OCTOBER BEAUTY

The jeweller: Thomas Cranmer

On the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, I often put up a praise to that day’s Collect, the most perfect in the whole Book of Common Prayer. The Collects, for those who are not familiar with the term, are the prayers that in Anglican Matins and Evensong come after the Creed and some responses, and conclude the Office; in the current Roman Catholic Mass, they correspond to the prayer that follows the Absolution and introduces the readings. A Collect is a prayer said, usually, by the priest on behalf of the congregation, and from very early days on Collects were highly developed in form. A typical Collect has five sections: Invocation, Acknowledgement, Petition, Aspiration and Pleading. Moreover, the Latin Collects from the early Sacramentaries were very structured in their sentence rhythms and forms; and this was recognised and adopted by Thomas Cranmer, the author of the first Book of Common Prayer and of the Collects that survive from that 1549 text to this day.

Of all the BCP’s marvellous Collects, the finest is that for Trinity 21:

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. Amen.

This is as beautifully crafted as a sonnet. Observe:

Gránt, we beséech thee,

Mérciful Lórd,

To thy fáithful péople

Párdon and péace;

That they may be cléansed from áll their síns

And sérve thee with a qúiet mínd.

First, four two-stress phrases give the Invocation (‘Lord’), the Acknowledgement (‘merciful’), and the Petition (‘grant pardon and peace’). Then each of the two things asked for is elaborated (in the Aspiration) in a three-stress phrase: pardon results in their being cleansed from all their sins, and peace, in their being able to serve God with a quiet mind. Finally, the usual Pleading: per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum, ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ The stress-patterns form perhaps the greatest beauty; but the vocabulary also plays, with the two objects of the petition being alliterative: that and their order relates them and makes it clear that the one must precede the other. There can be no peace without pardon. 

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer – in England still the BCP stipulates that, when Matins or Evensong is said by lay people, this prayer replaces the Absolution; thus recognising its particular power, compact riches, and beauty. We are sometimes told that ‘O Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness’ (Psalm 96:9) should never mentally be inverted to ‘the holiness of beauty’; but it is perhaps not forbidden to suggest that liturgical texts, images, music and rituals of seriously great comeliness are the result of some kind of true blessing or holiness in their creators. Trinity 21 is an annual jewel in the crown of October.

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.