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.

THE TEARS OF BEAUTY, AND VICE VERSA

SOME THOUGHTS ON BACH’S ST MATTHEW PASSION

I listen to this every year on Good Friday, as do many Dutchmen; when I was 15 my parents took me to hear what at the time was the country’s finest performance, by the Bach Association, with the great Dutch baritone Laurens Bogtman as Christ – a role the associations of which so overwhelmed him that he spent months spiritually preparing himself for the performance. Since then, I have preferred the 1964 Stuttgart version now on the Decca Ovation label, directed by Karl Münchinger, with Elly Ameling (soprano), Marga Höffgen (alto), Fritz Wunderlich (tenor) and Tom Krause (bass), who are all magnificent, but the miracle of this version is Peter Pears as the Evangelist.

This year, following it as always with the German text and a (rather horrid) English translation, I was struck differently by the Christian Friedrich Henrici’s (“Picander”’s) German poetry. When I was young, the pietistic texts of the arias tended to revolt me, but now I understand them better and appreciate them more. Because there are in fact four levels of text, and thus of poetry, in the work: 1) the Evangelist, who recites the narrative; 2) the characters, who act out the drama; 3) the Chorus, who give an emotional but controlled reaction, moving but (because?) restrained; and 4) the “I” of the arias, who gives a distinctly unrestrained emotional reaction. The texts of this group are the ones most controversial and, I notice with amusement, rather bowdlerised in the English translation – not that they are obscene, but they have a quality very similar to the poetry of Crashaw: quite unashamed of what to the sophisticate appears bathos, joining the great cosmic emotions of the Passion to intimate and quotidian imagery. An example: in the alto aria “Können Tränen meiner Wangen”, reacting with total grief to the flagellation and binding of Jesus, the text says, “If my cheeks’ tears cannot accomplish anything, O take my heart as well! But let it also, at the floods, when the wounds gently bleed, be the sacrificial bowl.” Or, in the monumental and moving final chorale, “Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder”, it says “May your grave and tombstone be for the frightened conscience a comfortable pillow and a resting place for the soul: there the eyes fall most pleasantly asleep.” In my old age I find these effusions endearing rather than annoying, as I do Crashaw’s “The Weeper”, for instance.

Some of the choruses, on the other hand, are magnificently moving in their disciplined, economical German. The one that struck me this year was no. 55, “Befiehl du deine Wege”, which I will try and give here bilingually:

Befiehl du deine Wege               Entrust your ways
Und was dein Herze kränkt       And what pains your heart
Der allertreusten Pflege               To the very faithfullest care
Des der den Himmel lenkt;       Of him who directs the Heaven;
Der Wolken, Luft und Winden       He who to clouds, air and winds
Gibt Wege, Lauf und Bahn,       Gives roads, course and direction,
Der wird auch Wege finden       He will surely find ways also
Da dein Fuss gehen kann.       Where your foot can go.

One miraculous little economy German can give that English can’t: “Faithfullest care/Des der den Himmel lenkt” Long live inflected languages. To the care “des” – of him; “der” – who, “den” – the, accusative singular masculine, with “Himmel” heaven, and the verb goes at the end. It clicks together like a beautiful machine.

So – this Good Friday, a little plaudit for the much-maligned Picander (of whom I have not been able to find a likeness), ennobled by the immortal and not nearly always austere Johann Sebastian.

CONTRITION/TRANSLATION

I came upon the traditional Latin text of the Act of Contrition the other day, and found it moving. However, all the translations I saw seemed not to do justice to their model. So, greatly daring, I embarked upon my own, emboldened only by the fact that many years ago I spent a great deal of time on the prose rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer. Now, still greatly daring, I share the result.

Deus meus, 
ex toto corde pænitet me 
omnium meorum peccatorum,
eaque detestor, quia, peccando,
non solum pœnas a te iuste statutas promeritus sum,
sed præsertim quia offendi te, summum bonum, 
ac dignum qui super omnia diligaris.
Ideo firmiter propono,
adiuvante gratia tua,
de cetero me non peccaturum 
peccandique occasiones proximas fugiturum.
Amen.

My God,
with all my heart I regret all my sins,
and I hate them because, in sinning,
not only have I richly deserved
the pains thou hast justly decided
but mainly because I have vexed thee 
supreme good and most worthy 
for me to love above all
Therefore I firmly propose
with the present help of thy grace
henceforth no more to sin
and to flee sin's future occasions.
Amen.