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Vol I No. 10

Beat Down Satan Under Our Feet Processions Within the LITANY

by
D. N. Keane

The procession, as R D Crouse said of its conceptual sister the pilgrimage, is ‘[t]he fundamental and all-encompassing theme of spiritual life.’1R. D. Crouse, Images of Pilgrimage: Paradise and Wilderness in Christian Spirituality (Darton, Longman, & Todd, 2023), p. 11. Although the primitive church spurned processions (pompa) as an expression of paganism – thus the baptismal vow to renounce ‘the vain pomp and glory of the world’ – they (unsurprisingly) reclaimed ambulatory prayer – called litanies or rogations – by the fourth century. The litany, the first vernacular liturgy of the Church of England, was not only first designed to be sung in procession but depicts a procession in three key petitions and facilitates an interior procession within the souls of those who pray it. Those three petitions correspond to three movements of salvation – what we are saved from, what we are saved by, and what we are saved for, or, put another way, the soul’s procession through repentance, faith, and good works. Through this procession God ‘shall give his angels charge over thee’ and ‘the young lion and the dragon shalt thou tread under thy feet.’2Ps 91:11a,13b.

The litany begins with the deprecations – petitions against all kinds of evil – from the interior (the source of sins) to the exterior (the consequences of sin).

From all blindness of heart; from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness,
Good Lord, deliver us.

Cranmer expanded this petition from his source material, depicting an infernal procession of the unfolding consequences of sin. The order reflects Sir 10:12-13 and Gregory the Great’s Moralia 31.87-89. Sirach says, ‘The beginning of pride is when one departeth from God, and his heart is turned away from his Maker. For pride is the beginning of sin, and he that hath it shall pour out abomination: and therefore the Lord brought upon them strange calamities.’ Pride proceeds from the blind heart producing all manner of uncharitableness, inviting calamity, as the Litany describes – ‘lightning and tempest … earthquake, fire, and flood … plague, pestilence, and famine … battle and murder, and … sudden death.’

The sequence of sins between ‘blindness of heart’ and ‘uncharitableness’ comes from the Moralia, a commentary on Job by Gregory the Great, from which the medieval idea of the ‘seven deadly sins’ largely derives. Gregory’s point was not to distinguish mortal from venial sins but alternating between military and maternal analogies to show the procession or generation of sins. Following Sirach, he names pride ‘the queen of sins’ explaining that when she ‘has fully possessed a conquered heart, she surrenders it immediately to seven principal sins, as if to some of her generals, to lay it waste’ (Moralia 31.87). These are ‘vainglory, envy, anger, melancholy, avarice, gluttony, lust.’ Each of these seven generals commands an ‘army against us.’ Gregory identifies hypocrisy as a lieutenant in vainglory’s host – thus the deprecation proceeds in order: ‘pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy.’ In the host of another of pride’s generals, envy, there marches ‘hatred … exultation at the misfortunes of a neighbour, and affliction at his prosperity.’ This matches up with the sequence ‘envy, hatred, and malice.’ The final of pride’s seven generals, lust, leads the list in the next deprecation, ‘From fornication, and all other deadly sin; and from all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil.’

This demonic procession that fights to possess the human soul – the deadly evil of which we must repent – is a foe beyond all our strength, and so we pray ‘Good Lord, deliver us.’ From the deprecations proceeds our deliverance. The next section of the litany, the obsecrations, depict the processional of the Divine Son.

‘[B]ecause He grieved that we were held captive by these seven sins of pride’ Gregory continued, ‘therefore our Redeemer came to the spiritual battle of our liberation, full of the spirit of sevenfold grace’ (Moralia 31.87). The litany has two obsecrations showing the pleading Christ’s victorious procession:

By the mystery of thy holy Incarnation; by thy holy Nativity and Circumcision; by thy Baptism, Fasting, and Temptation,
Good Lord, deliver us.

By thine Agony and Bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy precious Death and Burial; by thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension, and by the Coming of the Holy Ghost,

Good Lord, deliver us.

The obsecrations depict Christ as the great champion coming alone to defeat all the hosts of death and hell, naming those victorious acts that we commemorate in the annual procession of the church’s greater festivals. God the Son ‘cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a giant to run his course.’3Ps 19:5. Repenting sin, we turn toward Christ – ‘From God the Father He proceeds / To God the Father back He speeds / His course He runs to death and hell / Returning on God’s throne to dwell’ (Ambrose, Veni redemptor gentium, J. M. Neale (trans)). In him alone we place our faith.

From the obsecrations the litany proceeds to the intercessions, praying for the needs of the church, our country, ourselves, our neighbors, and even our enemies. Offering these prayers we follow Christ our leader and his Spirit prays within us; as he promised, ‘He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also.’4John 14:12. Prayer is the chief of the good works that Christ works within and through us. Toward the end of the intercessions, we find a third processional pictured:

That it may please thee to strengthen such as do stand; and to comfort and help the weak-hearted; and to raise up those who fall; and finally to beat down Satan under our feet; We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.

Inspired by Gen 3:15, Ps 91:13, and Rom 16:20, Luther added to his litany a petition to trample Satan under foot. It was probably suggested by the association between the litany and processionals. It appears as a kind of meta-petition, prompting us to imagine the vast company ‘all sorts and conditions of men’ clad in the whole armor of God,5Eph 6:10–18. praying the litany, a processional of Christ’s faithful soldiers marching ‘under his banner’ to do battle with ‘against sin, the world, and the devil.’6Quoted from the signation in the Prayer Book’s Baptism office. The ‘world’ here is not the earth, but this present age, subject to sin and death. With every step another petition and with every petition, the God of peace bruises Satan under their feet.7Rom 16:20. Cranmer expanded Luther’s petition, adding prayers for ‘such as do stand’, ‘the weak-hearted’, and ‘those who fall’, recalling the ever-present threat of deadly sin that we must deprecate and against which we must plead Christ’s victory. In this expanded form the petition recalls Isa 40:29–31:

He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

We go forth confidently not with arms – ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood’8Eph 6:12. – but with the good work of faithful prayer, because our great champion, Christ, has already crushed Satan under his feet. Praying the litany ‘with the spirit, and … with the understanding also’91 Cor 14:15. – conscious of its rich biblical imagery – ‘is itself’, as Crouse put it, ‘a kind of pilgrimage.’10Crouse, Images of Pilgrimage, 15.

Footnotes

  • 1
    R. D. Crouse, Images of Pilgrimage: Paradise and Wilderness in Christian Spirituality (Darton, Longman, & Todd, 2023), p. 11.
  • 2
    Ps 91:11a,13b.
  • 3
    Ps 19:5.
  • 4
    John 14:12.
  • 5
    Eph 6:10–18.
  • 6
    Quoted from the signation in the Prayer Book’s Baptism office. The ‘world’ here is not the earth, but this present age, subject to sin and death.
  • 7
    Rom 16:20.
  • 8
    Eph 6:12.
  • 9
    1 Cor 14:15.
  • 10
    Crouse, Images of Pilgrimage, 15.

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