Tag: sermon

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Ivo of Chartres, In Purificatione S. Mariae (On Candlemas)

In parallel with a certain popular celebration centered in the city of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the second day of February, in most Christian traditions, also marks the commemoration of the presentation of Christ in the Temple and the ritual purification of Mary. Due to the prominent role played by candles in the liturgical celebrations in the Latin tradition, the feast is commonly referred to as “Candlemas”.

The Presentation in the Temple (along with the text of the Nunc Dimitis). Taken from the Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry. Musée Condé, Ms 65, 63r. Via Wikipedia Commons. Public Domain.

For Ivo of Chartres, whose homilies on Advent and Christmas have short commentaries and translations elsewhere on this blog, his work In Purificatione takes the opportunity to reflect on the details of the liturgical celebration itself as a symbol of the moral imperatives of the Christian life. For him, the wax from which the candles are made represents the flesh of this life, but which also bears a light that illumines the shadows, echoing the Prologue of the Gospel of John. Carrying the candles in procession echoes, in a physical sense, the spiritual carrying of God accomplished through the imitation of Christ.

Interestingly, Ivo cites two short passages from liturgical texts. The first is taken from a version of the Exultet of Good Saturday, in which the celebrant, standing in front of lit candles, commemorates the bee as a symbol of the virginity of Mary. This verse, while it does not exist in the modern Roman rite, can still occasionally be found in use (for example, in this video of the Exultet intoned by a member of the Discalced Carmelites) [1]. The second passage is from a text of the feast of the Purification itself, in which Sion (i.e., the church) is commanded to adorn the bridal chamber in order to receive Christ. This text is well-attested as both a responsory and an antiphon in the manuscript tradition [2]. For Ivo, again, the spiritual meaning is clear: we are to adorn our hearts with virtues that we may have God dwelling within us.

The recourse to liturgical texts, at least for me, lightens the content by focusing more on the act of celebration, rather than emphasizing the grander themes of the economy of salvation and the final judgment found in some of his other homilies. The ultimate effect is almost to encourage a more active personal participation in the ritual on the part of his listeners, a suggestion to meditate on the texts and the actions of the liturgy and to apply the deeper, spiritual meaning in day-to-day life.

The translation and Latin text (Patrologia Latina) of the homily are available here.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

[1] For the full text of the Preface, categorized as the “Franco-Roman Version”, see Thomas Forrest Kelly, The Exultet in Southern Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 38.

[2] See, for example, the list hosted in the Cantus Database: https://cantusdatabase.org/chant-search/?search_bar=Adorna+thalamum+tuum.

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Ivo of Chartres, De nativitate

Following the liturgical calendar, the second installment in the festal homilies of Ivo of Chartres pertains to the celebration of the Nativity of Christ (De nativitate). For a short discussion of the context of this work, please see my previous post about his homily on Advent (De adventu Domini).

Emmanuel Tzanes, Christ Healing the Blind (1686). Public domain.

Stylistically, there are many similarities between Ivo’s homilies on Advent and on the Nativity. Perhaps most notable is the ongoing use of parallel structure. While a bit less noticeable than in the homily on Advent, Ivo regularly contrasts human and godly nature, the Mosaic and Christian laws, Eve and Mary, etc. Throughout, the focus in the text is the economy of salvation, that is, how the life of Christ has made possible the rewards of heaven and eternal life for his listeners.

Some passages in this homily merit further reflection. The first half of the text is dominated by a meditation on Christ as the Great Physician, based on the miracle of the healing of the man born blind in the Gospel of St. John (9:6) and further echoing, although never directly citing, a passage in the Gospel of Luke (5:31, “They that are whole, need not the physician: but they that are sick”). For Ivo, in a spiritual sense, Christ applies both homeopathic and heteropathic remedies. In order to confer health “through similar things” (“sanitatem contulit aegrotis per similia”), Christ endured and overcame the physical aspects of human life – birth, suffering, and death – in order that humanity might enjoy the spiritual counterparts of each – rebirth (in baptism), the avoidance of eternal torture, freedom from eternal death. Conversely, Christ the Physician also effected a cure through opposite means (“quibus contrariis contrarios morbos evacuaverit”): he granted freedom as a servant; he overcame pride through humility; he corrected our disobedience though his own obedience.

The second half of the text settles into a style of typological commentary very typical of Ivo’s other homilies, especially his liturgical commentaries, in which he contrasts the historical accounts in Genesis and the requirements of the Mosaic Law with their Christian and New Testament parallels. The sacrificial lamb of the original Passover is a forerunner of the true Lamb. Instead of doors being marked with the blood of the sacrifice, the foreheads of the faithful are marked with the sign of Christ’s sacrifice, i.e., the Cross. In place of the Old Testament priesthood, Christ himself is the priest who offers himself, since no other priest would be worthy to make such a sacrifice. In a similar way, Eve is contrasted with Mary: the curse of Eve, to bear children in pain, is revoked in the person of Christ’s mother, who received instead a blessing (“Benedicta tu in mulieribus”).

Ivo concludes with an emphasis on the incomplete knowledge of the divine afforded to us who are still making our pilgrimage, as it were, on earth, and exhorts us to be mindful of the salvific works of Christ as a means of easing the burden of the present life.

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Ivo of Chartes, De adventu Domini (On the Advent of the Lord)

Born around 1040, Ivo of Chartres is primarily known to modern scholarship as a canonist, and he is occasionally recognized as a prolific writer of letters, but relatively little regard has been given  to his surviving collection of homilies [1]. This scholarly neglect has been most keenly demonstrated by the absence of critical editions of the sermons, despite the call of Roger Reynolds over thirty years ago, with the overall effect of reducing the quality of academic discourse on one of the more prominent liturgists of the period of the Investiture Controversy [2].

Cambridge, Corpus Christi, Parker Library 289. Ivo of Chartres, Sermo de sacramentis neophitorum, here ascribed to Hugh of St. Victor. Images courtesy of The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 

The text most commonly cited in scholarly literature, and the one used in my translation of this homily, is that published by Jacques Paul Migne in Patrologia Latina vol. 162, which is in turn based on previous editions by Fronteau and Hittorp. Although I was not able to consult them within the scope of this project, more than seventy manuscripts survive that contain some or all of the homilies included in the Migne edition. The most important would be Chartres, Bibliothèque Municipal 138, which formerly belonged to Chartres Cathedral, but it was heavily damaged in the Allied bombing of the city during the Second World War and is now largely unreadable. The remaining manuscripts are distributed broadly across Western Europe, with large concentrations in the British Museum, various colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the Vatican. A surprising number of the extant witnesses date to the twelfth century, suggesting that this collection became popular shortly after its creation. The collection as a whole, to the best of my knowledge, has never been translated into a modern language. This specific sermon, however, was partially translated in the late 1940s as part of a broader gathering of works from across the Patristic and Medieval homiletic tradition [3].

The homilies in Ivo’s collection fall broadly into two categories. The first, encompassing numbers 1–6 and 22–24, are essentially liturgical commentaries, offering detailed allegorical explorations of various rites (e.g., Sermo I, De sacramentis neophytorum), other incidental features (e.g., Sermo III, De significationibus indumentorum sacerdotium), or specific prayers (e.g., Sermo XXII, De Oratione Dominica) of the Church. The balance of the homilies are on the feasts of the church, beginning with Advent and working through the feasts of the Nativity, Circumcision, Epiphany,  Purification (Candlemas), and the Lenten and Paschal cycles. The audience for some or all of these homilies appears to have been an assembly of the local clergy of Chartres: many of the manuscripts add the phrase “in synodo habitus” (something like “considered in synod”) to the titles of some of the texts, and even in the text below Ivo addresses his audience as “Your Fraternity,” strongly suggesting, at least to me, that he was speaking to other clerics [4].

The text presented below is the first of the festal homilies and discusses Advent, or, as Ivo insists, both Advents of Christ. The entirety of the work maintains a parallel structure, contrasting the first Advent, i.e., the earthly ministry of Christ, with the second, during which Christ will return as judge. Throughout, an emphasis is placed on the redemptive and restorative work that has already been accomplished during the “hidden” Advent, which prepares his audience for the completion of salvation in the second, “manifest,” coming.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. The most comprehensive study of Ivo of Chartres is by Rolf Sprandel, Ivo von Chartres und seine Stellung in der Kirchengeschichte (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1962). His life is also occasionally discussed in other secondary literature, especially on Ivo as a canonist, e.g., Christof Rolker, Canon Law and the Letters of Ivo of Chartres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
  2. Roger Reynolds, “Liturgical Scholarship at the Time of the Investiture Controversy: Past Research and Future Opportunities,” The Harvard Theological Review, 71 (1978): 109–124).
  3. Ray C. Petry, ed., No Uncertain Sound, Sermons that Shaped the Pulpit Tradition, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1948), 140–142.
  4. Credit belongs to Margot Fassler for suggesting the setting for these homilies, The Virgin of Chartres (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 136.