Concéde nobis, Dómine Deus noster, ut te tota mente venerémur et omnes hómines rationábili
diligámus afféctu.(Veronese
Sacramentary)
Lord our God,
make us love you above all things,
and all our fellow-men
with a love that is worthy of you.
The translation of the collect for this Sunday is not completely wrong but there are some rather important features missing from the translation. First, the translation of
mens, mentis is in modern translations almost never rendered by the most obvious English word ‘mind’. It is true that
mens can sometimes be best translated as ‘soul’. But often this translation ignores the context. (I suspect that ‘mind’ is considered to be a ‘harsher’ word than ‘soul’. We speak of a dear soul but not of a dear mind.)
The latest English translation simply drops mens altogether and supplies a mental conclusion instead: “make us love you above all things’. But the second part of the result clause continues to speak of mental activity:
rationabili affectu. The English translation speaks of the consequence rather than the thing itself: ‘a love that is worthy of you’. The love of ‘our fellow-men’ is of course necessarily emotional (affect)
but this is the very reason it must be governed by reason (rationábili.) The collect asks us to think: to use our minds to determine what is the proper love of God, on the one hand, and the proper love of men on the other.
More than ever modern folks need to be told to think.
No comments:
Post a Comment