The other day in class this one student used a text that we were reading about the interpretation of the Psalms to expound and say that this use of the psalms by monks had existed for centuries, and that then everything changed, and the rich tradition was taken away and lives were destroyed.
"It never affected me," the priest was like, "But then again, I never found Latin only in the church."
...then the guy started expounding more again - it was very inappropriate to do this in front of the whole class, so right when the priest was starting to change the subject, I was like, "Wait a sec, if we're going to talk history and then evaluate it, we should probably recognize that these offices were changed before and had never existed unchanged from one point in time, and that there were probably different ideas of the good underlying the change, so any analysis of those should take that into account, that's a more neutral place to start that discussion if these issues are brought up..."...
...I really felt compelled to say those two points, people in Classics who think about religion are so attracted to nostalgia and judging history in facile ways... I don't know if the priest approved of me saying that shit, but later I had a really good conversation with a 19yo math guy from Princeton who's learning biblical languages about interpretation and how you can study religion academically, and it stemmed from that comment I made in class...
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Wow! "...lives were destroyed" To paraphrase Cordelia, "exaggerating much"...:) You are very right, of course, about the historical evolution of the prayer office within and without the monastic traditions. I'm always perplexed when apologists of a traditionalist bent wax eloquent about the "Latin Mass" as if there always was the one and only liturgical rite, presumably unchanged since the beginning of time. Anyway, which text on the Psalms were you reading? And was it based primarily on the Gallican Psaltery (Psalmi iuxta LXX emendati) or the Psalmi iuxta Hebraicum translati? Enjoy the remainder of the class!
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