A final thought about the Great O’s.

Reading what I have written about the original series of the seven Great O's, I am struck by how deeply dependent they are on a particular culture of Bible reading. It goes without saying that it is not the predominant culture of our age.

Most modern people, even the most evangelical, read the Bible through filters put in place by the enlightenment, by the scientific revolution, by university-based academic study methods, and by a constantly enlarging base of historical knowledge. Which is to say, We are aware of the Bible as a text. This sounds almost absurd to say. Of course it is a text! What else could it be?

But for it to be a text, it must also be something we can investigate, an object separated from ourselves, over against which we can range ourselves and organize our reactions, responses, investigations, theories. The net result of our entry into the modern world through the historical revolutions named above is to change our relation to the Bible – indeed, to any text.

In a pre-modern culture the Bible has a different location in human experience. For our medieval ancestors the Bible was not primarily an object of consideration, to be studied, but the world of God into which one was invited to enter.

This was true at every level of participation in pre-modern Christian culture, but particularly for those who dedicated their lives to Christian service, monastics and mendicants but also “secular” clergy. The lives of such people were lived, to an extent we can hardly imagine, in a Bible-saturated world, mediated through the liturgical practice of monasteries and of the Church at large. In the course of a lifetime of listening and learning, they would have memorized large stretches of scripture, certainly the Psalms, and many major passages. In addition, the habit of lectio divina, which in those days was almost entirely focused on scripture, would have led most to know much if not most of the Bible by heart, and those passages not known to the level of recitation from memory would have been deeply embedded in the memory which can recall significant passages with the trigger of a word or phrase.

As regards memory the medieval world had an advantage over us. They did not value the new the way we do. We get a significant new Bible translation almost every generation it seems, certainly since the late 1800s. But what we gain in accuracy and freshness we lose in retention. There was a time when most English-speaking Protestant Christians knew large chunks of the King James Version by heart. Much has been lost in the communal culture of Christianity by abandoning the single-text model of scripture.

Medieval Christianity was single-text based with a vengeance. The Bible they used was the Vulgate translation of Jerome, with a few holdovers in the older parts of the liturgy from earlier Latin translations. This text was incredibly stable from the early 400's when the Vulgate was first promulgated until the time of the humanist scholars at the turn of the 1500's, a thousand years, half the history of Christianity. Everyone in Western Christianity was on the same biblical page for a millenium, so to speak. [The translation of the Bible into vernacular languages is a complex and wonderful story, but these translations did not assume a central ecclesial and cultural role until the Reformation.]

So what we see in the Great O’s is a special form of memory. Each of the antiphons combines several passages, evoked by a word or two or at most a phrase, which brings to mind the entire passage and its context. By juxtaposing them, the antiphon creates a rich meditation on the subject, which brings simultaneously into one’s consciousness two, three or even more scriptural passages and amalgamates them into a new, thoroughly scriptural and quite sophisticated theological reflection. And this was easily available not just to instructed individuals, but to a whole religious communal culture because of the commonality of liturgy and written word to all.

This kind of memory-based, communal theological thinking is almost impossible now. We no longer have the shared culture of centuries of everyone hearing or reading the same translation, of life-long memorization and living into the word of scripture that they had. So in order to begin to unlock some of the richness of these antiphons, we have to resort to learned study and think in historical, researched ways. I think an average medieval monastic probably would not have been able to write these antiphons. They are the work of a theological and poetic genius. But the average medieval monastic, certainly one who had been at it for ten to twenty years or more, would have understood their allusions immediately, and would have quickly appreciated their complex meanings. Whereas we have to dust off our concordances, or find them online, and then do the work of reconstruction.

Much has been gained by modern scripture study. I certainly rejoice in it. But much has also been lost by our exit from the ancient ways of experiencing scripture. One of the joys of monastic life for me, and I know for others as well, is (in addition to modern scripture study, of course) to live into the Bible not as a text, a book, an object, but as a World – the World of God’s Word, where our imaginations can use our instructed memories to build wonderful and deeper and deeper appreciations of God’s love and goodness from our increasing knowledge of the Word.