O Virgo Virginum

There is a final antiphon appointed for 23 December in the Sarum practice, but there is no Guite sonnet corresponding to it, and it is not even found in many of the lists of O Antiphons, which originally numbered seven. According to Benedict D. O’Cinnsealaigh: ‘[It] appears in both the Gallican (France) and Saerum (England) liturgies. Although it is difficult to establish just when this antiphon was first introduced, it was certainly known in the Middle Ages.’ Because it is often excluded, I print the text and an English translation (from John Mason Neale and Thomas Helmore, eds., Hymnal Noted - Parts I and II [London: Novello, 1856], p. 209) below.

O Virgo Virginum, quomodo fiet istud? quia nec primam similem visa es, nec habere sequentem. Filiæ Jerusalem, quid me admiramini? Divinum est mysterium hoc quod cernitis.

O Virgin of Virgins, how shall this be?
For neither before thee was there any like thee,
nor shall there be after. —
Daughters of Jerusalem, why marvel ye at me?
The thing that ye behold is a divine mystery.

Fortunately, this antiphon was not missed by Cynewulf. In ‘Christ I’ the corresponding section is ll. 71-103 (George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book, Vol. III of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, A Collective Edition [Morningside Heights, NY: Columbia U, 1961], pp. 5-6). Below is a prose translation from Cynewulf, The Christ of Cynewulf, trans. Charles Huntington Whitman (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1900), available here.

O thou joy of women in heavenly glory, fairest of all maidens throughout the regions of earth, so far as ocean-dwellers have ever learned, reveal to us the mystery that came to thee from the skies, how thou didst ever conceive so that a child might be born, and yet hadst not at all carnal intercourse after the manner of men! Of a truth we have never heard that in days of old there came to pass such a thing as thou didst receive by special grace, nor may we look for such an event in time to come. Truly a noble faith dwelt in thee, for thou didst bear within thy womb the Lord of glory, and yet thy splendid virginity was not defiled. All the children of men, as they sow in tears, even thus they reap—they bring forth unto death. Then spake the blessed maiden, the holy Mary, ever full of triumph: 'Why marvel ye thus, why grieve ye and sorrowfully lament, ye sons and daughters of Salem? Ye ask in curiosity how I preserved my virginity, my chastity, and yet became the mother of God's illustrious Son? Verily the secret is not known unto men, but Christ declared that in David's beloved daughter all the guilt of Eve is blotted out, the curse removed, and the weaker sex exalted. Hope hath arisen that a blessing amid the joy of heavenly angels, with the Father of righteousness, may now abide for both men and women evermore through all eternity.'

O Emmanuel

Here is Malcolm Guite's sonnet based on the O Antiphon appointed for 22 December in the Sarum practice:

O Emmanuel

O come, O come, and be our God-with-us

O long-sought With-ness for a world without,

O secret seed, O hidden spring of light.

Come to us, Wisdom, come unspoken Name

Come Root, and Key, and King, and holy Flame,

O quickened little wick so tightly curled,

Be folded with us into time and place,

Unfold for us the mystery of grace

And make a womb of all this wounded world.

O heart of heaven beating in the earth,

O tiny hope within our hopelessness

Come to be born, to bear us to our birth,

To touch a dying world with new-made hands

And make these rags of time our swaddling bands.

The corresponding section of Cynewulf’s ‘Christ I’ is in ll. 130-63 (George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book, Vol. III of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, A Collective Edition [Morningside Heights, NY: Columbia U, 1961], pp. 6-7). Below is a prose translation from Cynewulf, The Christ of Cynewulf, trans. Charles Huntington Whitman (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1900), available here.

O God of spirits, how wisely and how rightly wast Thou named Emmanuel, as the angel first called it in Hebrew, which, fully interpreted in its hidden meaning, is: 'Now is God Himself with us, the Guardian of the skies!' Even so of yore ancient men foretold the coming of the King of kings, the spotless Priest. Thus long ago the great Melchisedec, wise of spirit, revealed the divine majesty of the eternal Ruler. He was the bringer of laws and precepts to those who had long looked for His advent; for it was promised them that by the power of the Spirit the Son of the Creator would Himself pass through the regions of earth, and visit the lowest depths. Now were they waiting patiently in captivity until the Son of God should come unto them in their sorrow. And thus they spake, prostrated by suffering: 'Come now Thyself, high King of heaven. Bring salvation unto us wretched prisoners, worn out with weeping, with bitter burning tears. In Thee alone is relief for those in dire need. Seek us here, captives sad of heart; leave not behind Thee, when Thou goest hence, a multitude so great; but do Thou royally manifest Thy compassion upon us, O Christ our Savior, Prince of glory; let not the accursed have dominion over us. Leave unto us the eternal joy of Thy glory, that those whom Thou didst first create with Thine hands may worship Thee, the radiant King of hosts, who dwellest eternally on high with God the Father.'

O Rex Gentium

Here is Malcolm Guite's sonnet based on the O Antiphon appointed for 21 December in the Sarum practice:

O Rex Gentium
O King of our desire whom we despise,
King of the nations never on the throne,
Unfound foundation, cast-off cornerstone,
Rejected joiner, making many one,
You have no form or beauty for our eyes,
A King who comes to give away his crown,
A King within our rags of flesh and bone.
We pierce the flesh that pierces our disguise,
For we ourselves are found in you alone.
Come to us now and find in us your throne,
O King within the child within the clay,
O hidden King who shapes us in the play
Of all creation. Shape us for the day
Your coming Kingdom comes into its own.

And here is the corresponding portion (ll. 1-17) of Cynewulf’s ‘Christ I’ Advent lyrics. The Old English text can be found in The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, Vol. III of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, A Collective Edition (Morningside Heights, NY: Columbia U, 1961), p. 3. The translation is from Kevin Crossley-Holland, ed. and trans., The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford U, 1984), p. 197. Unfortunately, the opening lines of this poem have been lost, so it begins in media res, as it were.

. . . to the King.
You are the corner-stone the builders
once discarded. It becomes you well
to stand as the head of the great hall,
to lock together the lengthy walls,
the unbreakable flint, in your firm embrace,
so that all things on earth with eyes
may marvel endlessly, O Lord of Glory.
O true, victory-bright One, reveal now your own might
through your mysterious skill, and let wall
remain upright against wall. The hall needs
the care of the Craftsman and the King Himself
to repair—it is decayed now—the house
under its roof. He created the body’s limbs
of clay. Now the Lord of Life must save
dispirited men from devils, the wretched
from damnation, as He has often done before.

O Oriens, and an Unexpected Dante Reference

Here is Malcolm Guite's sonnet based on the O Antiphon appointed for 20 December in the Sarum practice:

O Oriens

Paradiso XXX.61

First light and then first lines along the east

To touch and brush a sheen of light on water

As though behind the sky itself they traced

The shift and shimmer of another river

Flowing unbidden from its hidden source;

The Day-Spring, the eternal Prima Vera.

Blake saw it too. Dante and Beatrice

Are bathing in it now, away upstream…

So every trace of light begins a grace

In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam

Is somehow a beginning and a calling;

‘Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream

For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,

Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking.’

The passage referenced from the Paradiso reads:

e vidi lume in forma di rivera
fulvido di fulgore, intra due rive
dipinte di mirabil primavera.

Here is the English translation by Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy 3: Paradise, trans. Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds [London: Penguin, 1962], p. 320):

Light I beheld which as a river flowed.
Fulgid with splendour; and on either shore
The colours of a wondrous springtime showed.

Now for Cynewulf. This is a prose translation of the section of the Advent lyrics in ‘Christ I’ that corresponds to today’s O Antiphon, ‘O Oriens’. The source is The Christ of Cynewulf, trans. Charles Huntington Whitman [Boston: Ginn & Co., 1900], available here.

Lo! Thou Splendor of the dayspring, fairest of angels sent to men upon earth, Thou Radiance of the Sun of righteousness, bright beyond the stars, Thou of Thy very self dost illumine all the tides of time! Even as Thou, God begotten of God, Son of the true Father, didst ever dwell without beginning in the glory of heaven, so Thine own handiwork in its present need imploreth Thee with confidence that Thou send us the bright sun, and come in Thy very person to enlighten those who have long been covered with murky cloud, and sitting here in darkness and eternal night, shrouded in sins, have been forced to endure the shadow of death. Now in the fulness of hope we believe in the salvation brought to men through the Word of God, who was in the beginning co-eternal with God the Father almighty, and afterward became flesh without blemish, being born of the virgin as a help for the afflicted. God appeared among us without sin; the mighty Son of God and the Son of Man dwelt together in harmony among mankind. Wherefore it is right that we should ever give thanks by our deeds unto the Lord of victory, for that He was willing to send Himself unto us.

O Clavis

Here is Malcolm Guite's sonnet based on the O Antiphon appointed for 19 December in the Sarum practice:

O Clavis
Even in the darkness where I sit
And huddle in the midst of misery
I can remember freedom, but forget
That every lock must answer to a key
That each dark clasp, sharp and intricate,
Must find a counter-clasp to meet its guard.
Particular, exact and intimate,
The clutch and catch that meshes with its ward.
I cry out for the key I threw away
That turned and over turned with certain touch
And with the lovely lifting of a latch
Opened my darkness to the light of day.
O come again, come quickly, set me free.

HT to the Confessing Reader for giving me the idea of using the Harrowing of Hell fresco (looks like a Panselinos to me) to illustrate the 'Key of David'. Actually, it makes me want to do a whole post on the Harrowing of Hell, but I don't have time at the moment!

It is now time to post the corresponding portion of Cynewulf's 'Christ I' Advent lyrics (ll. 18-49). The Old English text can be found in The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, Vol. III of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, A Collective Edition (Morningside Heights, NY: Columbia U, 1961), pp. 3-4. The translation I give here is that in Kevin Crossley-Hollan, ed. and trans., The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford U, 1984), p. 198.

You govern the locks, You open life,
O Lord and Ruler, righteous King.
Unless man's work is well done, You deny
him the paths of joy, the blessed journey.
Truly in our need we speak these words
and call upon Him who created man
that He should not consign to hell
those unhappy ones, we who sit in prison,
sorrowing. We yearn for the sun,
for the Lord of Life to show us light,
take our souls into His protection,
clothe our clouded minds in His glory;
we await the day when He will make us worthy
that He has admitted to His grace,
abject, cut off from our own country,
we who had to come to this narrow land.
Wherefore a man may say--he who speaks the truth--
that, when it was lost, He delivered
the race of man. The maid He chose
for mother was still young, a virgin
without sin. The bride grew great with child
without once entering a man's embrace.
There has not been such merit in a woman
anywhere on earth, before or since;
it was a mystery, one of God's miracles.
All the gifts of the Spirit grew on earth;
the Maker illumined many matters,
knowledge long since hidden under the soil;
the sayings of the prophets were realised
when the Ruler was born, He who fulfils
the cryptic words of those who, fittingly
and fervently, praise the name of the Creator.

O Radix

Here is Malcolm Guite's sonnet based on the O Antiphon appointed for 18 December in the Sarum practice:

O Radix
All of us sprung from one deep-hidden seed,
Rose from a root invisible to all.
We knew the virtues once of every weed,
But, severed from the roots of ritual,
We surf the surface of a wide-screen world
And find no virtue in the virtual.
We shrivel on the edges of a wood
Whose heart we once inhabited in love,
Now we have need of you, forgotten Root
The stock and stem of every living thing
Whom once we worshiped in the sacred grove,
For now is winter, now is withering
Unless we let you root us deep within,
Under the ground of being, graft us in.

It's Sapientiatide!

my valued readers, I’ve been putting off work on an Advent post, but now that we Orthodox on the Old Calendar have reached what the Catholics, Anglo-Catholics, and, I suppose, Western Rite Orthodox (whether they follow the Roman or the Sarum tradition), or some of them, call ‘Sapientiatide’, it can no longer safely be avoided. One of the primary purposes of this blog, aided by the day-by-day nature of blog-posting, is to be an urgent call to and enhancement of the observance of the liturgical year. I believe it is one of the most grievous lacunæ of modern life that not only is the passage of the year often unobserved entirely—thanks to our technological alienation from the sky, the seasons, and the fields—but that when it is observed it is only marked by degraded, almost entirely secularised ‘rituals’ (see this, for example). Sanctifying the passage of the year is part of how we fulfill St Paul’s exhortation to ‘walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil’ (Eph. 5:16-7).

The period of the Nativity Fast is one of my favourite times to try to focus on this, precisely because of the nearly complete dominance of what I have referred to as the ‘degraded, almost entirely secularised “rituals”’ that American society offers us during this season. It is a period of preparation for the observance of the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord, God, and Saviour, Jesus Christ, the celebration of our Lord’s coming in the flesh, and for this reason it has long been known in the Western world as ‘Advent’. The expectation of the feast is made more acute in the Western liturgical tradition, beginning on the 16th or 17th of December, by the use of a series of antiphonal hymns sung at Vespers with the Magnificat (much like our Άξιον εστίν is used during Matins in the Byzantine typicon), commonly known as the ‘O Antiphons’ because of the vocative ‘O’ with which they all begin.

Now this is a well-known tradition, which one can read more about in quite a few other places (I recommend this one and this one). It has also, I am informed, been done to death on countless blogs. I don’t want to bore those who are already quite familiar with them, or annoy those who never cared in the first place—cough! (Christopher Orr), cough! cough! (Esteban Vázquez)—so I’ll just point out two interesting things I’ve come across that don’t show up in a lot of ‘O Antiphon’ stuff.

The first is a series of sonnets based on each antiphon by this guy, Malcom Guite, which I found here. I really like these, and the whole idea of using the sonnet is very classy to me. Each day until Christmas, I am going to post Guite’s sonnet for the O Antiphon of that day (based on the Sarum practice). It will not be the only post, so if someone has no interest in it, they will have something else to read too.

The second is the Advent Lyrics by the mysterious Anglo-Saxon poet, Cynewulf, contained in the 10th-c. manuscript known as the Exeter Book, published in the Columbia University Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records collection (George Philip Krapp and Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, A Collective Edition: Vol. III [Morningside Heights, NY: Columbia U, 1963]). Cynewulf, much like Mr Guite in our own day, wrote lyrics expanding on the themes of the O Antiphons for all but three of them. Kevin Crossley-Holland has published verse translations of two in his The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology [Oxford: Oxford U, 1984], pp. 197-8. Charles Huntington Whitman published a prose translation of all of ‘Christ I’ (the longer poem of which the Advent Lyrics are a part) in The Christ of Cynewulf [Boston: Ginn & Co., 1900], available online here. I will post Crossley-Holland’s verse translations on the days to which the corresponding antiphons are assigned in the Sarum practice (19 and 21 December), and Whitman’s prose translations on the days to which the other corresponding antiphons are assigned. Because Cynewulf’s poem does not contain lyrics corresponding to the antiphons for 16, 17, and 18 December, I will not begin posting these until Thursday, 19 December according to the old Orthodox calendar. These translations will be included in the posts along with Guite’s sonnets.

I apologise to all of those who will be annoyed or uninterested in this stuff. I myself find the O Antiphons quite interesting (I was a little shocked when I realised their connection with ‘O Come, O Come Emmanuel’, a hymn I’ve loved since I was a little kid), but of course, I don’t follow enough blogs to find myself ‘inundated’ by posts about them! Christopher Orr has mentioned that he doesn’t have ‘a connection’ to them, the same way most Americans don’t have one with the Byzantine hymns for the Nativity. But I certainly did have that connection with ‘O Come, O Come’, and even though the O Antiphons per se were new to me a few years ago, I think part of what appealed to me was the idea of them being chanted in Advent in the Western monasteries centuries ago, the churches and the ‘feel’ of which have been part of my cultural consciousness for a long time. These do not seem foreign to me, although the modern, watered-down ‘heirs’ to them do! Anyway, far be it from me to argue that one ought to feel a connection to something. Also, Orr's points about the Western Rite are certainly well taken.

Well, after all of that ado, here are Guite’s sonnets for 16 and 17 December:

O Sapientia
I cannot think unless I have been thought
Nor can I speak unless I have been spoken
I cannot teach except as I am taught
Or break the bread except as I am broken.
O Mind behind the mind through which I seek,
O Light within the light by which I see,
O Word beneath the words with which I speak
O founding, unfound Wisdom, finding me
O sounding Song whose depth is sounding me
O Memory of time, reminding me
My Ground of Being, always grounding me
My Maker’s Bounding Line, defining me
Come, hidden Wisdom, come with all you bring
Come to me now, disguised as everything.

O Adonai
Unsayable, you chose to speak one tongue
Unseeable, you gave yourself away,
The Adonai, the Tetragramaton
Grew by a wayside in the light of day.
O you who dared to be a tribal God,
To own a language, people and a place,
Who chose to be exploited and betrayed,
If so you might be met with face to face,
Come to us here, who would not find you there,
Who chose to know the skin and not the pith,
Who heard no more than thunder in the air,
Who marked the mere events and not the myth.
Touch the bare branches of our unbelief
And blaze again like fire in every leaf.