Baroque Vespers of St Ignatius of Loyola

For the feast of St Ignatius of Loyola, here is a very Baroque musical setting of the psalms and hymn of his Second Vespers, composed by Domenico Zipoli (1688-1726), an Italian Jesuit missionary in South America. The Magnificat is done here in Gregorian chant, followed by an instrumental sonata and an orchestral Te Deum.

A few interesting things to note here. Unlike basically all other religious orders, the Jesuits did not have a proper Office for their founder; these texts are all taken from the Common Office of a Simple Confessor, which can be found in any edition of the Roman Breviary.

Fr Samuel Conedera SJ recently shared with me part of the text of a letter written by Fr Claudio Acquaviva, the fifth Master General of the Order, in 1609, which is pertinent to this. Writing to another Jesuit, Fr Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Fr Acquaviva shortly before St Ignatius’ beatification (which took place on July 27 of that year), says that he thinks that the order’s petition to be granted a proper office for their founder will likely be denied, since it had been denied in many similar cases. Therefore, in his estimation, there was no point in hurrying up to draw a proper office, and in the end, this was never done. (In early 2021, we published a series by Fr Conedera on the liturgical work of one of the early Jesuits, Fr Alfonso Salmerón (Part 1; Part 2, Part 3)

The first psalm is done in Gregorian chant, the others in polyphony with orchestral accompaniment, a deliberate gesture of respect, I imagine, to the older musical traditional. I don’t know why Zipoli did not include the Magnificat in his setting; perhaps the church for which he wrote this already had a setting which they did not wish to change.

St Ignatius and the Jesuits have taken a lot of criticism, much of it fair, and much of it unfair, for their approach to the liturgy, and especially the Divine Office, which they have never done in choir as an order. It should always been be borne in mind that the liturgical situation of the Society and the whole Catholic Church was very different before the Age of Revolutions began in the later 18th century. (I outlined this in my series on the reforms of the Breviary several years ago, specifically in reference to the Jesuits: see parts 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3.) And yet, here we have a very elaborate setting (which I admit is not entirely to my own personal tastes), not of a Mass, but of Vespers, written by a Jesuit, in an era when the solemn celebration of Vespers was still regarded as a very important part of any major feast. I have also read more than once that particularly in South America, the Jesuit missionaries quickly discovered that many of the native populations were incredibly talented at music, and put those talents to good use in the reducciones.

Domenico Zipoli was born in Prato in Tuscany, and after his early training, which included a brief stint with Alessandro Scarlatti in Naples, he became the organist of the main Jesuit church in Rome, the Gesù, at the age of only 23. A year later, he went to Seville in Spain to join the Society; as a novice, he was sent to Buenos Aires, and from there to Córdoba in what is now Argentina, where he completed his studies, but was never ordained, since there was no bishop available at the time to ordain him. He died of tuberculosis in 1726, at the age of only 38, but his fame as a composer had spread thoughout South America; the Spanish Viceroy in Lima wrote to Córdoba, which is over 2,000 miles away, to request copies of his works, which are also found in the musical archives of many of the reducciones. (For a sense of perspective, Zipoli himself had less distance to travel to get from Rome to Seville.)

The Prophet Elijah, Epic Hero of the Old Testament, Part Two

In Part One of this article, I outlined the historical literary genre known as the epic, and I suggested that we cannot “fully appreciate and honor the Prophet Elijah without consciously reading his life story as that of an epic hero.” (I also included a technical explanation for the different versions of his English name, if that sort of thing interests you. If it doesn’t, here’s the synopsis: The Hebrew name אֵלִיָּה would have sounded like “eleeyah,” the spelling “Elijah” has been around a long time but no longer encourages Hebraic pronunciation, and the spelling “Elias” came to English from Greek via Latin.)

Now it’s time to look at how we can understand and honor the Holy and Glorious Prophet Elijah, whose feast is July 20th in the Byzantine rite, through the lens of epic heroism.

“Into the Midst of Things”

One of the most well-known features of epic literature is the convention of beginning in medias res, which literally means “into the midst of things” and is used in literary theory for works that dive right into the primary narrative. The epic poet is expected to quickly capture the reader’s attention by dispensing with any sort of preamble and, at least initially, with events that led to the main action of the poem. The Aeneid gives us a fine example:

I sing of arms, and of the man who first
Came from the coasts of Troy to Italy
And the Lavinian shores, exiled by fate.
Much was he tossed about upon the lands
And on the ocean by supernal powers,
Because of cruel Juno's sleepless wrath.

These are the first lines of the poem, and Virgil’s song is already recounting Aeneas’ tempestuous voyage away from Troy. The narrative does not begin with the Trojan War or even the fall of Troy; we will, however, hear about some of that action later, in a flashback. (By the way, I’m using Christopher Pearse Cranch’s 1872 translation here; I’ve sampled many Aeneid translations, and this is my favorite. It’s truly excellent, and not well known.)

The opening lines of the Iliad have an even stronger in medias res feeling, and they also give you an idea of the stylistic differences between Virgil and Homer. (In fairness, though, this is from the Robert Fagles translation, which is superb but probably amplifies those differences.)

Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

This is how the story of the Prophet Elijah begins:

And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the sojourners of Gilead, said unto Ahab,
As the Lord, the God of Israel, liveth, before whom I stand,
there shall not be dew nor rain these years,
but according to my word. (1 Kings 17, 1)

No prelude, no family history, no tales of his previous life, not even the typical prophet-introducing phrase “The word of the Lord came to...” (this comes after his introduction, in the next verse). Elijah simply bursts onto the scene, and before the end of the first verse in which he is mentioned, he is already defying the wicked King Ahab. Biblical scholars puzzle over this abrupt entrance. They observe that we never learn his parentage or tribe, and the epithet “Tishbite” deepens, rather than clarifies, the mystery of his origin.

From a literary standpoint, though, this technique makes sense, as the German commentators Keil and Delitzsch at least partially recognized: “This abrupt appearance of Elijah ... is rather a part of the character of this mightiest of all the prophets.” It is an appearance in medias res, eminently appropriate for an epic hero.

Sacred Digressions

Epic poems are carefully enriched by digressions from the main storyline. This occurs as a story-within-a-story that narrates prior events, as prophecies uttered by a seer, or as episodes that are connected rather loosely to the principal action.

Elijah is fundamentally a prophet, so that connection already exists, and furthermore, his life is episodic, consisting of sudden, brief appearances within the larger frame of a grand mission to defend the cause of God when Israel was drowning in its own iniquity. We feel this especially in the homely stories of the ravens and the widow of Zarephath, which directly follow an introduction that portrays his prophetic mission as intense and momentous.

And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning,
and bread and flesh in the evening;
and he drank of the brook.
And it came to pass after a while, that the brook dried up,
because there was no rain in the land. (1 Kings 17, 6–7)

So he arose and went to Zarephath;
and when he came to the gate of the city,
behold, a widow woman was there gathering sticks:
and he called to her, and said,
Fetch me, I pray thee, a little water in a vessel, that I may drink. (1 Kings 17, 10)

Digressions bring variety and interest to a narrative, and more importantly, they allow an author to communicate themes and character traits that might be lost amidst the primary action of the epic story. Elijah is not only the bold, fiery prophet of Mount Carmel; he is also a humble, compassionate Israelite who promised the widow that her cruse of oil would not fail, and raised her son from the dead. And that brings us to our next epic moment in the prophet’s life.

The Underworld

The katabasis, from the Greek word for “descent,” is a distinctive feature of epic literature. It refers specifically to a descent into the underworld—that is, the world of the dead. The paradigmatic example occurs in Book 6 of the Aeneid, but not until Dante’s Inferno would epic katabasis reach its poetic and theological summit.

Elijah never descends to the underworld, but we hear echoes of katabasis in the story of the widow’s son, when Elijah confronts death and overcomes it. There are only three instances of someone being raised from the dead in the Old Testament, which suggests that great significance is involved in such events. The detail of Elijah stretching himself upon the dead child three times emphasizes his participation in the death, as though he mystically entered the realm of the dead in order to draw the child out of it.

And he stretched himself upon the child three times,
and cried unto the Lord, and said,
O Lord my God, I pray thee, let this child’s soul come into him again.
And the Lord hearkened unto the voice of Elijah;
and the soul of the child came into him again,
and he revived. (1 Kings 17, 21–22)

The Heroism of Faith

The last epic moment that I’ll mention requires little comment. It radiates the heroic energy that we naturally sense in the feats and conquests of ancient heroes, while also utterly surpassing them—for this is a feat of the spirit, not of the body. This is not a conquest of valor and strength and martial skill, however good and noble those things may be, but a conquest of one who prays, and who trusts—against overwhelming odds—that his prayer will be heard.

The passage is simply a masterpiece of epic literature. Saint Elijah the Prophet, defender of Israel against the impious tyrant Ahab, pray for us.

And he put the wood in order, and cut the bullock in pieces,
and laid it on the wood. And he said,
Fill four barrels with water, and pour it on the burnt offering, and on the wood.
And he said, Do it the second time; and they did it the second time.
And he said, Do it the third time; and they did it the third time.
And the water ran round about the altar; and he filled the trench also with water.
And it came to pass at the time of the offering of the evening oblation,
that Elijah the prophet came near, and said,
O Lord, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Israel,
let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel,
and that I am thy servant,
and that I have done all these things at thy word.
Hear me, O Lord, hear me,
that this people may know that thou, Lord, art God,
and that thou hast turned their heart back again.

Then the fire of the Lord fell,
and consumed the burnt offering,
and the wood, and the stones, and the dust,
and licked up the water that was in the trench.
And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces:
and they said, The Lord, he is God; the Lord, he is God. (1 Kings 18, 33–39)

An Altarpiece of Ss Abdon and Sennen

Today is the feast of Ss Abdon and Sennen, two Persians who are said to have been martyred in Rome ca. 250, in the first general persecution of the Church under the emperor Decius. This is one of the most ancient feasts of the Roman Rite, attested on the calendar of the oldest surviving sacramentary, known as the Old Gelasian, ca. 700 A.D. Their names are on a mid-4th century list of martyrs’ burials in Rome, and a picture of them from the 6th or 7th century is preserved in the catacomb where their remains were brought in the time of the emperor Constantine (ca. 320).

A portrait of Ss Abdon and Sennen, the central panel of the altarpiece described below.  

The pre-Tridentine Roman breviary states that they were arrested in a Persia by Decius, and imprisoned for refusing to worship the pagans gods. Four months later, he had them brought to Rome, and presented to the Senate as enemies of the republic; when they persisted in their Christian faith, he ordered them to be thrown to the wild beasts in the arena. As is so often the case, nature refused to cooperate with the persecutors, and the beasts lay down at their feet to guard them. They were therefore dispatched with the sword, and their bodies left to lie in front of the “idol of the sun”, i.e., the great statue that stood outside the Flavian amphitheater, and later gave it its nickname, the Colosseum. Three days later, a subdeacon named Quirinus was able to smuggle their bodies away to his house, and later give them a decent burial in one of the catacombs.

A modern representation of the Colosseum and the Colossus of Nero standing next to it; the statue itself disappeared in the ninth century, but the plinth can still be seen in its place to this day. (Image from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0) 

In the Golden Legend of Bl. Jacopo da Voragine, the most popular collection of Saints’ lives in the high Middle Ages, the story begins differently. Decius conquers Babylon “with other provinces”, rather than Persia. There he finds many Christians, whom he brings in captivity to a place called “Corduba”, and kills them in various ways. Abdon and Sennen are arrested and brought to Rome as punishment for burying their bodies, and the story then continues in a similar vein.

Discrepancies of these sorts, and notable inaccuracies such as Decius’ purported invasion of Persia or Babylon, which never took place, or the mention of the unknown city “Corduba”, are a solid indicator that the story cannot be accepted as historically reliable. In the Tridentine breviary, therefore, it is reduced to a single lesson, mixing the two accounts, and stating that the cause of their martyrdom was their burial of other Christian martyrs. (“Corduba of the Persians” was mentioned in the original version, but later removed.)

At the end of the tenth century, the relics of the Saints (or perhaps just a part of them) were conveyed to the abbey of St Mary in the northern Catalonian town of Arles-sur-Tech. (This place is now in France, and should not be confused with the other Arles in Provence). From there, devotion to the Saints spread throughout Catalonia, while their names were somehow transformed into Nin and Non. In 1460, a Catalan painter named Jaume Huguet was commissioned to do an altarpiece dedicated to them for the cathedral complex of Terrassa, about 18½ miles to the northwest of Barcelona. It is still displayed there, one of the best-preserved examples of the International Gothic style in Catalonia.

To either side of the portrait of the Saints in the middle are shown episodes from their legend: upper left, their appearance before Decius; lower left, in the arena with the wild beasts; upper right, their beheading; lower right, their relics are translated to Catalonia. 

Image from Wikimedia Commons by Amador Alverez, CC BY-SA 3.0; item the six images following. 

The scene of their martyrdom.

The upper central panel of the Crucifixion.

The predella panels are dedicated to Saints Cosmas and Damian: their portrait in the center. 

Their martyrdom.

One of the most popular medieval legends about Cosmas and Damian in the Middle Ages, recounts that they replaced the cancerous leg of the sacristan of a Roman church with the leg of an Ethiopian who had recently died.

The altarpiece as it is now displayed in the church in Terrassa.

Image from Wikimedia Commons by Enric, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The three churches of the former cathedral complex of Terrassa, Catalonia, dedicated to St Peter, the Archangel Michael, and the Virgin Mary.

The Chapel of St Peter Chrysologus in Ravenna

On the calendar of the post-Conciliar rite, today is the feast of St Peter Chrysologus, who was bishop of Ravenna from around 433 until his death in 450; in 1729, Pope Benedict XIII made him the 13th Doctor of the Church. Within the palace of the archbishops of Ravenna is a chapel dedicated to him jointly with St Andrew the Apostle; he is traditionally said to have built it, but it is actually the work of his namesake Peter II, who held the see from 494-519. The chapel is quite small, a cruciform space with a small atrium leading into it. The upper part of both the chapel and the atrium is covered with some very beautiful mosaic work, although it has been heavily restored several times, and some parts are completely lost. (Photos by Nicola de’ Grandi.)

In the apse, the Cross on a starry background. In this period, the Cross was generally shown empty to emphasize the Resurrection, which took place after Christ’s body had been removed from it. Above it we see Peter II’s monogram on a background of vines.

Following an older convention, which at the end of the 5th century had already become rare in the most important center of western Christianity, Rome, Christ is shown young and beardless, to indicate that He is a different person from God the Father. (The heresy that God the Son IS God the Father under a different guise, known as “Patripassianism”, was the great scare-heresy of the pre-Nicene period, and Arianism, which made the Son a creation of the Father, was the over-reaction to it.) He wears the purple of the Roman Emperors, and has a decorated halo, as signs of His divinity. To the right are the Apostles Peter, Andrew, and Philip; to the left, Paul, James and John

In the center of the vault, four angels support a stylized XP monogram; between them are the symbols of the four Evangelists, which are shown below in greater detail.

In the bay to the right of the apse, the Ascension of Christ, by local painter Luca Longhi (1507-80), made to replace a ruined mosaic. On the arch above, the XP symbol, with an alpha and an omega hanging from it; to the left, St Cassian of Imola (Peter Chrysologus’ native place, a bit less than 30 miles to the west of Ravenna), a martyr of the mid-4th century, St Chrysogonus, who was martyred at Aquileia (about 150 miles to the north along the coast of the upper Adriatic), and St Chysanthus, martyred at Rome with his wife Daria, ca. 285. To the right, Ss Polycarp, Cosmas and Damian. In the vault above, the eagle of St John.

In the bay to the left of the apse, a Pietà, also made by Longhi, also to replace a ruined mosaic. On the arch above, the same XP symbol with the alpha and omega; to the left, Ss Euphemia, Eugenia and Cecilia; to the right, Ss Daria (the wife of the Chrysanthus mentioned above), Perpetua and Felicity.

The 4th Ecumenical Council, which condemned the Monophysite heresy in 451, was held in a basilica dedicated to St Euphemia in Chalcedon, where she had been martyred in the persecution of Diocletian. The inventor of this heresy, one Eutyches, the archimandrite of a large monastery in Constantinople, had prevously been condemned in a synod, and written to Peter Chrysologus for support. The Saint replied that he should accept the judgment of the synod, and the faith professed by the bishop of Rome; this letter is incorporated into the acts of the Council of Chalcedon.

In the bay opposite the apse, a modern inscription attests that the space was formerly occupied by a mosaic image of St Peter, “bishop of the holy church of Ravenna, founder of this monastery of St Andrew the Apostle.” On the arch, an image of Christ which mirrors that of the arch above the apse; to the left, the Apostles James the Lesser, Jude Thaddeus and Simon the Canaanite; to the right, Thomas, Matthew and Bartholomew; on the vault above, the symbol of St Mark.

On the vault, the symbols of St Matthew

St John

St Mark

and St Luke.

At the time of the chapel’s construction, Italy was ruled by the Arian Ostrogoths under their King Theoderic, who lived in Ravenna for much of his reign, and ultimately died there. This image placed inside and above the door (heavily restored) is generally understood as a profession of the orthodox Nicene faith held by the bishops of Ravenna. Christ wears the clothing of a soldier, and carries a cross on His shoulder. The Gospel book in His hands has the words of John 14, 6, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” The lion and serpent on which He treads, in reference to the words of Psalm 90, 13, “thou shalt trample under foot the lion and the dragon”, appear as symbols of the Arian heresy. The same iconography occurs in another of the Christian monuments of Ravenna, known as the orthodox (i.e. non-Arian) baptistery.

The ceiling of the entry way into the chapel.

Early 20th-century reproductions in mosaic of the original dedicatory inscriptions, written in dactylic hexameters, which had fallen off the walls.

A section of the original decorative marble pavement.

Marie Reine du Canada Pilgrimage, Aug. 31 - Sept. 2

The 21st annual Marie Reine du Canada pilgrimage from Lanoraie, Quebec to the miraculous shrine of Notre Dame du Cap will take place on August 31 - September 2 this year, a 100 km (62 mile) walk along the St. Lawrence River in the footsteps of the North American Martyrs. Pilgrims from Ontario, Quebec and the United States are served en route by priests of the Fraternity of Saint Peter, as well as diocesan priests; Mass is celebrated daily in the traditional Roman Rite.

Marie Reine du Canada is a lay-led organization of the FSSP’s apostolate in Ottawa, St. Clement Parish. For registration forms, see: https://www.mariereine.ca/participate. Inquiries can be directed to mariereineducanada@gmail.com.

Some pictures of last year’s pilgrimage: