The Latin Liturgy of Jerusalem: a mixture of old and new, Occidental and Oriental

“The 12th century liturgy of Jerusalem was immensely important in the newly created socio-cultural and sacral landscape. Unique rites were established and formed part of a large project aimed at transforming the post-Byzantine Muslim city of Jerusalem into the Latin capital of their Kingdom and a spiritual centre of the Christian world. How was this accomplished?

Following the First Crusade, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Jerusalem patriarchate were appropriated by the new Latin ecclesiastical hierarchy, while the Greek-Orthodox clergy was relegated to a secondary position in the services at the church. In 1114 the secular canons residing at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were reformed and became regular canons following the rule of Saint Augustine.

The other important shrine churches of the Kingdom of Jerusalem were also occupied by regular canons and most likely followed the practice of Jerusalem, as did the Hospitallers, the Templars and later the Carmelites. The new practices established in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were thus widely influential. After the reform of 1114, the Church of Jerusalem  was, furthermore, an instrument for propagating the policies and ideas of the reform papacy in the Holy Land.

The liturgy of Jerusalem (…) had initially depended on the random availability of liturgical books of diverse European origin. These combined to establish the Jerusalem practice, which naturally remained fundamentally Western European in character but nonetheless adopted local traditions. The challenges of devising the liturgical program (included, TN) (…) constructing a new liturgical language from the various usages in the West; choosing local Eastern traditions to be adopted and continued within the programme; Finding a balance between their enthusiasm for the terrestrial city of which they were finally in possession, and its emblematic image as the celestial city.

The establishment of a Latin liturgy in Jerusalem was thus a process of recreating and reformulating familiar texts and rituals, as has been shown in a number of recent studies of the Latin liturgy of Jerusalem. They illustrate ever more clearly the ritual resources of the religious, cultural and devotional milieu of Frankish Jerusalem.

That the texts and practices imported from the West were not the only source of inspiration informing the liturgy is evident in several ways. Local Byzantine cultic dispositions were reflected in the names of locally venerated saints preserved in the Latin Calendars of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Frankish liturgy adopted some pre-crusade Eastern ceremonies, the most prominent being the celebration of the miracle of the Holy Fire, which continued to be celebrated but in a new Latin garb and drew a massive audience, as it still does today.

The process of liturgical development was to evolve alongside continued interaction with the local Oriental traditions and their representatives. It has been demonstrated that the local Oriental clergy operated alongside the Latin one in Jerusalem’s holiest shrines. This continuity was manifest especially on major feasts, but it can also be seen in places of shared veneration, for which we have growing evidence.(…)

Other examples of liturgical adjustment and awareness of innovation that have been noted are: the liturgical manuscripts from Jerusalem that clearly mark the occasions on which a distinction was made between what they call ‘old rituals’ and what they call new ones. The effort and thought that the clergy invested in elaborating their liturgy is not least reflected in their deliberations on whether and how to celebrate major events – as seen, for example, in the performance of the Visitatio Sepulchri  on Easter morning – which are documented in the Ordinal of Barletta and other liturgical texts. They also faced the need to devise entirely new celebrations – famously, the Liberation Ceremony for 15 July – and solemn practices connected with the relic of the True Cross. These examples portray the religious ritual as a critical junction of tradition and change.

It thus seems fair to say that the Jerusalem liturgy established a conscious dialogue with the past, building on Western traditions as well as traditions inherited from the pre-crusade centuries, which posited ritual resources credited with the religious authority of the Early Christian origins.“

This blog quotes, with some minor adaptations, from “The ‘Holy Women’ in the Liturgy and Art of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Twelfth-Century  Jerusalem” by Iris Shagrir (2017, in: The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources, ed. E. Lapina and N. Morton (Brill, 2017), pp. 455-475), source academia.edu. Illustration Church of the Holy Sepulchre cropped to approximately the area of the original church, photo Gerd Eichmann, source Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

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The novel lifestyle of medieval Cistercians – more labour, less liturgy

“The Cistercian documents claim that the Cistercian way of life was based
on a firm commitment to the Rule of St Benedict. The Rule laid down a
daily timetable devoted to three occupations: the performance of the
liturgy (the Opus Dei), manual labour, and reading. A novelty.

By the
eleventh century there had been a tendency for the liturgy to be
expanded to the detriment of manual labour, which was squeezed out of
the daily routine. The Cistercians cut back the length of the daily
services, allowing work once more to be a part of a monk’s life. 

In
other ways they went far beyond what was actually stated in the Rule in
an attempt to create, or recreate, a simple lifestyle, one that they
thought would bring them back to the practices of the earliest monks.
From the time of Abbot Stephen Harding (elected 1109, resigned 1133/4)
they adopted simplicity and austerity in their buildings, a
characteristic noted by William of Malmesbury and defended by Bernard of
Clairvaux as appropriate to the Cistercians’ desire for poverty. The
austerity of their physical environment was matched by the simplicity of
their lifestyle in terms of what they ate and drank and how they
dressed. Bernard’s Apologia (c. 1125) makes it clear that in all
these ways the Cistercians contrasted with the traditional Benedictine
and especially Cluniac monks. 

The customs developed over the years by
the General Chapter came to cover all aspects of monastic observance.
The Cistercians cultivated the image of themselves as ‘desert monks’,
and their regulations stated that their abbeys should be located ‘far
from the dwellings of men’, or, in the words of Orderic Vitalis, ‘in
lonely wooded places’. 

They developed a particular view of the desirable
economic basis of their abbeys. This rejected what were, by the
eleventh century, traditional forms of revenue for monastic houses, that
is, manors, churches and tithes, and laid down an economic framework
based on the direct exploitation of land consolidated into granges
(farms) and administered by conversi, or lay brothers. Although
the conversi, men who took vows but who were workers rather than monks,
were not unique to the Cistercian Order, the White Monks were the first
group to utilize them effectively to manage their vast estates and, in
many areas, to develop on a large scale the keeping of sheep and
production of wool for which the medieval Cistercians were famous.”

This blog quotes sections, with minor alterations, of this source. Illustration shows Cistercians at work in a detail from the Life of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, illustrated by Jörg Breu the Elder (1500), source, Public Domain

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Templar wealth: personal austerity, liturgical richness

Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux had noted in his letter “In praise of the new knighthood” that the Templars led an austere lifestyle and that their clothing and armour was undecorated, in contrast to secular knights’ flamboyant appearance. (…) Overall the Templars appear to have stuck with this image of austerity. Nothing should be wasted on themselves; all possible money should be saved for the help of the Holy Land. The exception to this was in their attitude to divine worship.

The Templars and their patrons noted the fine decoration of their chapels, their valuable plate, and the good service offered by their priests. The inventories taken after the Templars’ arrests in 1307 and 1308 reveal that many of their chapels were filled with beautiful fabrics and objects: priestly vestments, altar frontals, coloured banners, gold and silver plate, candlesticks and lamps, lovely reliquaries, images and statues of the saints, crosses and crucifixes, and liturgical books. Some of the chapels were used by the Templars alone, some also acted as parish churches, while yet others were attached to Templar houses where no Templars lived and so primarily operated to serve the parish community or patronal families.

ln the Templars’ chapels in the Crown of Aragon (for example) the holy relics included crosses contain-
ing (allegedly) fragments of Christ’s cross, cloth from Christ’s tunic, and relics from a wide range of saints. The Templars owned many relics of the True Cross, as well as having the cross on their habit, demonstrating their great devotion to Christ’s Cross. 

The chapel inventories of 1307-8 also mention images of Christ, the apostles, and other saints, especially the Blessed Virgin Mary: beautifully decorated diptychs, Mary holding Christ in her arms, crosses with Mary alongside, images of Mary alone, and images of Mary over the altar. The Templars had an image of the Blessed Virgin and the Christ child at their church of Santa María la Blanca at Villalcázar de Sirga in Palencia, Castile, that was reported to perform miracles. 

This blog quotes under the rules of Fair Use a slightly abbreviated portion of pages 34 and 35 of The Knights Templar by Helen J. Nicholson |( 2021, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds, UK). Illustration: An enamelled silver reliquary of the True Cross from Constantinople, c. 800, Unknown author, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain, source Wikipedia

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