2 February 2024

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?

7 comments:

  1. Would this lovely hymn were indeed better known! Only a fool could find a recitation of creation's love monotonous - a man devoid of the joys of life!

    But you fail inexplicably to state that all Latin clergy recite it a Lauds on Sunday and on every major feast. In the EF it is replaced in Lent with the other half of the Song of the Three Children "Benedictus es" (Dan 3:52-57, or 29-34 in the Catholic RSV), which is used in the NO on alternate Sundays.

    Presumably this hold true in the Ordinariate daily office.

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  2. "You know it makes sense..." (Hmm. Who said that?)
    I have a horrible feeling that the last time anyone pronounced those syllables thus outside a choir rehearsal for mattins (probably in Lent) was in the stage play "Daisy pulls it off" - or I may be mistaken and that was a partially bastardized pronunciation of Jubilate with a hard j and continental a.
    The things one recalls...

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  3. The Benedicite is also to be found in the Maronite Office of Safro (Lauds), after the Morning Psalms (148-150+117), on Feasts of Christ and Sundays. Each line ends with "bless the Lord", and there is an additional verse at the end which does not, so far as I know, appear elsewhere:

    Prophets, apostles, martyrs and confessors, bless the Lord,
    churches and monasteries and all those who dwell in the house of the Lord, bless the Lord.

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  4. Thank you, Father, for reminding even we lay faithful of our dignity as priests, capable--and obliged!--to render thanksgiving and sacrifice to God in whatever ways we can. Translating Creation's love for its Creator is a wonderful way to do this and gives me a greater appreciation for the Benedicite!

    As a post script, in my much-younger days, I was presented with a shorter Book of Common Prayer (green clothbound) from St. Paul's, London...I thought the best pronunciation of Benedicite was (wait for it) Bendy Kitty! That still comes to mind every now and then, although Benny! Die! City! is also up there.

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  5. The version of the Benedicite in the Book of Common Prayer has the refrain Praise him and magnify him for ever after every phrase and I can understand the weariness experienced by E.C.Ratcliffe. The version used in the Breviary and the Missal is quite different and only twice is the refrain used ( Oh let Israel ...... and later O Ananias,Azerias and Misael......) This changes the canticle quite considerably.

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  6. Pronunciation of the names of the Mattins canticles is a matter of some uncertainty. Is it the "Tee Dee-um" or the "Tay Day-um"? As a joke my old choirmaster sometimes said "Jubilate" so that the last syllable was like the English word "late". "Benny-die-city" was the pronunciation we used.
    At least there could be little dispute about the Evensong canticles: Magnificat, Nunc Dimittis and Deus Misereatur. I never heard anyone say "Cantate Domino" with the second syllable as in Tate & Lyle.

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  7. Yes, it is monotonous, especially in the English modern RC Liturgy of the Hours. I think I'm going to start omitting the refrain, or perhaps using it only every fourth line ...

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