Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 1.djvu/440

Rh AMBROSIAN 396 AMBROSIAN true, allusions to various services of the Milanese Cliureh in the writings of St. Augustine and St.^ Am- brose, and in the anonymous treatise " De Sacra- inentis", which used to be attributed to the latter, but is now definitely decided not to bo his; but these allusions are naturally enough insufficient for more than vague conjecture, and have been used with perhaps equal justification in support of either side of the controversy. Even if the rather improb- able story of Landulf is not to be believed, the ex- isting manuscripts, which only take us back at the earliest to the period of Charlemagne, leave the question of his influence open. This much we may confidently affirm, that though both the Missal and the Breviary have been subjected from time to time to various modifications, often, as might be expected, in a Roman direction, the changes are singularly few and unimportant, and the Arabrosian Rite of to-day is substantially the same as that represented in the early M3S. Indeed, since some of these doc- uments come from places in the Alpine valleys, such as Biasca, Lodrino, Venegono, and elsewhere, while the modern rite is that of the metropolitan cathe- dral and the churches of the city of Milan, some proportion of the differences may well turn out to be local rather than chronological developments. The arguments of the two principal theories are nec- essarily derived in a great measure from the internal evidence of the books themselves, and at present the end of the controversy is not in sight. The question resolves itself into this: Is the Ambrosian Rite archaic Roman? Or is it a much Romanized form of the Galilean Rite? And this question is mixed with that of the provenance of the Galilean Rite itself. Some liturgiologists of a past generation, notably Dr. J. M. Neale and others of the Anglican School, referred the Hispano-Gallican and Celtic fam- ily of liturgies to an original imported into Provence from Ephesus by St. Irena'us, who had received it through St. Polycarp from St. John the Divine. The name Epheaine was applied to this liturgy, and it was sometimes called the Liturgy of St. John. The idea was not modern. Colraan, at the Synod of Whitby in 664, attributed the Celtic rule of Easter to St. John, and in the curious little eighth-century treatise already mentioned (in Cott. MS. Nero A. II) one finds: "Johannes Evangelista primum cursus gal- lorum decantavit. Inde postea beatus policarpus dis- cipulus sci iohannis. Inde postea hiereneus qui fuit eps Lug.lunen.sisGallei. Tcrtius ipse ipsum cursum de- can tauerunt [sic] in galleis. " The author is not speak- ing of the Liturgy, but of the Divine Office, but that does not affect the question, and the theory, which had its obvious controversial value, was at one time very popular with Anglicans. Neale considered that the Ambrosian Rite was a Romanized form of this Hispano-Ciallican, or Ephesine, Rite. He never brought much evidence for this view, being gener- ally contented with stating it and giving a certain number of not very convincing comparisons with the Mozarabic Rite (Essays on Liturgiology, ed. 18G7, 171-197). But Neale greatly exaggerated the Romanizing effected by St. Charles Borromeo, and his essay on the Ambrosian Liturgy is now some- what out of date, though much of it is of great value as an analysis of the existing Rite. W. C. Bishop, in his article on the Ambrosian Breviary (Church Q., Oct., 18S0), takes up the same line as Neale in claim- ing a Galilean origin for the Ambrosian Divine Of- fice.^ But Duchesne in his "Origines du culte chr^ tien" has put forward a theory of origin which works out very clearly, though at present it is almost all founded on conjecture and a priori reasoning. He rejects entirely the Ephesine supposition, and con- siders that the Orientali.sms which he recognizes in the Hispano-Gallican Rite are of much later origin than the period of St. Irena-us, and that it was from Milan as a centre that a rite, imported or modified from the East, perhaps by the Cappadocian Arian Bishop Auxentius (355-374), the predecessor of St. Ambrose, gradually spread to Gaul, Spain, and Bri- tain. He lays great stress on the important posi- tion of Milan as a northern metropolis, and on the intercourse with the East by way of Aquileia and lUyria, as well as on the eastern nationality of many of the Bishops of Milan. In his analysis of the Gallican Mass, Duchesne assumes that the seventh- century Bobbio Sacramentary (Bibl. Nat., 13,246), though not actually Milanese, is to be counted as a guide to early Ambrosian usages, and makes use of it in the reconstruction of the primitive Rite be- fore, according to his theory, it was so extensively Romanized as it appears in the earliest undeniably Ambrosian documents. He also appears to assume that the usages mentioned in the Letter of St. In- nocent I to Decentius of Eugubium as differing from those of Rome were necessarily common to Milan and Gubbio. Paul Lejay has adopted this theory in his article in the "Revue d'histoire et litt^rature religeuses" (II. 173) and in Dom Cabrol's Diction- naire d'arch^ologie chrdtienne et de limrgie" [s. v. Ambrosien (Rit)]. The other theory, of which Ceriani and Magistretti are the most distinguished exponents, maintains that the Ambrosian Rite has preserved the pre-Gelasian and pre-Gregorian form of the Roman Rite. Dr. Ceriani (Notitia Liturgis Ambrosianie) supports his contention by many references to early writers and by comparisons of ea/lv forms of the Roman Ordinary with the Ambrosian. Both sides admit, of course, the self-evident fact that the Canon in the present Ambrosian Mass is a variety of the Roman Canon. Neither has explained satisfactorily how and when it got there. The borrowings from the Greek service books have been ably discussed by Cagin (Pal6o- graphie musicale, V), but there are Greek loans in the Roman books also, though, if Duchesne's theory of origin is correct, some of them may have travelled by way of the Milanese-Gallican Rite at the time of the Charlemagne revision. There are evident Galli- canisms in the Ambrosian Rite, but so there are in the present Roman, and the main outlines of the process by which they arrived in the latter are suffi- ciently certain, though the dates are not. The presence of a very definite Pvst-Sanctus of un- doubted Hispano-Gallican form in the Ambrosian Mass of Easter Eve requires more explanation than it has received, and the whole question of provenance is further complicated by a theory, into which Ceriani does not enter, of a Roman origin of all the Latin liturgies, Gallican, Celtic, Mozarabic, and Ambrosian alike. There are indications in his liturgical note to the "Book of Cerne" and in "The Genius of the Roman Rite" that Mr. Edmund Bishop, who, as far as he has spoken at all, prefere the conclusions, though not so much the arguments, of Ceriani to either the arguments or conclusions of Duchesne, may eventu- ally have something to say which will put the sul>- ject on a more solid basis. III. E.^RLY MSS.— The early MSS. of the Am- brosian Rite are generally found in the following forms: (1) The "Sacramentary" contains the Ora- Hones super Populum, Prophecies, Epistles, Gospels, Orationcs super Sindoncm, and super Oblata, the Prefaces and Post-Comnmnions throughout the year, with the variable forms of the Communicantes and Hanc igilur, when they occur, and the solitary Post Sanctus of Easter Eve, besides the ceremonies of Holy Week, etc., and the Ordinary and Canon of the Mass. There are often also occasional offices usually found in a modern ritual, such as Baptism, the Visitation and Unction of the Sick, the Burial of the Dead, and various benedictions. It is essentially a priest's book, like the Euchologion of the Greeks.