Collect of the Week - 26

The Christian Year begins on the first Sunday of Advent.  In the Western
Church, Advent is not only a preparation for Christmas, but a
looking-forward to Christ's second coming on the clouds.  This second coming
is frequently the subject of the readings and is often alluded to in the
prayers.  

This then is the collect for Advent I:

Excita, quaesumus, Domine, potentiam tuam et veni, ut ab imminentibus
peccatorum nostrorum periculis, te mereamur protegente eripi, te liberante
salvari.  
Qui vivis et regnas cum Deo Patre in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, 
per omnia saecula saeculorum.  Amen.

Note that this collect is addressed, not to God the Father, but to the Son,
who is asked to come quickly - as I have said, a recurrent theme of Advent.
Here is my own literal translation:

Stir up, we beseech thee, Lord, thy power and come, that from the imminent
dangers of our sins, we may merit to escape with you protecting us, to be
saved with you freeing us.  Who live and reign with God the Father in the
unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

This is not the BCP translation.  In fact there is no BCP translation, for
the reformers ignored this prayer and made up one of their own:

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and
put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in
which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility;  that in the
last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty to judge both the
quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth
and reigneth with thee and the Holy ghost, now and ever.  Amen.

Why did the reformers not translate the Latin prayer?  There was very little
(from their point of view) wrong with it, and with perhaps the omission of
the word "merit" - they were very much against the idea of human beings
having any merit - it would have expressed their doctrines well enough.  So
why write an entirely new composition?
I think it was their intention, to begin with, to write an entirely new set
of collects for the Christian Year, on rather different principles from the
Latin ones.  This would be the first of the series, and it is, in its own
way, a very fine prayer.  It takes up the ideas and wording of the Epistle
(Romans 13:8 ff):  

" . . . The night is far spent, the day is at hand.  Let us therefore cast
off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light . . ."

What were the new principles?  I think, firstly, a much more direct and
explicit reference to the scripture readings which follow.  The Latin
collects often allude to the readings very briefly, by a single word or
image, which often takes some exegesis to explicate.  Here we see the
reformers quoting two whole sentences from the Epistle, almost word for
word.  Secondly, they aimed for a much more explicit statement of doctrine.
Here they spell out exactly what is going to happen at the second coming:
Christ will come in majesty to judge both the quick [living] and the dead.
Again in the Latin we would expect to see such matters alluded to, but less
explicitly, less directly.

Now I have a good deal of sympathy with the reformers on this issue.  Much
as I love the subtlety of the Latin collects, I am sure that they were often
far over the heads of the people who heard them, and indeed of the priests
who sung them.  There was much to be said for spelling out the doctrine at
greater length and with more obvious reference to the scriptures.  Why then
did they not stick to their plan, but revert to translations of the Latin?

I think they simply ran out of time.  We know that the BCP was produced at
great speed, under pressure.  Collects of this quality are not composed in
five minutes.  Cranmer realised that if they kept to their original plan,
they would not meet their deadline.  And which scholar will not sympathise?
So, after only a few original compostions, they found it necessary to resort
to the Latin collects. 

Let us return now to our Latin collect:

Excita - yes, another "Stir up" Sunday.  Several of the Advent collects do
begin in this way.   Actually, for all I have said, we have here a very
direct quotation from Psalm 79(80):3,

Excita potentiam tuam, et veni, Ut salvos facias nos.

We should be altert by now to the hyperbaton in

te mereamur protegente eripi

a more natural word-order would be, 'te protegente, mereamur eripi';   but
the 'mereamur' is taken as it were into Christ's protection, surrounded by it.

As the collect is addressed to God the Son, we see a slightly different form
of the ending, which is put into the second person rather than the third:
vivis et regnas, rather than vivit et regnat.

Oriens.



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