Miserere mei, Deus (Have mercy on me, O God)
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
Against you, you alone, have I sinned,
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence
and blameless when you pass judgment.
Indeed, I was born guilty,
a sinner when my mother conceived me.
You desire truth in the inward being;
therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins,
and blot out all my iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a willing spirit.
A holy a blessed Lent to you all.
ReplyDeleteLenten Prayer of St. Ephrem
O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk.
But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to Thy servant.
Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother, for blessed art Thou, unto ages of ages. Amen.
A historical question: How old is Ash Wednesday? According to the online Catholic Encyclopedia, evidence for it has been traced back as far as Aelfric, an Anglo-Saxon Bible translator, who lived from about 955 to about 1020.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the Catholic Encyclopedia is now over a hundred years old. It occurred to me that more recent historians might have discovered evidence of an earlier date, but if they did, it’s not easy to find anything about it online. The New Catholic Encyclopedia, published in 2003, doesn’t even have an entry for Ash Wednesday, though there is just one single sentence under “Ashes” which refers to “the Anglo-Saxons” without mentioning Aelfric by name.
Similarly, Wikipedia mentions the Anglo-Saxon connection, but nothing earlier. Can that really still be all there is?
Even approaching the question from the other end, the history of Lent, has turned out to be a dead end. Lent was first instituted either during the Council of Nicea or soon afterward, say some time between 325 and 330, but in its original form it began only on Quadragesima Sunday, so that it lasted exactly forty days, ending on Holy Thursday.
The extra four days at the beginning of Lent, from Ash Wednesday to Saturday, were added very much later but, here again, nobody seems to know exactly when, not even whether that happened before or after Aelfric’s day. Or, if it is known, the information doesn’t seem to be readily available online.
Yet another approach would be to start off by looking for the origin of Shrove Tuesday. I tried that, too. As far as I can see, even less is known about the history of Shrove Tuesday than about Ash Wednesay.
Britannica has under Ash Wednesday:
DeleteIt was the practice in Rome for penitents and grievous sinners to begin their period of public penance on the first day of Lent in preparation for their restoration to the sacrament of the Eucharist. They were sprinkled with ashes, dressed in sackcloth, and obliged to remain apart until they were reconciled with the Christian community on Maundy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter. When these practices fell into disuse (8th–10th century), the beginning of the penitential season of Lent was symbolized by placing ashes on the heads of the entire congregation.
Shrove Tuesday's origins seem a bit more obscure. Shrove comes from shrive (to hear and absolve sins), which is an Anglo Saxon word, placing it in the early Middle Ages. The British custom of eating pancakes is 16th century, according to wiki. There are lots of similar customs around the world, which suggests that these were probably folk observances before they became formalised by the Church, explaining the lack of earlier evidence.
Lent was similarly first formalised at Nicea, but Britannia says 'A period of preparation and fasting likely has been observed before the Easter festival since apostolic times'. The council's liturgical decisions often simply only rubber stamped existing practices. I wouldn't call tracing it back to 325 a dead end! 😁
Also, we don't celebrate Ash Wednesday in the Orthodox Church, which would mean it probably originates post schism. This is from an
DeleteOrthodox site:
It is not clear when the Wednesday beginning the Lenten fast began to include the imposition of ashes. Originally, the imposition of ashes was one of several public rites required of those penitents who wished to be restored to the church. As early as the 4th century, these rites were associated with a 40 day fast. Most likely this fast was the Lenten fast, but the evidence is too thin to be conclusive. What does seem clear is that, by the end of the 10th century, it was customary in Western Europe (but not yet in Rome) for all the faithful to receive ashes on the first day of the Lenten fast. In 1091, this custom was then ordered by Pope Urban II at the council of Benevento to be extended to the church in Rome. Not long after that, the name of the day was referred to in the liturgical books as “Feria Quarta Cinerum” (i.e., Ash Wednesday).
@Lain, I wouldn't call tracing it back to 325 a dead end! 😁
DeleteA dead end as far as Ash Wednesday is concerned, because in its original form, introduced by Constantine and Athanasius, Lent didn't begin until Quadragesima Sunday.
Britannica mentions a pre-Easter fast dating back to Apostolic times, but I believe the original rule was to fast only for the last day or two in Holy Week. The forty-day fast seems to be something Constantine himself favoured, having observed it somewhere in the west. Athanasius had never heard of it before he visited Rome for the first time.
@Ray
DeleteAsh Wednesday seems to have only developed in its modern form in the last millennium. If it were an older universal practice, it would have been preserved in the East. As for a 40 day Lent,
this pdf excerpt has some more modern scholarship. It says that the predominate theory until recently was of an older Easter fast that gradually got longer and more pious over time, but that now appears not to be the case.
These new developments in scholarship have led some to conclude that the early history of Lent is simply impossible to reconstruct. The first clear and indisputable evidence for the forty-day Lent does not appear until after the Council of Nicea, and when it does, it looks to be unrelated to the earlier short pre-Easter fasts. As a result, some have suggested that Lent is best understood as an entirely new phenomenon that emerges rather suddenly after Nicea and that any organic or genetic relationship it may have to pre- Nicene fasting practices cannot be proved.
Other scholars have been less willing to abandon the effort to reconstruct the pre-history of Lent by focusing attention on a unique, and hotly contest- ed Egyptian fasting tradition. According to several, admittedly late sources, Christians in pre-Nicene Egypt observed a forty-day fast that began after the Feast of Theophany (i.e., Epiphany) on January 6 (11 Tybi on the Egyptian calendar). In strict imitation of the gospel narrative, this community would have commemorated the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan on January 6 and on the following day begun a forty-day fast just as Jesus had. Some sources claim further that this community baptized its catechumens at the end of the post-Theophany fast and not at Easter. After the Council of Nicea, the theory speculates, this fast would have been moved from its original position after Theophany and joined to Easter creating the Lent we know and with it bringing Egypt’s baptismal practice in line with the rest of the Church.
I suspect that it emerges at Nicaea simply because it's the first time the Church felt the need to formalise the Lenten practices, a logical undertaking given that the Council standardised the date of Easter.
In addition to addressing the Arian crisis, the Council of Nicea issued canons intended to bring general alignment on matters of liturgical practice and church organization. Among these was the establishment of a common date for the Easter feast that, up until that time, had been commemorated on different days in a given year depending on the method of calculation. While there is no evidence that the Council also dealt with Lent, one may surmise that its establishment prior to Easter, drawn from among the various and sundry fasting customs already being observed (including, perhaps, an Egyptian post-Theophany fast), was part of a broader movement toward alignment and standardization begun at Nicea and continued throughout the fourth century. And, if a post-Theophany fast was a hallmark of groups deemed heretical, the establishment of a forty-day Lent prior to Easter would stand in contradistinction as a touchstone of liturgical and theological allegiance.
Thank you, @Lain. I’m going to read that paper by Nicholas Russo slowly and carefully. In the meantime, here’s something else on the subject, that I found posted as a link on another website. It reads in part:
DeleteThis extension of Lent back to Ash Wednesday … is a proper custom of the Roman Rite, attested in the earliest Roman liturgical books of the century after St Gregory.
St Gregory the Great died in 604, so I suppose the “century after St Gregory” simply means the seventh century. Given that there is so much disagreement about how much of the early history of Ash Wednesday can in fact be unearthed, it’s a pity the author of this note hasn’t given a more explicit account of the wording he found in those seventh-century liturgies.
https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2023/02/liturgical-notes-on-ash-wednesday.html#.Y_fCmnbMLIU
Of equal, if not more interest is the development of private Confession and acts of penance.
Delete