More On "Sacral" English

The fist thing to say about Sacral English, which we saw yesterday the Australian ordinariate cites as a charism of the ordinariates, is that it is simply not a term in common use. Curious, I did a web search on "sacral English", and all that came up were links to English departments in various colleges in Sacramento, CA. Well, do they teach you how to writer prose with lots of thees and thous there? Who knows?

But I decided to follow up on yesterday's proposal to look at examples from the OF English mass and the Divine Worship missal side by side. Here's the Anamnesis that immediately follows the Mystery of Faith in the OF English mass (Eucharistic Prayer III):

Therefore, O Lord, we celebrate the memorial of the saving Passion of your Son, his wondrous Resurrection and Ascension into heaven, and as we look forward to his second coming, we offer you in thanksgiving this holy and living sacrifice.

Compared to the version in the Roman Canon section of the DW Missal (p 642 in my unofficial version):

Wherefore, O Lord, we thy servants, and thy holy people also, remembering the blessed Passion of the same Christ thy Son our Lord, as also his Resurrection from the dead, and his glorious Ascension into heaven; do offer unto thine excellent majesty of thine own gifts and bounty, the pure victim, the holy victim, the immaculate victim, the holy Bread of eternal life, and the Chalice of everlasting salvation.

Vouchsafe to look upon them with a merciful and pleasant countenance; and to accept them, even as thou didst vouchsafe to accept the gifts of thy servant Abel the righteous, and the sacrifice of our patriarch Abraham; and the holy sacrifice, the immaculate victim, which thy high priest Melchisedech offered unto thee.

The Church has assured us now for generations that the words in the OF English mass are sufficient for salvation. The OF is written in formal, elevated language that is appropriately reverential. On the other hand, the words in the Divine Worship missal take fully three times the space to do exactly the same thing -- and they're larded with words like "vouchsafe", lots of redundancy, and references to Abel the righteous and Melchisedech. This is the sort of ting a modern day Mark Twain would recount drily if he wandered into an ordinariate mass.

A modern day Mark Twain would mock this as much as Twain himself mocked Fennimore Cooper in his own time. Overly verbose, redundant, and bombastic writing is bad writing and always has been. It's worth pointing out that the Books of Common Prayer have always been political documents, intended not least to reinforce the legitimacy of the English monarchy. Thus they contain a level of patriotically driven bombast intended as such. There's nothing intrinsically holy about this language, and serious historical analysis of the Books of Common Prayer will allow us to separate the language from the religion.

My regular correspondent adds additional perspective:

“Sacral language” is a great example of Bp Lopes’s contention that the so-called Anglican Patrimony of the Ordinariates is what the Church says it is, full stop. A definition based on empirical evidence and/or scholarly analysis of Anglican texts would certainly identify vernacular liturgy as a core Anglican value. The first translation of the BCP into French was made in the 16th C, for use in the Channel Islands. This site lists scores of BCP translations, including more than a dozen in Canadian indigenous languages.

I would put the creation of “modern language” rites in the same category. Although I gather that the original BCP, like the KJV, is not written in the same style one would have used for chatting in the pub, it was not intended to be obscure and inaccessible in the service of some special, sacral ethos, in the way that Latin or Old Church Slavonic currently function. “Thee” and “thou,” for example, were not special terms just used for God, but the familiar form of “you,” similar to the “tu” and “du” used in French and German liturgies—-the same pronouns one would use for a close friend or family member.

Updating the phrasing of the BCP, in its English version or those in other languages is entirely in the spirit of Anglicanism. But in the Ordinariates, if one wishes to use a modern language rite, one must use the OF. The BDW had a contemporary language Rite II, regularly used at SMV, Arlington, but this was suppressed under Msgr Steenson.

Bp Lopes has spoken about a Spanish version of DW: The Missal being produced someday; is the current Libro de Oracion Comun, the Spanish version of the 1979 TEC BCP, in some kind of archaic “sacral” Spanish? What about its predecessor, the 1928 LOC? I guess one would have to ask a native Spanish speaker, but my guess is that the answer in both cases would be “no.” So where does this leave that aspect of the Ordinariate charism?

Writing courses continue to stress that writing should be clear and succinct, not rambling or redundant, and it should not go out of its way to use obscure or arcane language. The whole world now recognizes Melchisedek, for instance. Why would an editor not publishing an academic edition of a certain text not amend the spelling of "Melchisedech" to the modern orthography? I think this reflects, if nothing else, a deep uncertainty about what audience the DW missal is intended to address.

But again, not understanding the intended audience is a basic mark of bad writing.