Celestial Fire; A Book of Meditations on the Veni Sancte Spiritus
London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1913. First edition. Original ivory cloth (6 7/8 inches tall), front board stamped in red, gilt spine, top edge red. Slight toning to spine, faint soiling to boards, modest tanning to endpapers. A near-fine copy. Item #1821
"DART THEN ONE SPARK OF CELESTIAL FIRE INTO MY SOUL, AND GRANT THAT I MAY NOT END MY LIFE IN DEATH"
First edition of these Meditations on the Veni Sancte Spiritus—printed from a mysterious seventeenth-century devotional manuscript discovered in the possession of the Ferrar family of Little Gidding. Printed on good "laid" paper, with the title page in red-and-black, and illustrated with a frontispiece and three other facsimiles of the original manuscript. A fresh copy.
Thought to have been written around 1200 by Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Veni, Sancte Spiritus—the Golden Sequence for the Mass for Pentecost—is commonly regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces of sacred Latin poetry ever written. With a Preface by George Congreve, S.S.J.E., contemplating the identity of the author of these meditations. The concluding initials ("R.W.") on the manuscript were originally assumed to refer to a member of the Little Gidding community named Ralph Wodenoth, a cousin of Nicholas Ferrar. With an Introduction ("The Finding of the Manuscript") by editor E.M. Green, who traveled to the Jesuit's Farm Street Church to consult with Father Herbert Thurston. "Then I saw that my Little Gidding theory was toppling to the ground." It was ultimately determined that these meditations on the Holy Ghost were actually written by Father Richard White, an English Catholic priest, at St. Monica's, a monastery of the Canonesses of St. Augustine in Louvain. Further, it seems that there were three different copies prepared of Fr. White's manuscript, including one previously published as The Suppliant of the Holy Ghost (Burns and Oates, 1878) with a preface by T.E. Bridgett.
Price: $75.00