The Words We Speak. The Language Of The Ordinariate Mass.

A series of excerpts from articles on hieratic sacral English.

hieratic (adj.)

"pertaining to sacred things," 1660s, from Latin hieraticus, from Greek hieratikos "pertaining to a priest or his office, priestly, devoted to sacred purposes," from hierateia "priesthood," from hiereus "priest," from hieros "sacred, holy, hallowed; superhuman, mighty; divine".

"Sacred English" is a variation of English that was developed especially for use in religious settings. Remember the language from the King James and Douay-Rheims Bibles and previous versions of the Book of Common Prayer.

It is not necessary to constantly remind the reader who is speaking to whom when using sacral English. Every sentence in the language does this. Both ancient and contemporary languages are used for this. Unfortunately, common English is not one of them. This is the reason it is called "Sacral English": religious writings and prayers, particularly liturgical ones, are translated using the sacred (holy) form of the English language. Its unique application to sacred (holy) artifacts is where its name originates.

In the second century, Clement of Alexandria coined the term "hieratic." Literally meaning "priestly," Clement used the word to indicate "priestly writing" or "priestly language." Religious literature uses this language style, a language that was distinct from everyday speech and had a sacred quality. Therefore, when we talk about hieratic liturgical English, we are really talking about a type of English that is distinct from everyday vernaculars due to its sacral nature. The majority of Catholics still use it when saying "Our Father" and other traditional devotional prayers like "Hail Mary."

The Beauty of Nuance

These are nuances of Prayer Book English that work not only “above the measure” of everyday speech (in Tolkien’s phrase) but also “below the surface,” so to speak, subtly to tune the ear, and to train the heart for a deeper apprehension of the Trinitarian theology of God’s self-revelation and for the greater honor of human persons made and redeemed in His image and likeness. Dr. Clinton Allen Brand

Second Person Singular

thou, thee, thy, thine

Thou is the second person singular when used as the subject of a sentence.

Thee is the second person singular when used as the object of a sentence.

Thy is the second person singular when used as the subject possessively.

Thine is the second person singular when used as the object possessively.

Second Person Plural

ye, you, your, yours

Ye is the second person plural when used as the subject of a sentence.

You is the second person plural when used as the object of a sentence.

Your is the second person plural when used as the subject possessively.

Yours is the second person plural when used as the object possessively.

1. Sacral English distinguishes the second person of every sentence as either singular or plural.
2. By dropping the Second Person Singular (thou, thee, thy & thine) from our vocabulary, Common English now has difficulty distinguishing whether the second person is singular or plural. We simply use “you” for everything now, singular or plural, and as a result we have to add more words to a sentence to make a distinction.
3. In Common English, if we are talking to more than one person, we can say “you” and hope everyone understands. Or we can say “you all.” If we live in the American South, however, we’re likely to use the contraction “y’all” instead.
4. Sacral English uses the archaic solution to this by having two completely different terms for Second Person Singular (thou, thee, thy & thine) and Second Person Plural (ye, you, your & yours).
5. Hebrew and Greek also have different terms to make this distinction. For the obvious reasons, then, it is important to use a form of English that does that too, especially when translating these ancient religious texts.

Verb Conjugations

-st, -th

I come.

Thou comest. | You comest.

He cometh. | She cometh. | They come.

Thomas Cranmer virtually single-handedly established the liturgical idiom of English Christianity through the Prayer Book, which is still in use today. It is such a magnificent language that others outside of the Anglican Church, not only other Protestants, have adopted it. As evidenced by the early bilingual missals and, most notably, John Crichton-Stuart's English translation of the Tridentine Breviary, Roman Catholic translations of the Liturgy into English adopted Cranmer's renderings of liturgical Latin into English long before the social emancipation of English Catholics and the post-Vatican II ecumenical thaw. This also applies to the English translations of the Orthodox liturgy, which started in earnest with the work of Isabel Hapgood and John Mason Neale, both Anglicans.

Hieratic Linguistic Style

C.A. Brand in Antiphon (pp. 197-221 | The Fullness of Divine Worship: The Sacred Liturgy and Its Renewal, edited by Uwe Michael Lang.

Thomas Cranmer employed this sacral English in his Book of Common Prayer (hence, the term “Prayer Book English”). Elevated language draws the mind to heights that enable real, deep contemplation of the sacred mysteries.

1. Liturgical language is not so much a tool of edifying information as it is the simulacrum of divine encounter and revelation; it is not and has never been the diffuse idiom of everyday communication; rather it is the Church’s focused, concentrated instrument of mediation to effect, to incarnate our participation in the saving mysteries of our faith and to immerse, to wash the faithful in the figural meanings of Holy Scripture.
2. Liturgical language is stylized, enacted speech with its own kind of mediated intelligibility, and far from excluding archaic elements it welcomes a modicum of traditional expressions and ritualized, formulaic conventions that “reach to the roots,” resonate in the auditory memory, and habituate an experience of worship wider, deeper, older than ourselves, transcending the gathered congregation in time and space to represent and configure our incorporation into the Communion of the Saints.
3. Liturgical language is recursive and immersive; it bears and demands repetition, day by day, week by week, season by season, year by year, without ever exhausting its capacity to stimulate meditation and work ongoing conversion of life; its words are “poetic” in the sense of being athletic, even ascetic, by gently, insistently stretching the limits of expression in order to exercise, train, tune, and elevate our faculties that we might lift up our hearts to God and open out our lives in love and service.

III Prayer book English and Divine Worship

Clinton Allen Brand, Ph.D., K.S.G. (ed. GN)

• https://files.ecatholic.com/3059/documents/2016/3/2015_Brand_Antiphon.pdf?t=1457623388000

Liturgiam Authenticam sets out a striking challenge in assessing the suitability of liturgical language as a mode of missionizing inculturation: “liturgical prayer not only is formed by the genius of a culture, but itself contributes to the development of that culture.” In cautioning against an “an overly servile adherence to prevailing modes of expression,” the Instruction notes that stable idioms of public worship can derive a certain vitality from the best, time-tested resources of each language: “works that are commonly considered ‘classics’ in a given vernacular language may prove useful in providing a suitable standard for its vocabulary and usage.” While these norms offered some important, though necessarily circumscribed, guidance for the new English translation of the Roman Missal (hammered out just in the last decade), they also speak significantly to the rationale and motive that led the Holy See to tap into the linguistic sources of the Anglican tradition in making liturgical provision for the evangelizing work of the Ordinariates. Nearly everyone agrees with the eminent historical linguists David Crystal and Ian Robinson that an enduring vernacular “religious English” first emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) and the so-called Authorized Version (AV) or King James Version of the Bible. These two books gave the English language a distinctive Christian voice, shaped the subsequent development of English prose, and have exerted a wide influence far beyond the ranks of practicing Christians. [...]

 In addition to the aural qualities of dignity, sobriety, sonority, and balance, the Prayer Book’s sentences are famous for exhibiting the quality that C. S. Lewis called “pithiness.” Like the ancient Roman collects that are their models, these sentences are like coiled springs compressing much expressive energy in little space. But to modern ears these same sentences often feel “spacious.” Both “pithy” and “spacious” at once, this special dialect takes voice in rich periodic sentences, built on patterns of subordination (with many relative clauses) and coordination (with frequent use of synonymous constructions and parataxis in doublets and triplets): “meek heart and due reverence;” “rest and quietness;” “all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works.” The native English habit of using two words to express a single multivalent idea (a convention going back to Anglo-Saxon times) also serves in Prayer Book English to illuminate the sense of specialized Latin loan-words through their coupling with common English equivalents, thereby enriching the meanings of both: “remission and forgiveness;” “love and charity;” “regenerate and born anew.” The result is never amplitude for its own sake, but rather such expressions serve as the sinews of a uniquely powerful tool of accumulative mediation, constantly shuttling between and bridging time and eternity, earth and heaven, sin and grace, the here-and-now with salvation history, while connecting, as well, the homely and the supernal, and linking the earthy coziness of simple English words with the lofty abstractions of Latin theology. One familiar example will have to suffice. In the Prayer of Thanksgiving after Communion, the faithful give thanks that by virtue of the Sacrament, “we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, the blessed company of all faithful people, and are also heirs through hope of thy everlasting kingdom.” Notice how the somewhat heavy and abstract Latinate phrase, slightly archaic on its own, “very members incorporate,” finds humble explication in the simple phrase, “the blessed company of all faithful people,” and then reaches for precise application from our hopeful inheritance of heavenly beatitude to the assurance of grace here and now “to continue in that holy fellowship and do all such works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in.” The passage, in context, is not so much descriptive as demonstrative – it enacts what it says even as it summons the faithful to participate in a like enactment; it lifts us to heaven and then brings us back to earth, changed and equipped, perhaps even transfigured in a pledge taken on trust to live out the efficacy of the Sacrament. This kind of “performative speech,” I think, is one of the keys to understanding how the Prayer Book has managed to instill and nourish a deeply sacramental worldview.

Liturgiam Authenticam instructs scrupulous care in the vernacular translation of personal pronouns and the attendant inflection of verbs to convey accurately and precisely the sense of the original Latin liturgical texts.43 The document has mainly in mind the dangers of so-called “gender-inclusive language.” Happily, that is not a worry for Divine Worship. Fortuitously, though, Liturgiam Authenticam does imply a positive valuation of a rich and subtle resource of Prayer Book English preserved in Divine Worship – namely, the use of “thou” and “thee” to designate the second-person singular, in contrast to the second-person plural “you.” This is the distinction between the Latin “tu” and “vos” as retained in many modern European languages but altogether lost in contemporary idiomatic English (except in parts of the American South where folks know to distinguish between “you,” singular, and “y’all,” plural). There is a popular misunderstanding that use of “thou” and “thee” is simply an exalted, honorific way of addressing God Almighty in His loftiness. But, in fact, the second-person singular “thou” also signifies the familiar, affectionate, and intimate form of address, as opposed to the more formal, more distant “you.” Interestingly, nearly all regular English-speaking Catholics to this day feel no distance at all from God in praying the Our Father and the Hail Mary, those most intimate and memorable of prayers, long hallowed with these same traditional hieratic pronouns. Yet at the same time, “thou” is still reverential and finds in Prayer Book English, as in Divine Worship, some special, limited application also to individual human persons in the unique intimacy of sacramental action: “I baptize thee in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit;” “The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life;” “With this ring I thee wed.” The use of “thou” and “thee,” then, is not simply ornamental but rather functional in bearing witness to the inter-subjective mystery of personhood, the I-Thou relationship so richly pondered in Martin Buber’s famous book of that title. Mainly, though, we address God as “thou” because He is one God in the mystery of the holy Trinity, but we also address God as “thou” because He is closer, more intimate, to us than we are to our own selves. Not everyone will immediately or fully understand these distinctions, to be sure, but in the recursive, immersive experience of worship they can imperceptibly operate their subliminal effects all the same. These are nuances of Prayer Book English that work not only “above the measure” of everyday speech (in Tolkien’s phrase) but also “below the surface,” so to speak, subtly to tune the ear, and to train the heart for a deeper apprehension of the Trinitarian theology of God’s self-revelation and for the greater honor of human persons made and redeemed in His image and likeness.