Last spring on The Josias, I reviewed David Foley’s previous translation for Angelus Press, namely William of Tocco’s The Life of St. Thomas Aquinas. Foley made quick work of his follow-up, just published by the same: The Mysteries of the Mass by Pope Innocent III (†1216). Innocent is of course the great medieval pontiff who, inter alia, presided over the Fourth Lateran Council and approved the new mendicant religious orders. (On Pope Innocent’s integralism, see the Josias library.) This current text is Innocent III’s expositio Missae, his detailed theological commentary on the rites of the Mass from beginning to end. And the volume is exquisite.
Pope Innocent’s Mass commentary falls at one extreme of a certain interpretative spectrum for thirteenth-century theologians. My own doctoral studies are focused on St. Albert the Great, who is famously allergic to what he perceives as an excess of rememorative allegory—that is, equating different parts of the Mass with different moments in the life of Christ. Many scholars think that Pope Innocent is precisely the one Albert is reacting against, since Innocent seems never to have encountered an allegory he didn’t love. Readers of this new edition can determine for themselves whether Innocent is correct that the celebrant passes from the joys of the right side of the altar that represent the Lord’s Nativity, then to the sorrows of the left side of the altar for the gospel to represent the Lord’s Passion, then finally back to the right side after communion to represent the Lord’s Resurrection—or whether Albert is right that such eisegetical impositions make theology ridiculous. In either case, such comments certainly make Innocent’s treatise delightful to read. (St. Thomas Aquinas falls somewhere in between Innocent and Albert. See my recent book and the editor’s kind review of it.)
Unlike either Thomas or Albert, both of whom describe a fairly standard-issue solemn Mass, Pope Innocent comments on the highest of papal liturgies. Some details of this supreme pontifical rite will be unfamiliar to modern readers. For example, who knew that in quick succession during the entrance procession, the pope would go into the choir to light a bundle of flax on fire, then be kissed on the shoulder by the head cantor, then approach the altar and be kissed again by three priests on his face and on his breast (to represent the three Magi, of course, as well as the two natures of Christ: the human nature that is plain on his face and the divine nature that hides within his breast). Other elements of the liturgy will be more familiar, but Innocent’s explanation of them may not be. For example, he says that the reason the subdeacon reverences the celebrant after his reading, whereas the deacon is blessed by the celebrant before his own, is that the law finds its end in Christ, but the gospel takes its beginning from him. The text also reveals some shocking details about high medieval ars celebrandi: Innocent has to correct the clergy for the practice of confessing their personal sins out loud according to species during the Confiteor!
The Mysteries of the Mass is full of surprises. One of the loveliest comes in Book 2, Chapter 33 (a number that was almost certainly deliberate), where Innocent interrupts his explanation of the deacon’s signing himself before the gospel with a chapter-length aside on the mystery of the cross and its manifold effects. “How profound is the sacrament of the cross!” he exclaims, “O, how lofty is its mystery!” Then he waxes poetic over a series of Old Testament typologies for the sign of the cross: the bronze serpent, the (complicatedly cross-shaped) blessing of Jacob over Manasseh and Ephraim, Ezekiel’s vision of the man with the inkpot at his loins, the angel from Revelation and the forehead sign of the elect, the blood on the lintels in Egypt, Moses’s uplifted arms during the battle with Amalek, the tree he cast into the bitter waters, the tree of life in Eden, and more. (One is reminded of St. Thomas’s great digressive fervorino on Christ as the way in his commentary on John 14.)
Innocent III’s expositio begins with a long preparatory study on liturgical vestments, much of which has been omitted from this translation—which is fair enough, since it was also omitted from many medieval copies of the text. Also omitted are a handful of chapters from Book IV that pertain rather to dogmatic eucharistic theology than to liturgical commentary. While the medievalist in me would love to have a complete text, this decision seems justified given the intended audience of this edition, whose interests on the whole will be more mystagogical than scholastic.
One of the nicest features of Foley’s book is the diagrams, which are not his invention but rather the original schemata from a fifteenth-century illumination of this text. These circular diagrams are found throughout the book, but are especially concentrated in the glossy color insert in the middle. The beautiful cover image of Christ’s apparition during the elevation comes from this Biblia Pauperum manuscript as well.
In addition to The Mysteries of the Mass, this volume contains Foley’s translation of another of Pope Innocent’s works, The Four Kinds of Marriage. Maybe that title will help to market the book to an unsuspecting postmodern audience, but if so they will quickly discover that, for Innocent, the four kinds of marriage are not progressive alternatives to sacramental matrimony, but rather theological realities built upon the four senses of sacred scripture: the marriage of man and woman (literal), of Christ and the Church (allegorical), of God and the soul (tropological), and of the Word and human nature (anagogical). In his treatise, the pope comments on the last three of these, then glosses Psalm 44.
As with his Tocco translation, Foley’s rendering of Innocent III is readable and playful, done by someone who clearly loves English but nevertheless prefers Latin (and I mean that as a compliment). My only criticism of the book is for whoever composed the text for the back cover, which gives the following as a selling point: “In these works Pope Innocent provides an answer to modern society’s most pivotal questions: What is the symbolism of the Catholic Mass, and how does the sacrament of marriage mirror the life-giving love of Christ for the Church?” I’m not sure what modern society this editor is living in, but I would like to visit.
Urban Hannon is a seminarian of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, and a tertiary of St. Michael’s Abbey. He is the author of Thomistic Mystagogy: St. Thomas Aquinas’s Commentaries on the Mass (Os Justi Press). He is also a former editor of The Josias.