Lost in Translation #169
After the Kiss of Peace, the priest prepares for his Holy Communion with two prayers in the Orations style. Both are “shoots that grew from the still living roots of the abandoned Gallican liturgy,” in Jungmann’s colorful formulation. (vol. 2, 344) The first prayer may be found in the ninth-century Sacramentary of Amiens. It is:
Domine Jesu Christe, Fili Dei vivi, qui ex voluntate Patris, cooperante Spiritu Sancto, per mortem tuam mundum vivificasti: líbera me per hoc sacrosanctum Corpus et Sanguinem tuum ab omnibus iniquitatibus meis et universis malis: et fac me tuis semper inhaerere mandatis, et a te numquam separari permittas: Qui cum eodem Deo Patre et Spiritu Sancto vivis et regnas, Deus, in saecula saeculorum. Amen.
Which I translate as:
O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, Who, according to the will of the Father, with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit, has given life to the world by Thy death; deliver me by this, Thy sacrosanct Body and Blood, from all my iniquities and from all evils; and make me always cleave to Thy commandments, and permit me never to be separated from Thee, Who live and reign with the same God the Father and the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever. Amen.
To quote Nicholas Gihr, “This prayer [is] as solid and comprehensive as it is brief and simple.” (p. 726) The opening address to the Son of God is a marvelous compendium of New Testament theology. Jesus is, as St. Peter confesses, “the Son of the living God,” (Matt. 16, 19) who does the will of His Father (Luke 22, 42), and He does so with the help of the Holy Spirit. Cooperante Spiritu Sancto is a faint echo of a verse about Jesus after He ascended into Heaven:
But [the Apostles] going forth preached everywhere: the Lord working withal (Domino cooperante) and confirming the word with signs that followed. (Mark 16, 20)
Cooperante Spiritu Sancto is an ablative absolute, which in this case involves a present active participle in the ablative case. In English it is common to translate an ablative absolute with a noun, as I do here with “cooperation of the Holy Spirit.” The original Latin, however, is livelier since it leaves open the possibility that the Holy Spirit’s cooperation with the Father and the Son is ongoing. I am not fond of the 2011 ICEL translation “and the work of the Holy Spirit” because it loses this sense of collaboration between all three Divine Persons.
The petition of the prayer is threefold:
First, deliver me from all my iniquities and all evils. The use of libera ties the prayer back to the final petition of the Lord’s Prayer and the Embolism, which is why I believe that it should be translated as “deliver me” rather than ICEL’s “free me.” And the prayer seeks deliverance from all my iniquities as well as all evils in general, that is, the evil persons, things, and events outside of me. It is a comprehensive request.
And the prayer asks for deliverance through Christ’s sacrosanct Body and Blood. Sacrosanctus refers to something that is both sacred (sacer) and holy (sanctus), and the Eucharist is one of the few things that fits within this Venn diagram: as the really present living Christ, the Eucharist is eminently holy; and it also extremely sacred, that is, set apart for divine use and handled with great reverence. And yet Anglophone translators have developed a bad habit of translation only one of these attributes and then putting it into the superlative (which is absent from the Latin). ICEL and several preconciliar hand Missals have: “your most holy Body and Blood” while other preconciliar Missals have “your most sacred Body and Blood.” Referring to Christ’s Body and Blood as sacrosanct, incidentally, also occurs in the prayer Supplies te rogamus.
Second and third, the prayer asks to cleave (inhaerere) to Christ’s commandments and never to be separated from Him. There is a pleasing contrast between cleaving/clinging/sticking and separating. The diction may be an echo of Joshua 22, 5:
Love the Lord your God, and walk in all his ways, and keep all his commandments, and cleave to him (adhaereatisque ei), and serve him with all your heart and with all your soul.And there is something almost spiritually romantic about the image of cleaving, thanks to Genesis 2, 24:
Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh.
The Vulgate uses adhaerere here and elsewhere to translate the Hebrew dabaq or “cleave.” Technically, inhaerere is stronger (“ad-here” is to stick to while “in-here” is to stick into), but they tend to be used interchangeably. In a way, the priest is asking for the same thing to happen to him as is about to happen to Christ. Just as the Eucharist is about to stick to the priest’s flesh (as we will learn from a later prayer) and become one with it, so too does the priest ask to be utterly absorbed into Christ’s commandments and become one with them and with Him. It is a striking statement of self-surrender and communion.
These nuances, in my opinion, are lost in the 2011 ICEL translation:
keep me always faithful to your commandments,and never let me be parted from you.
