Sacred Mysteries: A big change to what people say in church
If you are in a church that uses the Book of Common Prayer and it is the right day, you will hear Psalm 1 begin: “Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly.” Tomorrow, the first Sunday in Advent, the Catholic Church in England and Wales changes its own version of the Psalms for use in public worship.
I was glad to find that Psalm 1 begins: “Blessed indeed is the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked.” A previous updating had begun “Happy indeed are those.” The idea there was to be inclusive (of women and men), but it slipped into the plural to do it, diffusing the focus. In the Psalms, statements are often applied by the Church to Christ; if they are made plural arbitrarily, the application is obscured.
It is surprising, perhaps, that in the Book of Common Prayer each Psalm is preceded by its first few words in Latin, here Beatus vir qui non abiit. But the Prayer Book does not use the Psalms from the version of the Bible published in 1611, but one made by Myles Coverdale for the Great Bible of 1539. He based his translation on Luther’s and on the Latin Vulgate.
So what we may hear in an Anglican church today is in more archaic English than that of the Bible translated under King James. Since the Psalms are used repeatedly, worshippers get used to them. It hardly matters how obsolete the language is. The turns of phrase become dear to them and identified with the act of worship.
The Psalms in worship always did follow a tangled path. St Jerome in the 4th century made more than one translation into Latin (learning Hebrew to do it better). The version used by Catholics in England since 1970 follows the Hebrew, too. It was made by a society of pious women called the Grail. Influenced by the French innovations of the Jerusalem Bible they bore in mind a need for euphonious and singable wording.
Two attempts were made to make the Grail Psalms gender inclusive. Neither was authorised for public worship. Their translation leant a little to the method of “dynamic equivalence” – making the version more idiomatic. The trouble then is that a sacred text can lose its traditional references and interpretations.
An extreme example is the weight that St Augustine in the 4th century gave to the phrase in idipsum, It occurs six times in the Latin Psalms. He took it as a reference to God, who has his whole being at once, in himself, in simplicity, immutability, unity, and eternity. Psalm 122 speaks of the holy city Jerusalem cujus participatio ejus in idipsum, which the Prayer Book translates as “that is at unity in itself”. Augustine was transported into contemplating the city’s participation in God himself. The saint would never have gone off on that train of thought if he’d only known the newest translation “bonded as one together”.
Yet the new translation tends not to dynamic equivalence but to formal equivalence, keeping closer to the original, which is complicated by the Psalms having an original in Hebrew, translated before the coming of Christ into Greek, contemplated in Latin for two millennia and recited in English for nearly 500 years.
The new version was made by Abbot Gregory Polan and the Benedictine monks of Conception Abbey, Missouri, based on the Grail text adapted on the principles of a document, Liturgiam Authenticam put out in 2001 by the Vatican under Pope Benedict XVI. He was more traditional in style than the present Pope, but these things take ages to filter through. Like any question of worship the new Psalms are hotly controverted.