Studia Traditionis Theologiae, subtitled ‘Explorations in Early and Medieval Theology’, is a series devoted to ‘the dynamic realm of tradition … concerned with how the past evolved in the past, and the interplay of theology, culture, and tradition’. Established fairly recently, it is prolific, with these volumes reaching its fiftieth. Imaginative in its construal of purpose, it includes engagement with liturgy, which these volumes approach in very different ways.

Jennifer O'Brien's book concerns the three Advent hymns of the Roman Office – Conditor alme siderum, Verbum supernum prodiens and Vox clara ecce intonate – but by focusing on these three hymns endeavours to give an account of the origins of the season of Advent, the preparation for Christmas, in the Roman Office, which thence spread throughout the West, being virtually unknown in the Eastern Churches. There follows a discussion of the origin of the hymn in the hymnaries of the Western Church, and the way its history is bound up with the growing hegemony of the Benedictine Office. There follows a kind of contemplative pause, in which each of these hymns is examined and their theology unfolded. What emerges is a rich theology in which preparation for the liturgical celebration of Christ's Nativity opens up into the Church's preparation for Christ's second coming – expressed in tightly composed hymns, full of memorable phrases, that help the faithful, through singing them, to draw the message of Christ's two comings into the their hearts. Here anyone familiar with the Eastern Orthodox liturgy might begin to grasp why the Byzantine Church never advanced beyond a forty-day fast in liturgical preparation for Christmas: for the theme of preparation for Christ's second coming is closely bound up in Orthodox theology with the Cross and Resurrection; it is the overruling theme of the first three days of Great and Holy Week. O'Brien then picks up the historical thread, showing how these hymns fared in the evolution of the Breviary. That was bound up with the growth of the mendicant orders, especially the Franciscans, for whom the office morphed into a personal devotion, needing a portable office book, rather than the library of liturgical books required for the monastic office. Further development occurred with the Renaissance, which shunned the demotic Latin of the hymns in favour of something more classical (Mary becoming nympha candidissima); the effect of this classicisation on the texts (and theology) of the three Advent hymns is spelled out in detail. The succeeding period, with a series of reforms of the breviary, is sketched in, before we arrive at the reforms of Vatican II, which opened the floodgates to sources for revision of what came to be called the Liturgia horarum and a process in which, though some sense of the purpose of the liturgy of the hours was expressed in conciliar and other official sources, the net result was – except in monastic circles – the reduction of the hours to not much more than a priestly private devotion, rather than an expression of the prayer of the Church. O'Brien shows how the three Advent hymns have been virtually lost, as other hymnic sources have been embraced and the season of Advent reduced to liturgical anticipation of the earthly birth of Christ, – finding an explanation for this in the usual suspects – commercialisation invading religious practice, the ‘invisibility’ of death and so on, leading to a kind of ‘mon-eucharisticism’, which runs the risk of trivialising the eucharist, the heart of Christian worship. She seeks a solution in a revival of the so-called Cathedral Office, a ‘path not taken’ at Vatican II. Hers is a learned and profoundly moving book, with her feet firmly on the ground of the practical realities of current worship, and a clear sense of what has been lost: a loss symbolised in the neglect of such liturgical resources as the three great Advent hymns.

While O'Brien's scholarship is deeply informed by a real problem in the worship of the Roman Catholic Church, and not only there, Sverre Elgvin Lied focuses on the pre-Nicene Church and how one might find there an evolving matrix in which the use of the Sanctus – or the Tersanctus, to be distinguished from the Trisagion – in the eucharistic liturgy developed. The Sanctus has come to form a turning point in virtually all eucharistic prayers (or Anaphorae): a turning point at which the worship of God by the heavenly hosts is recalled, in which worship we beseech our earthly praise to be included, and there follow the words of the Sanctus: ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord Sabaoth; heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the Name of the Lord, Hosanna in the highest’ (or similar words). From the fourth century onwards the Sanctus is virtually universal (though parts of the West were slower in their uptake); the earliest occurrence seems to be in the third-century Liturgy of Addai and Mari, despite the doubts of older scholarship that held it to be an interpolation. Its literary origin is certainly Isaiah vi.3 – the song the Seraphim call to one another in Isaiah's vision of the worship of heaven, made manifest in the worship of the Temple. Beyond that there is mostly scholarly conjecture, laying bare ‘but a few pieces of a vast jigsaw. Apart from these few pieces, the rest is lost’, as Spinks put it. In his book, Sverre Elgvin Lied seeks to set the search for the origins of the Sanctus in a broader context by focusing on the notion of participation in heavenly worship, and tracing this theme in the pre-Nicene period, beginning with the idea of the heavenly liturgy as it appears in early Jewish and Christian mysticism, and then pursuing it through the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, the Apostolic church order, the works of Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and finally summarising his findings in a concluding chapter, which ends with a section on ‘The enigma of the Sanctus’, and a brief coda on fourth-century developments found in Theodore of Mopsuestia, John Chrysostom and Ambrose, which laid the foundations for later developments.

Lied begins by delineating the crisis created for the Israelites by the destruction of the Jewish Temple and the consequent end of its sacrificial worship: a crisis of profound significance, since the worship of the earthly Temple in Jerusalem reflected and enabled participation in the eternal worship of God by the celestial beings of the heavenly courts. Recent scholarship, notably Guy G. Stroumsa's The end of sacrifice (Oxford 2009), has drawn attention to the profound trauma caused by these events: a trauma to which both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity can be seen as a response. Stroumsa's work is not mentioned; Lied does however mention (without much detail) the way in which living without the Temple (because its worship was corrupt) lay behind apocalyptic responses to the failure (presaging the final destruction) of the Temple, involving a ‘spiritualisation of the Temple’, that was a feature of ‘second Temple Judaism’ (an inconveniently all-too-embracing term, that covered not so much the continuing religious practice of the second Temple, as movements that turned their back on such religious practice). It is in the light of this crisis of the earthly Temple that Lied introduces the features of temple worship, such as earthly and heavenly typology, priests and other beings in the sanctuary, worship and praise, and sacrifice in heaven, the notion of participation in heavenly worship found in various apocalyptic texts. Middle Platonic notions, introduced by Philo, are briefly discussed, and summed up as an ‘ascent mysticism’ (only a small part of what Plato meant to Philo, for whom the Timaeus was massively significant).

There follow discussions of Ignatius, the Apostolic church order, Irenaeus, Clement and Origen – all of which are careful and, though serving a particular purpose (participation in the heavenly), are alive to the very various ways in which these temple themes are taken up in the very different writings discussed.

Leid's conclusion is that there is a rich matrix into which the fundamental theme represented by the Sanctus – some sort of reflection, if not always participation, of the worship of the heavenly courts in the worship (not necessarily eucharistic) of the Church on earth – can find manifold expressions. It is a valuable insight. It did strike me as odd that in a book with the subtitle, ‘From apocalyptic mysticism to the eucharistic Sanctus’, there is not a mention of the name of Alexander Golitsin, not to mention Margaret Barker.

Nevertheless, these are two fine books that engage with tradition in order to understand more deeply the present, and to face the future more equably.