Benny! Die! City!!

 One of the few surviving pleasures available to clergy who serve substantial churches with substantial musical establishments, is the use ... when announcing to a congregation today's piece of classy music ... of the old 'English' pronunciation of Latin. My heading today attempts crudely to suggest to you the 'old' pronunciation among Anglicans of the word Benedicite.

With the demise of choral Mattins, there are probably Anglican congregations which, two generations ago, would have known what the Benedicite was ... I suspect, not now. But it soldiers on, the sturdy old thing, from Prayerbook to Prayerbook. Among Catholic clergy, however, it still remains as part of the form to be used in Thanksgiving after the Offering of Holy Mass. Daily!! De gratias!

Nobody knows where it comes from, except that the earliest texts are in the septuagintal style of Greek. Somebody has suggested that it must have been written by an Alexandrian Jew ... as if Alexandria was the only place you might find hellenised Jews ... as if the vast and mighty Seleucid Empire, centred upon Antioch, had never existed. Dr Paul Levertoff (1878-1954), who enlivened the inter-war period at Holy Trinity Shoreditch by inventing his own idiosyncratic, very Thirties, synthesis of Middle-of-the-road Anglicanism and Rabbinic Judaism, thought the Benedicite emerged from the Synagogue ... a safe if not-very-daring guess. Equally vaguely, I would tend to attribute it to the rich if confusing or even messy world of Judaism (sometimes syncretistic) and Christianity (not always orthodox) from which our religious culture emerged.

Although it is to be found in the Byzantine daily Office, apparently not much of it is, daily, said there nowadays. It met with the approval of S Benedict.

A very considerable scholar called Craddock Ratcliff (1896-1967), who should have known better, twice uses the word "monotony" with regard to the Benedicite; "The length and monotonous form of Benedicite do not commend it for frequent use in modern congregations". This is because nearly every verse of it is along the lines of "O all ye XYZ, bless ye the Lord: prayse hym and magnifye hym for ever." But throughout history, the refrain has very commonly been omitted; in 1549, Cranmer had given this gawky English rendering: "speake good of the lorde" ... I suspect, in a donnish attempt to translate accurately Eulogeite. By 1552, he had seen sense.

Is the Benedicite boring? Not to me, when I say it daily in the Gratiarum Actione. Are we all so very busy ... is our every moment so valuable ...?

More importantly, we should remember that we humans are as priests of Creation, offering the praises of dumb creation to its Maker. As the hailstones rattle against your February windows, who else is there to translate their din into the rational adoration of the Logos?