Five words remain in the Roman Canon for us to examine.
Per omnia saecula saeculorum
The priest concludes the Canon’s doxology (the Per ipsum) by saying or intoning aloud, per omnia saecula saeculorum, or “unto ages of ages.” This Latin expression has an impressive biblical pedigree. It appears in various forms nineteen times in the Vulgate translation of the New Testament as a translation of the Greek eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn. In most of these instances, the phrase is followed by the word “Amen,” suggesting that it already had a place in the worship of the early Church even before it was committed to writing by the authors of the New Testament.
The phrase requires some explanation, as it might conjure up an image of God passing through an infinite succession of temporal moments. And yet we know that eternity is not time ad infinitum but rather all of time (past, present, and future) as present in one single and complete “Now.” In the words of Boethius: “The flowing now makes time, the abiding now makes eternity.” For Boethius (and Aquinas), eternity is thus “the simultaneously whole and perfect possession of unending life.” [1] The talk of God living forever and ever or unto endless ages is therefore metaphorical, just like the corporeal descriptions of God in the Old Testament as having an arm or a hand. [2]
The Roman Missal uses the plural “ages of ages” (saecula saeculorum), but some passages in the New Testament (and other Christian prayers) instead have “age of ages” (saeculum saeculorum). According to St. Anselm, both point to God’s eternity but have different connotations: the singular “age of ages” bespeaks an indivisible unit (eternity as a single now?) while “ages of ages” in the plural conures up the notion of an unending immensity. [3] One can see why the latter is used in doxologies, which focus on God’s greatness.
The utterance of per omnia saecula saeculorum breaks a silence that has lasted the entire Canon (the priest’s audible Nobis quoque peccatoribus barely counts as an exception). It is common in apostolic liturgies to end silent prayers in this manner. This device, called an ecphonesis, [4] serves several purposes. First, it reconnects the priest with the congregation. In silent prayer, the priest prays to God one-to-one, as if he had entered into a cloud, “remaining hidden from them.” With the ecphonesis, he reunites “himself with the faithful in prayer,” [5] like Moses come down from the mountain. Second, the ecphonesis alerts the faithful that a new part of the Mass is about to begin. Third, it invites the faithful to affirm the priest’s petitions or activities with a response—in this case, with “The Great Amen.” As Nicholas Gihr writes:
By this majestic and overpowering conclusion, recited aloud or sung, the mystic and solemn silence of the Canon is broken, in order that the people, by answering Amen, may make known their assent to and approval of all that the priest alone with God praying and offering in the holy cloud has performed. [6]
And if the Canon makes present the Sacrifice of the Cross, it is not unreasonable to think of the end of the Canon as the end of Christ’s life on the Cross. We have already seen how the rubrics of the Per ipsum were interpreted as signs of Christ’s death. Similarly, the ecphonesis of per omnia saecula saeculorum was taken to signify Our Lord’s crying out in a loud voice before He gave up the ghost (Matt. 27, 50) while the “Amen” signified the centurion’s declaration “Indeed this was the Son of God” (Matt. 27, 54) as well as the lamentations of the women at the tomb. [7]
The Great Amen
The Great Amen, as we have seen, broadcasts the assent of the faithful to the Sacrifice that has just been made. Dionysius of Alexandria (d. 264-265) lists it as one of the three privileges granted to the laity at Mass, the other two being listening to the Eucharistic Prayer and receiving the sacred food. [8] The privilege was not taken lightly. The practice, at least as old as St. Justin Marty (ca. 150), was once observed with gusto. St. Jerome describes the Christians in Rome shouting the response:
Where else does “Amen” reverberate like thunderclaps in the sky, and where else are the empty shrines of false gods shaken to the core? [9]
The response is simple but powerful. “Amen” is one of the few Hebrew loanwords in Christian life and liturgy. Although it is often translated as “so be it” (as with the French ainsi-soit-il), it is an adverb that means “truly” or “verily.” Erasmus’ expansive definition is:
Asserting in a manner of having believed in and continuing with utter trust to believe in the truthfulness and certainty of what has just been disclosed. [10]
And yet the Church deigns to leave “Amen” untranslated, perhaps for the sake of keeping a connection with the first Jewish converts to the Faith or perhaps out of fear that something might be lost in translation. Jerome cites Origen on the subject:
Owing to the native peculiarity of each language, [loanwords] cannot be expressed in the same way in another country as they have been uttered in their own country, and it is much better to cite them untranslated rather than to enfeeble their force by translation. [11]
What is enfeebled in this case, as Craig Toth writes, may be that sense of “a movingly heartfelt, confidently emphatic confirmation of what had just been prayed.” [12]
In any event, since the Great Amen is “the most important Amen in the entire Mass” [13] as well as “the people’s signature,” [14] we sympathize with those liturgists who advise the laity not to delegate this response to the ministers or the choir alone. It is an honor and a privilege to say to the newly confected Sacrament on the altar “Truly this is the Son of God” in the language of the Gospel’s first recipients.
Michael Foley is the author of Lost in Translation: Meditating on the Orations of the Traditional Roman Rite (Angelico Press, 2023).
Notes
[1] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.10.1.
[2] Ibid., I.10.1.ad 4.
[3] St. Anselm, Proslogion 21.
[4] Adrian Fortescue, The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), 360.
[5] Pius Parsch, The Liturgy of the Mass, trans. Frederic C. Eckhoff (St. Louis, Missouri: Herder, 1940), 255.
[6] Nicholas Gihr, The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: Dogmatically, Liturgically and Ascetically Explained, 6th ed. (St. Louis, Missouri: Herder, 1902), 694.
[7] William Durandus, Rationale Divinorum Officionorum IV.46.21.
[8] Quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History VII.9 (PG 20, 656).
[9] St. Jerome, Commentary on Galatians, trans. Andrew Cain (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 131-32.
[10] Quoted in Craig Toth and Louis Tofari, The Roman Canon: An Interlinear Translation (Romanitas Press, 2023), 232.
[11] Ibid., 232.
[12] Ibid., 232.
[13] John M. Cunningham, O.P., It is Right and Just: Responses of the Roman Missal (Pine Beach, NJ: Newman House Press, 2016), 45.
[14] Josef Jungmann, S.J., The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, vol. 2, trans. Rev. Francis A. Brunner, C. SS. R. (New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1951), 273.
