The Heart in Pilgrimage: a prayerbook for Catholic Christians

Reviewed by Christopher Howse
BLOOMSBURY, 576pp, £20
Tablet bookshop price £18                  
Tel 01420 592974

To say that this big, thick book of prayers is informed by a historian’s mind is not to condemn it as a trip into the past. Eamon Duffy does not want us to ape the worshippers of the late fifteenth century, whose religious life he brought to life 20 years ago in The Stripping of the Altars. Instead, drawing on Eastern as well as Latin church traditions, he attempts a kind of ressourcement for the devotional life of Christians.

For example, 10 pages are filled with the Akathist hymn to the Mother of God, the most solemn of prayers in honour of Mary, dating from the sixth century. In it, 12 short hymns on aspects of the Incarnation are followed by litanies of titles and salutations to the Virgin. Some open up unfamiliar ideas: “Rejoice, Revealer of the life of angels”. Some invite research: “Rejoice, who have torn apart the tangled conundrums of the Athenians”. Some baffle: “Rejoice, who quenched the idolatrous worship of fire”, which, to the uninformed, sounds like something from the litany-loving madman Christopher Smart.

Professor Duffy likes litanies too, recognising their ancient power to stir up prayer. (There is, no doubt, an interesting parallel in the Muslim devotion of the Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God.) The simple litany of the saints dates from the earliest centuries, forming part of the Easter Vigil, the archetypal celebration of the eucharistic mysteries. Among others, Duffy gives the sixteenth-century Golden Litany, much valued by Catholics in penal times, which contemplates the Passion of Jesus by way of his weaknesses: “By the sorrow of thy heart, labour and weariness, have mercy on me.”

A historical approach confronts the reader with some aspects of belief that may have been put to one side. Angels are an example. You can’t get very far in ancient liturgies before running into them. They also appear (memorably and comfortingly, in my experience) in the liturgy for the dying: “May Christ who called you take you to himself, And may the angels lead you to Abraham’s bosom.” This is among several classic prayers that Duffy gives in Latin too. It depends what people are accustomed to, but in any case the Adoro te Devote, for example, is richer in Latin than in any translation, even that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, given here.

From the subtitle “A prayerbook for Catholic Christians”, Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, in his foreword, takes the word Catholic as signifying “whole”. He observes that prayer “must be worked out in disciplines of life, disciplines that make a difference to us as bodily beings, not only as creatures who have ideas and aspirations”.

This strikes me as an important correlative of prayer being impossible to specify for anyone else. No one can tell you how you should pray, for it is fundamentally an activity of the Holy Spirit. At the same time, anyone honestly wanting to pray must apply the discipline of giving a regular time in which to remain entirely open to God.

Eamon Duffy spends a slice of his introduction examining another aspect of such discipline: fasting as prayer. The general disappearance of fasting in the 1970s, he thinks, “severed Catholics from one of the most intuitive of all religious observances, from the practice of ancient Israel and of Jesus himself, from the other world faiths, and from the Orthodox and Eastern Churches, which retain still the more demanding older discipline”.

There is a parallel between the bodily nature of fasting and the very use of formulas of prayer. Even Catholic Christians can over-value extempore prayer, as somehow more authentic. But, apart from the fact that one is unlikely to come up with anything as helpful as inherited prayers, we as rational animals are constructed to express ideas in words, so that language, from the outside, provokes the mind and heart.

The foundational prayers of Christianity are the Psalms. Jesus knew them, and in extremity cried out with the words of Psalm 21. Duffy includes parts of more than 50 Psalms. The Psalms he gives for morning and evening prayer, day by day, “have been taken from those used on the same days at Rome as far back as records take us”.

If unfamiliar, these Psalms, like anything else in The Heart in Pilgrimage, provide a sort of spiritual reading, which, as St Teresa found, can feed mental prayer as branches do a fire. Those that fill the memory, through use, can supply the spontaneous prayers that come to the lips because the heart knows them. “Short prayer pierces the heavens,” wrote the author of The Cloud of Unknowing.

In this, he is echoed by George Herbert’s poem defining prayer in a daring litany (“Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear”). From that poem comes the title The Heart in Pilgrimage. Though it is a practical book, not a florilegium, three or four entries are taken from Herbert, along with Lancelot Andrewes, Jeremy Taylor and T.S. Eliot, who followed a common tradition. Beyond that, Eamon Duffy has achieved something which, in architecture, Ninian Comper called “unity by inclusion”. St Patrick, St Dimitri of Rostov and St Thérèse of Lisieux lived in different worlds, yet here they all are, waiting to be visited. This is a book to change the lives of those who use it, and that is what I intend to do.