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 8th-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...
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.
