Terribilis est locus iste - a fascination revisited

In preparation for a talk I'll be giving next week, I have spent some time revisiting some of my favourite fragments from the special collection at the library of the University of Southern Denmark. The talk will be a general presentation of some of the liturgical fragments that I have been researching, and I was reading through my notes and looking through my pictures in order to find a good angle for presenting the wealth of material contained in the fragments in question. It is always challenging - albeit in a good way - to present liturgical fragments to people who are unfamiliar with liturgy, its vocabulary, its structure, and its abbreviations. Accordingly, I was trying to find some element that would allow me to gather a lot of the main points under one heading. As I did so, I was reminded of my fascination with the office for the dedication of a church. This was a liturgical celebrationcommon to all Latin Christendom which was held on the anniversary of the consecration of the church in question. Consequently, the feast had no fixed position in the liturgical calendar. However, the feast served one common purpose, namely to connect the newly consecrated church typologically with the Temple of Solomon and further back to the first consecration of a location in the Bible, namely the site where Jacob wrestled with the angel. I have written about the typology of Jacob in an earlier blogpost, so I will not say more about this here.

The typological connection between any given medieval church and the Temple of Solomon, however, was expressed in many ways throughout the series of chants and readings that comprised the office for the dedication. One such example is the antiphon "Tu domine universorum", whose initial is pictured below. The text of this antiphon is a paraphrase of 2 Machabees 14: 35-36, in which the temple is described, and thus the antiphon invoked the typological connection between the church in which the chant was being sung and the temple built by King Solomon. Such a connection emphasised how the newly consecrated church was a part of the same historical branch reaching back through the centuries.   

Initial for the antiphon Tu domine universorum (CID: 005199)

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA Musik M 4

As I was reading through the chants contained in one of the fragments of Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA Musik M 4, I kept recalling a detail from Paul Gauguin's painting Vision after the sermon which shows the scene of Jacob and the angel. I learned of this painting through the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, both because it is used as the cover image for the edition of his collected poems from 1985. The reason for this cover image is a reference to it in one of his poems from the collection Tenebrae (1978), and to which my mind was transported after a quick immersion into the medieval typology of churches.

Terribilis Est Locus Iste

Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School

Briefly they are amazed. The marigold-fields
mell and shudder and the travellers,
in sudden exile burdened with remote
hieratic gestures, journey to no end

beyond the vivid severance of each day,
strangeness at doors, a different solitude
between the mirror and the window, marked
visible absences, colours of the mind,

marginal angels lightning-sketched in red
chalk on the month's account or marigolds
in paint runnily embossed, or the renounced
self-portrait with a seraph and a storm.



And with this poem - one I enjoy tremendously - the fascination with the story of Jacob is brought to our modern times, showing again how gripping this story is, and how it has continued to have an impact on cultural expressions through the ages.