In today’s collect we prayed: “Almighty and merciful God, of whose only gift it cometh that thy faithful people do unto thee true and laudable service…”
One of the aspects of our lives of faith that constitute this ‘true and laudable service’ is the worship that we offer our Creator. It is very important that we offer this worship in the beauty of holiness. There are obviously ways in which this can be done. Here in this parish we have a distinctive way in which we offer that worship. We are wedded to the use of what is known as hieratic English.
The Book of Common Prayer, to which reference is made in the first Article of the Constitution of our Church, is seen as the expression of the standard of Faith and Doctrine held by our church. The first book was published in 1549, in the reign of Edward VI, and was a product of the English Reformation following the break with Rome. Prayer books, unlike books of prayers, contain the words of structured or liturgical services of worship. The book of 1549 was the first prayer book to contain the forms of service for daily and Sunday worship in English and to do so within a single volume; it included morning prayer, evening prayer, the Litany, and Holy Communion. The book included the other occasional services in full: the orders for baptism, confirmation, marriage, 'prayers to be said with the sick' and a funeral service. It set out in full the Epistle and Gospel lections or readings for the Sunday Communion Service. Set Old Testament and New Testament readings for daily prayer were specified in tabular format as were the set Psalms; and canticles, mostly biblical, that were provided to be sung between the readings.
The 1549 book was rapidly succeeded by a reformed revision in 1552 under the same editorial hand, that of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. It never came into use because, on the death of Edward VI, his half-sister Mary I restored Roman Catholic worship. On her death, a compromise version, largely 1552 with a few amendments from 1549, was published in 1559. Following the events which led to and including the English Civil War, another major revision was published in 1662. That edition has remained the official prayer book of the Church of England. It is that prayer book which is mentioned in our Constitution.
Together with the Authorized version of the Bible and the works of Shakespeare, the Book of Common Prayer has been one of the three fundamental underpinnings of modern English. As it has been in regular use for centuries, many phrases from its services have passed into the English language, either as deliberate quotations or as unconscious borrowings. They are used in non-liturgical ways. For example, many authors have used quotes from the prayer book as titles for their books. Other examples are words or phrases which people use in everyday speech.
Some examples of well-known phrases from the Book of Common Prayer are:
• "Speak now or forever hold your peace" from the marriage liturgy.
• "Till death us do part", from the marriage liturgy.
• "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust" from the funeral service.
• "From all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil" from the litany.
• "Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" from the collect for the second Sunday of Advent, or Bible Sunday.
• "Evil liver" comes from the rubrics for Holy Communion.
• "All sorts and conditions of men" from the Order for Morning Prayer, what we usually know as Matins.
In this province of the church we have our own revision of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which we know as the Book of Common Prayer (South Africa). It was first published in 1954, although the order for Mass was first published in 1929. The BCP (SA) was know as the most catholic of the versions of the BCP, as a result of the influence of the Tractarians, who were the missionaries largely responsible for bringing Anglicanism to this land.
What is this English, used in the BCP, which I have termed ‘hieratic English’? The BCP was a translation, for the most part, of the Latin liturgies of the Church of Rome. Those liturgies were expressed in Latin. The Latin used in the liturgy displays a sacral style – a style which specifically refers to the sacred. The basis and starting point of Liturgical Latin was the Early Christian idiom. This, however, through the use of features of style drawn from the Early Roman religious tradition mingled with biblical stylistic elements, took on a strongly hieratic character, which was widely removed from the everyday Christian colloquial language.
The advocates of the use of modern English in the liturgy, who maintain that even in Christian Antiquity the current speech of everyday life, what they usually call "the Latin of the common man," was employed, are far off the mark. Liturgical Latin is not Classical Latin, but neither is it, as is so often said, the Latin which was considered decadent by educated people.
Christine Morhmann, a scholar on liturgical language, has said that the earliest liturgical Latin was a strongly stylized, more or less artificial language. She added, “This language was far removed from that of everyday life, a fact which was certainly appreciated, since, at the time, people still retained the sens du sacré.” It was this sense of the sacred which drove the style of language used. That is what people are, more and more, crying out for in our own day. The sense of the sacred brings mystery into our lives. We can find ourselves worshipping the God who is, in the words of Rudolf Otto, “Mysterium tremendum et fascinans”. This term directs our thoughts to the fact that God is both a mystery - a tremendous mystery – while also being fascinating – drawing us to himself.
The Liturgy of the Mass, by grace, changes lives. Any priest who is blessed with a number of priestly vocations in his parish knows that they come in spite of worship from which any reference to gender has been stripped, as happens in so many parishes today; in spite of parish liturgy committees which are continually re-inventing the liturgy Sunday by Sunday; and in spite of bands and song leaders whose arms flail around like so many windmills. These vocations simply join the chorus of the Greeks, as found in Scripture: "Sir, we would see Jesus." That is what we are seeking to offer as our true and laudable service.
G.K. Chesterton spoke of Christianity as that which "has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried." That is what I would suggest about liturgical English: it is not something which has been tried and found wanting; it has rather been tried in a way which is wanting. A richer and more satisfying approach to it has perhaps been perceived as "difficult" and accordingly not tried.
We attempt to try that liturgical English. It is our sacred language. In it we meet God in beauty and holiness. It enables our ‘true and laudable service. It enables us to worship.
May God bless you in the days of the week ahead.
