PANGE LINGUA GLORIOSI

Let me remind you of an interesting Graeco-Latin metre: the trochaic tetrameter catalectic. You should be equipped with this information, because it is the metre of the two great Pange lingua hymns used in the Holy Week Liturgy: the one about the Cross, written by Venantius Fortunatus for a royal Mother Superior who had succeeded in begging a Relic of the True Cross from the Emperor in Constantinople; we sing that on Good Friday at the Liturgy of the Cross (and in the Divine Office). The other, written by S Thomas Aquinas for Corpus Christi, is sung as the Most Holy is taken to Altar of Repose on Maundy Thursday. But this metre got its first recorded Christian use in the hymn Corde natus ex Parentis, often used at Christmas, centonised from (i.e. made up of extracts from) the Cathemerinon of Prudentius (348-c410).

Tumpty is a trochee; two of them, tumpty tumpty, make up a 'trochaic metron'; four of these are described as a trochaic tetrameter; and if you chop off the very last syllable of the sixteen, what's left is a trochaic tetrameter catalectic. (Some people call it a trochaic septenarius, but then, they would, wouldn't they.) The line is very long, and, since there is a regular word-break after the eighth syllable, printers commonly split it up into two lines respectively of eight and of seven syllables.

What is surprising about this metre is that it was seen and used by the ancients as comic and vulgar (and so described, kordakikoteron, by Aristotle ... the kordax was a very obscene dance). It is used by the great writer of New Comedy, Menander (you could go and see a nice bust of him among the Howard marbles in the Ashmolean; he more or less invented the 'situation comedy' and perfected the eternally fertile formula 'Boy loves Girl: there is an Obstacle: the help of a Clever Slave solves it so that all live Happily Ever After'). In one of his 'latest' plays ('latest' in the sense that lost plays keep turning up on papyri preserved in the dry sand of the Egyptian desert), the Girl from Samos, it is used in a hilarious slapstick scene featuring Girl's comically nasty Father, Niceratus. Menander's Roman imitators adapted it into Latin, and so Plautus uses this metre in his Mostellaria for the scene where Boy, drunk, comes across Girl while she is putting her make-up on and goes for an inopportune contact.

So how did this frivolous, indeed indecent, metre come to be used for what we might think of as the stateliest and most dogma-laden hymns of our Latin tradition? One possibility: Think Roman Squaddies. Think Roman Squaddies in a happy mood, particularly after a great victory; they have returned to Rome; the Senate has voted a Triumph; and so the troops, heavy with gold and alcohol, are singing in the Triumph Procession as they process behind their general. You may be surprised by this; but they are singing obscene songs insulting the general, probably to avert from him divine jealousy. And Suetonius preserves for us three lines in just this metre which were sung during C Iulius Caesar's Gallic triumph (interesting that, just as with the Christian hymnographers, three lines seem to make up a stanza):
Gallias Caesar subegit, Nicomedes Caesarem:
Ecce Caesar nunc triumphat qui subegit Gallias;
Nicomedes non triumphat qui subegit Caesarem.

Which is best left untranslated; well, anyway, I am going to leave it untranslated. And so, turning now to the Christian hymnwriters, we find the sense of military triumph already vividly present in one of Prudentius' stanzas:
Solve vocem mens sonoram, solve linguam mobilem,
Dic tropaeum passionis, dic triumphalem crucem,
Pange vexillum, notatis quod refulget frontibus*.

This, of course, is the inspiration of Venantius Fortunatus' first stanza (and, indeed, of his hymn Vexilla Regis):
Pange lingua gloriosi proelium certaminis,
Et super crucis tropaeo dic triumphum nobilem,
Qualiter redemptor orbis immolatus vicerit.

The idea is of the Tree of the Cross as the tropaion [trophy], i.e. the battlefield Tree upon which the rejoicing soldiery hung the spoils (mainly armour) looted from their defeated enemies. It is both clever and appropriate; compare S Paul (Colossians 2:14-15) proselosas auto toi stauroi; apekdusamenos tas archas ... thriambeusas autous en autoi. No wonder Venantius Fortunatus thought the idea, and the metre, appropriate to express the exuberant joy of processing into Poitiers with a Relic of the Redeeming Tree.

And is there not a whiff of a Triumph Procession as the priest bends the ends of the Humeral Veil over the ciborium containing God's Body and then carries It through the adoring People of God?
__________________________________________________________________________
*Literally: Loose, O mind, the sonorous voice, loose the mobile tongue, speak the trophy of the Passion, speak the triumphal Cross, sing the banner which shines on marked foreheads [referring to the Cross marked on the foreheads with Chrism at Confirmation/Consignation].

STRONG WOMEN

So here come those lovely Passiontide hymns, which are permitted in the Liturgia Horarum for this coming week even though it has officially abolished Passiontide.

Having a powerful and well-connected Mother Superior in your patch is not every cleric's preference, especially if she's inclined to start the day after Mass by just happening to mention 'By the way, father, my friend the Emperor of Constantinople is sending me a nice big relic of the True Cross. Will you be around? Could you just knock up a new hymn or two for the occasion?' But I jest: undoubtedly Venantius Fortunatus, the bishop of Poitiers who died in 609, was just as excited by the prospect of such a glamorous relic as was the Rt Revd and Rt Royal Lady Abbess Radegunde herself.

Sing my tongue the glorious battle, sing the ending of the fray,
now above the Cross, the trophy, sound the loud triumphant lay;
tell how Christ, the world's Redeemer, as a Victim won the day.
What a wonderful expression of joy at the thought of Jesus' Crucifixion. Some people used to say that only the Orthodox really understand S John's perception that Jesus' death on the Cross is the high triumphant moment of his glory (doxa). But this hymn (Pange lingua) and its twin (Vexilla regis) coming from so very Western a Christian as Venantius prove what nonsense that is.

Triumphant, yes, but before that word Venantius uses another: a Greek word, tropaion. This refers to what you did after winning a glorious battle: first you found a tree; then you lopped its branches off; and you clad it with armour stripped from your defeated foes. Clever of Venantius, to see the Cross as a Victory Tree, and neat to think of the diabolical powers as stripped naked in defeat. Next we have a Latin word, Triumph, which refers to the boisterous procession into Rome after a victory: the Triumphator, his face painted red so that he looked like Juppiter, processed in his chariot with his legions following and singing. By the chariot wheels marched the leaders of the defeated enemy; they were facing a decisive end in a dark little cellar on the Capitoline Hill (you'll remember that Cleopatra didn't look forward to making her last public appearance in such a way). And what the soldiers chanted was the Triumphant Lay: io triumphe io triumphe. Venantius neatly suggests that we Christans have our own Triumphant Lay: immolatus vicerit; The Sacrificial Victim has won the day. An oxymoron: sacrificial victims usually ended up dead rather than in glory. Or you could call it a paradox; G K Chesterton rightly observed that it's not easy to be a Christian if you can't take paradox.

The metre of this hymn calls for comment: the trochaic tetrameter catalectic (tumtytumty four times with the final syllable chopped off). What is interesting here is that this metre was used by writers such as Menander in Athenian New Comedy for scenes that are pretty nearly slapstick - Aristotle called it kordakikoteron or 'tending to a lively vulgarity'*. Caesar's soldiery chanted their ritual abuse at him (to avoid the the risk of the Gods taking offence as he rode in triumph) in this metre. I wonder if Venantius chose it because of the joyous exuberance of the procession accompanying Abbess Radegunde's spectacular new acquisition into Poitiers. Roman Triumph Processions were boisterous to the point of being disorderly, the soldiers probably having already made bibulous inroads into their bounties. I'm not suggesting that Pange lingua was written to accompany a drunken orgy, but I bet the procession at which it received its premiere was not quite the sort of prim and stately event that Anglican Outdoor Religious Processions usually are.

The same may be true of some of those first Corpus Christi processions in Avignon after one of my favourite popes, John XXII, got that festival going and thus gave an airing to the great hymn in which S Thomas Aquinas borrowed Venantius' first three words, and his metre.

(And I wonder if Prudentius danced a bit as he composed Corde natus - also in this metre.)

*Sandbach wrote, in 1973, that "such passages in this metre are distinguished in tone from the adjacent iambics, but not always in the same way". In his 2013 edition of the Samia Sommerstein wrote "trochaic tetrameters  were clearly considered suitable both for farcical scenes (such as the latter part of the present act [Samia IV]) and for passages of unusual solemnity (such as Demeas' speech in [Samia] 694-712 or Knemon's in Dyskolos 708-47)."

FILIOQUE

I do not intend to explain what this is all about ab initio to those who do not already know the general outlines. Just to add some facts which some who do know may not be familiar with.

In 1995 the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity published a learned and interesting paper which suggested that a lack of correlation between the Greek (ekporeuesthai) and Latin (procedere) terms for "proceedeth" is part of the problem. ekporeuesthai refers to the origin of the Holy Spirit within the eternal and glorious economy of the Holy Trinity. And, since the Father is the Source (pege, aitia) of the being of the other two Persons, clearly the Spirit ekporeuetai from the Father alone. To suggest that he might ekporeuesthai from the Son as well is to risk positing two sources of Divinity and thus, in effect, to believe in two Gods.

Procedere, on the other hand, is a broader term. As well as sharing the meaning of ekporeuesthai, it also encompasses the Sending (proienai), wthin time, of the Spirit by the Son. And it includes the possibility of asserting that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son.When the Western Church was battling against Arianism, it seemed important to safeguard the full divinity of the Son by incorporating into the Creed His authentic Missio of the Spirit.

So you could argue that Filioque with ekporeuesthai is gravely erroneous because it is tantamount to polytheism, while procedere without the Filioque is dangerously suggestive of Arianism.

It is well known that Rome firmly forbids the addition of Filioque to the Creed when it is said in (or translated from) Greek - whether by 'uniate' Byzantines or in ecumenical contexts. But she has been slow to delete Filioque from the Creed when it is used in (or translated from) Latin.

However, in 2000 a very significant new development occurred. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger issued a document called Dominus Iesus, which was immediately made the object of hysterical abuse by illiterates who couldn't read it (including poor dopey George Carey) - you probably remember the hooha raised at that time by the ecumaniac industry both inside and outside the Roman Catholic Church. This furore still occasionally has echoes. This is and was unfortunate; the document represented some very interesting advances ecumenically in several respects. Not the least of these is that it began by giving, as 'the fundamental contents of the profession of the Christian faith', the 'Nicene' Creed in Latin and without the Filioque.

I would lose very little sleep if a Roman Pontiff eliminated Filioque from the Latin Creed. But it would leave some traces behind it. In, for example, the Quicumque vult. And I know an Anglican priest who, being very Orthodoxophile, presses his lips together at a certain point in the Creed. But, when he does duty in College chapels here in Oxford, he has to sing, in the Litany, " ... proceeding from the Father and the Son ..." because otherwise disastrous confusion would ensue when the choir came to repeat his words. The learned Dom Benedict of Silverstream once showed me a version of the Pange lingua in which a 'Western Orthodox' had rewritten S Thomas's Doxology ...

No; I would be very unwilling to go down such paths as those. The Latin West is as entitled to the integrity of its own Patrimony as is the Byzantine East. Probably best to leave the sleeping dogs ...

And we gallant presbyters of the Ordinariate are unlikely to forget that Filioque was introduced to the English Church by the Syrian Greek S Theodore whom Pope S Vitalian (657-672) sent to be Archbishop of Canterbury. I think we could catch the stuffier "English Orthodox" on the horns of a juicy dilemma by asking them whether the "Anglo-Saxon Church" of S Theodore was Orthodox ... or not ...

CORPUS CHRISTI

(1) It seemed to me very jejune to leave this great feast with the Common Preface, as the not-entirely-satisfactory Missal of 1962 did. Many people were happier with the older usage of employing the Nativity Preface. Communities enjoying an indult used the 'Gallican' Preface from the 1738 Paris Missal. This, happily, was authorised by the 2020 CDF legislation.

(2) What a shame we don't have a Patristic Preface for the Blessed Sacrament ... but stay: we could have had! The Verona ('Leonine') Sacramentary provided, at Christmas, a superb little Preface (VD tuae laudis hostiam), mentioning ... as you would expect ... the 'typical' figures of Abel, Passover Lamb, Abraham, and Melchisedek. Beautifully Roman; elegantly phrased and terse enough to have come from a very august papal pen.

(3) The EF and OF texts in Missal and Breviary for Corpus Christi are robustly supersessionist. Take the Lauda Sion (novum Pascha novae Legis Phase vetus terminat; Vetustatem novitas, umbram fugat veritas, noctem lux eliminat) and the Pange lingua (et antiquum documentum novo cedat ritui). Comments on this blog in 2016 established that German "translations" of the Liturgia Horarum, as early as the early 1970s, eliminated prayers for the Conversion of the Jews. 

Do German translations of S Thomas's hymns eliminate his supersessionism? Are the German and English hierarchies known to be agitating for the Angelic Doctor to be mutilated ('abelardised'?) so to make him Politically Correct?

(For classicists) Pange lingua ...

... gloriosi; and how glorious Venantius' hymn is. And how admirable that Dom Lentini's boys gave us back, in the Liturgia Horarum, something approaching the authentic text. The nominative (or accusative) absolute in Lustra sex ... peracta even survives: cleverly promoted to the licit status of a praedicativum obiecti!

But I am a bit disappointed by the survival of the old emendation ferre saecli pretium. The original is ferre pretium saeculi*, which was the text offered in the first draft Hymni instaurandi Breviarii Romani of Coetus VII. Here pretium is to be pronounced pretzum. This is to be expected in Late Latin: texts survive in which negotiator is spelt, by someone writing his Latin phonetically in the Greek alphabet, as nagouzatro; we even find gaudioso written as gauzioso. Saecli, of course, is a perfectly acceptable syncope for saeculi; but why replace the words of Venantius? Is it not part of the joy of saying one's office in Latin that linguistic markers survive from all the different centuries through which the Latin liturgy has made its august way? A permanent monument to the Hermeneutic of Continuity?
_________________________________________________________________
*The same problem arises in the Vexilla regis. The problem of course is that, in chant, if one pronounces pretium as having three syllables, the line is one syllable too long for the rhythm. The Coetus got round this in their first draft by printing preti in italics.

Commemorating the Cross

In the pre-1960s Roman Rite, during most of Eastertide, the rubrics sometimes ordered that a commemoration at Lauds and Vespers be made of the Holy Cross. I find this wholly edifying, as a reminder that Cross and Resurrection are two sides of the same redemptive coin. Although divided chronologically, they are inseparable doctrinally; so that it is bad method to forget the Resurrection when concentrating on the Lord's Passion, or the Cross when glorying in his Resurrection. Thus in the Western Rites the triumphalist hymns Pange lingua and Vexilla Regis are sung during Holy Week and even on Good Friday.

Here is the Commemoration, which followed the Collect of the Day.

Antiphon The Crucified hath risen from the dead and hath redeemed us, alleluia, alleluia. V Tell it among the nations, alleluia. R That the Lord hath reigned from the Tree, alleluia.
Let us pray.
God, didst will that for us thy Son should undergo the suffering of the Cross that he might drive out from among us the power of the Enemy: grant to us thy servants; that we may attain unto the grace of the Resurrection. Through the same.
The Response (" ... YHWH hath reigned from the Tree") comes from a version of Psalm 95 (aka 96) verse 10. This was how it read in early Latin translations of the Psalter, and it is known that the reading goes back at least to S Justin. It is found in many later Latin Fathers, and in Venantius Fortunatus' original text of Vexilla regis. The admirable (Anglican Patrimony) translator of Latin hymnology, John Mason Neale, renders Venantius thus: 
Fulfilled is all that David told
In true prophetic song of old;
Amidst the nations, God, saith he,
Hath reigned and triumphed from the Tree.

The more recent history of this stanza is highly interesting and significant. The first (1968) draft of the hymns for the new breviary finds Dom Anselmo Lentini (who was in charge of the post-Conciliar coetus set up to revise the hymns), explaining the unbelievably venerable history of this reading; he concludes by observing "So we do not dare to suppress the stanza or change the line". But, in the three years before the Liturgia horarum was actually published in 1971, that stanza had bitten the dust. Somebody had 'dared'. Here we have a minute footnoted detail which penetratingly illustrates the entire post-Conciliar process; "Experts" feeling increasingly liberated, as creative day followed inventive day, from a need to respect texts which had fed the Latin Church for 1,500 years. The Council had wisely mandated only such changes as were certainly necessary; in less than a decade the "Experts" had gradually come to gloss this as meaning Fay ce que voudras. (Was Theleme a Benedictine House?)

It is easy to see the 'problem'. The old text of this hymn alleges that King David, regarded as the composer of the psalms, had written the words about God having reigned "from the tree". Pedantic 'Enlightenment' readers of the Hebrew Massoretic Text will speedily if ponderously point out that they are absent from it. Indeed, even in the Greek Septuagint only the bilingual 'Verona' psalter, I think, gives this reading (apo xulou).

But this demonstrates exactly what is wrong with that sort of approach to the august interwoven synthesis of littera scripta and Tradition which is at the heart of our Faith. And even some secular literary critics would inform you that "Reception is part of Text".

This reminds me of the point made by Benedict XVI in his Regensburg Lecture about the divine inspiration of the Septuagint. And Mgr Andrew Burnham, in his splendid book on Liturgy, pointed out that, for the Orthodox, the Septuagint is a divinely inspired correction of the Hebrew Old Testament.


Footnote Before 1956, the 'Commemoration of the Cross' was somewhat more complicated than the simplification I give above.

Rhodanus Eloquentiae Latinae ... the Feast of S Hilary and of All Holy Airport Bishops

 "The Rhone of Latin Eloquence": is that how you would characterise S Hilary of Poitiers? Truth to tell, I am not totally sure that I understand what S Jerome meant when he thus described the great Athanasius of the West. Or when he used another phrase: that S Hilary was the 'Gallic Cothornus'. The Rhone, of course, for the Romans, was the great River of Gaul ... flowing down through a coastline civilised for centuries by Greek colonies, temples, theatres, vineyards; the river of the city of Arles, which was for late Antiquity one of the world's great, primatial, cities. As one looks across from the pons abruptus at Avignon, one is certainly aware of the might of this river. Perhaps there ought to be a special word for the world's really great rivers. Megalopotamoi?

Today is the "real" festival of S Hilary; it was only because they wanted to disentangle him from the Octave Day of the Epiphany that some usages eased him onto the following day.

I think it was in 2013 that PF coined that inspired and wonderful phrase "airport bishop". Keen though the Airport Pope has himself been (like his predecessors from S Paul VI onwards) to swing around the globe like a besequinned and idolised pop-star, PF is dead scared of anybody else getting in on the same act. But S Hilary was ... whatever "an Airport bishop" would have to be in Greek or Latin (any ideas?). 

One powerful Arian crook, the Primate of Arles himself, by insidiis et dolo got S Hilary exiled to Syria. But ... gracious me ... we orthodox don't play by the rules, do we? Just recall how the Ss Eusebii I mentioned in December, and S Athanasius himself, made good use of their government-imposed exiles. S Hilary did exactly the same. He spread the horrors of Catholic Truth wherever he went. The Arian bully-boys hand-in-glove with the government found him most terribly off-message.

This, of course, was an era very much like our own, when, in S John Henry Newman's neat expression, the Church's Teaching Authority was In Suspense. I don't think you'll find much mention of the Roman Bishopric in the old Breviary readings for S Hilary. In a couple of centuries, when you look at the Breviary Readings for S Raymond Burke and S Athanasius Schneider, you may not find many references to PF.

S Hilary is most definitely, and in so very many ways, a Saint For Our Time.

So ... S Hilary was such a nuisance to the Arians in the East that they were soon plotting to get him out of their hair by sending him back to Poitiers! From there, he seems to have converted the whole of Gaul ... all three parts ... from dozy old unreflective Arian-like assumptions to full-blooded and explicit Nicene Christianity, doing it partly (as S Ambrose was to do later) by composing Catholic hymns with sound Christology for his laity to sing. (One of the metres he used was the trochaic tetrameter catalectic, a 'triumphalist' metre, associated with Victory [Pange lingua gloriosi ...] ... S Venantius Fortunatus ... S Thomas Aquinas ...)

Dom Gueranger says that at Poitiers in his own time, the Preface of the Holy Trinity was used on the Feast of S Hilary. Not a bad idea. Unrubrical; but we mustn't be Rigid.

No; "Airport bishops" don't fit into a Bergoglianical agenda, do they ... and rumour had it that Bishop Schneider was addressed strictly about the need to cut down on his travels and to hand his airmiles over to Cardinal Parolin.

When you are a pope and you have an ingenious master-plan, carefully crafted and based on using your office to spread error and immorality thoughout the world (and to suppress the Authentic Use of the Roman Rite and to miserify those who love it), you're not exactly going to be pleased when some German bishop from Kazakhstan starts popping up all over the place with orthodoxy and orthopraxy springing up around him like the fritillaries along Addison's Walk.

Not quite the sort of "Surprise" the Bergoglians thought they had scripted, is it?

Nor precisely the right sort of "Mess".

AN OLIVE BRANCH ON PALM SUNDAY ...

 ... or ... a Palm Branch on Olive Sunday??

So what improvements has the Ordinariate Missal  made to the Novus Ordo rites for Palm Sunday? Well, the 'palms' are to be properly blessed and then distributed; and their solemn Blessing begins with a Sursum corda. Both of these are important gestures back to the pre-Pius XII, pre-Bugnini Roman Rite. But, in my view, the most important return to Tradition is that the formulae mention the Olive as well as the Palm. Let me explain the importance of this.

Palm, of course, is the ancient Mediterranean symbol of Victory: and our Lord's triumphant ride into Jerusalem is what we might call the pre-emptive procession of the Great Conqueror. Perhaps we should not think of Holy Week in too 'linear' a way. It is well known that S John's Gospel, read in the Western Rite on Good Friday, emphasises the Victory of the Cross (Victory doesn't have to wait for Easter morning). On Maundy Thursday, the Lord gives his disciples to eat and drink the Body and Blood which, in terms of a simplistic 'linear' approach, have not yet been broken, shed, or sacrificed. Yet he gives them to his disciples as already sacrificed. And Triumph is already integral to Palm Sunday. All the themes and elements of Pascha surface in all the rites of Holy Week; it is a thematic unity, even if poor mortals, bogged down by 'linear' time, have to take the components one at a time. The shopping bag you brought back from the supermarket contains all your groceries simultaneously, even if you take them out one at a time.

But Olive has, if anything, an even profounder ideology associated with it than does Palm. It suggests richness and fruitfulness enjoyed in peace. The Tridentine and Ordinariate rites allude to Noah, to whom the dove brought back an Olive twig, emblem of the end of God's wrath, emblem of the first covenantal peace between God and His people. How fitting to think of the Olive on this day when He who is the Covenant sets aside the Temple Sacrifices by 'cleansing' His Temple of the beasts awaiting immolation ... so that, antitype for type, He can set up the Eucharistic New Table of Sacrifice.

We meet Olive again at the Chrism Mass, and I would like to revive an edifying speculation of Dom Gregory Dix. Ancient Jewish tradition held that the tree of life standing in the midst of the garden of Eden was an Olive, from which came the oil of mercy that cured both pain and death. That is why patristic sources insistently associate the Chrism of Confirmation with immortality and resurrection. And the Medieval Cornish Mystery Plays make much headway, typologically, with the pun between elaion [oil; pronounced in later Antiquity as eleon] and eleos [mercy]

In some early writings, the tree from which this oil flows is the tree of the Cross. It seems to me that here the images of Scripture and Tradition merge and mingle. The Cross, the New Tree in the New Garden, is the true Tree of Life, and the Anointing (Chrisma), which makes and marks us as Christians unto everlasting life, flows from that tree. And it is the tree of which Venantius Fortunatus in his Pange lingua teaches us that it is itself soaked, anointed, through and through, with the blood of the lamb ( ... quem sacer cruor perunxit fusus agni corpore).

A preChristian Jewish writing pictures Adam begging to be given of the oil that flows from the tree in garden. He is given for anwer: 'It shall not be thine now, but at the end of the times. Then shall all flesh be raised up and God will give them of the tree of life'. 

Praise be to God, who, even here in the end-time, gives us in our Confirmation the privilege to be marked with the anointing unto everlasting life; and to eat the Food of Eternity.

Mariam invoca: our Lady in time of plague

I offer you my own my recension of this medieval antiphon to our Lady in time of plague. I have expanded e into ae where modern convention requires this, and arranged it so as to bring out the rhymes.

You could call it a sort of sonnet ...

Stella caeli extirpavit
  (quae lactavit Dominum)
mortis pestem, quam plantavit
  primus parens hominum.

Ipsa stella nunc dignetur
  sidera compescere,
quorum bella plebem caedunt
  dirae mortis ulcere.

O gloriosa stella maris,
a peste succurre nobis.

Audi nos: nam Filius tuus
  nil negans te honorat.
Salva nos, Jesu, pro quibus
  Virgo mater te orat. 

The first two stanzas and the final one employ trochaic tetrameters catalectic in the style of those of Pange lingua. But at O gloriosa a syllable gets added and the regularities of both rhyme and rhythm are subverted: does this heighten the emotion?

In the final stanza, I suggest that Filius is to be pronounced Filyus, and I write nil for nihil. I am far from sure that I am right about these two lines!

A translation on the internet makes a hash of quorum ... ulcere by not realising that the verb is caedunt and that ulcere .is an ablative singular, its ending guaranteed by the rhyme with compescere.

The Star of Heaven (who nourished the Lord) rooted up the plague of death which the first father of mankind planted; 
may that same Star now deign to hold in check the constellations, whose wars strike down the people with the sore of a dread death. 
O glorious Star of the sea, succour us from the plague. 
Hear us: for thy Son, denying thee nothing, honours thee. Save us, Jesus, for whom thy Virgin Mother implores thee.

Medieval science attributed plagues to configurations among the constellations ... helpfully reminding us that all 'scientific laws' are really just falsifiable hypotheses, God bless them.

I wonder if the Astronomer Royal is present at COBRA meetings ... 

A little elementary ... no; intermediate ... Latin

In his great hymn Pange lingua for Vespers at Corpus Christi, S Thomas writes:
Verbum caro panem verum
    verbo carnem efficit ...

We are going to translate it together. Are you sitting comfortably?

You will only be able to translate it by first asking and answering certain questions. Such as these.

Here we go.

What is the subject? That is, what is in the nominative? Verbum ... but caro as well. They are in what is often called 'apposition'. They stick together. Verbum means the Word in the sense of the Second Person of the Blessed and Undivided Trinity. Caro means flesh; so Verbum caro means the Word [who had become] flesh ... i.e. the Incarnate Word.

What is the verb? efficit, meaning makes.

What is the object? That is, what is in the accusative? panem, verum, and carnem. Let me persuade you to put carnem in the fridge for a moment and to deal first with panem verum. That means true bread.

So far, we have "The Word [made] flesh makes true bread ...."

Time to polish off carnem. Let's pause for a moment. Consider (1)"He beat the boy black and blue"; (2). "He beat the black and blue boy". In each of these English sentences, 'black and blue' is in grammatical agreement with (i.e. it tells us more about) the boy. But they are different. (2) means that the boy was black and blue before the beating. (1) means that the blackness and blueness was the result of the beating ... i.e. the end, purpose, result, of the verbal action.

Carnem is like (1). It is the result of the verbal action.

"The Word [made] flesh makes true bread [to be] flesh".

Oops ... we've left out verbo, which, incidentally, has a lower-case v. Its ending makes clear that it is either dative or ablative. I will tell you for free that it is ablative.

"The Word [made] flesh by a word makes true bread [to be] flesh".

You can't translate Latin, as you can a lot of modern languages, by attacking each word in the order in which it comes in the sentence. You have to work out grammatical things like what is the subject, what is the verb, what is the object etc. etc.. Otherwise, you are just wasting your time.

By 'wasting', I mean wasting.

Because the sense in Latin depends on the inflexions (i.e. the syllable at the end of a word which changes, as with verbum ... verbo; caro ... carnem), a poet is able to group the words in a beautiful or pointed way. The patterning of this couple of lines is, in my view, perfectly exquisite.

The great Anglican scholar John Mason Neale translated these lines, very simply, very finely,
Word made Flesh, by word he maketh
       Very bread his Flesh to be. 

Have you booked yet to attend the Latin Mass Society Latin course this summer in Pantasaph?