HELP!

On this Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, and very suitably following the feasts of Michaelmas and of the Guardian Angels, we ask to be protected.

Latin original

CUSTODI, Domine, quæsumus, Ecclesiam tuam propitiatione perpetua; et quia sine te labitur humana mortalitas, tuis semper auxiliis et abstrahatur a noxiis, et ad salutaria dirigatur ; per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum Amen. 

1549

KEPE we beseche thee, O Lorde, thy Churche with thy perpetuall mercye: and because the frailtie of man without thee, cannot but fall: Kepe us ever by thy helpe, and leade us to al thynges profitable to our salvacion; through Jesus Christe our Lorde. Amen.

1662

Keep, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church with thy perpetual mercy : and because the fraily of man without thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

One of the rare occasions when the 1662 revisers were more faithful to the Latin original, in restoring its a noxiis. One wonders why Cranmer left it out. He may have thought it self-evident and considered that its omission would lead the sentence more swiftly and elegantly to its conclusion. The Latin is, as usual, a jewel of compact form and shapely rhythm, employing no less than four cursus tardus and ending in a cursus velox (which, in spite of its name, I always suspect was seen by the writers as slower and more dignified).

The Latin original of Cranmer’s “perpetual mercy” is propitiatio, “an appeasing, atonement, propitiation” – which is very odd. One might translate it as “Keep,, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church in perpetual atonement”; and one wonders if the perpetual atonement may not belong rather to the church than to its keeping: so that God may be being asked to take care of a Church that lives in perpetual atonement. I suspect, though, that it is rather an unusual medieval use of the word, which makes it rather a peace-offering on God’s behalf, and which thus comes a little closer to Cranmer’s “mercy”.

It is a prayer for protection: custodi, Domine. Take care of us, Lord: protect us. And the rest of the prayer makes specific both the protection and the threat. We ask to be protected from “all things hurtful”, and if Cranmer had used 18^th- or 19^th-century punctuation instead of Tudor, he would have put a second comma after “profitable”. Because what dismays us here is not the threat of things hurtful in general, but the threat of things hurtful to our salvation. 

What are those? What can hurt our salvation? Not the horrors of the world: as St Paul put it in his letter to the Christians in Rome, “I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” No: the only things hurtful to our salvation can come from ourselves. And the Collect understands this: it makes this request because the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall. Not the nastiness of man; not his inherent evil; no, his frailty. He is weak. He wants to do everything right; but on his own, on a daily, hourly basis he falls, he screws it up and scuppers his own salvation. So we ask Him to protect us from doingall things hurtful, and to lead us to doingall things profitable, to our salvation.

Again, a close reading of, and meditation on, a brief prayer shows how rich it is in meaning and how it helps us increase our understanding of ourselves in our relation to our loving but doubtless frequently exasperated Father.

DON'T TRIP, STUMBLE AND FALL: TRINITY 13

Joss Naylor, shepherd and fell-runner

Latin original (in both Leonine and Gelasian Sacramentaries)

OMNIPOTENS et misericors Deus, a cujus beneficentia profiscitur ut tibi a fidelibus tuis digne et laudabiliter serviatur, tribue quæsumus nobis, ut ad promissiones tuas sine offensione curramus. Per Jesum Christum Do. &c.

1549 

ALMYGHTIE and mercyfull God, of whose onely gifte it cometh that thy faythfull people doe unto thee true and laudable service; graunte we beseche thee, that we may so runne to thy heavenly promises, that we faile not finally to attayne the same; through Jesus Christe our Lorde.

1662

ALMIGHTY and merciful God, of whose only gift it cometh that thy faithful people do unto thee true and laudable service; Grant, we beseech thee, that we may so faithfully serve thee in this life, that we fail not finally to attain thy heavenly promises; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Cranmer’s translation is fairly tight, but deftly underlines a few points he sees in the Latin. He translates God’s beneficentia as his “onely gift” with an Elizabethanly-displaced adjective: it is not God’s only gift, it is only by His gift that we can serve him truly and well. To his credit, he keeps our running (remembering the Collect of a couple of weeks ago)to God’s promises, but he wants to stress that they are heavenly; and he dodges the complexity of the Latin offensiones, which are both physical stumbling-blocks, things that one trips over when running, and bad things one may commit or undergo. Instead, he translates the sense, neutrally hoping that in running to the promises we may not, in the end, fail to reach them.

At first this seems like a much less rich and dramatic Collect than Trinity 12. Yet it is worth looking at with real care and discernment. First, the choice of the Invocation. It’s a common one – God both almighty and merciful – but here it explains the beneficentia that earns our gratitude: God is both mighty enough to give us the capacity to serve him and merciful enough to be ready and willing to do so, recognizing our need. 

Then, the Acknowledgement. God’s fideli, His faithful people, serve him in ways that are both true (faithful and efficacious) and laudable (well enough to be praiseworthy); and they recognize, because they are fideli, that they can do this only because it is itself already His gift. We, faithful as we may be, can still do no true and praiseworthy thing for God on our own initiative and behalf. 

Now for the Petition. The sentence turns from the third person plural, the general category of the fideli and their actions, to the first person plural: we who are here in prayer. What do we realize we need, what do we want, what can we ask for? Well, first of all, to run to His heavenly promises. To recognize that they are there, that they are infinitely desirable, to desire them urgently enough to drop our parcels and run.

And secondly (this is really the Aspiration), as we run, panting, we hope and pray that we may not trip over an unseen obstacle, some sleeping policeman, some banana skin, that will leave us flat on our face with two broken ribs; or, to put it another way (Trop., say Lewis and Short), that in running toward heavenly promises, we may not do something unforgivable, like elbowing a neighbouring runner out of the way, that will ban us from receiving them.

Once again, the 1662 revisers do not like the image of running and suppress it, replacing it by the dutiful serving which, if it is dutiful enough,  will let us attain the promises,though only by the merits of Christ. One may think, as I do, that this change is a weakening; but whatever one’s opinion, it is clear that even what we may at first think a humdrum sort of Collect is a wonderfully compact commentary on the life of both fides, faith, and re-ligio, the restoring of the bond between the human race and its long-suffering Deity.

THE LIGHTNESS OF BEING - TRINITY 9

saevis tranquillus in undis - tranquil amid the raging waves

(motto of William of Orange)

Largire nobis, domine, quæsumus, spiritum cogitandi quæ bona sunt promptius et agendi : ut qui sine te esse non possumus, secundum te vivere valeamus. Per.

Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful : that we, which cannot be without thee, may by thee be able to live according to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

My first reaction to this Collect was, as often happens, one of amazement at the sheer elegance of the Latin. Having been raised on the idea that Latin succumbed to barbarism between Antiquity and the Renaissance, I have been discovering in the orationes of the Leonine, Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries a sophistication that predates and announces the precision and beauty of the sonnet. Then, admiration for Thomas Cranmer at his compact and adequate translation, which the revisers of 1662 weakened by changing “we, which cannot be without thee” to “we, who cannot do anything that is good without thee”. No, no: we cannot be without thee – God created us, God sustains us, to God we shall return, we cannot be, in any condition, without Him. As Massey Shepherd said about this Collect, it “expresses as succinctly as possible the whole doctrine of grace.”

What does that mean? First, our very existence is based on God. We cannot be without thee. But also: we cannot be without thee – we cannot do without thee, thou art necessary to our continued being, to our going on living. From day to day, Father, we need you in order to go on living: without you it would be meaningless, cold and dark, and we might kill ourselves to escape from such a world. 

Second: this being so, since we need, we ask (because He has told us we may, and should). What do we ask? Spiritum;  pneuma;  ruach.  Breath: the breath of life: the spirit. The Spirit will allow us to think and to act. To have the intelligence, the insight, the discernment, to know what is good – far harder than at first it seems. Life (aided at crucial moments by the Adversary) has a way of suggesting tempting courses of action, or, conversely, of telling us there is no way forward, no way out. We need spiritus cogitandi, the spirit to think. And having thought, having discerned what is good, we still need the spirit in order to do it – not to end up like St Paul: “the good that I would, I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.” (Romans 7:19)

And to what end do we do all this? Then comes that wonderful antithesis: so that we who cannot be without thee may by thee – what? Be able to be, live, live the true life, which is live according to thy will, in that marvellous harmony of our will with the Father’s which is the true goal and end of our existence. The whole doctrine of grace, indeed.  

Wm of Orange memorial medal 1933

"my shield and my stronghold art thou, O God my Lord"

SMALL JEWELS: EASTER 4

DEUS, qui fidelium mentes unius efficis voluntatis, da populo tuo id amare quod præcipis, id desiderare quod promittis, ut inter mundanas varietates ibi nostra fixa sint corda, ubi vera sunt gaudia. Per Christum Do. &c

O almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men : Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise : that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of this world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

  

In my occasional contemplation of the Collects in the Book of Common Prayer, the oratio for this week seemed particularly pleasing. Once again we begin with the Latin, compact and tense as always: “God, who makes the minds of the faithful of one will…” – and we see right away that Cranmer has been embroidering. “O Almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men . . .” Whoa! The Acknowledgement here departs considerably from the Latin. Adding “Almighty” to the Invocation is not a problem, but from there on Cranmer seems to veer off into interpretation. What does he add or change? Let’s follow the order of the Latin and start with “fidelium mentes”. No longer, in the English, does God unite the hearts of the faithful: it is of sinful men that He orders, not the minds or spirits but the wills and affections. Moreover, this is so difficult that He alone can do it. 

It all looks very pessimistic and Protestant, and to some extent it is; but there is more to it than that. I think that the Archbishop has been looking at the Petition and Aspiration, which specify what we are asking and to what end. These, interestingly, he translates simply and straightforwardly: we want to be able to love what God commands and to desire what He promises. But when we think about that, we realise that that is not only peculiar but feels oddly wrong: to love what we are commanded to do feels like not only being told to do something but being ordered to love it, while to desire what we are promised feels like putting the cart before the horse. And that strange wrongness, Cranmer clearly thinks and wants to tell us, comes from our wills and affections being somehow skewed: if we were in heaven, it would come naturally – there would be a natural concord between our will and God’s, so that what He commands would be what we love and what He promises would be what we desire. And conversely: they would all fit together in the perfect chords of His will’s harmony. That this is clearly not so, that we need to ask for it to be made so, shows that our wills and affections are “unruly” and that we the faithful are therefore “sinful men”. Being unruly, said wills and affections need to be “ordered” – as we pray every morning that our doings may be “ordered” by His governance.  Notes of music, duly ordered or well-tempered, make a harmony, among themselves and with the spirit of the composer. 

Once again, we see what a small intricate jewel such a Collect is. And Cranmer can even add some ornaments: the bald mundanas varietates become “sundry and manifold”, adding a pretty rhythm, and fixa is intensified by “surely”, that splendid adverb the richness of which I mentioned in my last post. A miniature treasure, for which we may be truly thankful.

SMALL JEWELS: HOW AND WHAT THEY MEAN

Reciting Collects, those intricate small jewels of language and piety, I sometimes make myself slow down and think about the words and their meanings. For example, consider the Second Collect for Morning Prayer:

O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is  perfect freedom: defend us thy humble servants in all assaults of our enemies, that we surely trusting in thy defence may not fear the power of any adversaries; through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

And the original:

Deus auctor pacis et amator, quem nosse, vivere; cui servire, regnare est : protege ab omni oppugnatione suppleces tuos, ut qui in tua protectione confidimus, nullius hostilitatis arma timeamus. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

It’s fascinating, first of all, to see what Cranmer has done with the Acknowledgement, the relative clause naming the relevant qualities of the Deity. The Latin, with its incomparable brevity, says: God, author and lover of peace, whom to know is to live and to serve is to reign… In this case, Cranmer with his “author of peace and lover of concord” expands the Latin, in my opinion for the sake of the rhythm (with the implication, interesting in itself, that peace and concord are perfect synonyms). He then expands the second term to “in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life”, thus explaining the bald vivere; and the third term to “whose service is perfect freedom”. This last is where he exercises the greatest liberty: he seems to have found regnarea little too extreme (perhaps with the possible wrath of Henry VIII in mind), and so replaces it with “perfect freedom”, which could, in a pinch, be described as a synonym, as only a ruler is completely free to act. (Incidentally, Milton may have had the Latin Collect and its verbal oxymoron in mind when he wrote that it is “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”.)

In the Petition, he translates supplecesas “humble servants” while the Latin more strictly means “those who beseech” or  “those who humbly request”; and to the danger from which they ask to be protected, the simple oppugnatio, attack or assault, he adds the enemies (implicit in the Latin), again I think for the sake of rhythm. 

Then, in the Aspiration, he emphasizes confidimusby adding “surely” (with 16^th-century overtones of “safely”, “securely”, “loyally”, “steadfastly”, and “confidently”); and changes the “weapons of any conflict” to “power of any adversaries”, generalizing the first term and particularizing the second. And even though he has shown himself sensitive to rhythm, in this case he does not attempt to copy or represent the Latin’s elegant combination of a cursus tardus(protectióne confídimus) with a cursus velox(árma timeámus). 

On the whole, Cranmer’s meaning follows the Latin; and what I find fascinating is what we ask to be protected against, and why: defend us in, protect us against, assaults, but not so that we may have a quiet life but so that we may not fear. The point of the whole Collect, in other words, is a prayer against fear. And in the light of the Acknowledgement, the removal of fear will in turn facilitate the knowledge of God that gives us eternal life, and His service that confers perfect freedom. As so often in the case of these orationesthe text, as compact and elegant as a sonnet, when suitably parsed gives us the spiritual wealth of an entire homily.

SOMETIMES YOU GET IT WRONG . . .

Partly because I have spent my professional life in the sixteenth century and its language, and partly because I became an Anglican by falling in love with the texts of Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, I have always preferred to read the liturgy there and the Scriptural passages in the 1611 Authorised Version. Until yesterday, that is; when the lectionary proposed reading St Paul's Epistle to the Romans and when, reading it in the AV, I found my eyes glazing over and realised that I understood not three words together of a text that I thought I knew.

So I went to a website I have come to like a great deal: Bible Gateway, where one can look up any passage in the Bible in a vast number of different versions and in a number of languages. I typed in "Romans 1" and was faced with the choice of versions. There are modern translations I genuinely dislike for their chattiness, but I also thought that going to other older versions, like Douai or Geneva, would probably not be a help. For the Epistle to the Romans is a notoriously theoretical and difficult letter of Paul's -- Karl Barth's most famous work is a book-length study of it --, so a modern version was after all indicated.

Then I remembered that when I was a boy my father used to read us a passage of Scripture at Sunday breakfast, and that these often came from a volume called Letters to Young Churches, translated into modern English by J.B. Phillips. So within the list on Bible Gateway I looked for the name, and found the J.B. Phillips Bible. The result you can follow here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+1&version=PHILLIPS .

I started reading, and found I couldn't stop: it was fascinating, intelligent, challenging and wholly engrossing. My eyes glued to the screen, I read all 16 chapters. And at the end, I realised that there are moments when one's love for Renaissance English can be a hindrance rather than a help. A sobering thought, entirely suitable for Lent.

J.B. Phillips

A PROSE LYRIC

Today is the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity by the old and proper Anglican reckoning. It is especial only to those who still, after 468 years, love Thomas Cranmer, not particularly for his personality nor even for his doctrine, but for his unusual literary genius – a talent that showed itself nowhere in his ordinary prose but only in his translations of Latin liturgical texts. These, as a hundred generations knew by birthright but new generations are only slowly rediscovering, are little short of miraculous; and today’s Collect is perhaps the most perfect of them all.

Here is the original version, from the 8^th-century Gelasian Sacramentary:

Largire, quaesumus Domine, fidelibus tuis indulgentiam placátus, et pácem: ut pariter ab omnibus mundentur offensis, et secura tibi ménte desérviant.
Per Dominum... 

What Cranmer found there was a text moving in its meaning: it asks God to give to his faithful the gifts of forgiveness and peace, so that they may equally be shriven of all their offences and serve him in security of spirit. Moreover, the Latin has some elegance in its word-order, and the endings of the two clauses are so ordered that they show the characteristic rhythmic end-patterns known as cursus, in this case a cursus planus (/xx/x) and a cursus velox (/xx/xx) respectively.

The challenge for the translator lay in the form’s compact and condensed beauty. How to render this in English? Cranmer had an ear for the cursus, which has distant relatives in native English prose rhythms, and the collect’s first one suggested to him the use of the very English feature of alliteration. Moreover, he realised that the Latin was so constructed that each of the second clause’s two halves expanded on a term of the first clause, the first on indulgentiam and the second on pacem: this he could also do in his translation. We do not know how many attempts he made, but when he had finished the Collect for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity looked like this:

Grant, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy faithful people pardon and peace: that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

However, the beauty of the form and the ordering of the content is better seen if we print it like this:

Grant, we beseech thee,

merciful Lord,

to thy faithful people

pardon and peace:

that they may be cleansed from all their sins

and serve thee with a quiet mind.

Note how Cranmer begins with a cursus planus, but placed at the beginning of sentence, which Latin never did; and he continues with three other two-stress phrases, the second and fourth ending on a stressed syllable, to give an almost metric stanza (or two Anglo-Saxon half-lines). Then he broadens the pattern to end with two three-stress lines, which expand on “pardon” and “peace” respectively.

It is a jewel of a Collect, as exquisitely patterned as an Elizabethan sonnet. For those not used to examining Cranmer’s Collects in this way, it provides a splendid introduction: almost all of these prayers in the Book of Common Prayer have remarkable qualities of content or form, or both.

SOME INTELLIGENT WISDOM

Faith, Charity, and Hope

This morning, the French Prions en église collection showed, as the collect for today’s Mass, something I recognised. It was a French version of the Collect Anglicans know as Trinity 12, from the Leonine Sacramentary, revised in the Gelasian; of which the original, 1549 Book of Common Prayer version is this:

Almighty and everlasting God, which art always more ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve; Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving unto us that that our prayer dare not presume to ask, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

It’s one I’ve always loved; and the commentary on it in Frederick Barbee and Paul Zahl’s The Collects of Thomas Cranmer is so good I thought I’d reproduce it here:

This Collect is a treasure chest, truly overflowing, of uplifting insights drawn from our religion:

·       God is more ready to hear than we are to pray. We pray too little, too timorously, and too pallidly. We seldom pray for what we really need and while we are unceasingly preoccupied with our perceived needs, we simply pray too seldom! God is a listening ear, waiting for communications which too infrequently arrive. God is the more active dialogue-partner in the “I-Thou” conversation.

·       God wills to give us more than we want and certainly more than we deserve. Can we for one second comprehend that? God does not work on the principle of distributive justice, i.e. “we get what we deserve”. On the one hand, He wants to do more for us, in our impoverished frangibility, than we can conceive. On the other hand, He wants to do good to us rather than judge us according to our deservings. If He gave us what we deserve, who could stand? His grace is neither Aristotelian and distributive, nor quixotic and mercurial. He blesses – with abundance – and does not curse.

·       We ask Him to forgive us the things that weigh on our conscience and cause us to fear to look Him in the eye. Even what seems to us, humanly speaking, unforgivable, can be forgiven by God. The reach of His mercy is further than our insight at its most layered and Freudian.

·       We ask Him to give us what we cannot even imagine asking Him to give us. Again the Collect presents the overwhelming idea that God is able and desires to give us things that we cannot fathom even suggesting: such as change within an unchanging character fault, love when we have long given up hope of it, opportunity which we have stopped even seeking, and open doors when every door has slammed shut.

ἀγάπη

In the Church of England as it was, today is Quinquagesima Sunday, the last Sunday before Lent, and the Epistle is one everyone knows: 1 Corinthians 13. Everyone knows it; but as I reread it, I was struck all over again by the sheer power of the Authorized Version. I checked my Jerusalem Bible, often the best of the modern translations, but found it flabby and vulgar. So I thought I would put up the 1611 version in all its glory, so that we can all learn from it, reading it aloud: here, for once, the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty do not contradict one another.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. 

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; 

charity envieth not; 

charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,  doth not behave itself unseemly, 

seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;  

rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; 

beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. 

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: 

now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

Here is Cranmer's Collect that goes with it:

O Lord, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth; Send thy Holy Ghost, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee; Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ's sake. Amen. 

And just in case that word "charity" for agapè still bothers us, here is the finest exposition of it I know:

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

                   Guiltie of dust and sinne.

But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack

                   From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

                   If I lack’d any thing.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:

                   Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkinde, ungratefull?  Ah my deare,

                   I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

                   Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame

                   Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?

                   My deare, then I will serve.

You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:

                   So I did sit and eat.* 

Whatever we each do about Lent and its usages, these three passages are as good a preparation for it as I can imagine.



*George Herbert, "Love (III)" from The Temple.