The Prayer Memento and Ipsis, Domine

From a Roman Missal printed in Venice in 1520. 

Lost in Translation #147

After the Supplices te rogamus, the priest prays:

Memento etiam, Dómine, famulórum famularumque tuárum N. et N. qui nos praecessérunt cum signo fídei, et dormiunt in somno pacis.

Ipsis, Dómine, et ómnibus in Christo quiescéntibus, locum refrigerii, lucis et pacis, ut indúlgeas, deprecámur. Per eundem Christum Dóminum nostrum. Amen.

Which I translate as:

Remember also, O Lord, Thy servants and handmaids N. et N., who are gone before us with the sign of Faith and rest in the sleep of peace.

We beg that You indulge these, O Lord, and all who rest in Christ, with a place of refreshment, light, and peace. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

The language mirrors that which is in the standard Catholic prayer for the faithful departed: “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace.” What the Ipsis, Domine in particular adds is the notion of refreshment or refrigerium, a word upon which we dwell in this essay at some length.

The Ipsis, Domine is of special interest to those who are curious about what is lost in translation since one of its expressions was used by the liturgical reformers of the 1960s as a reason to reject literal translations of the sacred liturgy, and to embrace what would come to be called “dynamic equivalence.” On January 25, 1969, the Consilium for Implementing the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy issued “Comme le Prevoit – On the Translation of Liturgical Texts for Celebrations with a Congregation.” The document, which argues that translations should be “suited to the greater number of the faithful who speak it in everyday use, even ‘children and persons of small education’” (15a) (might we dare say “baby talk”?) includes the following clause:

The metaphors must be changed to keep the true sense, as in locum refrigerii in northern regions. (23b)

The authors are referring to the fact that refrigerium literally refers to a “cooling” since it is from the verb refrigero, “to cool off” (hence the name for our modern appliance, the refrigerator). Their assumption is that the idea of a cool space only appeals to people in hot climates, and so the metaphor needs to be changed for colder parts of the globe. [1]

Whether that assumption is valid is debatable. When describing the “small but richly diverse world” of his character Virginia Troy, who lives in the northern regions of England and Scotland, Evelyn Waugh writes approvingly that it “was one of coolness, light and peace”—an obvious allusion to this prayer. [2] A locum refrigerii can also refer not to the temperature of a room but to a place that provides a cool, refreshing drink, which appeals to anyone who has been working outside and develops a hot thirst, even in the coldest of weather (see illustration below).

According to Comme le Prevoit, he should not be enjoying that.

There are four other problems as well with Comme le Prevoit 23b. First, refrigerium does not only mean coolness and therefore does not require a radical reinterpretation based on climate. Second, even if it did, every Apostolic liturgy, in imitation of the Incarnation itself, has some “scandal of particularity.” Third, the particular “scandal” of refrigerium is that it is ideally suited to designate the remedy for the souls in Purgatory. Fourth, a locum refrigerii is not, as the authors of Comme le Prevoit presume, a metaphor at all but another “scandalously” particular allusion.

1. The Christian Meaning of Refrigerium

It is true that refrigerium denotes coolness. In the devilishly godly humor of (Eastern Orthodox believer) Jason Peters, locum refrigerii is code for the kitchen – “whence all sickness, sorrow, and sighing have fled” – in part because it is where “Mr. Freezer” gets to meet “Mr. Martini glass.” [3] Peters even makes full use of the Ipsis, Domine, albeit in a way its pious author(s) never intended:

You ignore [Walker Percy’s essay] on bourbon at your own peril. One thing you’ll miss out on is Uncle Will’s mint julep recipe, to say nothing of Percy on the topic of college girls and nurses, where he’s without rival among the writers of the century he graced and helped make bearable. Ipsis, Domine, et Walker Percy et omnibus in Christo quiescentibus, locum refrigerii, lucis, pacis et bourbon, ut indulgeas, deprecamur. Per eumdem Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen. [4]

But as this citation illustrates, locum refrigerii can also mean a place of refreshment and consolation, and indeed it has had this usage in ecclesiastical Latin since the days of Tertullian. In his Apologeticus, Tertullian even uses the word in the same way as the Ipsis, Dominine, that is, as a description of the Beatific Vision. Christian beliefs about the afterlife, he writes,

make all who believe them better men and women, under the fear of eternal punishment and the hope of eternal refreshment [refrigerium].[5]

The Vulgate translation of the Bible also employs the broader definition of refrigerium:

Thou hast set men over our heads. We have passed through fire and water, and thou hast brought us out into a refreshment [refrigerium]. (Psalm 65, 12)

For they have said, reasoning with themselves, but not right: ‘The time of our life is short and tedious, and in the end of a man there is no remedy [refrigerium], and no man hath been known to have returned from Hell.’ (Wisdom 2, 1)

To whom he said: ‘This is my rest, refresh the weary, and this is my refreshing [refrigerium].’ And they would not hear. (Isaiah 28, 12)

The Lord give mercy to the house of Onesiphorus: because he hath often refreshed [refrigeravit] me, and hath not been ashamed of my chain. (2 Timothy 1, 16)

Curiously, the Consilium that issued Comme le Prevoit seems entirely unaware of the Christian usage of the word, fixating only on its original, pagan meaning. Other Catholics, however, were aware of the word’s deeper meaning. Evelyn Waugh includes a breathtaking description of a skydive in his Sword of Honour trilogy:

Guy jumped. For a second, as the rush of air hit him, he lost consciousness. Then he came to himself, his senses purged of the noise and smell and throb of the machine. The hazy November sun enveloped him in golden light. His solitude was absolute. He experienced rapture, something as near as his earthbound soul could reach to a foretaste of paradise, locum refrigerii, lucis et pacis. The aeroplane seemed as far distant as will, at the moment of death, the spinning earth. As though he had cast the constraining bonds of flesh and muscle and nerve, he found himself floating free… He was a free spirit in an element as fresh as on the day of its creation. [6]

Several (though not all) official translations of the Mass also evince a greater awareness of the Christian meaning of refrigerium. The 2011 English translation has “a place of refreshment, light, and peace,” replacing the earlier translation inspired by Comme le Prevoit: “May these…find in your presence light, happiness, and peace.” [7] The Missal in use in Mexico is similar to the improved 2011 English edition: concédeles el lugar del consuelo, de la luz y de la paz.[8]

2. Scandal of Particularity

A second point to be considered is that Christianity, and Judaism before it, radiates outward from what theologians call the “scandal of the particular.” [9] In the Old Testament, the Lord God chose Abraham and his seed out of all other nations to be His Chosen People. In the New, the eternal Word of God chose to take flesh in the Person of Jesus Christ, the foster son of a carpenter in the “fly over” town of Nazareth at a particular historical epoch, when the Romans had conquered much of the known world.

Apostolic liturgies followed suit, reveling in the cultural context in which they first received the Gospel. In the Byzantine Rite, homage is paid to St. John Chrysostom, the patriarch of their liturgy. In the Armenian Rite, it is St. Gregory the Illuminator. In the Roman Rite, it is the new founders of Christian Rome, Saints Peter and Paul, as one sees in the Confiteor and elsewhere. Apostolic liturgies do not abstract from the particular hands that bequeathed them the universal Gospel (itself a product of particular Revelation) but add them to the narrative, thereby providing a concrete link between our current age and that of the Apostles. As Pope Benedict XVI writes in his memoirs:

It was becoming more and more clear to me that here I was encountering a reality that no one had simply thought up, a reality that no official authority or great individual had created. This mysterious fabric of texts and actions had grown from the faith of the Church over the centuries. It bore the whole weight of history within itself, and yet, at the same time, it was much more than the product of human history. [10]

The traditional Roman Rite bears the whole weight of its Roman history, which is why it contains “metaphors” of coolness coming from a hot climate, and which is why it metaphorically conceives of the North as the realm of heathenism (the Germans!) when it points the celebrant northward to proclaim the Gospel, towards the barbarians on the other side of the Alps. Such particularity is not to be disdained but honored in an incarnational religion.

3. Souls in Purgatory

A third consideration is that the Ipsis, Domine is a prayer for the poor souls in Purgatory, and a petition to grant them a place of refreshment is a suitable remedy for their condition. As Fr. Martin Jugie writes in his classic Purgatory and the Means to Avoid It, the Magisterium has never formally defined Purgatory as a realm of fire, but it is by far the most common way to imagine it. [11] Western Christian art most often depicts Purgatory as such, and so does private revelation. In every vision that Saint Faustina had of Purgatory or of a soul in it, flames were involved. Indeed, Faustina describes Purgatory in her journal as “a misty place full of fire.” And if Purgatory is a misty place full of fire, then the antidote, so to speak, is a lightsome and peaceful place of refreshment. Appropriately, when Salvian of Marseilles (d. 480) discusses the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, when the damned Dives asks for Lazarus to “dip the tip of his finger in water, to cool [his] tongue, for [he is] tormented in this flame,” (Luke 16, 24) he calls it a petition for a “drop of refreshment” (gutta refrigerii). [12]

Souls in the flames of Purgatory, 15th century Missal

4. Not a Metaphor

Finally, the Consilium authors assume that locum refrigerii is a metaphor when in fact it is an allusion to a historic location.

During the Roman persecutions of Christianity, the sacred sites where Saints were martyred or buried and the places where the faithful gathered to celebrate Mass were not one and the same. And when the persecutions ceased, this custom of maintaining separate places continued for a while. At martyrs’ shrines like Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls and Saint Agnes in Rome, there were two buildings: a smaller basilica ad corpus where the bones of the martyr were kept and a larger basilica major or coemeterium, a roofed cemetery where Christians were either interred  in the ground or in mausolea. The basilica major was occasionally used for the celebration of Mass, but its main function was to house funerary banquets. Despite the protests of some Church Fathers like Saints Ambrose and Augustine, these banquets were enormously popular among early Christians. And the name of these banquets? A refrigerium. [13] There is, then, an actual historical locum refrigerii: it is the basilica major or coemeterium. The Ipsis, Domine, then, is essentially praying that the souls of the faithful departed may rest as peacefully as their bodies do in the places where funerary banquets are held, surrounded by joy and confidence.

Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls in the fourth century.

Conclusion

The Consilium’s disregard of the aforementioned considerations calls to mind an additional scriptural verse containing the word we have been tracing:

Thus saith the Lord: ‘Stand ye on the ways, and see and ask for the old paths which is the good way, and walk ye in it, and you shall find refreshment for your souls.’ And they said: ‘We will not walk.’ (Jeremiah 6, 16)

Notes

[1] Some readers may wish to forgive the Northern-Hemisphere bias of this statement, which ignores the cold southernmost regions of the Southern Hemisphere, e.g., Chile, Argentina, Australia, etc.

[2] Evelyn Waugh, Unconditional Surrender (London: Methuen, 1986), 75.

[3] Jason Peters, The Culinary Plagiarist: (Mis)Adventures of a Lusty, Thieving, God-Fearing Gourmand (Eugene, Oregon: Front Porch Republic Books, 2020), 209; see also 203.

[4] Peters, 234.

[5] Apologeticus 49.2. See 39.16, where Tertullian uses the word to describe the post-liturgical agape meal designed to refresh the poor.

[6] Evelyn Waugh, 102.

[7] For the 1985 Missal, see The Roman Missal (New York: Catholic Book Publishing, 1985), p. 547; for the 2011 Missal, see The Roman Missal, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: USCCB Publishing, 2011), p. 642. The French and Italian translations are similar to the 1985 English Missal even though as southern regions they should not have to “change the metaphor”: Qu’ils demeurent dans la joie, lumière et la paix. (Missel Romain, 3rd. ed. [MAME Desclée, 2001], p. 473, no. 95) and la beatitudine, la luce e la pace (Messale Romano, 3rd ed. [Fond.ne di Religione San Francesco d’Assisi E Ca, 2020], p. 627), resp.

[8] Misal Romano (2017), p. 92, no. 95.

[9] See Peter Kwasniewski, The Once and Future Roman Rite, (Gastonia, NC: TAN Books, 2023), p. 228, n. 15.

[10] Joseph Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927–1977, trans. Erasmo Leiva- Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), 20.

[11] Purgatory and the Means to Avoid It (Fortin Collins, Colorado: Roman Catholic Books, 2022),15. Nor has the Church weighed in on whether this fire is to be taken literally or as an ardent pain.

[12] Salvianus Massiliensis, Adversus avaritiam 3.11.

[13] See Kelsey Anne Bell, “The Use of Sacred Space in Hellenistic, Roman, and Christian Religious Sites” (Baylor University Honors Thesis, May 2015), pp. 30-49.