In case anybody's curious about this rather strange episcopal headgear, here are a couple of links:
The camelaucum (Greek: καμιλαύκιον, kamilaukion), the headdress both the mitre and thePapal tiara stem from, was originally a cap used by officials of the Imperial Byzantine court.
The whole thing, in other words, is a Christendom innovation to do with power, pomp, and circumstance. Apparently it's not all that old (as church history goes), either; the Catholic encyclopedia dates it to the tenth or eleventh centuries.
This article is I suspect a spoof, but even so, it's a hilarious one. I will now never be able to shake the idea of a bishop wearing a fish's head...
Even today, mitres are by no means universal in the Anglican Church, and a hundred years ago only Anglo-Catholics wore them. The bishop who ordained me a deacon, Jack Sperry, never wore one, and I don't think he was any less a bishop for it. In my view, it's long past time for us to rethink the wearing of ceremonial robes based on the dress of civil officials in the Roman empire (in other words, adopted as a sign of Christianity's growing temporal power). Even Dom Gregory Dix admitted that in the early church a bishop probably presided at the Eucharist in ordinary clothes (The Shape of the Liturgy, A & C. Black, 1945, reprinted by Seabury Press, 1983, p.142).
4 comments:
I'd love the Dix reference, as I have great doubts about whether a lounge suit is appropriate for celebrating the Eucharist. Not because I think robes are 100% correct - I'm happy to wear them but I recognise the arguments against them - more because suit-wearing seems to be to import Christendom from a different sphere. It is the uniform of the businessman, ie the existing Byzantine empire. I don't see anything particularly Christian about wearing that uniform instead of something which, whatever the origins, has at least been hallowed by use. I'd rather celebrate in jeans and hawaiian shirt than celebrate wearing a suit.
Sam: I read it over twenty years ago and apparently memory had played tricks on me. I looked up the reference this morning and it's in 'The Shape of the Liturgy', p.142 - Dix's imaginative reconstruction of a pre-Nicene Eucharist if it was taking place in modern London. 'At the other end of the drawing room sitting in the best arm chair is an elderly man, a gentleman by his clothes but nothing out of the ordinary - the bishop of London'.
so where did I get the idea that the shape of the mitre was to recall the Pentecostal tongues of fire?
Ken, Southminster
I think that's apocryphal, Ken...
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