots of Traditional Anglican Worship.” In it, I took issue with the consensus of modern liturgical scholarship that it was a “Reformation Fallacy” (as Robert F. Taft dubbed it), undreamt of before Martin Luther, to put the reading of scripture at the centre of the Divine Office. I argued that this characteristically monastic mode of prayer was integral to English liturgical spirituality for a thousand years before the Reformation, and that one of the Reformation’s aims was to make it possible for the laity to participate in it fully.

I suggested that the fundamental turning point was in the fourth and fifth centuries, when the psalter in particular ceased to be treated as readings to be listened to, and was transformed into a collection of prayers to be recited as one’s own. (This had a significant musical impact: a whole choir of monks chanting the psalms together as prayer needed a much simpler, more regimented singing style than had been used by solo cantor-lectors. I sang some examples to illustrate the difference.)

In this new understanding, reciting the words of scripture became the principal means both to learn how to pray, and also to be transformed into the kind of person who can pray these words—an insight later picked up by Richard Hooker in his defence of the Book of Common Prayer. As someone suggested to me afterwards, praying the scriptures in the Divine Office “offers all that is needed by the human soul for its ongoing conversion, sanctification, and ultimate deification.”

Apart from such serious considerations, it was great fun to go over some of the complaints by medieval bishops and preachers about clerical misbehaviour during the liturgy. The canons of Exeter in the fourteenth century seem to have been especially incorrigible!

I hope that the text of the lecture will be published in due course.

[UPDATE: A lightly revised and expanded version of my lecture has now appeared in Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology 27, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 157–79. Google Preview (alas, not including my article) here.]