Collect of the Week - 22

This year All Saints' Day takes the place of the Sunday.  Let's look at both
the Sunday and the feast;  and to begin with:

Collect for the 21st Sunday after Trinity:

Largire, quaesumus, Domine, fidelibus tuis indulgentiam placatus et pacem;
ut pariter ab omnibus mundentur offensis, et secura tibi mente deserviant.
Per Dominum . . .

BCP:

Grant, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy faithful people pardon and
peace, that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a
quiet mind;  through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The most obvious change from the Latin is the rendering of 'placatus',
'having been placated [by the death of Christ]' by the bland 'merciful'.
The reason is probably the same as that which in last week's collect
rendered 'propitiatus', with its direct reference to the Atonement, by the
more general 'of thy bountiful goodness.'

The hyperbaton of the Latin brings together an apparent alliterating pair,
'placatus et pacem', drawing a connexion between the propitiation of God and
our peace;  the real pair however is 'indulgentiam et pacem', rendered
happily enough in the English as 'pardon and peace.'

'Largire' is rather more than 'grant'.  Goulburn writes:  

'The Latin word for "grant" is "largire," - "grant largely or bountifully."
God never does things by halves.  He is always a bountiful giver, - "wont to
give more than either we desire or deserve."  [Collect for Trinity 12].
When he feeds a famished multitude with bread and fish, there remain of
fragments twelve baskets full [Matthew 14:20 etc.]  "Open thy mouth wide,"
says He to the petitioner who draws nigh to His throne of grace - bring me a
large void to fill, and a large expectation of its being filled - and I will
fill it."  [Psalm 80(81):10].'

'Indulgentia' is pardon, but not in the straightforward legal sense;  rather
it is 'forbearance, tenderness, fondness, affection, mildness' - the kind of
mildness which a kind father would exhibit to his much-loved, if wayward,
child, rather than the mercy which a judge might exhibit to a malefactor.
So much in this collect depends upon the precise tone of the words.

'Pariter', 'equally, in equal degree,'  is omitted from the BCP translation;
a pity, because it draws a nice equation between being cleansed from our
offences and the ability to serve God with a quiet mind.

'Deservio' is to serve zealously, to be devoted to;  the tone is more
fervent than simply 'serve'.   

'Securus', 'free from care, untroubled, fearless' is another lovely word.
Altogether this collect is marked not so much by rhetorical figures - though
there is the hyperbaton which I have mentioned - but by a careful choice of
words whose tone suggests tenderness, affection, devotion.

Goulburn says of this collect:

'The Collect is indeed a devotional gem;  and beautiful is the echo made in
it to that most gracious invitation in the eleventh Chapter of St Matthew,
with the wording of which we are all so familiar, that its meaning fails to
impress us as it ought;  "Come unto me, all ye that labout and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me,
for I am meek and lowly in heart:  and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."  The passage itself is a
perfect summary of the gospel;  and the prayer before us is a summary of the
passage.  To go to God in Christ's name under a sense of our
constantly-recurring guilt, and to ask for pardon, is to go to Christ.  The
result of going is, that Christ bestows on us the sense of pardon, which
brings peace into the soul.  But these wonderfully comprehensive words
speak, not only of a peace given, but of a peace gained.  There is a rest,
not only in the reception of Christ, but also in the complete submission of
the will to His commands and dispensations - in the taking upon us His "easy
yoke and light burden."  The echo of this second rest, which supervenes upon
obedience, is heard in the last clause of the prayer, "that they may serve
thee with a quiet mind."  The original peace comes of simply going to
Christ, or through Christ to God;  the subsequent peace comes of the devoted
service, which after pardon we yield to Him.'

So now let us look at the Collect for All Saints' Day.  St Ephrem Syrus (d.
373) mentions a feast of All Saints;  St John Chrysostom (d. 407), assigns
it to the Sunday after Pentecost, the day still observed in the eastern
church - in the west, of course, this day is Trinity Sunday.  It was not
established in the west until Boniface IV consecrated the Pantheon in Rome
to Christian use on 13th May, 609 or 610.  Thereafter there was a
celebration of All Saints on 13th May annually.  Gregory III (d. 741)
changed the date to 1st November when he dedicated on that day a chapel in
the Basilica of St Peter to all the Saints.  Gregory IV (d. 844) ordered its
universal observance.

The collect is as follows:

Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui nos omnium Sanctorum merita sub una
tribuisti celebritate venerari;  quaesumus, ut desideratam nobis tuae
propitiationis abundantiam, multiplicatis intercessoribus, largiaris.  Per
Dominum nostrum.

Translation:

Almighty and everlasting God, who hast granted us under one solemnity to
show reverence to the merits of all the Saints;  Pour down upon us, we
beseech thee, at the request of these many intercessors, that abundance of
thy mercy which we so much need and desire.  Through our Lord.

The translation is courtesy of Goulburn.  It is decidedly not the collect in
the BCP, for the reformers took exception to the mention of the merits and
intercession of the saints, and composed an entirely new collect, which,
while being a fine prayer in its own right, is of no use whatever in
interpreting our Latin collect.

And our collect does very definitely promote the idea of the saints as
interceding for us.  An introduction to the subject can be found
conveniently in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church [by the way,
there is now a Third Edition of this useful tome, which I am asking my wife
to buy me for Christmas] s.v. 'SAINTS, devotion to the'.
We may pick out a few of the many instances there noted:

'Origen was apparently the first of the Fathers to give the cult of martyrs
an express theological foundation.  He placed it within the doctrine of the
Communion of Saints and taught that the prayer of the saints is efficacious
in so far as the faithful follow in their footsteps . . .

'St Cyril of Jerusalem distinguished the saints commemorated at the
Eucharistic Sacrifice who offer prayer to God from the ordinary dead who
would be benefited by the sacrifice.  The same distinction is found in St
Chrysostom, who exhorted his hearers to have confidence in the intercession
of the martyrs . . .

'St Leo affirmed that the saints as our special intercessors obtain for us
the mercy of God by their prayers;  St Gregory . . . exhorted the faithful
in his 'dialogues to place themselves under the protection of the saints . . .'

As the veneration of the saints, and particularly the desire for their
intercession, is commonly held to be a late development - and, from a
certain theological viewpoint, a corruption - it is worth pointing out that
our collect contains nothing that Leo could not have written, as can be seen
from the following extract  from Leo's Sermon LXXXII, on the Apostles Peter
and Paul:

'But as we have proved for ourselves, and our forefathers maintained, we
believe, and are sure that, amid all the toils of this life, we must always
be assisted in obtaining God's mercy by the prayers of special interceders,
that we may be raised by the Apostles' merits in proportion as we are
weighed down by our own sins.'
[Nicene & Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 12, p. 196].

Oriens.



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