Lost in Translation #160
After the Per quem haec omnia, the priest concludes the Canon with:
Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso, est tibi Deo Patri omnipotenti, in unitáte Spíritus Sancti, omnis honor et gloria… per omnia saecula sæculórum. ℟. Amen.
Which I translate as:
Through His very self and with His very self and in His very self, all honor and glory belongs to You, God the Father Almighty, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, through all ages of ages. ℟. Amen.
The phrasing of the Per ipsum is inspired by Romans 11, 36:
Quis enim cognovit sensum Domini? aut quis consiliarius ejus fuit?aut quis prior dedit illi, et retribuetur ei?Quoniam ex ipso, et per ipsum, et in ipso sunt omnia: ipsi gloria in saecula. Amen. (Rom. 11, 34-36)
Which the Douay-Rheims translates as:
For who hath known the mind of the Lord? Or who hath been His counsellor?Or who hath first given to Him, and recompense shall be made Him?For of Him, and by Him, and in Him, are all things: to Him be glory for ever. Amen.
In this passage, St. Paul is concluding a theologically dense reflection on salvation history and the cryptic role that Israel plays in it. He ends by stating that since God is the Creator of all (and we cannot say the same about ourselves), we should resign ourselves to the fact that He knows what He is doing even though we cannot fully understand His plan, and that we should glorify him. The triple expression – ;“of Him,” etc. – is primarily in reference to the Father (with a possible Trinitarian echo) and to the beginning, middle, and end of creation. All things have their origin in God; all things continue to exist by virtue of God; and all things have God as their end (the original Greek eis auton or “unto Him” more clearly expresses this idea than the Vulgate’s in ipso).
Although the Per ipsum also has creation in mind (because of the way that it follows the Per quem), it is different in a number of respects, not least of which is that the triple expression is in reference to the Son rather than the Father. We may therefore consider the prayer an example of spiritual eructation; but in this case it is not so much the content that is the object of rumination but a kind of grammar of ascent, a mode of thinking about the transcendent mysteries. [1]
Let us now turn to the different parts of the prayer. (We shall leave the very end and the Minor Elevation for another day.)
Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso
The prayer refers to the Son of God with the demonstrative pronoun ipse rather than is. Whereas the latter simply means “he,” the former is more emphatic and can be translated as “he himself,” “he the very one,” “he in person,” etc. And by making the sign of the cross each time he says ipse with the Host over the Precious Blood (as the rubrics instruct him to do), the priest adds an actual demonstration to a demonstrative word, almost literally pointing to the Person about whom he is speaking.
The prepositions are also telling. For Fr. Pius Parsch, the three expressions are not “mere amplifications but serve to reveal our most intimate relationship with Christ.” “Through” reminds us that He is our Mediator; “with” that He is the Person to whom we must unite as His mystical body; and “in” that we unite with Him “by the living union of grace.” [2] Fr. Jacques Olier has a beautiful reflection on the theme of unity in this prayer. “It is not enough,” he writes,
to pray with Jesus Christ and in His company…. it is necessary actually to be in unity with Jesus Christ, and to act before God in the power and in the grace of His Spirit, which cannot exist in us separately from His love. It is necessary, as Our Lord says, that we should be in Him, as He is in His Father. [3]
While Parsch and Olier think of the prepositions in relation to us, Fr. Nicholas Gihr stays closer to the original meaning of the text and views the prepositions in relation to the Father and the Holy Spirit. The First and Third Divine persons are honored through the Second “inasmuch as the God-man offers Himself on the altar.” The Father and the Holy Spirit also receive all honor and glory along with the Son, and they also receive it in the Son, for “all three Divine Persons by reason of the unity of their essence are eternally in each other, and, consequently, the veneration of one is not to be separated from the veneration of the other two.” [4]
Est tibi Deo Patri…glória
In Latin, there are three ways to indicate possession: a possessive pronoun (“It is His honor”), a genitive of possession (“The honor of God”), and a dative of possession (“To God is the honor”). The first two emphasize the possessor while the third emphasizes the fact of possession. If I say “it is His honor” or if I am speaking about “the honor of God,” I am saying that the honor is God’s and no one else’s. But if I say “To God is the honor,” I am saying that it is His and that He has other things as well.
Another difference between the genitive of possession and the dative of possession is that the former can sometimes indicate mere legal possession while the latter is more robust, implying a more personal relationship with or enjoyment of the thing possessed. Subsequently, it is sometimes called the “sympathetic dative.”
With these considerations in mind, we speculate that the Per ipsum suggests that all honor and glory belong to God the Father in a special way insofar as He has a unique relationship with them, and that He possesses many other things besides.
Pius Parsch views this ending as fraught with eschatology, and given that every Mass is a foretaste of the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, it is difficult to disagree:
This doxology is a presage of a scene that may take place at the end of time….Christ our Lord comes into the presence of His heavenly Father to announce that the work of the redemption has been accomplished: “My Father, the redemption of the human race has been consummated. The breach between Thee and mankind has been closed. Through Me, and with Me, and in Me, is unto Thee, Father, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, all honor and glory”…. It will be one of those magnificent liturgical moments, such as St. John pictures in the Apocalypse ; it will be the closing scene in the drama of salvation. [5]
But there is one problem. As we have seen with the Greater Doxology (the Gloria in excelsis), and as one can see with the Minor Doxology (the Gloria Patri), most doxologies are in the subjunctive mood: that is, they proclaim that glory should be given to God, not assert that glory already belongs to God. The Per ipsum, on the other hand, is in the indicative rather than the subjunctive: All honor and glory belongs to God right now and not just at the end of time. In the words of Fr. Josef Jungmann:
It is not by chance that this encomium… has the indicative form (est) instead of the subjunctive or “wishing” form. Here, where the Church is gathered, right in front of the altar on which the Sacrament reposes, gathered indeed to offer the Body and Blood of Christ in reverence – here God does actually receive all honor and glory. [6]
Perhaps the best way to reconcile these differing viewpoints is to recall the New Testament distinction between chronos (regular, sequential time) and Kairos, the time when God acts. Like all liturgy, the Eucharistic action is a moment not within chronos but Kairos, and as such there is no past or future but only present. In Kairos, the end is not nigh; the end is now.
Notes
[1] “Ascent” is not a typo. Although I am alluding to Newman’s grammar of assent, I am referring to a way of thinking by which we more easily ascend from quotidian realities up to the divine mysteries.
[2] Pius Parsch, The Liturgy of the Mass, trans. Frederic C. Eckhoff (St. Louis, Missouri: Herder, 1940), 254.
[3] Jean-Jacques Olier, The Mystical Meaning of the Ceremonies of the Mass, trans. David J. Critchley (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2024), 108.
[4] Nicholas Gihr, The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: Dogmatically, Liturgically and Ascetically Explained, 5th ed., (St. Louis, Missouri: Herder, 1918), 692.
[5] Parsch, 254.
[6] Josef Jungmann, S.J., The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, vol. 2 (New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1951), 266.
