A Responsory for Palm Sunday: Ingrediente Domino ("As the Lord entered the holy city")

I've never heard it used, but this Responsory is prescribed for use upon the (re-)entrance into the church after the Palm Sunday procession, just before the mass itself begins.



Here's an English translation from Cantica Nova; it's easy to see why it is used at this particular moment in the liturgy.  The chant score is below.

R. As the Lord entered the holy city, the children of the Hebrews proclaimed the resurrection of life. Waving their branches of palm, they cried: Hosanna in the highest.

V, When the people heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, they went out to meet him. Waving their branches of palm, they cried: Hosanna in the highest.

The chapter titled "The Palm Sunday Procession in Medieval Chartres" in the book The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages mentions Ingrediente domino, describing it as "a Matins responsory of Palm Sunday at Chartres and elsewhere."  Here's a description of the Palm Sunday Procession as it moves to the cathedral for the mass:

[The assembly] followed the Rue Saint-Pierre, which led from the Benedictine house of Saint-Père up the hill and into the upper town (haute ville).  Along the route the succentor intoned and the multitude sang after him a succession of antiphons and responsories, the texts of which were mainly reworkings of the four evangelists' accounts of Christ's entry into Jerusalem:  A. Ceperunt omnes, A. Cum audiesset populus, A. Ante sex dies, R. Cum audisset turbe, R. Dominus Jhesus ante sex dies, and R. Ingrediente domino.  At the Porte Cendreuse, one of the half-dozen gates leading through the old walls into the upper town of Chartres, the clergy sang this last responsory, Ingredient domino.  This chant, a Matins responsory of Palm Sunday at Chartres and elsewhere, was reserved for this special moment of "entry into Jerusalem" here in Chartres and in most of the other dioceses in northern France.  Finally, as the procession passed through the west door of the cathedral of Notre-Dame, the spiritual theme, as communicated in the text of the plainsong, switched from on extolling Christ's triumph to one honoring the Virgin Mary (A. Letare virgo v. Post partum virgo).

Ingrediente domino has definitely been used in this way at the Palm Sunday mass since at least the Tridentine (1570) era (see this page; change the date to 4-13-2014); however, I have not been able to find Ingrediente domino listed as a Palm Sunday Matins Responsory at Divinum Officium (or anywhere else), as described in the above paragraph.   [EDIT:  I was wondering here why this was called a "Responsory," rather than an antiphon.  Fr. Michael in comments points out that "It's a responsory because it has a Verse, sung by the cantor alone, and then everyone again sings the latter half of the first portion."  I hadn't ever really understood what defined a "Responsory" in particular, or why it was different from the many other kinds of call-response chants that exist - so thanks much to him.] 

"The Palm Sunday Procession in Medieval Chartres" continues this way, with more about the entrance into the Cathedral:

Although this was a standard liturgical practice - to change to chants honoring the patron of the church at the moment of entry - the transition from chants for Palm Sunday to one for the Virgin is of interest here, for it occurred beneath a similar thematic transition represented in sculpture and glass.  The typmpanum of the west side of the famous royal portal, as is well known, is constructed around an imposing sculpture of Christ in Majesty surrounded by four apocalyptic animals symbolizing the four evangelists.  Those in the procession celebrating the First Coming of Christ looked up to vision of the ultimate prophecy, the majestic Second Coming of Christ, when He would judge the quick and the dead.

Passing through the portal and into the church, the sudden darkness brought to light, then as now, three of the finest examples of stained glass ever created, the dazzling twelfth-century lancet windows immediately below the great west rose.  The largest and most central of these lancet windows, the one directly above the royal portal, is the Incarnation Window, which recounts the story of the principal events in the life of Christ up to, but not including, His passion and resurrection.  At the top of the central Incarnation Window are three panels depicting Christ's entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.  The telling in glass of the story of Palm Sunday concludes the history of His earthly life.  Accordingly, these panels are then immediately surmounted by a great crowned Virgin and Child in Glory, a fitting capstone to the theme of the Word made flesh.  Thus, just as the processional chants proceed from a theme commemorating Christ's final triumphant arrival to one honoring the Virgin, so the sculpture and stained glass directly above the heads of the clergy and laity of Chartres depict the same subjects.  At this moment musical and visual arts stood in perfect harmony.

As the faithful reentered the cathedral the bells of the church rang again.  Inside a candelabrum holding seven candles was illuminated, and the crosses and relics were left uncovered for the remainder of the day.  Having entered the chancel and mounted to their choir stalls, the canons and chaplains of the cathedral again celebrated the office of Terce, just as they had earlier that morning at Saint-Cheron.  High Mass then immediately followed.

Here's that "Christ in Majesty," photo courtesy of Vassil:

And here are the three "Entry into Jerusalem" stained glass panels from the Incarnation Window: (all window images © Dr Stuart Whatling, 2011):

The Disciples

Christ riding a donkey

The City's Welcome

Finally, this is the "great crowned Virgin and Child in Glory" at the top of the window, described above:

Here's some general introductory stuff about the Palm Sunday procession, from the beginning of the same chapter:

The origin of the Palm Sunday procession in the Latin West can be traced back to Jerusalem and the scriptural account of Christ's triumphant entry into the Holy City as a prelude to His final great work of Redemption.  The joyful scene, described in varying degrees of detail in the four Gospels, naturally lent itself to vivid re-creation.  As early as the late fourth century the nun Egeria, a pilgrim to the Holy Land from Spain or southern France, observed the people of Jerusalem reenacting the entry of the conquering Christ.  From the top of the Mount of Olives they led their bishop back to the celestial City, the children running before him shouting "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord."  From Jerusalem the Palm Sunday ceremony moved westward, to th elands of the Gallican rite, undoubtedly carried by pilgrims such as Egeria and by later monastic refugees fleeing the Holy Lands.  The Bobbio Missal, a Gallican source of the early eighth century, contains a blessing of the palms ("Benedictio palme et olivae super altario"), which implies that  a procession followed thereafter (Hermann Graef 1959, II; and Tyrer 1932, 50).  And although there are suggestions that a procession was known in Spain by this time, documents of the ninth century originating in northern France are the first to prove incontrovertibly its existence.  Most important among these is the statement by Amalarius of Metz indicating that the tradition of a Palm Sunday procession was already widespread.  Later, the custom was carried into Italy, though apparently not until the twelfth century was it officially adopted in Rome.

Thus, invoking Amalarius as the witness, we can say with confidence that the clergy of the principal monasteries and cathedrals of the Carolingian Empire were accustomed to celebrate Palm Sunday with an appropriate procession by the ninth century.

You can read Egeria's descriptions of The Liturgy of Jerusalem during the 4th Century; the liturgies of Holy Week are among the most detailed.    Here's the section titled "Procession with Palms on the Mount of Olives":

Accordingly at the seventh hour all the people go up to the Mount of Olives, that is, to Eleona, and the bishop with them, to the church, where hymns and antiphons suitable to the day and to the place are said, and lessons in like manner. And when the ninth hour approaches they go up with hymns to the Imbomon, that is, to the place whence the Lord ascended into heaven, and there they sit down, for all the people are always bidden to sit when the bishop is present; the deacons alone always stand. Hymns and antiphons suitable to the day and to the place are said, interspersed with lections and prayers.

And as the eleventh hour approaches, the passage from the Gospel is read, where the children, carrying branches and palms, met the Lord, saying; Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord, and the bishop immediately rises, and all the people with him, and they all go on foot from the top of the Mount of Olives, all the people going before him with hymns and antiphons, answering one to another: Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord.

And all the children in the neighbourhood, even those who are too young to walk, are carried by their parents on their shoulders, all of them bearing branches, some of palms and some of olives, and thus the bishop is escorted in the same manner as the Lord was of old.

For all, even those of rank, both matrons and men, accompany the bishop all the way on foot in this manner, making these responses, from the top of the mount to the city, and thence through the whole city to the Anastasis, going very slowly lest the people should be wearied; and thus they arrive at the Anastasis at a late hour. And on arriving, although it is late, lucernare takes place, with prayer at the Cross; after which the people are dismissed.

As you can see, the procession in Jerusalem was stational; it moved from place to place on the way to the Church of the Resurrection (called "the Anastasis" by Egeria) many hours later.  This was also the case in the Chartres procession; in fact, the route of the procession was laid out to recall the geography of Jerusalem itself.  Again according to "The Palm Sunday Procession in Medieval Chartres," and moving back to the beginning of the procession as it leaves the cathedral:

To the sounds of now a great general pealing, they exited [the cathedral] through the royal west door, preceded by crosses, Gospel books for the clergy of each church, and feretories bearing the relics of saints.  The succentor soon sang forth the incipit of the first of the responsoria de historia, the succession of nine great responsories that tell the story of Christ's triumphant entry into Jerusalem.  This cycle had already been sung at the cathedral that morning at Matins and now was chanted again as the procession made its way through the streets of Chartres.  Moving towards the east, the assembly passed beyond the walls of the city and to the first station, a cemetery outside the priory of Saint-Barthélemy, where it was joined by processions coming from other churches.  The route of the procession had obviously been chosen so as to traverse a topography reminiscent of that of ancient Jerusalem.  The cemetery at Saint-Barthélemy corresponds to Golgotha, the site of Christ's crucifixion to the east and beyond the walls of Jerusalem.  From there the procession of Chartres ascended a hill to the abbey church of Saint-Cheron.  Again, the topography was perfectly chosen.  Saint-Cheron, then as now, sits atop a hill, a substitute Mount of Olives, whence one can see the celestial Jerusalem of Chartres some four kilometers distant to the west.

.....

At the great cross in the cemetery the clergy and populace stopped in station and divided themselves into two distinct performing groups.  The bishop, cantor, priests, and deacons, and the multitude of townsfolk (populus multus) remained on the est side of the cross looking west.  The succentor, subdeacons, and choir-boys, all in a prearranged order, moved to their customary place (consuetus locus) on the west side and faced the other group to the east.  With the choirboys singing the verses and the bishop's group and succentor's group alternating with the refrain, the chanted the ninth-century processional hymn Gloria laus et honor [Palm Sunday: Gloria, laus et honor tibi ("All Glory, Laud, and Honor")].  This antiphonal singing of the Gloria laus was a musical and dramatic high point of the ceremony.

Sounds great!  And this was followed by an "Adoration of the Cross," including prostrations, to the singing of antiphons.


Here's another chant version of the responsory, sung by Giovanni Viannini:




And here's a polyphonic setting by Pandolfo Zallamella (1551 - 1591), sung by the Czech group Dyškanti: "Sacred Music from the Rosenberg Library," 14 May 2011 at the Church of the Virgin Mary in Ceské Budejovice:



ChristusRex.org has all the chant propers for today, sung by the Sao Paolo Benedictines:

Hebdomada SanctaDominica in Palmis de Passione Domini

Antiphona: Hosanna filio David (34.9s - 548 kb) score

Ad processionem
Procedamus (8.3s - 133 kb) score
Antiphona: Pueri... portantes (2m24.9s - 2266 kb) score
Antiphona: Pueri... vestimenta (1m18.4s - 1228 kb) score
Hymnus ad Christum Regem: Gloria, laus (2m43.7s - 2558 kb) score
Responsorium: Ingrediente Domino (3m34.2s - 3350 kb) score

Ad Missam

Tractus: Ps. 21, 2-9.18.19.22.24.32 Deus, Deus meus (1m54.7s - 1794 kb) score
Graduale: Phil. 2, 8. V. 9 Christus factus est (2m19.3s - 2178 kb) score
Offertorium: Ps. 68, 21.22 Improperium... et dederunt (2m40.2s - 2504 kb) score
Communio: Mt. 26, 42 Pater, si non potest (3m28.0s - 3252 kb) score

And here are Chantblog posts on some of these:

• Palm Sunday: Hosanna, Filio David
• Palm Sunday: Gloria, laus et honor tibi ("All Glory, Laud, and Honor").
• The Palm Sunday Tract: Deus, Deus Meus
• The Palm Sunday Gradual: Christus factus est
• The Palm Sunday Offertory: Improperium expectavit cor meum

"He called up a new nation"

Lee cites Garry Wills' Lincoln at Gettysburg on this 150th Anniversary of the Gettysburg Address:

This was the perfect medium for changing the way most Americans thought about the nation’s founding acts. Lincoln does not argue law or history, as Daniel Webster did. He makes history. He does not come to present a theory, but to impose a symbol, one tested in experience and appealing to national values, with an emotional urgency entirely expressed in calm abstractions (fire in ice). He came to change the world, to effect an intellectual revolution. No other words could have done it. The miracle is that these words did. In his brief time before the crowd at Gettysburg he wove a spell that has not, yet, been broken–he called up a new nation out of the blood and trauma.

Lee also points to this Atlantic piece by Wills.   Important to mark this day, I think.

Here's the speech itself:

One of the only two confirmed photos of Abraham Lincoln^[1][2][3] 
(circled) at Gettysburg, taken about noon, just after Lincoln
arrived and some three hours before the speech. To Lincoln's right
is his bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

"When God Spoke Greek : The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible"

This is a review of this new book about "what the Septuagint was and is, and how the Greek Bible changed to become a Hebrew and Greek Bible."   It looks to be pretty interesting; I'd love to know more about the LXX, the process of that translation (if anything can be known about it), and the history of the period.    The review reminded me again, too, how important "translation" is.   Here's an excerpt about that (my bold):

 When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 we suddenly had before us manuscripts of parts of the Hebrew Bible that were far older than anything we had ever seen. Before the middle of the last century, biblical scholars had largely to content themselves with the Leningrad Codex, the oldest complete version of the Hebrew Scriptures, which dates to the 11th century. There is little doubt that this manuscript, along with the less complete Aleppo Codex (the 10th century), faithfully preserves the Scriptures over centuries of rabbinic and medieval copying. Yet when it was recognized that the Dead Sea Scrolls recorded Hebrew Scriptures that differed from those in the received Hebrew Bible something startling came to light. The older manuscripts tended to agree with the LXX, and a conclusion was unavoidable: the Hebrew Scriptures in the received Bible are in places revisions of earlier texts. If one wishes to speak of divine revelation, then there is good reason to conceive of the received Hebrew Bible as one version of revelation among others; the LXX captures bits and pieces of that earlier revelation.

How significant are these differences? More particularly, are there scriptural grounds for changing widely held theological judgments in Christianity? Not all scholars of the LXX think along the same lines. Anneli Aejmelaeus, for one, maintains that the received Hebrew Bible and the LXX share a common theological vision. This may well be so if one steps back sufficiently far from the biblical text. Yet if one moves in quite close at certain points, the chances are that some Christians will be made uneasy. Think for example of Paul’s letter to the Romans, perhaps the most important text for many Protestants in the whole Bible. Paul draws on the LXX, not the Hebrew Bible, which he was perfectly capable of doing. For example, in Romans 9:25-26 Paul draws on Hosea 1:10 and 2:23, and prefers the Greek to the Hebrew precisely because it allows him to extend God’s promise that Israel will prosper to include the Gentiles. It is one instance among many. The LXX allows Paul in his mature theology to develop his view that God’s saving plan includes all human beings, not just the Jews. If we take Paul to be divinely inspired, we would see the Holy Spirit is directing him to the LXX. And what does that mean for our thinking about the canonical form of the Scriptures?

Timothy Michael Law does not think the LXX and the received Hebrew Bible share a common theological vision. He gives the example of Exodus 15:3. The Hebrew is translated into English as “The Lord is a warrior, the Lord is his name” (NSRV) yet when we render the LXX into English we have “The Lord, when he shatters wars, the Lord is his name.” The original translator does not wish us to see God as a warrior but as a peacemaker. Similarly, in Psalm 9:21 the Hebrew, when put into English, reads, “Put them in fear, O Lord; let the nations know that they are only human” (NSRV) whereas the LXX has “Set a lawgiver over them, O Lord; let the nations know that they are human beings.” Here God brings law to the nations, not just fear. Not that the LXX promotes a uniform theology of peace and justice: elsewhere one hear a good deal about God smiting those who do not please him.

William Walton: "Coronation Te Deum"

We praise thee, O God :
    we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship thee :
    the Father everlasting.
To thee all Angels cry aloud :
    the Heavens, and all the Powers therein.
To thee Cherubim and Seraphim :
    continually do cry,
Holy, Holy, Holy :
    Lord God of Sabaoth;
Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty :
    of thy glory.
The glorious company of the Apostles : praise thee.
The goodly fellowship of the Prophets : praise thee.
The noble army of Martyrs : praise thee.
The holy Church throughout all the world :
    doth acknowledge thee;
The Father : of an infinite Majesty;
Thine honourable, true : and only Son;
Also the Holy Ghost : the Comforter.
Thou art the King of Glory : O Christ.
Thou art the everlasting Son : of the Father.
When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man :
    thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb.
When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death :
    thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
Thou sittest at the right hand of God : in the glory of the Father.
We believe that thou shalt come : to be our Judge.
We therefore pray thee, help thy servants :
    whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood.
Make them to be numbered with thy Saints : in glory everlasting.

[added later, mainly from Psalm verses:]
O Lord, save thy people :
    and bless thine heritage.
Govern them : and lift them up for ever.
Day by day : we magnify thee;
And we worship thy Name : ever world without end.
Vouchsafe, O Lord : to keep us this day without sin.
O Lord, have mercy upon us : have mercy upon us.
O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us :
    as our trust is in thee.
O Lord, in thee have I trusted :
    let me never be confounded.

From theYouTube page:

The Stanford Chamber Chorale and University Organist Robert Huw Morgan, under the direction of Stephen M. Sano, perform the "Coronation Te Deum" of William Walton (1902-1983), in the arrangement for double choir and organ by Simon Preston and Mark Blatchly.

The audio is taken from a live concert recording in May 2009 in Stanford Memorial Church.

For more information, please visit the Chorale's website: http://chorale.stanford.edu/

This piece was originally written for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.   You can also listen to it - along with some other really tasty treats (Langlais' Messe Solennelle, Parry's "I Was Glad," and Bruckner's "Locus Iste," for instance) - on the 10/6/2013 webcast of St. Thomas NYC's Feast of Dedication; it's the 100th Anniversary of the first worship service in its current (quite astounding) building.

"Delusions of peace"

This is John Gray's splendid 2011 review of Steven Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.   It's more or less a total takedown of the (as Gray points out) untenable combination of Darwinism and liberal humanism espoused by all of our favorite top-flight atheists and scientism-ists.   An amazing example - once again - of the "colossal degree of human self-delusion."

I would like to just cite parts of this, but it doesn't seem possible without losing some of its sense - so here's the whole piece.  My bold, of course.  (There are some good ideas here that the church might want to look at....)

“Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries,” Steven Pinker writes in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: the Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes. The celebrated Harvard professor of psychology is discussing what he calls “the Long Peace”: the period since the end of the second world war in which “the great powers, and developed states in general, have stopped waging war on one another.” As a result of “this blessed state of affairs,” he notes, “two entire categories of war—the imperial war to acquire colonies, and the colonial war to keep them—no longer exist.” Now and then there have been minor conflicts. “To be sure, [the super-powers] occasionally fought each other’s smaller allies and stoked proxy wars among their client states.” But these episodes do not diminish Pinker’s enthusiasm about the Long Peace. Chronic warfare is only to be expected in backward parts of the world. “Tribal, civil, private, slave-raiding, imperial, and colonial wars have inflamed the territories of the developing world for millennia.” In more civilised zones, war has all but disappeared. There is nothing inevitable in the process; major wars could break out again, even among the great powers. But the change in human affairs that has occurred is fundamental. “An underlying shift that supports predictions about the future,” the Long Peace points to a world in which violence is in steady decline.

A sceptical reader might wonder whether the outbreak of peace in developed countries and endemic conflict in less fortunate lands might not be somehow connected. Was the immense violence that ravaged southeast Asia after 1945 a result of immemorial backwardness in the region? Or was a subtle and refined civilisation wrecked by world war and the aftermath of decades of neo-colonial conflict—as Norman Lewis intimated would happen in his prophetic account of his travels in the region, A Dragon Apparent (1951)? It is true that the second world war was followed by over 40 years of peace in North America and Europe—even if for the eastern half of the continent it was a peace that rested on Soviet conquest. But there was no peace between the powers that had emerged as rivals from the global conflict.


In much the same way that rich societies exported their pollution to developing countries, the societies of the highly-developed world exported their conflicts. They were at war with one another the entire time—not only in Indo-China but in other parts of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. The Korean war, the Chinese invasion of Tibet, British counter-insurgency warfare in Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez, the Angolan civil war, decades of civil war in the Congo and Guatemala, the Six Day War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Iran-Iraq war and the Soviet-Afghan war—these are only some of the armed conflicts through which the great powers pursued their rivalries while avoiding direct war with each other. When the end of the Cold War removed the Soviet Union from the scene, war did not end. It continued in the first Gulf war, the Balkan wars, Chechnya, the Iraq war and in Afghanistan and Kashmir, among other conflicts. Taken together these conflicts add up to a formidable sum of violence. For Pinker they are minor, peripheral and hardly worth mentioning. The real story, for him, is the outbreak of peace in advanced societies, a shift that augurs an unprecedented transformation in human affairs.


***


While Pinker makes a great show of relying on evidence—the 700-odd pages of this bulky treatise are stuffed with impressive-looking graphs and statistics—his argument that violence is on the way out does not, in the end, rest on scientific investigation. He cites numerous reasons for the change, including increasing wealth and the spread of democracy. For him, none is as important as the adoption of a particular view of the world: “The reason so many violent institutions succumbed within so short a span of time was that the arguments that slew them belong to a coherent philosophy that emerged during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The ideas of thinkers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria, Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and John Stuart Mill coalesced into a worldview that we can call Enlightenment humanism.” (The italics are Pinker’s.)

Yet these are highly disparate thinkers, and it is far from clear that any coherent philosophy could have “coalesced” from their often incompatible ideas. The difficulty would be magnified if Pinker included Marx, Bakunin and Lenin, who undeniably belong within the extended family of intellectual movements that comprised the Enlightenment, but are left off the list. Like other latter-day partisans of “Enlightenment values,” Pinker prefers to ignore the fact that many Enlightenment thinkers have been doctrinally anti-liberal, while quite a few have favoured the large-scale use of political violence, from the Jacobins who insisted on the necessity of terror during the French revolution, to Engels who welcomed a world war in which the Slavs—“aborigines in the heart of Europe”—would be wiped out.

The idea that a new world can be constructed through the rational application of force is peculiarly modern, animating ideas of revolutionary war and pedagogic terror that feature in an influential tradition of radical Enlightenment thinking. Downplaying this tradition is extremely important for Pinker. Along with liberal humanists everywhere, he regards the core of the Enlightenment as a commitment to rationality. The fact that prominent Enlightenment figures have favoured violence as an instrument of social transformation is—to put it mildly—inconvenient.

There is a deeper difficulty. Like so many contemporary evangelists for humanism, Pinker takes for granted that science endorses an Enlightenment account of human reason. Since science is a human creation, how could humans not be rational? Surely science and humanism are one and the same. Actually it’s extremely curious—though entirely typical of current thinking—that science should be linked with humanism in this way. A method of inquiry rather than a settled view of the world, there can be no guarantee that science will vindicate Enlightenment ideals of human rationality. Science could just as well end up showing them to be unrealisable.

Admittedly, this was not a conflict that faced any of the thinkers Pinker cites. None of them based their view of the human animal on the findings of science. The Origin of Species appeared in the same year as John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), but the most influential liberal humanist (who died in 1873) never mentioned Darwin in his seminal works. Although Mill wrote extensively on the need for “moral science,” his view of human beings was a mix of classical philosophy (especially Aristotle) and the ideas of personal development he imbibed from the Romantics. Mill never considered the possibility that his view of human beings could be falsified by scientific investigation. Still, one must not judge him too harshly. He did not have to consider whether his view of humankind squared with science because the science of evolution was only just coming into being.

Pinker and his fellow humanists have no such excuse today. Evolutionary psychology is in its infancy, and much of what passes for knowledge in the subject is not much more than speculation—or worse. There have been countless attempts to apply evolutionary theory to social life but, since there is no mechanism in society comparable to natural selection in biology, they have produced only a succession of misleading metaphors, in which social systems are mistakenly viewed as living organisms. Indeed, if there is anything of substance to be derived from an evolutionary view of the human mind, it must be the persistence of unreason.

As the related discipline of behavioural finance has shown in some detail with regard to decision-making under conditions of risk and uncertainty, human thought and perception are riddled with bias, inconsistency and self-deception. Since our minds are animal minds—as Darwin argued in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)—things could hardly be otherwise. Shaped by imperatives of survival, the human mind will not normally function as an organ for seeking out the truth. If science is the pursuit of truth—an assumption that begs some tricky questions—it doesn’t follow that anything similar is possible in other areas of human life. The idea that humans can shape their lives by the use of reason is an inheritance from rationalist philosophy that does not fit easily with what we know of the evolution of our mammalian brain. The end result of scientific inquiry may well be that irrational beliefs are humanly indispensable.

Science and humanism are at odds more often than they are at one. For a devoted Darwinist like Pinker to maintain that the world is being pacified by the spread of a particular world view is deeply ironic. There is nothing in Darwinism to suggest that ideas and beliefs can transform human life. To be sure, there have been attempts to formulate an idea of progress in terms of competing memes—vaguely defined concepts or units of meaning that are held to be in some ways akin to genes—although nothing like a scientific theory has been developed. Even if there were such things as memes and they did somehow compete with one another, there is nothing to say that benign memes would be the winners. Quite to the contrary, if history is any guide. Racist ideas are extremely resilient and highly contagious, as is shown by the re-emergence of xenophobic ethnic nationalism and antisemitism in post-communist Europe. So are utopian ideas, which have resurfaced in neoconservative thinking about regime change. The recurrent appearance of these memes suggests that outside of some fairly narrowly defined areas of scientific investigation, progress is at best fitful and elusive. Science may be the cumulative elimination of error, but the human fondness for toxic ideas is remarkably constant.

The irony is compounded when we recall that Pinker achieved notoriety through his attempt to reinstate the idea that the human mind is fixed and limited. His bestseller The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), an assault on the idea that human behaviour is indefinitely malleable, was controversial for several reasons—not least for its attack on the belief that pre-agricultural cultures were inherently peaceable. The book provoked a storm of criticism from liberal humanists who sensed—rightly—that this emphasis on the constancy of human nature limited the scope of future human advance. Pinker seems to have come to share this anxiety, and the present volume is the result. The decline of violence posited in The Better Angels of Our Nature is a progressive transformation of precisely the kind his earlier book seemed to preclude. But the contradiction in which Pinker is stuck is not his alone. It afflicts anyone who tries to combine rigorous Darwinism with a belief in moral progress. Darwinism is unlikely to be the last word on evolution and, rather than identifying universal laws of natural selection, it may only apply in our corner of the universe. But if Darwin’s theory is even approximately right, there can be no rational basis for expecting any revolution in human behaviour.

***

This is a troubling truth for humanists, including Pinker. It can be avoided only by pointing to some kind of ongoing evolution in humans, and Pinker is now ready to entertain “the possibility that in recent history Homo Sapiens has literally evolved to become less violent in the biologist’s technical sense of a change in our genome.” He concludes that there is very little evidence that this is so, but the fact that he takes the possibility seriously is telling. Social violence is coeval with the human species. This is not because humans have always been driven by an inbuilt instinct of aggression. Some of the impulses we inherit from our evolutionary past may incline us to conflict, but others— “the better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln called them—incline us to peaceful cooperation. In order to show that conflicts between the two will in future increasingly be settled in favour of peace, Pinker needs to be able to identify some very powerful trends. He does his best, but the changes to which he points—the spread of democracy and the increase of wealth, for example—are more problematic than he realises. The formation of democratic nation-states was one of the principal drivers of violence of the last century, involving ethnic cleansing in inter-war Europe, post-colonial states and the post-communist Balkans. Steadily-growing prosperity may act as a kind of tranquilliser, but there is no reason to think the increase of wealth can go on indefinitely—and when it falters violence will surely return. In quite different ways, attacks on minorities and immigrants by neo-fascists in Europe, the popular demonstrations against austerity in Greece and the English riots of the past summer show the disruptive and dangerous impact of sudden economic slowdown on social peace. All the trends that supposedly lie behind the Long Peace are contingent and reversible.

Hobbes is cited more than once by Pinker, but he misses Hobbes’s most important insight: that even if humans were not moved by the pursuit of power and glory, scarcity and uncertainty would drive them repeatedly into conflict with one another. Recurrent violence is a result of the normal disorder of human life. In some ways Hobbes—an early Enlightenment thinker and an intrepid rationalist—was overly sanguine about the capacity of humans to lift themselves out of conflict. Envisioning a social contract in which the power of violence is handed over to a peace-making state, he failed to take account of the fact that humans adapt to violence and often turn it into a way of life. (The novelist Cormac McCarthy presents an image of such a way of life in Blood Meridian, his fictional recreation of the mid-19th century American-Mexican borderlands.) When it is not a way of life, violence is often simply a method. Suicide bombing is morally repugnant but it is also cheap and highly effective, deploying an abundant and easily replaceable resource—human life—to achieve objectives that could be compromised if the perpetrators survived to be captured and interrogated. Humans use violence for many reasons, and everything points to their doing so for the foreseeable future.

No doubt we have become less violent in some ways. But it is easy for liberal humanists to pass over the respects in which civilisation has retreated. Pinker is no exception. Just as he writes off mass killing in developing countries as evidence of backwardness without enquiring whether it might be linked in some way to peace in the developed world, he celebrates “recivilisation” in America without much concern for those who pay the price of the recivilising process. Focusing on large, ill-defined cultural changes—a decline of the values of respectability and self-control in the 1960s, for example, which he tells us resulted from the influence of “the counterculture”—his analysis has a tabloid flavour, not improved by his repeated recourse to not always very illuminating statistics.

One set of numbers does stand out, however. “By the early 1990s Americans had gotten sick of the muggers, vandals and drive-by shootings.” The result is clear: “Today more than two million Americans are in jail, the highest incarceration rate on the planet. This works out to three-quarters of a percent of the entire population and a much larger percentage of young men, especially African Americans.” (Again the italics are Pinker’s.) The astonishing numbers of black young men in jail in the US is due to the disproportionate impact on black people of the “decivilising process,” notably the high rate of black children born out of wedlock and what Pinker sees as the resulting potential for violence in families (black or white) that lack the civilising influence of women. While “massive imprisonment” has not reversed this trend, it “removes the most crime-prone individuals from the streets, incapacitating them.” America’s experiment in mass incarceration is, apparently, an integral part of the recivilising process.

The vast growth of the American penal state, reaching a size not achieved in any other country, does not immediately present itself as an advance in civilisation. A large part of the rise in the prison population has to do with America’s repressive policies on drugs, which Pinker endorses when he observes: “A regime that trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will net a certain number of violent people as a by-catch, further thinning the ranks of the violent people who remain on the streets.” While it may be counter-productive in regard to its stated goal of controlling drugs use, it seems America’s prohibitionist regime offers a useful means of banging up troublesome people. The possibility that mass incarceration of young males may be in some way linked with family breakdown is not considered. Highly uneven access to education, disappearing low-skill jobs, cuts in welfare and greatly increased economic inequality are also disregarded, even though these factors go a long way in explaining why there are so many poor blacks and so few affluent whites in prison in America today.

Talking to the vacuum cleaner salesman and part-time British agent James Wormold in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, the Cuban secret policeman Captain Segura refers to “the torturable class”: those, chiefly the poor, who expect to be tortured and who (according to Segura) accept the fact. The poor in America may not fall exactly into this category—even if some of the practices to which they are subject in US prisons are not far from torture. But there is certainly an imprisonable class in the United States, largely composed of people that Pinker describes as decivilised, and once they have been defined in this way there is a kind of logic in consigning this category of human beings to the custody of America’s barbaric justice system.

Pinker’s attempt to ground the hope of peace in science is profoundly instructive, for it testifies to our enduring need for faith. We don’t need science to tell us that humans are violent animals. History and contemporary experience provide more than sufficient evidence. For liberal humanists, the role of science is, in effect, to explain away this evidence. They look to science to show that, over the long run, violence will decline—hence the panoply of statistics and graphs and the resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts. The result is no more credible than the efforts of Marxists to show the scientific necessity of socialism, or free-market economists to demonstrate the permanence of what was until quite recently hailed as the Long Boom. The Long Peace is another such delusion, and just as ephemeral.

"Why Are You Not Dead Yet?"

An interesting article about increased lifespan on Slate.

The most important difference between the world today and 150 years ago isn’t airplane flight or nuclear weapons or the Internet. It’s lifespan. We used to live 35 or 40 years on average in the United States, but now we live almost 80. We used to get one life. Now we get two.

You may well be living your second life already. Have you ever had some health problem that could have killed you if you’d been born in an earlier era? Leave aside for a minute the probabilistic ways you would have died in the past—the smallpox that didn’t kill you because it was eradicated by a massive global vaccine drive, the cholera you never contracted because you drink filtered and chemically treated water. Did some specific medical treatment save your life? It’s a fun conversation starter: Why are you not dead yet?It turns out almost everybody has a story, but we rarely hear them; life-saving treatments have become routine. I asked around, and here is a small sample of what would have killed my friends and acquaintances:

• Adrian’s lung spontaneously collapsed when he was 18.
• Becky had an ectopic pregnancy that caused massive internal bleeding.
• Carl had St. Anthony’s Fire, a strep infection of the skin that killed John Stuart Mill.*
• Dahlia would have died delivering a child (twice) or later of a ruptured gall bladder.
• David had an aortic valve replaced.
• Hanna acquired Type 1 diabetes during a pregnancy and would die without insulin.
• Julia had a burst appendix at age 14.
• Katherine was diagnosed with pernicious anemia in her 20s. She treats it with supplements of vitamin B-12, but in the past she would have withered away.
• Laura (that’s me) had scarlet fever when she was 2, which was once a leading cause of death among children but is now easily treatable with antibiotics.
• Mitch was bitten by a cat (filthy animals) and had to have emergency surgery and a month of antibiotics or he would have died of cat scratch fever.

After a while, these not-dead-yet stories start to sound sort of absurd, like a giddy, hooray-for-modernity response to The Gashleycrumb Tinies. Edward Gorey’s delightfully dark poem is an alphabetical list of children (fictional!) who died gruesome deaths: “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/ B is for Basil assaulted by bears.” Here’s how modern science, medicine, and public health would amend it:

M is for Maud who was swept out to sea … then brought back to shore by a lifeguard and resuscitated by emergency medical technicians.

O is for Olive run through with an awl … but saved during a four-hour emergency surgery to repair her collapsed lung.

S is for Susan, who perished of fits … or who would have, anyway, if her epilepsy hadn’t been diagnosed promptly and treated with powerful anticonvulsant drugs.

This, to me, may be the single biggest change in the human condition ever - and to my mind explains, in one go, why the churches have emptied out.   (The increase is not actually due, BTW, to recent advances in medicine as I had thought; the article says that the change began during the last century, and is credited to public health initiatives:  clean water, sewage treatment, washing hands, etc.  Also to improved farming methods; we're no longer subject to starvation.  Of course, vaccines and medical treatment have had a huge effect, too - particularly I think on worldviews; my mother - just one generation back - was deathly afraid of illness, particularly polio, for some reason.)

To understand why people live so long today, it helps to start with how people died in the past. (To take a step back in time, play our interactive game.) People died young, and they died painfully of consumption (tuberculosis), quinsy (tonsillitis), fever, childbirth, and worms. There’s nothing like looking back at the history of death and dying in the United States to dispel any romantic notions you may have that people used to live in harmony with the land or be more in touch with their bodies. Life was miserable—full of contagious disease, spoiled food, malnutrition, exposure, and injuries.

But disease was the worst. The vast majority of deaths before the mid-20th century were caused by microbes—bacteria, amoebas, protozoans, or viruses that ruled the Earth and to a lesser extent still do. It’s not always clear which microbes get the credit for which kills. Bills of mortality (lists of deaths by causes) were kept in London starting in the 1600s and in certain North American cities and parishes starting in the 1700s. At the time, people thought fevers were spread by miasmas (bad air) and the treatment of choice for pretty much everything was blood-letting. So we don’t necessarily know what caused “inflammatory fever” or what it meant to die of “dropsy” (swelling), or whether ague referred  to typhoid fever, malaria, or some other disease. Interpreting these records has become a fascinating sub-field of history. But overall, death was mysterious, capricious, and ever-present.

.....

One of the best tours of how people died in the past is The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America by Gerald Grob. It’s a great antidote to all the heroic pioneer narratives you learned in elementary school history class, and it makes the Little House on the Prairie books seem delusional in retrospect. Pioneers traveling west in wagon trains had barely enough food, and much of it spoiled; their water came from stagnant, larvae-infested ponds. They died in droves of dysentery. Did you ever play with Lincoln logs or dream about living in a log cabin? What a fun fort for grown-ups, right? Wrong. The poorly sealed, damp, unventilated houses were teeming with mosquitoes and vermin. Because of settlement patterns along waterways and the way people cleared the land, some of the most notorious places for malaria in the mid-1800s were Ohio and Michigan. Everybody in the Midwest had the ague!

* * *

How did we go from the miseries of the past to our current expectation of long and healthy lives? “Most people credit medical advances,” says David Jones, a medical historian at Harvard—“but most historians would not.” One problem is the timing. Most of the effective medical treatments we recognize as saving our lives today have been available only since World War II: antibiotics, chemotherapy, drugs to treat high blood pressure. But the steepest increase in life expectancy occurred from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Even some dramatically successful medical treatments such as insulin for diabetics have kept individual people alive—send in those #NotDeadYet stories!—but haven’t necessarily had a population-level impact on average lifespan. We’ll examine the second half of the 20th century in a later story, but for now let’s look at the bigger early drivers of the doubled lifespan.

The credit largely goes to a wide range of public health advances, broadly defined, some of which were explicitly aimed at preventing disease, others of which did so only incidentally. “There was a whole suite of things that occurred simultaneously,” says S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity researcher at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Mathematically, the interventions that saved infants and children from dying of communicable disease had the greatest impact on lifespan. (During a particularly awful plague in Europe, James Riley points out in Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History, the average life expectancy could temporarily drop by five years.) And until the early 20th century, the most common age of death was in infancy.

Clean water may be the biggest lifesaver in history. Some historians attribute one-half of the overall reduction in mortality, two-thirds of the reduction in child mortality, and three-fourths of the reduction in infant mortality to clean water. In 1854, John Snow traced a cholera outbreak in London to a water pump next to a leaky sewer, and some of the big public works projects of the late 1900s involved separating clean water from dirty. Cities ran water through sand and gravel to physically trap filth, and when that didn’t work (germs are awfully small) they started chlorinating water.

More at the link.  More later as to how this ties in with "The Trouble With Anglicanism" and "Why prooftexting?"

"I've Been 'Buked, and I've Been Scorned"

From the YouTube page:

At the March on Washington in 1963 Mahalia sang in front of 250,000 people "I've Been 'Buked, and I've Been Scorned", in which Martin Luther King, Jr. made his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. She also sang "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" at the funeral of her friend Martin Luther King, Jr. She was one of his favorite gospel singers. Indeed, her good friend Martin Luther King said "a voice like hers comes along once in a millennium". In addition to sharing her singing talent with the world, she mentored the extraordinarily gifted Aretha Franklin; she was a close friend of Aretha's father, C. L. Franklin, and a frequent guest in the Franklin home.

"Jane Addams, world's 'best-loved woman,' honored with Google doodle"

From CSMonitor.com; September 6 was her birthday.  

In September of 1889, Jane Addams, just 29 years old, opened a red house at 800 South Halsted Street in Chicago as a place of refuge for the new immigrants to the blighted neighborhood. That home, pictured today in a Google doodle that celebrates Ms. Addams, would become the tangible epicenter of Addams’s work and her vision for a fairer, more peaceful world.

Addams, who is credited in the New York Times 1935 obituary for her work in developing “a scientific approach to the relief of poverty and suffering,” is difficult to categorize. That’s perhaps due to the sheer number of titles that have been given to her – feminist; social activist; internationalist; philosopher; author; and sociologist.

Addams was born to Quaker parents in Cedarville, Illinois on Sept. 6, 1860. Her father, a miller, was a former congressman and friend to Abraham Lincoln, and Addams would later credit the belief both men had in the equality of man as underpinning her own hope for the equality of all people, women included.

Addams, an 1881 graduate of Rockford College for Women, moved with Ellen Gates Starr (the two were a couple) to Chicago in 1889. There, she founded Hull House and began receiving Chicago’s new immigrants from all around the world into the home.

At Addams’s leased mansion, where numbers burgeoned to around 2,000 each week after just a year of operations, immigrants paid rent to receive lessons in the English 
language and American government, as well as practical skills like cooking and sewing. Addams’s goal was assimilation – an iconoclastic goal at a time at which immigrants were often ghettoized and de facto barred from middle class life.

That home soon became the locus of Addams’ broader social activism. No topic, so long as it gestured toward broader fairness for all people, was outside the bounds of Addams’ advocacy: Her work included pushing for more opportunities for women, for the poor, and for immigrants; She was a pacifist and fought against war with Germany and, later, for generous peace terms; She pressed for better sanitary conditions in Chicago, taking up the official post of garbage inspector of the Nineteenth Ward, and for more sensitive care for the mentally ill, disabled, and sick. She wanted better milk, better midwife training, and better childcare.

Some of those beliefs made fast enemies for Addams. In particular, her progressive support for and representation of women’s equal rights made her unpopular with leading male figures: In 1912, Charles Elliot, the president of Harvard at the time, criticized what he called Addams’s politics after she seconded Franklin D. Roosevelt’s nomination for president. “Women,” he wrote in an interview published in the New York Times, “have no proper share in political convention.” Addams’ participation was “in very bad taste," he said.

And her disdain for war was equally ill-received in certain camps. In letters published in the press as the US lunged into world war, the parents of World War I soldiers lampooned her pacifism. Addams, wrote one of them, “evidently knows nothing of the joys of combat.” Around that time, as Addams began taking up positions in anti-war groups, the Daughters of the American Revolution also booted her out.

Even now, Addams is a controversial figure. Recent biographies that plumb her early life and work have noted that Hull House was a patriarchal, evangelist place, where immigrants were objects of sympathy that required rescuing from their old ways of life.

But, for all the criticism, Addams was and is regarded as an extraordinary figure, even by most of her critics. In 1931, Addams, already the first woman to have received an honorary degree from Yale University, was awarded the Noble Peace Prize, making her the first American woman to win that award.

A few weeks before her death, Addams was the guest of honor at a dinner in Washington, where Eleanor Roosevelt called her “the greatest living woman.” That, the New York Times obituary said, was just one of the titles – as numerous as the causes for which Addams fought – that had been given to her. “Miss Addams,” the Times wrote, “has been called ‘the greatest woman in the world,’ the ‘mother of social service,’ ‘the greatest woman internationalist’ and the ‘first citizen of Chicago.’ And the Times added its own to the list: “She was, perhaps, the world's best-known and best-loved woman.”

'They raped every German female from eight to 80'

By Antony Beevor, from a 2002 Guardian article.  Here's the whole stunning thing, my bolding:

"Red Army soldiers don't believe in 'individual liaisons' with German women," wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. "Nine, ten, twelve men at a time - they rape them on a collective basis."

The Soviet armies advancing into East Prussia in January 1945, in huge, long columns, were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, lend-lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, and then a second echelon in horse-drawn carts. The variety of character among the soldiers was almost as great as that of their military equipment. There were freebooters who drank and raped quite shamelessly, and there were idealistic, austere communists and members of the intelligentsia appalled by such behaviour.

Beria and Stalin, back in Moscow, knew perfectly well what was going on from a number of detailed reports. One stated that "many Germans declare that all German women in East Prussia who stayed behind were raped by Red Army soldiers". Numerous examples of gang rape were given - "girls under 18 and old women included".

Marshal Rokossovsky issued order No 006 in an attempt to direct "the feelings of hatred at fighting the enemy on the battlefield." It appears to have had little effect. There were also a few arbitrary attempts to exert authority. The commander of one rifle division is said to have "personally shot a lieutenant who was lining up a group of his men before a German woman spreadeagled on the ground". But either officers were involved themselves, or the lack of discipline made it too dangerous to restore order over drunken soldiers armed with submachine guns.

Calls to avenge the Motherland, violated by the Wehrmacht's invasion, had given the idea that almost any cruelty would be allowed. Even many young women soldiers and medical staff in the Red Army did not appear to disapprove. "Our soldiers' behaviour towards Germans, particularly German women, is absolutely correct!" said a 21-year-old from Agranenko's reconnaissance detachment. A number seemed to find it amusing. Several German women recorded how Soviet servicewomen watched and laughed when they were raped. But some women were deeply shaken by what they witnessed in Germany. Natalya Gesse, a close friend of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, had observed the Red Army in action in 1945 as a Soviet war correspondent. "The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty," she recounted later. "It was an army of rapists."

Drink of every variety, including dangerous chemicals seized from laboratories and workshops, was a major factor in the violence. It seems as if Soviet soldiers needed alcoholic courage to attack a woman. But then, all too often, they drank too much and, unable to complete the act, used the bottle instead with appalling effect. A number of victims were mutilated obscenely.

The subject of the Red Army's mass rapes in Germany has been so repressed in Russia that even today veterans refuse to acknowledge what really happened. The handful prepared to speak openly, however, are totally unrepentant. "They all lifted their skirts for us and lay on the bed," said the leader of one tank company. He even went on to boast that "two million of our children were born" in Germany.

The capacity of Soviet officers to convince themselves that most of the victims were either happy with their fate, or at least accepted that it was their turn to suffer after what the Wehrmacht had done in Russia, is striking. "Our fellows were so sex-starved," a Soviet major told a British journalist at the time, "that they often raped old women of sixty, seventy or even eighty - much to these grandmothers' surprise, if not downright delight."

One can only scratch at the surface of the psychological contradictions. When gang-raped women in Königsberg begged their attackers afterwards to put them out of their misery, the Red Army men appear to have felt insulted. "Russian soldiers do not shoot women," they replied. "Only German soldiers do that." The Red Army had managed to convince itself that because it had assumed the moral mission to liberate Europe from fascism it could behave entirely as it liked, both personally and politically.

Domination and humiliation permeated most soldiers' treatment of women in East Prussia. The victims not only bore the brunt of revenge for Wehrmacht crimes, they also represented an atavistic target as old as war itself. Rape is the act of a conqueror, the feminist historian Susan Brownmiller observed, aimed at the "bodies of the defeated enemy's women" to emphasise his victory. Yet after the initial fury of January 1945 dissipated, the sadism became less marked. By the time the Red Army reached Berlin three months later, its soldiers tended to regard German women more as a casual right of conquest. The sense of domination certainly continued, but this was perhaps partly an indirect product of the humiliations which they themselves had suffered at the hands of their commanders and the Soviet authorities as a whole.

A number of other forces or influences were at work. Sexual freedom had been a subject for lively debate within Communist party circles during the 1920s, but during the following decade, Stalin ensured that Soviet society depicted itself as virtually asexual. This had nothing to do with genuine puritanism: it was because love and sex did not fit in with dogma designed to "deindividualise" the individual. Human urges and emotions had to be suppressed. Freud's work was banned, divorce and adultery were matters for strong party disapproval. Criminal sanctions against homosexuality were reintroduced. The new doctrine extended even to the complete suppression of sex education. In graphic art, the clothed outline of a woman's breasts was regarded as dangerously erotic. They had to be disguised under boiler suits. The regime clearly wanted any form of desire to be converted into love for the party and above all for Comrade Stalin.

Most ill-educated Red Army soldiers suffered from sexual ignorance and utterly unenlightened attitudes towards women. So the Soviet state's attempts to suppress the libido of its people created what one Russian writer described as a sort of "barracks eroticism" which was far more primitive and violent than "the most sordid foreign pornography". All this was combined with the dehumanising influence of modern propaganda and the atavistic, warring impulses of men marked by fear and suffering.

The novelist Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent attached to the invading Red Army, soon discovered that rape victims were not just Germans. Polish women also suffered. So did young Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian women who had been sent back to Germany by the Wehrmacht for slave labour. "Liberated Soviet girls quite often complain that our soldiers rape them," he noted. "One girl said to me in tears: 'He was an old man, older than my father'."

The rape of Soviet women and girls seriously undermines Russian attempts to justify Red Army behaviour on the grounds of revenge for German brutality in the Soviet Union. On March 29 1945 the central committee of the Komsomol (the youth organisation of the Soviet Union) informed Stalin's associate Malenkov of a report from the 1st Ukrainian Front. "On the night of 24 February," General Tsygankov recorded in the first of many examples, "a group of 35 provisional lieutenants on a course and their battalion commander entered the women's dormitory in the village of Grutenberg and raped them."

In Berlin, many women were simply not prepared for the shock of Russian revenge, however much horror propaganda they had heard from Goebbels. Many reassured themselves that, although the danger must be great out in the countryside, mass rapes could hardly take place in the city in front of everybody.

In Dahlem, Soviet officers visited Sister Kunigunde, the mother superior of Haus Dahlem, a maternity clinic and orphanage. The officers and their men behaved impeccably. In fact, the officers even warned Sister Kunigunde about the second-line troops following on behind. Their prediction proved entirely accurate. Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped without pity.

Yet within a couple of days, a pattern emerged of soldiers flashing torches in the faces of women huddled in the bunkers to choose their victims. This process of selection, as opposed to the indiscriminate violence shown earlier, indicates a definite change. By this stage Soviet soldiers started to treat German women more as sexual spoils of war than as substitutes for the Wehrmacht on which to vent their rage.

Rape has often been defined by writers on the subject as an act of violence which has little to do with sex. But that is a definition from the victim's perspective. To understand the crime, one needs to see things from the perpetrator's point of view, especially in the later stages when unaggravated rape had succeeded the extreme onslaught of January and February.

Many women found themselves forced to "concede" to one soldier in the hope that he would protect them from others. Magda Wieland, a 24-year-old actress, was dragged from a cupboard in her apartment just off the Kurfürstendamm. A very young soldier from central Asia hauled her out. He was so excited at the prospect of a beautiful young blonde that he ejaculated prematurely. By sign language, she offered herself to him as a girlfriend if he would protect her from other Russian soldiers, but he went off to boast to his comrades and another soldier raped her. Ellen Goetz, a Jewish friend of Magda's, was also raped. When other Germans tried to explain to the Russians that she was Jewish and had been persecuted, they received the retort: "Frau ist Frau."

Women soon learned to disappear during the "hunting hours" of the evening. Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end. Mothers emerged into the street to fetch water only in the early morning when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol from the night before. Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding place of other girls in a desperate bid to save her own daughter. Older Berliners still remember the screams every night. It was impossible not to hear them because all the windows had been blown in.

Estimates of rape victims from the city's two main hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in the city, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death rate was thought to have been much higher among the 1.4 million estimated victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least two million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape.

If anyone attempted to defend a woman against a Soviet attacker it was either a father trying to defend a daughter or a young son trying to protect his mother. "The 13-year old Dieter Sahl," neighbours wrote in a letter shortly after the event, "threw himself with flailing fists at a Russian who was raping his mother in front of him. He did not succeed in anything except getting himself shot."

After the second stage of women offering themselves to one soldier to save themselves from others, came the post-battle need to survive starvation. Susan Brownmiller noted "the murky line that divides wartime rape from wartime prostitution". Soon after the surrender in Berlin, Ursula von Kardorff found all sorts of women prostituting themselves for food or the alternative currency of cigarettes. Helke Sander, a German film-maker who researched the subject in great detail, wrote of "the grey area of direct force, blackmail, calculation and real affection".

The fourth stage was a strange form of cohabitation in which Red Army officers settled in with German "occupation wives". The Soviet authorities were appalled and enraged when a number of Red Army officers, intent on staying with their German lovers, deserted when it was time to return to the Motherland.

Even if the feminist definition of rape purely as an act of violence proves to be simplistic, there is no justification for male complacency. If anything, the events of 1945 reveal how thin the veneer of civilisation can be when there is little fear of retribution. It also suggests a much darker side to male sexuality than we might care to admit.

Learning about Gregorian Chant, from Solesmes

From the YouTube page:

Do you want to learn more about Gregorian chant? This highly pedagogical presentation by a monk of Solesmes, Dom Daniel Saulnier, is read by Sarah Moule and gives the amateur listener basic notions about the chant, its history, musical forms and genres, with a generous selection of examples culled from Solesmes recordings.

This seems to be the order of program on the video; I haven't watched it through yet.

History of Gregorian chant
1 Gloria With ringing of the bells
2 Gloria Ambrosian
3 Antiphon In mandatis & Psalm 111
4 Psalm Psalm 110
5 Psalm Psalm 111
PROPER OF THE MASS
6 Introit Nos autem
7 Gradual Concupivi
8 Alleluia Pascha nostrum
9 Offertory Lætentur
10 Communion Pascha nostrum
ORDINARY OF THE MASS
11 Kyrie III
12 Gloria IX
13 Sanctus XVIII
14 Agnus XVIII
DIVINE OFFICE
15 Antiphon Dixit Dominus & Ps 109
16 Antiphon Si offers & Magnificat
17 Response Credo
18 Hymn Lucis creator
19 Hymn Salve festa dies

http://www.solesmes.com/GB/editions/disques.php?

HT Chant Cafe.

The Office of the Dead (Catholic Encyclopedia, 1913)

Here's the full entry.  It's a full description of the Office as it existed, and was understood, in 1913 in the Roman Catholic Church.    I'll be interested to learn if anything further has been discovered since then; I'd guess not much, but you never know.  I'm also interested in finding out more about it from an Anglican perspective, and will post what I find.

I. COMPOSITION OF THE OFFICE

This office, as it now exists in the Roman Liturgy, is composed of First Vespers, Mass, Matins, and Lauds. The Vespers comprise psalms, cxiv, cxix, cxx, cxxix, cxxxvii, with the Magnificat and the preces. The Matins, composed like those of feast days, have three nocturns, each consisting of three psalms and three lessons; the Lauds, as usual, have three psalms (Ps. lxii and lxvi united are counted as one) and a canticle (that of Ezechias), the three psalms Laudate, and the Benedictus. We shall speak presently of the Mass. The office differs in important points from the other offices of the Roman Liturgy. It has not the Little Hours, the Second Vespers, or the Complin. In this respect it resembles the ancient vigils, which began at eventide (First Vespers), continued during the night (Matins), and ended at the dawn (Lauds); Mass followed and terminated the vigil of the feast. The absence of the introduction, "Deus in adjutorium", of the hymns, absolution, blessings, and of the doxology in the psalms also recall ancient times, when these additions had not yet been made. The psalms are chosen not in their serial order, as in the Sunday Office or the Roman ferial Office, but because certain verses, which serve as antiphons, seem to allude to the state of the dead. The use of some of these psalms in the funeral service is of high antiquity, as appears from passages in St. Augustine and other writers of the fourth and fifth centuries. The lessons from Job, so suitable for the Office of the Dead, were also read in very early days at funeral services. The responses, too, deserve notice, especially the response "Libera me, Domine, de viis inferni qui portas æreas confregisti et visitasti inferum et dedisti eis lumen . . . qui erant in poenis . . . advenisti redemptor noster" etc. This is one of the few texts in the Roman Liturgy alluding to Christ's descent into hell. It is also a very ancient composition (see Cabrol, "La descente du Christ aux enfers" in "Rassegna Gregor.", May and June, 1909).

The "Libera me de morte æterna", which is found more complete in the ancient manuscripts, dates also from an early period (see Cabrol in "Dict. d'archéol. et de liturgie", s. v. Absoute). Mgr Batiffol remarks that it is not of Roman origin, but it is very ancient (Hist. du brév., 148). The distinctive character of the Mass, its various epistles, its tract, its offertory in the form of a prayer, the communion (like the offertory) with versicles, according to the ancient custom, and the sequence "Dies Iræ" (q.v.; concerning its author see also BURIAL), it is impossible to dwell upon here. The omission of the Alleluia, and the kiss of peace is also characteristic of this mass. There was a time when the Alleluia was one of the chants customary at funeral services (see Dict. d'archéol. et de liturgie, s. v. Alleluia, I, 1235). Later it was looked upon exclusively as a song of joy, and was omitted on days of penance (e.g. Lent and ember week), sometimes in Advent, and at all funeral ceremonies. It is replaced to-day by a tract. A treatise of the eighth-ninth century published by Muratori (Liturg. Rom. vet., II, 391) shows that the Alleluia was then suppressed. The omission of the kiss of peace at the Mass is probably due to the fact that that ceremony preceded the distribution of the Eucharist to the faithful and was a preparation for it, so, as communion is not given at the Mass for the Dead, the kiss of peace was suppressed.

Not to speak of the variety of ceremonies of the Mozarabic, Ambrosian, or Oriental liturgies, even in countries where the Roman liturgy prevailed, there were many variations. The lessons, the responses, and other formulæ were borrowed from various sources; certain Churches included in this office the Second Vespers and Complin; in other places, instead of the lessons of our Roman Ritual, they read St. Augustine, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus, Osee, Isaiah, Daniel, etc. The responses varied likewise; many examples may be found in Martène and the writers cited below in the bibliography. It is fortunate that the Roman Church preserved carefully and without notable change this office, which, like that of Holy Week, has retained for us in its archaic forms the memory and the atmosphere of a very ancient liturgy. The Mozarabic Liturgy possesses a very rich funeral ritual. Dom Férotin in his "Liber Ordinum" (pp. 107 sqq.) has published a ritual (probably the oldest extant), dating back possibly to the seventh century. He has also published a large number of votive masses of the dead. For the Ambrosian Liturgy, see Magistretti, "Manuale Ambrosianum", I (Milan, 1905), 67; for the Greek Ritual, see Burial, pp. 77-8.

II. HISTORY

The Office of the Dead has been attributed at times to St. Isidore, to St. Augustine, to St. Ambrose, and even to Origen. There is no foundation for these assertions. In its present form, while it has some very ancient characteristics, it cannot be older than the seventh or even eighth century. Its authorship is discussed at length in the dissertation of Horatius de Turre, mentioned in the bibliography. Some writers attribute it to Amalarius, others to Alcuin (see Batiffol, "Hist. du Brév.", 181-92; and for the opposing view, Bäumer-Biron, "Hist. du Brév.", II, 37). These opinions are more probable, but are not as yet very solidly established. Amalarius speaks of the Office of the Dead, but seems to imply that it existed before his time ("De Eccles. officiis", IV, xlii, in P. L., CV, 1238). He alludes to the "Agenda Mortuorum" contained in a sacramentary, but nothing leads us to believe that he was its author. Alcuin is also known for his activity in liturgical matters, and we owe certain liturgical compositions to him; but there is no reason for considering him the author of this office (see Cabrol in "Dict. d'archéol. et de liturgie", s. v. Alcuin). In the Gregorian Antiphonary we do find a mass and an office in agenda mortuorum, but it is admitted that this part is an addition; a fortiori this applies to the Gelasian. The Maurist editors of St. Gregory are inclined to attribute their composition to Albinus and Etienne of Liège (Microl., lx). But if it is impossible to trace the office and the mass in their actual form beyond the ninth or eighth century, it is notwithstanding certain that the prayers and a service for the dead existed long before that time. We find them in the fifth, fourth, and even in the third and second century. Pseudo-Dionysius, Sts. Gregory of Nyssa, Jerome, and Augustine, Tertullian, and the inscriptions in the catacombs afford a proof of this (see Burial, III, 76; PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD; Cabrol, "La prière pour les morts" in "Rev. d'apologétique", 15 Sept., 1909, pp. 881-93).

III. PRACTICE AND OBLIGATION

The Office of the Dead was composed originally to satisfy private devotion to the dead, and at first had no official character. Even in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, it was recited chiefly by the religious orders (the Cluniacs, Cistercians, Carthusians), like the Office of Our Lady (see Guyet, loc. cit., 465). Later it was prescribed for all clerics and became obligatory whenever a ferial office was celebrated. It has even been said that it was to remove the obligation of reciting it that the feasts of double and semi-double rite were multiplied, for it could be omitted on such days (Bäumer-Biron, op. cit., II, 198). The reformed Breviary of St. Pius V assigned the recitation of the Office of the Dead to the first free day in the month, the Mondays of Advent and Lent, to some vigils, and ember days. Even then it was not obligatory, for the Bull "Quod a nobis" of the same pope merely recommends it earnestly, like the Office of Our Lady and the Penitential Psalms, without imposing it as a duty (Van der Stappen, "Sacra Liturgia", I, Malines, 1898, p. 115). At the present time, it is obligatory on the clergy only on the feast of All Souls and in certain mortuary services. Some religious orders (Carthusians, Cistercians etc.) have preserved the custom of reciting it in choir on the days assigned by the Bull "Quod a nobis".

Notes

Apostolic Constitutions, VI, xxx; VIII, xl; PS.-DIONYS., De hierarch. eccl., vii, n. 2; AMALARIUS in P. L., CV, 1239 (De eccles. officiis, III, xlix; IV, xlii); DURANDUS, Rationale, VII, xxxv; BELETH, Rationale in P. L., CII, 156, 161; RAOUL DE TONGRES, De observantia canonum, prop. xx; PITTONUS, Tractatus de octavis festorum (1739), I (towards end), Brevis tract. de commem. omnium fidel. defunct.; HORATIUS A TURRE, De mortuorum officio dissertatio postuma in Collectio Calogiera, Raccolta d'opuscoli, XXVII (Venice, 1742), 409-429; GAVANTI, Thesaur. rituum, II, 175 sqq.; MARTÈNE, De antiq. ecclesioeritibus, II (1788), 366-411; THOMASSIN, De disciplina eccles., I-II, lxxxvi, 9; ZACCARIA, Bibl. ritualis, II, 417-8; IDEM, Onomasticon, I, 110, s. v. Defuncti; BONA, Rerum liturg., I, xvii, §§ 6-7; HITTORP, De div. cathol. eccles. officiis, 1329; GUYET, Heortologia, 462-73 (on the rubrics to be observed in the office of the dead); CATALANUS, Rituale Romanum, I (1757), 408, 416 etc.; CERIANAI, Circa obligationem officii defunctorum; BÄUMER-BIRON,Hist. du Brév., II, 30, 37, 131 etc.; BATIFFOL, Hist. du Brév., 181-92; PLAINE, La piété envers les morts in Rev. du clergé français, IV (1895), 365 sqq.; La fête des morts, ibid., VIII (1896), 432 sqq.; La messe des morts, ibid., XVI (1898), 196; EBNER, Quellen u. Forschungen zur Gesch. des Missale Romanum, 44, 53 etc.; THALHOFER, Handbuch der kathol. Liturgik, II (Freiburg, 1893), 502-08; KEFERLOHER, Das Todtenofficium der röm. Kirche (Munich, 1873); HOEYNEK, Officium defunctorum (Kempten, 1892); IDEM, Zur Gesch. des Officium defunctorum in Katholik., II (1893), 329. See also the literature of the article BURIAL and other articles cited above, CEMETERY, CREMATION etc.

FERNAND CABROL

Here's a copy in Latin - the book was published in 1722 - of the Office of the Dead (Officium Defunctorum: Sancta & Salubris est cogitatio, pro Defunctis exorare, ut a peccatis solvantur ("The Office of the Dead: Holy and wholesome to think and pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins.")).