Thoughts on the Collect, Trinity XIV
Perhaps I’ve written on it every year. I honestly don’t know. But I DO know that the translation in LSB just grates on my ear. O Lord, keep Your Church with Your perpetual mercy, and because of our frailty we cannot but fall, keep us ever by your help from all things hurtful and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation; through Jesus Christ....
TLH had Keep, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy Church with Thy perpetual mercy; and because the frailty of man without Thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by Thy help from all things hurtful and lead us to all things profitable for our salvation; through Jesus Christ....
The Latin original (from the Gelasian Sacramentary) is: Custódi, Dómine, quaésumus Ecclésiam tuam propitiatióne perpétua: et quia sine te lábitur humána mortálitas; tuis semper auxíliis et abstrahátur a nóxiis, et ad salutária dirigátur.
The awkward phrasing of the LSB rendition of this collect removed the sine te, the without Thee. I have no idea why. And not only did we lose God, we lost man! Humana mortálitas; the frailty of man. I am honestly befuddled why it was not rendered along the lines of because our human frailty (or mortality) without You cannot but fall.
But the irritation with the version in our current rite sent me back to the Latin and a thought occurred that had not before about the request itself. The Latin does not ask the Lord to keep His Church with His perpetual mercy precisely, but with his His perpetual propitiation. I began to wonder if the actual referent then is the Eucharist itself: O Lord, keep Your Church with Your perpetual propitiation (which is ever made present for us in the the most holy Eucharist), and since due to our human mortality we simply fall (flat on our faces and right down into the grave) without You, keep us ever by your help (in that very Holy Eucharist) from all things hurtful or noxious to us, and lead us to everything that is salutary or saving; through Jesus Christ. This, of course, sent me on a mission to find out about the change.
Luther D. Reed actually says of the original collect: “The original propitione perptua, ‘by thy perpetual atonement’ is suggestive of a possible reference to the sacrifice of the Mass, and the Reformers substituted ‘by thy perpetual mercy.’” (Lutheran Liturgy, p. 535). But I thinks he overstates his case, implying that the Lutherans went along with Cranmer here. In point of fact, they did not. You can see, for example, the Lutherans in the 1613 Magdeburg Order giving the prayer in Latin exactly as printed above (Cantica Sacra, p 876 - I posted the pic of it).
My guess is that it was Anglican squeamishness about the notion of perpetual propitiation with its implication of, well, the actual sacrifice of atonement (noun, not verb!) being present is what led to the alteration. Lutherans have no such squeamishness. They happily confess that in the Eucharist we do indeed receive the very body that upon the cross carried all our sin and the precious blood of Christ that redeemed us, our propitiation indeed, and perpetually given to us at the Table. How was it that the great dogmatician Hollaz expressed it?
If we view the matter from the material standpoint, the sacrifice in the Eucharist is numerically the same as the sacrifice that took place on the cross; put otherwise, one can say that the things itself and the substance is the same in each case, the victim or oblation is the same. If we view the matter formally, from the standpoint of the act of sacrifice, then even though the victim is numerically the same, the action is not; that is, the immolation in the Eucharist is different from the immolation carried out on the cross. For on the cross an offering was made by means of the passion and death of an immolated living thing, without which there can be no sacrifice in the narrow sense, but in the Eucharist the oblation takes place through the prayers and through the commemoration of the death or sacrifice offered on the cross. (Examen theologicum acroamaticum, II, 620)
Sigh. Maybe next time round we’ll get some of the goodies in the original put back in?
