COLLECT (Usus Recentior)
Respice, Domine, familiam tuam, et praesta,
ut apud te mens nostra tuo desiderio fulgeat,
quae se corporalium moderatione castigat.
Today’s prayer was in the 1962 Missale Romanum and, long before that, in the so-called ancient “Gregorian Sacramentary“. This has been “adapted” for the Novus Ordo, however. More about that later.
The interesting word today is moderatio.
Moderatio basically means “a moderating, moderation in any thing; moderateness, temperateness of the weather” and then extends to “guidance, government.” A moderator is a “governor” as in the governor of a state. The verb form, modero (and deponent moderor) is “to regulate a thing”, in the sense of keeping it within bounds. You can see conceptually how moderatio would be considered by the ancients to be one of the political virtues. It refers to self-governance in the personal sense, and broader governance in the social sense. Moderatio had a particularly strong meaning for Romans who, in a stoic sense, were to remain cool and controlled. The opposite of moderatio would be expressed by words like saevitia, savageness.
I said that this prayer was changed from its earlier form. The earlier form says: “…quae se carnis maceratione castigat…. which checks itself by a softening up of the flesh.” A couple things are evident. First, mens and caro are more sharply in contrast to each other than mens and corporalia. Caro is more immediately pertinent to us, our own person while corporalia might be fleshly things in general. Second, maceratio, a “softening up”. Sounds strange, right? You would think we want to toughen, not soften. Think of the cooking term maceration. We macerate things by immersing them in some substance in order to break them down. This is done with meat, for example to tenderize it, to break down the fibers of muscle so that they will not contract under heat and make the meat tough. We do the same thing by pounding flesh with a spiky hammer. Maceratio means tenderize. Think of softening up an entrenched position of the enemy by hammering it with artillery. That is what maceratio means. The best way to translate carnis maceratio is “mortification of the flesh”. The newer version speaks of “self-governance of bodily things.” These two versions create very different effects in my ear.
LITERAL TRANSLATION
Look up Your family, O Lord, and grant,
that our soul, which is checking itself by means of moderation of corporal things
may shine in Your sight with Your longing.
The phrase tuo desiderio is very elegant. It can be looked at as being either “subjective” or “objective”. If we say “your desire”, we leave open the possibility that we are speaking of “our desire for you” or “your desire for us”. We can’t tell which it is. So, in the English version I will leave the phrase just as ambiguous as the Latin so that you can decide for yourselves which direction to take it. Which way do I go? I like the idea of God’s love and desire for us being such that its reaches out to us, into our very souls, and makes our souls shine with something of the same glory that our Lord revealed on Mt. Tabor in His transfiguration. At the same time, as God’s images we are made to act as God acts, to know, to will, to love. So, as we come to know ourselves and Him better, will in a more discplined matter and love the things proper to our state in life, we show forth even in a dazzling way God’s image in us.
Bl. Pope John XXIII cited this prayer in his 1962 letter Paenitentiam agere by which asked people to do penance on the eve of the Second Vatican Council. The English version of that letter found on the Vatican website translates one phrase as “Make our souls to glow in Thy sight with desire of Thee.”
Take your pick.
One rad-trad site renders the Collect in this way:
RAD TRAD VERSION
Let us pray. Look down upon Thy household, O Lord,
and grant that our minds may be made glow [sic] by the desire of Thee,
which have been chastened by the tormenting of their bodies
A slavishly literal translation, like a crow-bar, can help us pry open the prayer’s content. But this version can be of little use to us other than as a starting point for a deeper examination. This is just wrong in several ways. Castigo is not “torment” as much as it is “to set right by word or deed, to correct, chastise, punish; to blame, reprove, chide, censure, find fault with”. In its roots it means to “correct, set right, mend”, not “torment”. We looked at the meaning of maceratio and I don’t think in this context it can be construed as “torment”. “Mortify” yes, “torment” no. Is this rad trad version, the source of which I am not quite sure, imbued with a weird Janenistic tinge?
Familia as “household” is a pretty idea, because of the roots of the word in ancient Oscan fama.
More about moderatio. In a very interesting letter to a woman named Ecdicia St. Augustine of Hippo (+430) talks about moderatio.
Ecdicia and her husband, mostly be her instigation, chose to live in a continent relationship. She pretty much imposed this on her husband, but he went along… with difficulty. Then she started to dress like a widow. Then she alienated some of their property by giving it to itinerant monks. Then she started to disinherit their son by given money to the Church. Ecdicia’s husband, frustrated beyond endurance, eventually started taking up with other women, etc.
Ecdicia wrote to Augustine to get him to intervene with her husband, assuming that he would be on her side. Augustine takes her apart, saying that she had violated the virtue of moderatio. The referred not just to the excesses she got into but the fact that she violated the order of things and did not exercise proper governance within her sphere. Of course in those days, the clear hierarchy was that women were immediately subservient to men in marriage. However, Augustine says that she needed to exercise “governance”, moderatio.
A good image was offered to me about this seeming contrast by a good friend and excellent patristicist. If you saw the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding you will remember the scene when the daughter wants to go to school. The father is against it and mother will intervene saying that even though he might be the “head” of the family, she is the “neck”. The neck makes the head point in this direction or that. This is effectively what Augustine tells Ecdicia in his letter. Augustine tells Ecdicia to start behaving like a real wife and knock off all the widow-like business and stop cutting her husband off, etc.
Moderatio is a virtue that all of us must cultivate in our lives, not just in the sense of avoiding excess, but in the sense of active self-governance in respect to our spheres of living.
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Father, what a fascinating post! I am drawn by the earthiness (almost, perhaps, Incarnation-ality?) of both forms of this collect, although “carnis maceratio” creates the most vivid imagery (for an American English speaker) of the two. I hope that the vices of my flesh get fully macerated this Lent.
It is tempting, though, to ask which wine pairs best with a serving of “carnis maceratio.” [Perhaps a Chianti... and fava beans.]
In Christ,
The source of the Rad Trad version would appear to be Rev. F.X. Lasance’s New Roman Missal of 1937. [Thanks. So many of my books are now in storage, alas.]
I would hardly expect St. Augustine to disagree with St. Paul, who, in 1 Corinthians 7 wrote:
“The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does. Do not refuse one another except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, lest Satan tempt you through lack of self-control” (verses 3-5) thoough in verse 6 he states that he offers this “by way of concession, not of command.”
I believe it is the concession and not command that permits spouses, by mutual agreement, to completely renounce their conjugal rights.
Four early uses and assorted translations of the phrase:
In the Anglo-Saxon liturgical texts, this was translated as “Fl?sces wonunge,” a decrease or waning of the flesh. (See Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary).
In Raymond of Pennafort’s “Summa Paenitentia,” n. 36, “On Satisfaction,”
“…Aliter etiam potest dici, videlicet, quod satisfactio consistit in duobus, scilicet, in largitione eleemosynae et carnis maceratione.”
In English:
“It can also be stated otherwise, namely that satisfaction consists in two things, that is to say, the free dispensing of alms and the tormenting of the flesh.”
(See: Sources and analogues of the Canterbury Tales, section on The Parson’s Tale, by Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, 2002, D.S. Brewer, Cambridge; Latin text is Ochoa and Diez edition, Rome, 1976)
In his First Life of St. Francis, Thomas of Celano used the phrase to describe what Francis’ companions thought of him in the early days of his conversion:
“Cernebant eum a pristinis moribus alteratum
et carnis maceratione valde confectum”
(1 Cel 11.3, Fontes Franciscani)
This is translated into English by Armstrong et alia as:
“They saw him as changed from his earlier ways
and weakened by starving his body.”
In Italian:
“Lo vedevano così diverso dal solito comportamento,
macerato dalla penitenza” (FF 338).
St. Thomas Aquinas used the phrase a couple of times in his commentary on Psalm 34 (v. 13):
Circa primum facit tria, secundum quod sanctitas in tribus consistit, scilicet in carnis maceratione, in spiritus devotione, et affectus pietate.
In English: Concerning the first he does three things, insofar as sanctity consists in three things, namely in mortification of the body, devotion of the spirit, and devoutness of one’s desire.
(see: http://www4.desales.edu/~philtheo/loughlin/ATP/Psalm_34.html)
Lewis and Short indicate that “macero, maceravi” means to make soft or tender, to soften by steeping, to soak, steep, and later, by transfer, to a weakening or wasting away, or torment, distress, torture, pain. But they mention that it is etymologically probably from Greek “masso,” meaning to knead, as bread, pressing loaves into molds. So many dimensions here–being conformed to the image of God, pressed into the mold of the Crucified, being softened and made tender to our hardness of heart by soaking and steeping in the love of God, especially revealed in his work of redemption. Replacing my hard heart ruled by the desires of the flesh with a softened heart of flesh (cf. Ez. 36:26).
But there is more here, I think.
The first reading of the Ordinary Form is only Is 55,10-11, about the Lord’s word doing the work it is sent to do, like rain softening the earth and germinating fruit. ut the Extraordinary Form lesson starts a few verses earlier, and is Is 55,6-11. In the earlier verses Isaiah calls the wicked to “forsake his way and the unjust man his thoughts, and let him return to the Lord, and He will have mercy on him…” I think the Extraordinary Form lesson provides a very important context of repentance and conversion that is lost in the shorter version of the Ordinary Form. [Good job. The softening image, yes. Good job.]
Our hearts are hard, hard mainly because they follow the concupiscence of our flesh. We need them to be softened by steeping especially in God’s word that comes like rain and snow that we may repent and be converted. Then we can make some satisfaction by disciplining the flesh, as Paul in 1 Cor 9:27 “sed castigo corpus meum et in servitutem redigo…”