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The Laity and the Breviary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2024
Extract
Readers of Sir Walter Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel may perhaps recall the Dwarf in the poem, and ‘how much he marvelled’ to find that the wounded opponent of Lord Cranstoun,
- ‘ … a knight of pride
- Like a book-bosomed priest should ride.’
And the context reveals that he
- ‘thought not to search or staunch the wound
- Until the secret he had found.'
Ignoring the fact that ‘the mighty book’ in this instance was none other than a magic book of spells by Sir Walter's medieval namesake Michael, and attending to the simile alone, we learn from the poet's own explanatory but confusing note, that ‘The book-a-bosom priests were those who went to a distance to baptize or marry with the Mass-book in their breasts'. Without any pedantic head-shaking in the direction of Abbotsford we may pass from the wounded knight to a more familiar modern figure, that of the travelling cleric, not book-bosomed perhaps, so much as book-pocketed or book-brief-cased.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © 1958 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
Footnotes
1
A Paper read at THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT Conference, September 1957.
References
2 Canto III, viii.
3 Ibid. note.
4 I do not mean a proximate expectation, nor one that is likely to come about without controversy and opposition. In this context it is worth while nothing that the Secular Institutes, so marked a feature of the time, so prolific since the war, and usually so closely allied to what is up-to-date (even ‘advanced’) in liturgical practice, do not by any means universally assume any greater use of the breviary for their members even when living the common life. Indeed some have adopted the attitude that the Office is so much the part of clerics and religious that ‘secular’ Christians have no time or aptitude for it. Amongest the petty ironies of history is surely the fact that one such Institude bears the anomalous title of ‘Opus Dei'!
5 Consider the typical psalmic pattern of the Benedicite at festal Lauds with its piling of imagery; the singer calls on a whole procession of creatures to join him in praise of God. This is no prayer of'distractions’ but, if we can rely on the assertions of so many saints, the royal road to contemplation. Incidentally, the same procedure still seemed natural and congenial to St Francis of Assisi in his Cantico del Frate Sole and to Dante in his celebrated pageant of the church in Purg. xxxii ff., and indeed throughout the whole of his poem.
6 Now Dom Pablo Maria, Carthusian. As head of the Department of Psychology and Psychiatry and Director of the Child Guidance Centre at the Catholic University of America, Washington D.C., he is well known as the author of a number of books on psychology and mental hygiene. The work I had particularly in mind here was his ‘clinical’ treatment of the spiritual life in The Life of Man with Cod, New York 1956.
7 Laudate Dominum, special number of La Vie Spirituelle, 19.
8 The perseverantes Handbook, Colchester 1956.