The Gloria in Excelsis (Part Three)

Thomas Cole, The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, 1834

Lost in Translation #101

Last week we examined the opening words of the Gloria in excelsis, “Glory to God in the highest.” Today we examine the second verse, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.

Men of Good Will?

Consulting the original biblical text helps us gain a better understanding of who these men of good will are. Εὐδοκία or eudokia, which the Vulgate renders bona voluntas or “good will,” literally means “favorable thinking” or “being well-pleased.” When, for example, God the Father says of Jesus Christ, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” (Matt 3, 17) He uses the verb eudokeō. The message in Luke 2, 14, then, is that on earth there will be peace for the men with whom God is well pleased, the men of whom He thinks favorably. There is also a nice word play in the Greek that cannot be translated. The verse begins with “Glory (doxa) to God in the highest” and ends with “men of good will (eudokias), with doxa and eudokia being etymologically connected.

Perhaps because they were not familiar with the original Greek, several Latin commentators interpret “good will” as a reference to the men’s character rather than God’s favoritism towards them. St. Bede, reading the verse in its immediate Nativity context, concludes that men of good will are those who receive the newborn Jesus as the Christ. Thinking more generally, St. Augustine writes that men of good will possess a divine justice by which the devil has been conquered. Having a good will involves at least two things: “to will well, and to be able to do what one wills,” and “to be purged from vices”. [1] Augustine also combines this verse with Matthew 12, 50:

“Whoever has done the will of God (voluntas Dei), He is my brother and mother and sister.” And therefore, at least among those who do the will of God, the will of God is done: not because they cause God to will but because they do what He wants, that is, according to His will. [2]

In a sense, the misunderstanding does not matter. As the Venerable Bede notes, “there is no peace to the ungodly,” (Isa. 57, 20) but “much peace to them that love the name of God.” (Ps. 118, 165). God is well pleased with those who love Him, and insofar as they love Him, their wills are good. And to these men with whom God is well pleased He gives peace, even though, paradoxically, their ability to love Him, which makes God well pleased, is itself a gift of God. Just as God gives a peace that the world cannot give, (John 14, 27) He infuses us with a love that our wills cannot produce.

In 2018, the meaning of this verse came into dispute when the Italian bishops changed their older translation of the Greater Doxology from “pace in terra agli uomini di buona volontà – peace on earth to men of good will” to “pace in terra agli uomini, amati dal Signore – peace on earth to men, loved by the Lord.”

As our brief survey of the Greek suggests, the new translation is in some ways an improvement, since “loved by the Lord” captures the sense of the Lord being well pleased. But the translation is nevertheless misleading, for it gives the impression that all men are loved by the Lord and that all men are therefore to be given peace. It is true that the Lord loves all men, but it is not true that the Lord gives peace to all men: just ask the souls writhing in Hell. “There is no peace for the ungodly,” Isaiah reminds us. The sounder interpretation of the verse, then, is that peace will only go to some men, the men with whom God is well pleased. Writing for this journal, Gregory DiPippo concludes:

To speak of “men of good will” implies that there are men who are not of good will, one of the most basic facts about human existence, and one which the Church has for over half a century wasted enormous time and effort on denying. The new reading permits the insertion of a comma, turning the phrase “loved by the Lord” into a non-restrictive adjectival phrase, (“men, who are loved by the Lord”), in a way that cannot be done by translating the actual text.

Men of Good Will?

The second controversy surrounding this verse is the use of so-called gender inclusive language. The English translation of the 1965 and 1970 Roman Missals translate hominibus bonae voluntatis as “men of good will” while the 2011 English translation has “people of good will.” Both the Greek anthropoi and the Latin homines designate human persons, male and female. Historically, the English language has used only one one-word term for this referent: “man,” as in “mankind.” But since “man” can also refer to a male human being, twentieth-century feminists contended that the use of “man” for homo or anthropos is sexist, a denial of a woman’s full humanity.

Rev. Paul Mankowski, S.J.

Fr. Paul Mankowski, God rest his soul, wrote powerfully against any concession to the ideological manipulation of language, and persuasively argued that the distinction between gender-inclusive and gender-exclusive words makes no sense linguistically; he was joined in this opinion by such doyens of English as E. B. White, editor of Strunk and White’s famous Elements of Style. [3] I agree with Fr. Mankowski, and his insights are especially prescient in an age where pronouns are now being divorced from reality and put in the service of an often capricious self-identification. I also maintain that “outdated” language in liturgy is good insofar as it contributes to its sacrality, such as the use of “deign” and “vouchsafe” or “Thou.”

On the other hand, if the point of translating is to make concepts intelligible in one’s own language, and if the majority of people in that language no longer think that this word means A but B, then liturgical translators are faced with a genuine dilemma. It is one thing to compromise theological meaning, as I believe the use of “brothers and sisters” for fratres does (more on this in a later essay); it is also problematic to violate the rules of grammar or of eloquent usage, as with the substitution of “their” or “his/her” for the more proper pronoun “his.” But when neither orthodoxy nor grammar nor sonority is at stake but the basic meaning is, I wonder what the right path is.

That said, in the case of hominibus bonae voluntatis, I still tend to favor “men of good will” over “people of good will” because “people” can signify a single populace or group, but “men” keeps the focus on the chosen individuals with whom God is well-pleased. “Persons of good will” sounds too clunky and abstract, and “men and women of good will” is, despite recent ideological disputes, still semantically redundant. Perhaps the best course of action would have been for the USCCB to have left things alone in 2011. Of course, ironically, in order to see the goodness of the older translation, one must approach it with a good will of one’s own, one in line with the Catholic wisdom tradition and a spirit of benevolent interpretation rather than with an ideologically-driven hermeneutics of suspicion.

Notes

[1] On the Trinity 13.13.17.

[2] On the Sermon on the Mount, II.6.21.

[3] See “Voices of Wrath: When Words Become Weapons,” in Jesuit at Large: Essays and Reviews by Paul V. Mankowski, S.J., ed. George Weigel (Ignatius Press, 2021), 42-49. See also E. B. White, who rejected the idea of gender-neutral writing in the fourth and final edition of Elements of Style. “The use of he as a pronoun for nouns embracing both genders is a simple, practical convention rooted in the beginnings of the English language,” he wrote in 1979. “He has lost all suggestion of maleness in these circumstances.” After White’s death, however, the following line was added. “Currently, however, many writers find the use of the generic he or his to rename indefinite antecedents limiting or offensive.” The Wall Street Journal characterizes the posthumous insertion as “an assassin slipping a stiletto into someone's back." (David Gelernter, “Back to Basics, Please,” October 14, 2005, W.13)

The Legend of St James the Greater

In the Synoptic Gospels, St James the Greater appears as a particularly prominent figure among the Twelve Apostles. When the names of the Twelve are given as a group, he always appears in the first set of four, along with the brothers Peter and Andrew, and his own brother John. After his calling, which is described at the beginning of Our Lord’s public ministry in all three Synoptics, he appears with Peter and John as a witness of several notable events: the healing of Jairus’ daughter, the Transfiguration, when Christ first revealed His divinity to his Apostles, and the Agony in the Garden. The Gospel of St Mark (3, 13-19) tells us that Christ gave to James and John the nickname “Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder”; this transcription of the Hebrew “b’nê regesh” may be intended to suggest something like “boan ergon” in Greek, “the work of shouting.” St Luke writes (9, 53-56) that when the Samaritans did not receive Christ, “James and John … said: ‘Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them?’ And turning, He rebuked them, saying, ‘You know not of what spirit you are. The Son of man came not to destroy souls, but to save.’ ” (The words in italics are missing in many ancient manuscripts.)

The Transfiguration, by Duccio di Buoninsegna, one of the panels of the dismembered altarpiece of Siena Cathedral known as the Maestà, 1311; this one is now located in the National Gallery in London. (Public domain image from Wikipedia.)

In the Gospel of St Matthew 20, 20-23, it is recounted that their mother, Salome, came to the Lord, “adoring and asking something of him. Who said to her: ‘What wilt thou?’ She saith to him: ‘Say that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on thy left, in thy kingdom.’ And Jesus answering, said, ‘You know not what you ask. Can you drink the chalice that I shall drink?’ They say to him. ‘We can.’ He saith to them, ‘My chalice indeed you shall drink; but to sit on my right or left hand, is not mine to give to you, but to them for whom it is prepared by my Father.’ ” This is the Gospel of St James’ feast, and also that of his brother John’s feast “at the Latin Gate”, which commemorates his martyrdom, in fulfillment of the Lord’s prophecy that “My chalice indeed you (plural) shall drink.”

In the Acts, James is named once again with the other Apostles right after the Ascension (1, 13), but then only once more, at the beginning of chapter 12. “And at the same time, Herod the king stretched forth his hands, to afflict some of the church. And he killed James, the brother of John, with the sword. And seeing that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to take up Peter also.” Concerning his martyrdom, the first among the Twelve, Eusebius of Caesarea records that “Clement (of Alexandria), in the seventh book of his Hypotyposes (a work which is now lost), relates a story which is worthy of mention; telling it as he received it from those who had lived before him. He says that the one who led James to the judgment-seat, when he saw him bearing his testimony, was moved, and confessed that he was himself also a Christian. They were both therefore, he says, led away together; and on the way, he begged James to forgive him. And he, after considering a little, said ‘Peace be with you,’ and kissed him. And thus they were both beheaded at the same time.” (Church History 2, 9)

A 15th century reliquary of St James the Apostle in the cathedral of Pistoia, Italy, which also contains relics of his mother, Maria Salome, as well as St Martin of Tours, and two early local martyrs, priests named Rufinus and Felix.

The tradition that St James went to Spain and began the work of evangelizing that country is a fairly late one; it was unknown to writers of the early centuries, and even explicitly denied by St Julian, the archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain in the later 7th century. The Golden Legend of Bl. James of Voragine devotes very little space to it, saying merely that “he went to Spain, to sow the word of God there. But when he saw that he was making no progress there, and had made only nine disciples, he left two of them there to preach, and taking the other seven with him, returned to Judaea.” These are traditionally known as the “Seven Apostolic Men”, Saints Torquatus, Ctesiphon, Secundus, Indaletius, Caecilius, Hesychius and Euphrasius; the Tridentine Martyrology has an entry for them on May 15th, which states that the Apostles ordained them as bishops and sent them back to Spain, where they preached the Gospel in various places. The Golden Legend goes on to give a lengthy account of St James’ martyrdom, which includes the conversion of a magician named Hermogenes; at the end, a story is told of how his relics were translated to Spain, one which does much to enhance the author’s reputation for excessive credulity.

Lest it seem that too much credulity is given here to the hagiographical skeptics, even the pre-Tridentine Roman Breviary shows great reserve about these traditions, giving no space to any part of the legend of St James, not even the very ancient story recorded in Eusebius. All nine of the Matins lessons for the feast are taken from a homily of St John Chrysostom on the day’s Gospel, in which he says much in praise of Salome as one who followed Christ, and was principally concerned with the eternal salvation of her sons. In the Tridentine Breviary, a new set of readings was composed for the second nocturne, which sum up the traditional story as described above. It also notes that James’ death took place around the time of the Jewish Passover, but that his feast day is kept on the day of the translation of his relics to the famous cathedral at Compostela.

The church of Rome was always very slow to accept new liturgical texts; one often finds that a Saint who was hugely popular in the Middle Ages had a proper Office elsewhere, but was celebrated in the Roman Use with a Common Office. Such is the case with St James. At Compostela itself, an Office was sung with a completely proper set of antiphons, responsories and hymns, which refer to the tradition of his coming to Spain, the presence of his relics, and his frequent aid to the Spanish kings in liberating the peninsula from the Moors during the Reconquista. One of the best of these antiphons was then received by the Dominicans for the Magnificat at First Vespers of his feast, although they did not take on any of the rest of the propers from Compostela.

O lux et decus Hispaniae, sanctissime Jacobe, qui inter Apostolos primatum tenes, primus eorum martyrio laureatus! O singulare praesidium, qui meruisti videre Redemptorem nostrum adhuc mortalem in Deitate transformatum! Exaudi preces servorum tuorum, et intercede pro nostra salute omniumque populorum.

A superb motet by the Spanish composer Ambrosio Cotes (1550-1603), with the first words of the antiphon given above.

O light and glory of Spain, most holy James, who among the Apostles holdest the primacy, the first of them crowned with martyrdom! Our special defense, who merited to see our Redeemer transformed in the Godhead while yet a mortal! Hear the prayers of thy servants, and intercede for our salvation, and of all peoples!

St James is traditionally depicted in the garb of a pilgrim, with a broad hat and a staff, even though he is the destination, and not the traveler. This is not done with other Saints whose tombs or relics were popular pilgrimage centers, indicating perhaps that to the medieval mind, a trip to Compostela was thought of as the pilgrimage par excellence. This may have something to do with its location at almost the westernmost point in continental Europe. Compostela is about 48 miles from a town on the Atlantic called “Fisterra”, which literally means “the end of the land”; pilgrims would often take an extra couple of days to go as far as the ocean itself, beyond which it was believed that there was nothing but more water to the other side of the globe. (Technically, Cabo da Roca in Portugal is 15 minutes of longitude further to the west.)

St James the Greater dressed as a pilgrim, by Ferrer and Arnau Bassa, ca. 1347; from the Diocesan Museum of Barcelona (Courtesy of the Schola Sainte Cécile).

The third element which identifies St James in art is a scallop shell, a custom which ultimately derives from the medieval laws collectively known as the Peace of God. These laws prohibited armed men from bothering various classes of people, including all women and children, clerics and monks, pilgrims, merchants and Jews. Women and children are obviously such, clerics and monks were identified by their tonsure; the other groups habitually wore something to identify them as members of one of the classes entitled to the protection of the Peace of God. For pilgrims, the hat and staff were not at first sufficiently distinct to serve that purpose, and so they would wear something else to indicate their destination. The scallop shell showed that one was traveling as a pilgrim to or from the shrine of St James, along the Galician coast where scallops grow in abundance. This became so well know that even today, the German word for “scallop” is either “Jakobsmuschel – James’ mussel” or “Pilgermuschel – a pilgrim mussel.”

The Chicago Eucharistic Congress of 1926

Since a Eucharistic Congress just concluded in Indianapolis, and was by all accounts very successful, our readers might be interested to see these two newsreels from a similar congress held in Chicago in 1926, so long ago that moving pictures still did no have sound! From the always interesting archives of British Pathé.

And here is a photograph of the first general meeting, at which a Solemn Pontifical Mass was celebrated by His Eminence Giovanni Cardinal Bonzano, the papal delegate to the conference. (From 1912-22, he had been the Apostolic Delegate to the United States, the office which is now that of the nuncio; he passed away about a year later.) The Mass was sung by 60,000 parochial school children at Soldiers’ Field in Chicago on June 21, 1926.

The Basilica of St Apollinaris in Classe

Today is the feast of St Apollinaris, bishop and martyr. The traditional story of his life states that he accompanied St Peter from Antioch to Rome, was appointed by him to be the first bishop of Ravenna, a small city of the northern Italian region now called the Emilia-Romagna; after various persecutions and exiles, he was martyred in the reign of the Emperor Vespasian, ca. 79 AD. This story is not regarded as historically reliable, and his feast was removed from the general calendar in 1969; in the most recent revision of the Missal, however, he was put back, but on July 20th, since his traditional feast day is now occupied by St Bridget of Sweden, who died on this day in 1373.

In the late 5th century, Ravenna was the capital of the Ostrogothic Kings, after they had definitively overthrown the Roman Emperor of the West in 476. It was subsequently retaken by the Eastern Roman Empire, and became the seat of the Byzantine governor of Italy, known as the Exarch of Ravenna, until the mid-8th century. Several Christian monuments survive from this period, including two churches dedicated to St Apollinaris. The older of these is not in Ravenna itself, but the nearby city of Classe, an important commercial and military port; in antiquity, Classe was directly on the sea, but due to the silting-up of the Adriatic coast, it is now more than 5½ miles inland.

The façade and bell-tower.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Gerd Eichmann, CC BY-SA 4.0

The apsidal mosaic of the church is one of the best preserved examples of early Byzantine work in Italy, dating to the mid-6th century. St Apollinaris is represented in the lower middle, wearing a stole and with his hands raised in prayer. At the very top, Christ Himself is shown, as He is in many early Christian images, with six sheep to either side of Him, emerging from the holy cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. These represent the twelve Apostles, of course, and the representation of Apollinaris in similar company is probably intended to remind the viewer of his close connection to the Apostolic era, and therefore also of the antiquity of the see of Ravenna. (Click to enlarge.)

Image from Wikimedia Commons by José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro; CC BY-SA 4.0

The face of Christ is placed at the center of the Cross, with Moses and Elijah to either side; the three sheep (two to the right, one to the left) represent the Apostles Peter, James and John. This is therefore a symbolic representation of the Transfiguration, the moment at which Christ revealed His Divinity to His Apostles for the first time, foreshadowing the glory of His Resurrection, which can only come through the suffering of the Cross.

Image from Wikimedia Commons by Pequod 76, CC BY-SA 3.0

A closer view of St Apollinaris.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

Learn the Geometry of Cosmatesque Ornaments - Free Online Introductory Lessons from a Teacher Living in Rome

Here is a free resource provided by Magdalena Ganestam, to learn how to draw geometric patterns in the classic style of Roman pavement mosaics known as Cosmatesque. Magdalena was born in Warsaw, Poland, and at the age of 12 moved to England; she now lives in Rome and is basing her designs on those she sees around her on the floors of churches in her adoptive city. Magdalena studied sacred geometry as the main focus of her M.A. at the King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts in London. To learn more about these classes, go to her website, magdalenaganestam.com, or to her Instagram page, @magdalenaganestam.

I encourage people to take a look at this. It is a rare chance to learn this art rigorously at no cost. Magdalena is hoping to develop a following and start charging for tutorials and classes for advanced study. I would like to see her able to do this. 

Cosmatesque floor in Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome. Image by Manfred Heyde via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Cosmatesque decoration is an Italian tradition of opus sectile - cut work - in which pieces of colored marble are cut to shape and pieced together. It is similar to but distinct from what is traditionally called mosaic, which use many even-sized coloured pieces of glass or ceramic called tesserae to construct images and patterns. It is named for the Cosmati family which, over three generations in Rome, established the tradition in the 14th century, and the vast majority of these designs are in Rome and the surrounding area. You can read more about Cosmatesque decoration here. Below: the design work in process.

Mary Magdalene, Expelled Demons, and the Empty Room

One of El Greco's many paintings of the Magdalene

On this feastday of St. Mary Magdalene, we might reflect on a curious detail recorded about her. In St. Luke’s Gospel, we read: “Soon afterward he went on through cities and villages, preaching and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. And the twelve were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means” (Lk 8:1-3).

In St. Mark's Gospel, the same fact is mentioned, but this time in the narrative of the resurrection: “Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons” (Mk 16:9).

As I reflected on these passages, another saying of the Lord Jesus came to mind: “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he passes through waterless places seeking rest, but he finds none. Then he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first. So shall it be also with this evil generation” (Mt 12:43-45; cf. Lk 11:24-26).

Mary Magdalene was a woman with problems, seven demons to be exact, but when she met the Lord and received His mercy, she was transformed—by being rid of her demons and filled instead with the love of Christ, filled as with a banquet. She went from being surfeited with evils to being nourished by the good.

The problem with the unnamed man in the other passage is that the moment he was free to take charge of his own affairs, he did not fill himself with God, but rationalistically cleaned out (one might even say sanitized) his inner chamber, which was characterized not by the order of charity but by mere orderliness. His condition was an irresistible invitation for seven more demons to come in and take advantage of precisely that swept and orderly emptiness.

The one who let her soul be overtaken, seized, and filled with Jesus threw off the demonic powers and received a first glimpse of the glory of His resurrection; the one who opted for function over beauty, freedom of possibility over the bond of commitment, reason’s order over God’s ecstasy, this one suffered corruption, won hellish company, saw no resurrection to life.

There is only one choice facing man: to be filled with God or to be full of demons (not by possession, which is rather rare, but by their influence and by one's surrender to any of the seven deadly sins). Contrary to the lie espoused by modernity, neutrality is not possible: either we are tending towards God by faith, animated by love, or we are moving away from God by unbelief or a lifeless faith.

We are either Magdalene, the sinner called and converted, or the evil generation, called and callous. The seven demons most characteristic of modernity—nominalism, rationalism, naturalism, liberalism, relativism, atheism, nihilism—are gathered and led by the unclean spirit par excellence, exaltation of self, Lucifer’s sin. Self-exaltation is the spirit most inimical to the spirit of Christ, the spirit of Christian discipleship, and the spirit of the liturgy, where the saying of St. John the Baptist rings true: “He must increase and I must decrease.”

Divine worship is the believer’s self-giving Amen to God’s primacy, ultimacy, desirability as the One who fills all in all. The believer who adores says, with body and soul, what the Psalmist says (and as St. Mary Magdalene could well have prayed):

          O God, you are my God, for you I long;
          for you my soul is thirsting.
          My body pines for you
          like a dry, weary land without water.
          So I gaze on you in the sanctuary
          to see your strength and your glory.
          For your love is better than life,
          my lips will speak your praise.
          So I will bless you all my life,
          in your name I will lift up my hands.
          My soul shall be filled as with a banquet,
          my mouth shall praise you with joy.
                                       (Psalm 62)

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s Substack “Tradition & Sanity”; personal site; composer site; publishing house Os Justi Press and YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify pages.

St John XXIII on St Lawrence of Brindisi

Today is the feast of St Lawrence of Brindisi, who was born on the feast of St Mary Magdalene in 1559, and died on the same day at the age of sixty in 1619. Although his family was Venetian, he was born in the major port city of Brindisi, then in the Kingdom of Naples, far down Italy’s Adriatic coast. After entering the Capuchins at the age of 16, he studied at the University of Padua, then the major university of the Venetian Republic, and showed a remarkable facility for languages, learning several modern ones in addition to the languages of the Bible. He was instrumental in establishing the Capuchin Order, then still a fairly new branch of the Franciscans, in Germany as a bulwark against the further spread of Protestantism, but also in rallying the German princes against the Ottoman Turks. He was chaplain to the army, which he helped to organize, stirred to attack with a rousing address, and led in battle armed only with a crucifix in his hand.

Despite these and many other activities, including a period as the head of his Order, and despite the extreme austerity of Capuchin life and the full round of liturgical and devotional prayer, St Lawrence also found time to write hundreds of sermons, almost all in Latin, covering a very wide variety of topics, as well as a commentary on Genesis and some writings against Lutheranism. As is noted in the revised Butler’s Lives of the Saints, when these writings were examined during his canonization process, it was said that “Indeed, he is fit to be included among the holy doctors of the Church.” This honor was bestowed upon him by Pope St John XXIII in 1959, the fourth centennial year of his birth, making him the 30th Doctor of the Church.

Here are a few interesting excerpts from the Apostolic letter Celsitudo ex humilitate, promulgated by Pope St John March 19th of that year, the feast of St Joseph, in which he expounds some of the reasons for making St Lawrence a Doctor. (Image courtesy of Toma Blizanac, via his blog, from the Monte dei Capuccini church in Turin, Italy.)

Oh, the inestimable affection of the love of Christ, Who never has never allowed Himself to be lacking to the Church, His Bride, and finds present remedies for the evils that are hurled against her. When the insane daring of the innovators rose up, and the Catholic name was attacked by hostile assaults, when the Faith was languishing in many places among the Christian people, and morals were in steep decline, He raised up Lawrence to defend what was under attack, to avenge what had been destroyed, and to promote that which was conducive to the salvation of all. And since wicked plagues are again being introduced, and men are being ensnared by the inventions of false beliefs and other corruptions, it is useful that this many be placed in a brighter light, so that the Christian faithful may be confirmed towards what is right by the glory of his virtues, and nourished by the precepts of his salutary teaching. Therefore, just as Rome boasts of Lawrence, Christ’s unconquered champion, who by the most dire torments which he suffered, increased the strength of the Church as She was rent by persecution, so Brindisi is held in honor for begetting another Lawrence, who strengthened Her by his zeal for religion and the abundance of his talents as she was afflicted by evil from within and from without. …

In this noble and excellent two things are especially outstanding: his apostolic zeal, and his mastery of doctrine. He taught with his word, he instructed with his pen, he fought with both. Not deeming it enough to withdraw into himself, and dedicate himself to prayer and study in the refuge of his monastery, and occupy himself only with domestic matters, he leaped forth as if he could not contain the force of his spirit, wounded with the love of Christ and his brothers. Speaking from many pulpits about Christian dogma, about morals, the divine writings, and the virtues of the denizens of heaven, he spurred Catholics on to devotion, and moved those who had been swallowed up by the filth of their sins to wash away their crimes, and undertake the emendation of their lives. … outside the sacred precincts, when preaching to those who those who lacked the true religion, he defended it wisely and fearlessly; in meetings with Jews and heretics, he stood as the standard-bearer of the Roman church, and persuaded many to renounce and foreswear the opinions of false teaching. …

In the three volumes called “A Sketch of Lutheranism” (Lutheranismi hypotyposis), this defender of the Catholic law, mighty in his great learning, seeks to disabuse the people of the errors which the heretical teachers had spread. Therefore, those who treat of the sacred disciples, and especially those who seek to expound and defend the catholic faith, have in him the means to nourish their minds, to instruct themselves for the defense and persuasion of the truth, and to prepare themselves to work for the salvation of others. If they follow this author who eradicate errors, who made clear what was obscure or doubtful, they may know they walk upon a sure path. (Pope St John continues, in the traditional manner of such documents, with a lengthy list of the praises other Popes before him have heaped upon St Lawrence.)

The Prophet Elijah, Epic Hero of the Old Testament, Part One

July 20th in the Byzantine rite is the feast of the Holy and Glorious Prophet Elijah, a man whose singularly exalted status in salvation history suggests that his life deserves more attention than it receives. In my experience, eastern Christianity has been more faithful than western Christianity in celebrating the monumental figures of the Old Testament—men and women whose actions and interior lives emerge not from the records of mere mortals but from the Holy Bible, wellspring of divine Wisdom and the world’s greatest work of literature.

Elijah rebuked a king, brought down “the fire of the Lord” upon Mount Carmel with his prayers, vanquished four hundred and fifty pagan prophets, brought abundance to a desolate widow, raised the widow’s son from the dead, received nourishment from the hand of an angel, conversed with the Almighty on Mount Horeb, divided the Jordan River, and ascended to heaven in a flaming chariot. This is a life that has been studied and contemplated for millennia. This is a story that ignites and ennobles the imagination, and will until the end of time. This is a man who demonstrates to every nation and every age that Christianity is, or at least should be, a religion of heroes.

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The interminable doctrinal disputes that began with the Protestant Reformation have turned our attention away from the literary qualities of the Bible. Indeed, one of the delights of being Catholic is the freedom to savor the Bible as a work of art, without fretting over how exactly its poetic, narrative, and epistolary texts should be translated into dogmas. Mother Church has done this work for us—if we humbly accept her magisterial teachings, we ipso facto accept that the Bible cannot contradict them, and then the many obscure passages of Scripture become as so many dark caves and shadowy woodlands where wonders await us if we are willing to explore, and contemplate, and pray.

Elijah and the widow’s son. Early sixteenth century.

Among the Bible’s forgotten literary qualities are genres and poetic forms that enrich the Truth-telling stories which the good God has written for us. John Milton, of Paradise Lost fame, believed that the Bible was superior to the classics as a work of literature. That’s a bold assessment coming from a Renaissance humanist, and also a compelling one given that Milton was a prodigiously intelligent scholar and classicist.

The epic, defined as “a long narrative poem of heroic action,” is arguably the most influential literary genre in history. The three most famous examples in Western culture are the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, but we could also mention the Divine Comedy, Beowulf, Hesiod’s Theogony, the Song of Roland, and even humanity’s oldest surviving work of written literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is only natural that we would find epic in Holy Scripture as well. Milton interpreted the Book of Job, which was written almost entirely in verse, as an epic, and traces of epic are found, for example, in the poetical prose of Genesis, Exodus, and the Gospels.

Elijah awakened by an angel. Fifteenth century.

The epic mode of thought was more instinctual for inhabitants of the pre-modern world. Not only timeless masterpieces like the Aeneid but also countless oral poems, folk tales, and sagas formed minds and hearts in the poetics of heroism, mortality, prophecy, noble adventure, divine intervention, sacred tradition, majestic language, and communal identity. Modern readers such as ourselves have been raised in and influenced by a very different imaginative and artistic environment, and I don’t think we can fully appreciate and honor the Prophet Elijah without consciously reading his life story as that of an epic hero. I’ll provide some guidance on how to do that in Part Two of this essay.

Addendum: Elias vs. Elijah; or, The Prophet and His English Names

The prophet’s name is a source of much confusion in the English-language biblical tradition. To my great consternation, modern bibles prefer “Elijah,” which has normalized the pronunciation /ɪˈlaɪdʒə/, with the final consonant pronounced like the “j” in “jump” or the “s” in “pleasure.” There is no such sound in the Hebrew name אֵלִיָּה, which if we ignore the initial aleph would resemble “eleeyah.” The consonant in question here is Hebrew yod, which corresponds to English “y” in “you” (and also happens to be a name for the phonetic symbol ⟨j⟩).

During the surge of English-language bible translation in the sixteenth century, “i” and “j” were two different forms of the same letter. We see an example of this in the 1587 Geneva Bible, where the prophet’s name is spelled once as “Elijah” and once as “Eliiah” in the same verse. The more common spelling by far in the Geneva Bible is “Eliiah,” where the second “i” may have had a consonantal value similar to that of modern English “y.” The first edition of the King James Bible also used both “Eliiah” and “Elijah.”

Glenn Bauscher’s translation of the Syriac Bible has “Elyah,” which, though novel, is highly commendable. The most anomalous spelling appears in a nineteenth-century translation of the Septuagint carried out by Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton: he predominantly used “Eliu,” because the Septuagint predominantly used the genitive form Ηλιου (“Eliou”) instead of the nominative form Ηλιας (“Elias”). I don’t like the sound of “Eliu,” but neither am I inclined to argue with anyone whose name includes “Sir Lancelot.”

The spelling “Elias” appears in the Coverdale Bible (1535), the Bishops’ Bible (1568), and the Douay-Rheims (1609). The prophet’s Hebrew name ends in the letter hei, equivalent to English “h”; the “-s” ending is a Greco-Roman phenomenon: Greek pronunciation didn’t allow for an “h” sound at the end of a word, and translators of the Septuagint replaced the “-ah” in names such as “Elijah,” “Isaiah,” and “Jeremiah” with “-as.” This was carried over into the Vulgate and thence to some English versions of the Bible.

Fortescue’s Major Work on Eastern Orthodoxy Republished in a New Edition

As booklovers know from repeated experience, acquiring a long out-of-print classic can be a chore. Old copies, if they are not prohibitively expensive, are often beaten up and malodorous; and newer “reprint” companies seem to take no pains either with their facsimiles or with their OCR’d products.

I was therefore delighted when Peter Day-Milne, one of the best writers at Adoremus (see his archive of articles here), suggested to me that it was high time to bring out a newly typeset edition of Adrian Fortescue’s superb work The Orthodox Eastern Church. This is now available from Os Justi Press (here) and from every Amazon site in the world (paperback, hardcover, ebook). (Just a word of warning: there are several crummy editions of this work in various forms, so if you want to find the new Os Justi edition in particular, use the above links, visit the OJP site, or search by ISBNs, which you will find below.)

First published in 1907 and revised in 1911, The Orthodox Eastern Church quickly established itself as a classic in the field, thanks to Fr. Fortescue’s masterful grasp of the doctrinal disputes that divide East and West, his narration of the intricate historical factors that played an outsized role, and his identification of attitudes and conditionings that block the reunion of the Churches so ardently desired by all Christians of good will.

At a time when rose-colored portraits of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are flourishing thanks to tribalist internet apologetics, Fortescue—not sparing East or West in his portrait of their disintegration—offers us a more realistic account of what happened. Fortescue’s is not the last word on this topic, by any means; but his analysis remains compelling, and his lively wit gives pleasure to readers. The first hundred pages of the work contain so many testimonies of the Church Fathers to the necessity for union with the bishop of Rome, and the remainder of the work so many illustrations of Eastern misgovernance and error, that any modern-day Roman Catholic tempted to swim the Bosphorus in search of greener fields will quickly be cured of his temptation.

NLM readers in particular will enjoy the author’s erudite (and often quite entertaining) descriptions of Eastern liturgical rites, chants, vestments, implements, and clerical titles.

This newly typeset edition does aesthetic justice to the quality of the content. Peter Day-Milne, in particular, outdid himself by reviewing every line of the page proofs, ensuring that the many words and phrases in Greek were exactly right, and revamping all internal references and the index to ensure accuracy. The ebook, based on the printed edition, reflects this quality as well. All the original illustrations are present, such as these:

 

Here is the table of contents together with a sample page: 

Endorsements of this new edition:

Fr. Aidan Nichols, author of The Latin Clerk (a biography of Fortescue) and Rome and the Eastern Churches:

“Adrian Fortescue brought to the subject of this book not only a wealth of knowledge but an unusual combination of attitudes: waspish wit along with deep religious feeling. The present-day reader will find here colourful vignettes of the churches of the Orthodox world before the massive changes of twentieth-century politics transformed them utterly. But they will also have the benefit of a broad historical panorama, an in-depth encounter with some theological dividing issues, and an account of the liturgical life which—typical of the man—waxes eloquent on such matters as music and vesture. Though there is fun here, there is also deadly seriousness. Fortescue knew the weaknesses, as well as the strengths, of the Latin church of his day. He saw the wisdom of Unionist endeavours, if also, alas, the improbability of their success.”

Erick Ybarra, author of The Papacy: Revisiting the Debate Between Catholics and Orthodox:

“At a time when the powers of this age are working within the bounds of the visible Church to attack her foundations to the core, more and more Catholics are reconsidering their belief in the truth claims of the Catholic Church and are inquiring into Eastern Orthodoxy. Many have taken up the task of investigating Byzantine claims against Catholicism; yet how many have traveled far-distant lands, learned Oriental languages, spent their entire lives studying the Eastern Churches? Fr. Fortescue did just these things, making him a scholar on whom we can rely. For Catholics curiously gazing to the East, Fortescue’s The Orthodox Eastern Church will be a welcome accompaniment.”

Joshua Charles, President of Eternal Christendom:

“The republication of this classic work by a great scholar comes at an auspicious time. As some are allured by the East under the pretext of problems in the West, Fr. Fortescue’s book will provide a learned, joyful, and direct reminder of inconvenient facts. As much as there is to admire among our separated brethren in the East, this book is a reminder of why we embrace the Catholic communion of our shared Fathers, and urge them to return to the same—without prejudice to the liturgy, spirituality, and theological culture that is their legitimate boast.”

If you are looking for an invigorating study of the Eastern Orthodox, this is a book not to be missed.

Adrian Fortescue, Ph.D., D.D. The Orthodox Eastern Church. Based on the third edition from 1911, with a new Publisher's Note. xx + 427 pp. Os Justi Press, 2024. ISBN 978-1-960711-92-2 (paperback); ISBN 978-1-960711-93-9 (hardcover); ISBN 978-1-960711-94-6 (ebook).

The Gloria in excelsis (Part Two)

Govert Flinck, Angels Announcing the Birth of Christ to the Shepherds, 1639

Lost in Translation #100

The Gloria in excelsis was translated from Greek into Latin, possibly by St. Hilary of Poitiers (310 ca. - 367). We are happy to honor this attribution while also entertaining the likelihood of a later redactor.

The first verse of the Gloria is:

Gloria in excelsis Deo,

et in terra pax homínibus bonae voluntátis.

Which I translate as:

Glory to God in the highest places,

And on earth, peace to men of good will.

The verse is taken from Luke 2, 13-14, which according to the Vulgate is:

Et subito facta est cum angelo multitudo militiae caelestis laudantium Deum, et dicentium: Gloria in altissimis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.

Which the Douay-Rheims translates as:

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly army, praising God, and saying: “Glory to God in the highest; and on earth peace to men of good will.”

Word Order and Implied Verb

The first peculiarity is the syntax and the lack of an explicit verb in both the original Greek and in the Latin translation. As one of my teachers used to say, word order in Greek and Latin does not matter--until it does. There is a difference between saying that to God belongs the glory that is in the high places and saying that glory belongs to God, who is in the high places. Most interpretations favor the latter.

And because the verb “to be” in this verse is only implied, we do not know if the statement is in the indicative or subjunctive. Are we singing that all glory is God’s, or that all glory should be given to God? I believe that context supports the latter interpretation, but grammatically both are equally valid.

The Good Place, or the Good Places?

Another peculiarity in the original Greek is the diction. Why did the Evangelist use the plural rather than the singular for God’s location? The Greek ὑψίστοι (hypsistoi) appears in the Nativity narrative of Luke 2, 14, and in the Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem narratives of Matthew 21, 9, Mark 11, 10, and Luke 19, 38.

English translations usually have “Glory to God in the highest,” and they are not wrong, but the Greek (and Latin) are in the plural: “Glory to God in the highest places.” What is the difference? There may not be a logical but a psychological distinction. At least to my mind, the singular suggests a fixed place, and fixed places are more comprehensible and therefore more reassuring. Robert Browning seems to agree in his poem “Pippa’s Song”:

The year’s at the spring,

And day’s at the morn;

Morning’s at seven;

The hill-side’s dew-pearl’d;

The lark’s on the wing;

The snail’s on the thorn;

God’s in His heaven—

All’s right with the world!

Robert Browning

“God’s in His heaven,” and “all’s right with the world.” For Browning, Heaven is a well-bounded place, a center of stability from which God regulates or at least sits atop the world. But the term “highest places” is more amorphous, and perhaps a little more unsettling. In this case, God does not come from a center of stability but from a mysterious, numinous realm—or realms—which are not easily circumscribed. God comes from God knows where; He is the Other who dwells in the nebulous regions of otherhood. We shall return to this topic when we examine the Credo.

High from Above or from Below?

As for the Latin translation, one may wonder about the choice of excelsis rather than altissimis for hypsistois. There is a Vetus Latina manuscript [1] that translates Luke 2, 14 as Gloria in excelsis Deo, and there may be one that translates the verse as Gloria in altissimis Deo. In any event, St. Jerome’s Gospels, which were published twenty years after St. Hilary passed away, has altissimis for hypsistois in Luke 2, 14 and in Matthew 21, 9 (the entrance into Jerusalem), while excelsis is the Vulgate word for the Jerusalem entrance in Mark 11, 10 and Luke 19, 38.

It should be borne in mind that St. Jerome did not translate the Gospels afresh from the original languages, but edited the prevailing Vetus Latina translations, which were uneven in quality and often had multiple variations for any given verse. He often kept divergent terms that he personally would have preferred to regularize. For example, in the Gospel texts that he inherited, “high priest” (ἀρχιερεὺς, archiereus) is rendered princeps sacerdotum in Matthew 26, 62 and Luke 22, 50, summus sacerdos in Mark 14, 53, and pontifex in John 11, 49. Whatever his personal druthers, Jerome let them be.

St Jerome presents the Gospels to Pope St Damasus I

Again logically, there is little difference between altissimi and excelsi, for both are in the plural and both signify height or loftiness. If we can ascribe any divine providence to the appearance of excelsis in the Great Doxology, it might be this. In classical Latin, altissimus literally designates altitude, height, or depth, while excelsus (ex-cello) is etymologically related to excellence. With excelsis, God is not far away in a distant galaxy but in an elevated position of outstanding superiority. It is true that altissimus can also mean noble or elevated, but the word also suggests being “seen from below upwards.” [2] Excelsus, on the other hand, can mean seeing from the perspective of what is above or at least seeing on the same level. The Angelic Hymn, then, begins with a bird’s eye—or rather, an Angel’s eye—viewpoint that looks at God’s glory not from below but from the heights. It thus forms a more striking contrast between the mysterious realms of God and the earth, where dwell the poor, well-intentioned humans that are the subject of the rest of the verse and to whom we will turn next week.

NoteS

[1] The Vetus Latina (also known as the Itala or Old Italic) is the collection of early Latin translations of the Bible, a collection that admitted of numerous manuscript variations. In A.D. 382, Pope Damasus I commissioned St. Jerome to revise the Vetus Latina Gospels.

[2] “Altus, a, um,” under “Alo,” A, Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), p. 95, column B.

Abp Cordileone’s Review of Dr Michael Foley’s Lost in Translation

We are very honored to share this review by His Excellency Salvatore Cordileone, the Archbishop of San Francisco, of our contributor Dr Michael Foley’s book Lost in Translation; the essays which form the largest part of the book were originally published here on NLM. A shorter version of this review was published on Sunday at The Catholic Thing.

Rooted in the conviction that the Sacred Liturgy, as “an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ,” is “the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed” and “the font from which all her power flows,” the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council asserted the supremacy of liturgical prayer in the life of the Church and called for the entire people of God – clergy, religious and laity alike – to form themselves in a spiritual life centered on the Church’s Liturgy. In so doing, they gave voice in authoritative manner to the Liturgical Movement that had been blossoming in the Church for some 100 years, the central aim of that Liturgical Movement being the reawakening of the Christian faithful to a liturgically-centered spiritual life.

Among the contemporary Catholic writers answering this call of Vatican II and the Liturgical Movement, Michael P. Foley has distinguished himself both in a popular key with his best-selling Drinking with the Saints (and related volumes) and in the academic world with his well-researched and learned explorations of “liturgical recapitulation” and of “Ordinary Time” in the Church’s liturgical calendar. Now, however, Foley has produced a hybrid of the popular and the scholarly in Lost in Translation: Meditating on the Orations of the Traditional Roman Rite (Angelico Press, 2023), a work of spiritually rich theological reflection composed in approachable prose.

The purpose of Lost in Translation is at once simple and profound: to meditate fruitfully on the liturgical prayers – principally, the Collect, Secret and Postcommunion – of the classical texts of the Roman Rite by paying careful attention to the various shades of meaning and context in the poetry and rhetoric of the Latin prayers themselves. An expert Latinist as well as a liturgical scholar, Foley demonstrates throughout his work that the meaning of the liturgical prayers can sometimes be “lost in translation” because of the various subtleties and nuances in the original text of the prayers. To help the reader pray the Liturgy, then, Foley provides accurate English translations of the orations, and in so doing, he shows how the prayers of the Roman Liturgy are a sort of “eructation” (literally, a belching!) of the Sacred Scriptures, chewed over diligently by Mother Church, who brings forth her Scriptural treasures in order to form us as her children in her “school of love.”

Lost in Translation begins with a brief and lucid introduction to the essential elements in the composition of the orations of the Roman Rite, with the author providing a kind of roadmap for understanding the content of these prayers of the Roman Church. Armed with this initiation, the reader is equipped with adequate understanding to meditate on the liturgical prayers of the Church year. The rest of Foley’s volume is divided into nine parts, the first seven of which take the reader through the “temporal cycle” of the liturgical year – the commemoration of the mysteries of Christ, renewed in the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, through the seven traditional liturgical seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Pre-Lent, Lent, Easter, and Time after Pentecost. The eighth part of the book includes the major celebrations of what is known as the “sanctoral cycle” of the liturgical year – the various feast days of Our Lord, Our Lady, and the saints, assigned to certain dates and days on the calendar. Finally, the ninth part provides a theological analysis of the structure of the orations themselves, particularly focusing on their “adjuration” or ending. In total, then, Lost in Translation unpacks the theological and spiritual meaning of the orations of 77 distinct liturgical celebrations. Two appendices even provide bonus material, analyzing the sequences sung on the feasts of Easter and Pentecost.

The brilliance of Foley’s achievement is evident in manifold ways throughout his work, even beyond that of which he speaks explicitly. For example, one can read into his writing a certain beautiful coherence with the liturgical teaching of Dom Prosper Guéranger, the founder of the Abbey of Solesmes and the man who, according to Pope St. Paul VI, inaugurated the Liturgical Movement in the life of the Church. Dom Guéranger taught that the liturgical year, as a true school of spiritual growth, was structured in such a way as to bring the Christian through the three ages of the interior life – the purgative, illuminative and unitive. I would like to reflect on that coherence here.

Advent, for Guéranger, is the season of the purgative life, and Foley’s meditations for Advent help us understand how the Christian is always in need of deeper purgation even as he lives the liturgical year fruitfully again and again. Indeed, the often-vexing question of the shape of the liturgical year itself is elucidated brilliantly in Foley’s analysis of the Collects for the First, Second and Fourth Sundays of Advent, all of which ask God to “stir up” His People or His power. Foley notes that the Collect for the Last Sunday after Pentecost also contains this “stir up” petition to God, and Foley takes this as a linguistic cue that the Roman Church intends us to understand that the end and beginning of the liturgical year overlap, especially when one considers that the gospel readings for the last and first Sundays both focus on the Second Coming of the Lord. Thus, these “stir up” Sundays, occurring at the year’s end and beginning, function, in Foley’s words, “as two interlocking clasps that connect the dazzling necklace of the year’s feasts and seasons.” Such an insight provides a satisfying sense of unity and wholeness to the liturgical year itself. It also allows us to see that the circularity of the liturgical year functions more like a spiral, pushing us ever higher towards Heaven. Thus, the purgative life of Advent, renewed each year, is not redundant but “stirs up” in us an ever-greater detachment from affection for sin and the things of this world.

The illuminative life commences, says Dom Guéranger, at the feast of Christmas, and Foley’s analysis of the Collect for the Vigil Mass of Christmas Eve deepens our understanding of this illumination afforded by the Sacred Liturgy. On Christmas Eve, the Roman Church prays in her Collect that “we who now joyfully receive” Jesus “as our Redeemer, may also confidently behold Him coming as our judge.” Here is, as Foley explains by connecting the traditional “three Comings” of Christ for which Advent prepares us, the key to Christmas peace and joy: to be in such a state of union with Christ in His Coming to us by the grace He pours into our souls (the “intermediate” or “middle” Coming, corresponding to the illuminative life) that we will receive His Final Coming at the end of time with the same gladness with which we greet His First Coming in the stable of Bethlehem. Such an interpretation of the liturgical year harmonizes beautifully with Dom Guéranger’s connection of the progress of the liturgical year with the progress of the soul in the spiritual life: the peace of the Christ Child’s illumination of our souls – casting away from us all serious sin, which is what, practically speaking, it means to be in the illuminative way; indeed, it brings us the ability to expect His Last Day with tranquil hearts.

For Dom Guéranger, the seasons of Pre-Lent and Lent are invitations to deeper purgation within the illuminative life of Christ’s mysteries, moving us from the joyful sweetness of Christmas and Epiphany to the awesome glory of Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension. Thus, Foley notes that the Collect for Ash Wednesday (which inaugurates our Lenten fast of forty days) speaks of our Lenten penance as the “solemnities of fasting which should be venerated.” In this way, far from grumpiness over the deprivations that come with a strict diet, the Liturgy forms in us an illuminated love for the precious sobriety of Christ’s Fasting, Passion and Death, to which we are conformed in the commemoration of Christ’s sorrowful mysteries.

Our more deeply purifying conformation to Christ’s mysteries leads us then, according to Dom Guéranger, to the fullest brightness of the illuminative life, with the arrival of Easter Sunday and Ascension Thursday. In harmony with this movement of the liturgical year, Foley notes that the Collect for Easter Sunday forms our hearts to relish that Christ “has conquered death and opened for us the gate of eternity.” Perfecting our paschal joy, the Collect for Ascension Thursday, Foley teaches us, elevates us even now through that gate of eternity, as the Church prays that we the faithful “may ourselves dwell in mind amidst heavenly things.”

Noting that the mysteries of Easter time bring us to the climax of the illuminative life, Dom Guéranger connects the Easter-consummating feast of Pentecost and the Time after Pentecost with the “unitive way” of spiritual progress, and Foley’s meditation on the Collect for the feast of Pentecost highlights the mystery of this unitive life even as it reveals the need for a book like Lost in Translation. Indeed, precious gems can very much get lost in translation if we are not careful to appreciate the Latin of the orations, and our author explains that the “recta sapere” of the Collect for Pentecost can be translated in no fewer than five different ways! Foley rightly privileges the intellectual meaning of sapere, and so renders the phrase as “to understand what is right,” but he explains that the verb can also mean “to taste”, “to savor”, “to resemble”, or “to be well acquainted with the value of.” All of these alternate renderings shed light on the dynamism of the unitive life of the Christian who lives predominantly under the influence of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit: here the Christian experiences a practical connaturality with the Spirit, even in the sense of a kind of tasting and experiencing of the Spirit Himself.

Foley’s linguistic work here, then, unpacks for the reader multiple levels of rich material for meditation, bringing the light and heat of the fire of Pentecost down into the everyday life of the reader in the pursuit of real progress in the spiritual life.

The unitive life enjoyed by the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit during the Time after Pentecost comes to its fruition in the context of the Feast of All Saints on November 1. Foley points out that the Collect for that feast boldly claims that “God…hast given” us the celebration of the whole heavenly court. This insistence on the primary causality of God in the giving of the feast day highlights the divine mode of Christian life in the unitive way, as the soul lives primarily under the direct action of God, according to the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Doubling down on the soul’s rejoicing in the Celestial City, the Heavenward focus of the unitive life in the Time after Pentecost is reinforced also in the Collect for the Last Sunday after Pentecost (always reserved for the last Sunday of the liturgical year), in which the Church states as a matter of fact that, as Foley highlights, God has given her “to rejoice in divine participation,” an apt description of the unitive life. Thus, in Lost in Translation, we witness the achievement of a truly liturgical spirituality.

In addition to providing these (and many more) multi-faceted insights fit for Liturgy- centered personal prayer, Foley’s analysis of the content of the orations of the traditional Roman Missal allows him to provide the reader with an initiation into the spirit of the liturgical year, an endeavor valuable in itself. Foley manages then to capture the joy of liturgical living, even as he provides serious content for the reader’s meditation. In so doing, he continues the legacy of Dom Guéranger, and many others after him, who have re-introduced the Catholic faithful to the transforming power of the Sacred Liturgy. In terms of how the book should be used, Foley’s reflections are versatile in that they provide what could be a ten-minute period of spiritual reading in preparation for Holy Mass or a more extended time of mental prayer centered on the liturgical texts. Beneath the erudite analysis of the Latin, however, what is offered in this work is quite remarkable: the reader, week after week, feast after feast, whether using the text for spiritual reading or mental prayer, will learn to pray with the actual text of the Sacred Liturgy. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council envisioned exactly such a spiritual exercise as the soul of the Catholic spiritual life.