Who Produced Early Conciliar Acta and How?

I am endlessly fascinated by historiography, not least the exploration of how certain reputations in ecclesial history get traduced and trashed as "heretics." Yes, I'm thinking of Origen here, and derivatively of his ostensible follower Evagrius of Pontus (on whom, in this connection, the definitive "rehabilitation," as it were, has been written by Augustine Casiday. I interviewed him here about his book on Evagrius which everybody must read.) But we could ask such questions of every person of prominence, and especially of every council in ecclesial history--though it seems we rarely do ask such questions. 

As someone who has over the years often played secretary to various academic committees, I am only too aware of how one can shape the record for good or ill. I alert my colleagues to this problem by making them watch two clips of the invaluable and hilarious Yes, Prime Minister, as here and here. 

But we rarely--in my experience at least--pay sufficient and critical attention to the crucial question of who was involved in the writing of the minutes or acta of councils in the Church. How much credibility ought we give to such people if we can even find out who they were in some cases? How reliable is their record? How many machinations were going on behind the scene to make sure something was or was not on the agenda (and when!), did or did not get minuted, came up for discussion or was then decided or shelved, etc? 

Perhaps more rarely do we attend to the socioeconomic conditions in which councils were held and their records produced. (John O'Malley's great book on Vatican I, as I showed here, is a recent and prominent exception.)

If you read the uproarious diaries of Congar, as I did here, you get the low-down on all these things: committees that overran their time, leaving everyone hopping on one leg with full bladders; people furiously pulling levers behind the magic curtain to promote or forbid discussion of certain things, to get their favourite candidates onto drafting committees (or have their enemies on them silenced or evicted), and to ensure that their hands remain on the levers of power, not their enemies'. Other diaries, including those of Bouyer, even more shocking in some respects than Congar's, or of Hermaniuk's (much the tamer of the three), all show this. 

Every time I am doing a clinical intake with a patient, I am asking myself the question "How reliable an historian is this person" in telling me of, say, their childhood, or the violence they saw, or any other thing? For human memory is malleable and fallible, and that includes the memories of churchmen gathered in council. But too many Christians seem blithely unaware of these difficulties, and too anxious to press too far into inquiring about them. 

A new book, however, does not shy away from doing so but instead looks set to draw some welcome and overdue attention to this problem: The Acts of Early Church Councils Acts: Production and Character by Thomas Graumann (Oxford UP, 2021), 352pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The Acts of Early Church Councils Acts examines the acts of ancient church councils as the objects of textual practices, in their editorial shaping, and in their material conditions. It traces the processes of their production, starting from the recording of spoken interventions during a meeting, to the preparation of minutes of individual sessions, to their collection into larger units, their storage and the earliest attempts at their dissemination.

Thomas Graumann demonstrates that the preparation of 'paperwork' is central for the bishops' self-presentation and the projection of prevailing conciliar ideologies. The councils' aspirations to legitimacy and authority before real and imagined audiences of the wider church and the empire, and for posterity, fundamentally reside in the relevant textual and bureaucratic processes. Council leaders and administrators also scrutinized and inspected documents and records of previous occasions. From the evidence of such examinations the volume further reconstructs the textual and physical characteristics of ancient conciliar documents and explores the criteria of their assessment. Reading strategies prompted by the features observed from material textual objects handled in council, and the opportunities and limits afforded by the techniques of 'writing-up' conciliar business are analysed. Papyrological evidence and contemporary legal regulations are used to contextualise these efforts. The book thus offers a unique assessment of the production processes, character and the material conditions of council acts that must be the foundation for any historical and theological research into the councils of the ancient church.

We are also given the table of contents: 

Abbreviations and Conventions

Introduction

Part I: The Quest for Documentation

1. The Earliest Church Councils: A Documentary History

2. 'Council Acts' and the Variations of Conciliar Documentation and Recording Patterns

3. The Conference of Carthage (AD 411): An Imperial Model Case

Part II: 'Reading' and 'Using' Acts

4. Examining the Records: Two Inquiries into Eutyches' Trial (AD 449)

5. Original Acts and Documents at Chalcedon (451)

6. 'Authentic' Documents: Visual Features, Annotation, and Administrative Handling

7. Assessing and Performing Authenticity: A View from Later Councils

Part III: 'Writing' Acts: The Council's Secretariat in Action

8. All the President's Men: Administrative Aides and the 'Official' Secretariat

9. The Stenographic Protocol: Professionalism, Conventions, and Challenges

10. 'Transferring' Shorthand Notes to Long-hand Transcript

Part IV: The Written Record

11. The Hypomnemata: Production and Qualities

12. Documents Incorporated: Incorporating Documents

13. Abstracting and Summary Records

14. Collecting and Appending Signatures

15. The Structure and Elements of the 'Ideal' Session-record and the Role of 'Editing'

Part V: Files, Collections, Editions: Dossierization and Dissemination

16. Council Acts Gathered and Organised: Minutes, Case Files and Collected Records

17. Ancillary Documentation and the Beginnings of Dossierization

18. The Preparation of 'Editions' and the Dissemination of Documentation

Conclusion

Bibliography

The Maisky Diaries

For those interested in political diaries, and for those who want glimpses inside the mind of Soviet diplomacy before and during the Second World War, then I commend to you The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James's, 1932-1943 by Ivan Maisky and edited by‎ Gabriel Gorodetsky. Published by Yale University Press in 2015 in this condensed version (the fuller three volumes are also available), they offer revealing insights into all the largely unsuccessful diplomatic maneuvers between Britain, the USSR, and France, inter alia, in trying to prevent what everyone seems to have regarded as inevitable: another war with Germany. And then of course once war was underway, we see renewed attempts at building an alliance to defeat Hitler.

Though he says almost nothing about the plight of Eastern Christians in the USSR, he does on a couple of occasions very off-handedly dismiss Christianity in unsurprising terms as a silly bourgeois tradition--until he meets the so-called red dean of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson. Maisky seems to find Johnson's unflagging support of the USSR useful and encouraging if at times a little de trop. But Maisky seems almost unnerved by Johnson's desire for justice for the poor, suggesting that if more Christians were like this then they might not justify dismissal everywhere as guilty of so much middle-class twaddle and superstition.

Maisky was a clever and cunning figure to survive the purges of the late 30s in the Soviet Union, and also in knowing what information to reveal and what to conceal in official communications between London and Moscow. He also developed the neat trick of reporting to Stalin confidential conversations with British cabinet ministers and Foreign Office officials in London in which Maisky put his own plans into the mouths of British officials and then reported these back to Stalin as a way of encouraging him to think about some idea or other that Maisky would not openly advocate lest he fall afoul of the regime and wind up dead.

He would survive, and then, like Churchill, go on to write (also in a semi-official capacity) some of the history in which he was himself a participant. As David Reynolds revealed in his splendid and deeply fascinating In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, both sides used the writings of their statesmen after the war to retouch (to put it mildly in some cases) parts of the historical record in view of the politics of the immediate postwar and early Cold War periods. What they left out was often as revealing, and often more so, than what they put in.

Louis Bouyer's Memoirs (I)

As I have noted several times on here in the past, I am an inveterate and unapologetic reader of diaries, the blunter the better. In this absurd and ghastly age, where offense and outrage are now manufactured in ever finer gradations by brutish bourgeois brats sniveling about "micro-aggressions" and claiming to find "racism," "trans-phobia," and "misogyny" (etc., etc., etc.) under every fig leaf, it seems that private diaries are increasingly the only place where one may speak frankly without being hounded to death by mobs of juveniles whom a better age would have brought up to shut up if not to grow up.

In recent years, we have seen the publication of the diaries and memoirs of a number of prominent Catholic and Orthodox scholars of the last century, as I noted at the link. Now we have another set freshly translated into English just this year: The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer: From Youth and Conversion to Vatican II, the Liturgical Reform, and After (Angelico Press, 2015), 272pp.

I read these with great interest, and to my surprise there was a lot more here than I expected. By that I mean two things: first, the bulk of the text is devoted to his early life, including his Protestant period; Vatican II and its liturgically disastrous aftermath are only treated relatively briefly towards the end. Bouyer seems to have known just about everybody of prominence in Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox circles, and he is not at all shy about name-dropping.

Second, I had forgotten--if I ever knew--just how prolific Bouyer was. I had of course read some of his works, including The Church of God: Body of Christ and Temple of the Holy Spirit. And for a time, Bouyer's historical works, including Orthodox Spirituality and Protestant and Anglican Spirituality, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, and in particular his Introduction to Spirituality seemed to be on every Roman Catholic theology and seminary curriculum and you couldn't escape them even if you wanted to.

His study of the founder of the Oratory and the "apostle of Rome," St Philip Neri: A Portrait was a valuable little book when I was myself exploring a vocation with the Oratorians--though I have to confess that as far as biographies of Neri are concerned, I preferred Philip Neri: The Fire of Joy by the German Paul Türks. It was translated by the priest-scholar Daniel Utrecht of the Toronto Oratory, who introduced me to the book in the late 90s when I spent several wonderful weeks at the Toronto Oratory, which I have elsewhere described as a rare and shining jewel in the Catholic Church in Canada.

When I was working on a very early draft of the dissertation which became Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, I had a chapter that at one point included a lengthy discussion of the founder of the modern Oratory in the Anglophone world, John Henry Newman, about whom Bouyer wrote such studies as Newman: His Life and Spirituality that I found valuable if a bit dated (it came out in 1958). Since the late 50s, Newman scholarship has of course exploded and there are so many books on him now that I cannot possibly describe them all here. (Start with Ian Ker's absolutely splendid and unrivaled John Henry Newman: A Biography if you are at a loss for where to begin.)

Perhaps more than any other work--and the above are only the ones I have read, and only a fraction of what Bouyer wrote--I found his Life and Liturgy a useful book in bridging the gap between, well, liturgy and life. It's one thing to read pious phrases from the Fathers about the home being a "domestic Church," but it's another to see someone think through some of the implications of what that means. Bouyer was the first to help me do that, but there were other books that helped to bridge that gap, including, on the Orthodox side, Lev Gillet's  Year of Grace of the Lord; on the Catholic side, Joseph Ratzinger's valuable early little study, The Feast of Faith: Approaches to a Theology of the Liturgy; and then, for greater history and deeper philosophy and anthropology, Catherine Pickstock's After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, a book I still regard as the most important and damning, but neglected, work of liturgical criticism in English of what happened to the Latin liturgy after Vatican II. The fact that her criticism of the structural defects in the new Mass has never been adequately answered so far as I have seen says to me that all the defenders of Latin liturgical reform are quite simply incapable of answering it and thus have conceded the correctness of her views here, with which I am entirely in agreement.

On the question of liturgical reform, I forget where I first read an oft-cited quotation attributed to Bouyer who apparently already within just a year or two of the new Pauline missal (the "Novus Ordo") had concluded that "we must speak plainly: there is practically no liturgy worthy of the name today in the Catholic Church." That struck me as a touch polemical at the time and perhaps just a tad too sweeping a generalization.

But, having now read The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer: From Youth and Conversion to Vatican II, the Liturgical Reform, and After, I see that blunt and sweeping criticisms are Bouyer's stock in trade. And, of course, Bouyer's blunt assessment would also be seconded by others, most notably Ratzinger in his Milestones: Memoirs, 1927-1977. Late in the book, Bouyer reflects on his first encounters with Ratzinger at the council, and praises the German's "clearness of views, his wide knowledge, his intellectual courage as well as his penetrating judgment....[and] his humor, which was so full of kindness; he was, however, nobody's fool" (p.226).

I will give further examples of Bouyer's blunt analysis, and discuss the early chapters in more detail, in subsequent entries.

To be continued. 

The Problem of History in Ecclesiology: Further Thoughts on Congar

In my initial discussion of Yves Congar's wonderful My Journal of the Council, I noted that anyone with an interest in so many events and personages in twentieth-century Catholicism, and Christianity writ large, would find these diaries fascinating. I am pleased that an historian of the stature of John O'Malley has recently come out calling Congar "the council’s single most important theologian." Congar's journal (also available in a Kindle edition), which I continue to savor, records several themes, but perhaps none is so clear in this book, as in Congar's larger oeuvre, of the problem of history in ecclesiology and the lack of real, wide-spread awareness of what actually happened in Christian history in general, and in East-West relations in particular. The Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart is absolutely right when he says that too much of Christian division, East-West division above all, is the result of bad history. 

Much of what gives an Eastern Christian pause in reading Congar has to do with the attitude he records on the part of many Latins who seemed to regard their own tradition as the only valid one. This "soteriological exclusivism," as it has been called, was, of course, by no means limited to the Latin Church: some Orthodox apologists also adopted it, as did not a few Protestants. But none seemed so convinced of it as certain Roman Catholics, often viewed as the "minority" at Vatican II: people who argued for an "ecumenism of return," who exalted the pope in absurdly ultramontane terms, and who, in general, wanted the council to do nothing so much as flatly restate, in baldly propositional terms, dogmatic claims to which all the world would be summoned, under pain of eternal damnation, to make their simple and unquestioning submission. 

I am not running down this minority. In some respects, I side very closely with them, especially in the views of some of them on what happened to the Latin liturgy in the aftermath of the council. I also think they are correct in recognizing--in a way that few others want to do--the uncomfortable and disconcerting hermeneutical and historical problems raised by a council that accepted and praised (often, we now realize, with undue enthusiasm) what popes, scarcely a century before, had condemned in the most hair-raising terms: relations between Church and state (including the question of "religious freedom"), relations with non-Catholics, and the vexed questions of relations with Jews and Muslims, inter alia. Anyone who wants to be taken seriously today simply must admit that there are very serious, real, and obvious hermeneutical problems in reconciling past Catholic teaching with what the council condoned: the famous problem of a "hermeneutic of continuity" vs. a "hermeneutic of rupture." Apologists for the council insist on the former, but have, in my estimation, done an extremely poor job of demonstrating that continuity in ways that do not do violence to history. I also think that such apologists paint themselves unnecessarily into a corner by trying to demonstrate continuity when, on its face, none exists. Why not adopt the vastly simpler and certainly more honest course of frankly admitting that on certain questions, the Church (or at least the papacy, which is not the same thing) has simply changed her mind? This is not suggesting a change in major dogma, but instead a recognition that on more practical and political questions (e.g., democracy, human rights, relations with Jews and Muslims), views have changed, and there is nothing wrong with that. The skandalon consists not in doing this, but precisely in refusing to do so.

Congar had no problem in admitting when his confreres got it wrong, or adopted positions demonstrably unsupported by the facts of history. Time and again he skewers those guilty of what another great historian, Robert Taft, would call the substitution of "confessional propaganda" for real history. Congar knew too much to let a lot of this nonsense pass by without comment. But it seems to me, fifty years after the beginning of the council, the problem remains with us, and we have work ahead of us. Still today history is used and abused for present felt purposes--as Congar and Taft, and more recently Bernard Lewis and Margaret MacMillan, have shown. We are, then, once more indebted to Congar for raising these difficult questions, and for refusing to allow us to get away with facile sloganeering in the place of deep understanding not only of the bare "facts" of history, but also of the difficult relationship between changing and contingent historical forms, and the eternal and changeless truths they are supposed to convey. 

Diaries and More Diaries

As I noted before, diaries are a fascinating and fun thing to read. This year seems set to be a banner year for those diaries--and many other books besides--commemorating the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. First we had, of course, the sprawling, wonderful diaries of Yves Congar. I have not finished them by any means. I read portions as time allows, saving more for another time, much as one does not quaff but sips a Lagavulin or Talisker or Highland Park, any of which you would be welcome to send me at any time for any reason.

Now I have recently received from the publisher the following: Jaroslav Skira, trans., The Second Vatican Council Diaries of Met. Maxim Hermaniuk, C.Ss.R. (1960-1965) (Peeters-Leuven, 2012), 333pp. About this book the publisher tells us:

The Second Vatican Council diaries of the late Met. Maxim Hermaniuk, C.Ss.R., provide a captivating glimpse into the public and behind-the-scenes work of this Council Father. Hermaniuk was a graduate of the Catholic University of Louvain, and taught for a number of years in Belgium in the study houses of the Redemptorist order before being named the first Metropolitan of the Ukrainian (Eastern) Catholics in Canada. Hermaniuk was by far the most active of all the Ukrainian Catholic bishops at the Council. Much of his work was carried out through his membership in the Preconciliar Theological Commission and in the influential Secretariat for Christian Unity. Hermaniuk’s activities centred on his proposal to establish an Apostolic College, as well as his call to nullify the anathemas of 1054 between East and West. He was a strong advocate of ecumenical dialogue with other Christians, particularly with the Eastern Orthodox churches. His work also included the promotion of dialogue with other faiths. In reference to the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which was at the time severely persecuted in the Soviet Union, one sees his affirmations of the particularity and dignity of his Church, his promotion of religious liberty, and his condemnations of religious and political oppression. These diaries also reveal how the Ukrainian Catholic bishops responded to the pastoral needs of their faithful — in liturgy, catechesis, education, mission and ecclesial governance — and the call to renewal made by the Council. Finally, the diaries are unique since they are one of the very few accounts of the Council by an Eastern Catholic Council Father.

As with the Congar diaries, these are a wonderful read, best savored over days and weeks to enjoy so many fascinating insights into the council, the Catholic Church at mid-century, Catholic-Orthodox relations, and the politics of the Cold War (inter alia). Skira has written a helpful introduction to the diaries and brief biography of Hermaniuk, who was not as well known as Congar, but was a very substantial personality in his own right. Born in Ukraine, and educated in Belgium, Hermaniuk became an accomplished biblical scholar whose early works are still cited in the literature. He was also a driving figure behind the council's decree on ecumenism and the Eastern Churches, as well as the recovery of the notion of collegiality; some have dubbed Hermaniuk the "father of collegiality." He was, as I noted in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, rather critical of post-conciliar developments that did not allow for the full flourishing of synodality in the Catholic Church and a dampening of collegial efforts. Late in life, in the 1990s, he became editor-in-chief of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, of which I am now editor.

Reading these diaries takes us back into an age that still seems almost surreal: when the Soviet Union existed. How long ago that now seems, but what a time of darkness and endless suffering it was for so many Christians, Ukrainian Catholics especially, whose entire church was officially banned by Stalin and driven underground, all her bishops imprisoned or killed, and many others besides. The head of the church, Metropolitan Joseph Slipyj was sent with the other bishops to the Gulag, but was released in 1963 thanks in part to Norman Cousins, John F. Kennedy, and Pope John XXIII. 

It seems clear, especially from Hermaniuk's tone, that he and much of the rest of the Ukrainian hierarchy were out of sorts and did not know how to relate to Slipyj. This is not news to those who know the history, but it is somewhat startling to see that again and again there is a stiffness and awkwardness to Hermaniuk's tone when Slipyj is mentioned. For those who know the history, the Ukrainian Catholic Church from the 1960s until 1991 was suppressed in Ukraine, but flourished in North America, Canada especially. Bishops in these latter territories often had no connection to bishops in the underground, and ended up de facto leading the whole church, which was often said to be in some ways a surrogate for a free state of Ukraine. I'll have more to say about these fascinating diaries as I continue to explore them. They are at once a reminder of a world that is now gone--thank God--and yet of a Church in many ways still with us. 

The Deliciously Dishy Diaries of Yves Congar

As I have noted before, I am an inveterate and unapologetic reader of diaries--the more indiscreet, the more "incorrect" in this stifling age of ideological conformity and shrieking demands for "apologies" at bogus offenses, the better. Evelyn Waugh's are immensely satisfying in this regard, as are Alan Clark's. For the theologian or liturgist, Alexander Schmemann's journals are fascinating and revealing in equal measure, though, as Michael Plekon has so helpfully noted, what we currently have in English is a heavily edited and truncated rescension of a much fuller French original.


Some may find all this "salacious" or whatever, but such objections are hard to regard as anything other than pious guff. We should be thankful for these records reveal to us the humanity of people whom some may be inclined to romanticize, lionize, or mythologize--and that is an effort greatly to be resisted. For those who may be, or more likely claim earnestly and piously to be, "scandalized" by the full humanity of a Waugh, Clark, Schmemann, or Congar, we must respond that God did not come to save plastic people or the plaster saints so often on offer in official hagiographies: He came to save us in our full humanity, "warts" and all. We must continually reject, as Newman aptly put it, the portrayal of Christian and holy living as merely a "clothes-rack of virtues." God saves real human beings as they really are: not as we wish or imagine them to be.


It is, then, an immensely happy development to have in English at long last the diaries of Yves Congar, one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century who did so much to advance the cause of Orthodox-Catholic unity. One leisurely day when I was wasting time in the library not working on my dissertation, I read parts of these journals in the French original to great enjoyment. And now here, thankfully, splendidly, they are available in English: Yves Congar, My Journal of the Council, trans. Mary John Ronayne and Mary Cecily Boulding, ed. Denis Minns (Liturgical Press, 2012), xlvi+979pp.

If you have any interest in, inter alia: Congar's life, the developments in the Catholic Church during the twentieth century, the Second Vatican Council, Protestant-Catholic relations, Orthodox-Catholic relations, the ongoing deliberations between the Society of St. Pius X (whose founder, Marcel Lefebvre recurs in this narrative, and is a far more complex personality than the portrait of him as some lone little Dutch boy holding his finger in the dike against some imagined tide of Vatican II-sponsored "modernism" or whatever) and Rome today, the early thought and career of Joseph Ratzinger, Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, and much else besides, then you simply must buy this book. It is an absolute goldmine of insights into all the foregoing persons, events, and institutions, and into Congar himself, of course--and much, much else besides. It ranges from soaring insights--especially into ecclesiology, which was Congar's speciality--to such mundane comments after an overlong meeting of conciliar officials in Rome in September 1964 as "Afterwards, I went out for a pee."  

He records the most hilariously but soberly apt description of Pope Paul VI I have ever read: his tortured personality was a perfect combination of "Paul outside the walls, and Peter in chains." 


He records the searing, startling chauvinism of many Roman curialists, and there are many instances of cringe-making incidents of Catholics approaching their Orthodox brethren with good intentions but incredibly clumsy, if not outright offensive, ideas and gestures. He does not hesitate to denounce the interference of nuncios in the life of local churches, calling their actions "cretinous" and "STUPID" [sic]. He savages those whom he regards as odious: e.g., Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo, prefect of the dicastery for seminaries and Catholic universities, calling him "an imbecile, a sub-human...this wretched freak, this sub-mediocrity with no culture, no horizon, no humanity." Other people who really arouse his ire include fanatical Mariologists who want to argue that the Theotokos was virtually on a par with the Trinity: these ideas he denounces, inter alia, as "crack-brained" and the product of people like the Franciscan theologian Carlo Balić, of whom Congar says "What a clown!!!" 


He is even more incredulous and incendiary in recording the ludicrous ideas of some people who exalt the pope to a level not merely on a par with, but in fact a part of, the Trinity. Some of these ideas are thinly disguised idolatry (papolatry indeed!) and so absurd I am astonished anyone could hold them, let alone advance them with a straight face.  Such a lot of nonsense.  


He gives us especially interesting reflections on how the work of the council is often undermined by its liturgies: all the talk about communion, ecumenism, and collegiality is often undone, or at least severely undermined, by liturgies in which the pope is carried in like some potentate on a litter and the entire focus is not on Christ, or the gospels, but the pope with "his sedia and his flabella." Again and again Congar makes clear his contempt for what he calls sixteenth-century court ritual totally at odds with the spirit of the gospel and true nature of the Church.

For all his openness to the East, and for all the work he so helpfully did to lay the groundwork for an East-West rapprochement, Congar records a consistent complaint about the various Eastern liturgies--Melkite, Ukrainian, Ethiopian--celebrated during the council, complaining that (horrors!) they all went over an hour, "wearing everybody out" (Ukrainian), often involved "strange bawling" and "terribly painful" chant that "put me in mind of the ravings of drunkards" (Ethiopian), or otherwise made Congar, who was very sick and incredibly overworked during the council, rather impatient to get on with whatever of the myriad tasks were at hand. Still, at points (e.g., 16 October 1964, after a Melkite liturgy) he does say that the 75 minutes it took were an "object lesson. The East speaks through liturgical action."  

Anyway, I'll have more to post as I make my way through this delightful but massive tome. Buy it, read it, and be astonished by the details, awed by this man's bluntness (so much so that publication was embargoed until the year 2000), convulsed with laughter at some of his acerbic but accurate comments, bored by some of the tedious details of endless meetings, but delighted for hours on end with this delicious vin extraordinaire. 

Yves Congar Newly Translated

If you read my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity you will note in there my indebtedness to, inter alia, Yves Congar, especially his great work True and False Reform in the Church,
whose French original, published in Paris in 1950, I drew on. Congar noted rightly that any true reform always consists of a return to first principles and proceeds ex traditione: “la grande loi d’un réformisme catholique sera donc de commencer par un retour aux principes du catholicisme. Il faudra d’abord interroger la tradition, se replonger en elle.” Only in 2011 was this book finally translated into English, making this pivotal figure and his rich thinking available to anglophone audiences.

Congar, in his own day, was perhaps best known for his After Nine Hundred Years: The Background of the Schism Between the Eastern and Western Churches. He was easily one of the most informed and most sympathetic Roman Catholic scholars of the Christian East, and one of the important proponents of the ressourcement movement that did so much for Catholics and Orthodox alike in recovering forgotten parts of our common patristic heritage.

The last two years have seen a considerable number of his works emerge at long last. In 2010 we had Yves Congar: Essential Writings as well as At the Heart of Christian Worship: Liturgical Essays of Yves Congar. Just before Christmas 2011, we had Fifty Years of Catholic Theology: Conversations with Yves Congar. 

And later this month, we will have at long last an English translation of his fascinating and delightful journals which he kept during Vatican II: My Journal of the Council (Liturgical Press: May, 2012), 1100pp. This is an important and personal record of much that went on between 1962 and 1965 at that pivotal ecclesial event not merely for the Catholic Church but perforce for all Christians. As I noted before, I am an unrepentant reader of diaries and so, having read parts of this in French in the library in Ottawa many years ago, I look forward to reading the whole thing later this year--especially in conjunction with the forthcoming council diaries of another important figure, Maxim Hermaniuk.  

About Congar's diaries, the publisher tells us:

“At the beginning of the meeting Cardinal Ottaviani said that, to speed the work up, the experts should not speak unless questioned. Beside me Rahner chafed at the bit, and said, ‘What are we doing here?’”

Yves Congar, OP, was one of the most important and influential theologians of the twentieth century. Much of this influence came as a result of his role as theological advisor to the bishops who participated at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). After working under a cloud of ecclesiastical censure and suspicion in the decade prior to its start, Congar was, from beginning to end, an influential day-to-day participant in the council’s work. He also managed to keep detailed personal notes throughout the time.

At long last, the council diaries of Yves Congar are available in English! This material is a treasure trove of information and insight for anyone interested in the history of that council and its remarkable and historic teaching. It provides a window into the council’s workings and the development of what would become a series of historic documents and declarations. It also offers Congar’s own down-to-earth and personal perspective on many of the other remarkable figures who played a role in the council.

Diaries of Met. Maxim Hermaniuk at Vatican II

I am an unrepentant reader of diaries, especially, as it happens, of "controversial" but hugely entertaining Englishmen such as the greatest Catholic writer of his generation, Evelyn Waugh or the Tory cabinet minister Alan Clark: The Diaries 1972 - 1999, a racy collection by a man who could have rivaled Waugh for the political incorrectness award of the twentieth century. The genre of a diary was, of course, made most famous by that of another Englishman, Samuel Pepys. Many others have followed suite down through the ages. E.g., John Colville's The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries, 1939-1955 offers fascinating insights into the Second World War in general and Churchill's direction of it in particular. For the same time, The Harold Nicolson Diaries 1907-1964 are also fascinating, not least for Nicolson's very unusual marriage to Vita Sackville-West.

In theology, the diary is not a major genre, though there are arguments to be made that some of the classical literature of the Fathers, including much of the patristic literature of the desert, along with Augustine's Confessions come close to what we understand as a diary in the modern sense. But it is in the last two centuries in particular that we find more celebrated examples of theological diarists, including, once more, the greatest Englishman of his day, John Henry Cardinal Newman, a voluminous writer of letters, diaries, and other magnificent prose, most famously his Apologia pro Vita Sua. More recently still, in Mon journal du Concile the French Dominican ecclesiologist, ecumenist, and historian Yves Congar reveals fascinating details of his life at the centre of some of the great controversies in the Catholic Church in the twentieth century--before, during, and after Vatican II.

In an Eastern context, there are several recent examples, including The Diary of Mar Dionysios Georgios al-Qas Behnam, Metropolitan of Aleppo (1912-1992) (Dar Mardin: Christian Arabic and Syriac Studies from the Middle East); and Aleksandr Elchaninov, The Diary of a Russian Priest. But the best example remains, of course, The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983, published in 2000 by SVS Press in a redacted form.

More recently, the fuller version was published in French, and Michael Plekon discussed them in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies last year at this time. In his review, Plekon began by saying that

Before going on, let me plead that those in control of these texts allow them to be published in English translation—not the truncated collections of excerpts, but the full entries, and all of them. And let me further note that not only should the full journal see the light of day in English, but also his letters and perhaps earlier papers and memoirs. There is a wealth of tapes and transcriptions of the thousands of talks Schmemann recorded for Radio Liberty for broadcast to the USSR. 

Later this year, we should see the publication of The Second Vatican Council Diaries of Met. Maxim Hermaniuk, C.Ss.R. (1960-1965) under the editorship of Jaroslav Skira and K. Schelkens (Peeters, 2011). These promise to be fascinating as Hermaniuk was a major figure at the council and after, sometimes called the "father of collegiality."

He was forthright about certain developments after the council, voicing the disappointment of many that the "synod" of bishops Pope Paul VI ironically unilaterally created in 1965 was not a real example of Synod and Synodality but instead just "international study days for the Catholic bishops." (I review the nature and different types of synods in the East in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity). We will certainly be paying attention to Hermaniuk's diaries upon publication, discussing them on here and reviewing them in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, the scholarly revue of which Hermaniuk was editor-in-chief from 1993 until his death in 1996.