THE collects are temporary, tightly structured prayers appointed to be read in church each Sunday and holy day all year long. Many of people who appear in Common Worship have their origin within the Gregorian Sacramentary of the sixth century — a set of prayers composed in Latin, and, within the late eighth century, authorised by Charlemagne to be used throughout the Frankish Empire. The Gregorian Sacramentary was eventually adopted within the Western Church, and later became one in every of the muse texts of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and, in our own generation, of Common Worship.
In the sixteenth century, an increasingly literate laity called for manuals of personal devotion. Cranmer was not the primary to provide an English translation of Latin prayers. There were already in circulation printed collections generally known as “primers”. Cranmer referred to one in every of these in a letter he wrote to Thomas Cromwell in 1539: “I even have overseen [looked at] the Primer which you sent unto me, and therein I even have noted and amended such faults as are most worthy of reformation. . . Howbeit, they be not of that importance but that for this time they could be well enough permitted and suffered to be read of the people. And the book itself little question is superb and commendable” (quoted by G. Cuming in Godly Order, Alcuin Club no. 65, 1983).
Some years later, nonetheless, when Cranmer compiled the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, he applied a better standard to his own treatment of the medieval Latin collects. His skill was to increase and soften the terse language of the unique. One example may be heard within the collect for peace, familiar to those that attend morning prayer wherever the Book of Common Prayer continues to be in use (Common Worship’s barely altered version is appointed to be used on Thursday morning). He replaced the temporary phrase Deus auctor pacis et amator with the more fluent “O God, who art the writer of peace and lover of concord”, and expanded the abrupt quem nosse vivere to the more graceful “in knowledge of whom standeth our everlasting life”.
Sometimes, Cranmer the translator couldn’t resist the demands of Cranmer the reformer, and there are occasions when he allowed his sympathy with the Continental reformers to intrude. While we must always not be surprised by his reforming zeal, what might surprise is the degree to which he preserved the liturgical types of the Catholic past. Of the 84 seasonal collects within the Book of Common Prayer, by far the bulk were translations from the Latin of the Sarum Use. Of the 22 collects provided in Common Worship for the Sundays after Trinity, no fewer than 14 are ultimately derived from the identical source.
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Almighty and ever-living God, clothed in majesty, whose beloved Son was today presented within the Temple, in substance of our flesh: grant that we could also be presented to you with pure and clean hearts by your Son Jesus Christ our Lord.
THE collect appointed by Common Worship for the feast of the Presentation is a modernised version of the collect within the Book of Common Prayer, itself a translation made by Cranmer from the medieval Latin, with origins within the Gregorian Sacramentary.
As is usually the case, the collect finds echoes within the biblical texts appointed for the day, including the one from Malachi set for the Principal Service, and the one from Haggai set for the Second Service. Both prophesy the Lord’s purifying of the Temple.
ACCORDING to the Book of Common Prayer, this feast was called the Purification of St Mary the Virgin, to which was added in smaller print “The Presentation of Christ within the Temple”. The additional words were included within the 1662 revision of the Prayer Book at Bishop Cosin’s suggestion. Common Worship has removed the reference to Mary’s purification, which was at all times misleading. In Luke 2.22-35, the main target just isn’t on Mary, but on her child, Jesus, who was destined “for the falling and rising of many in Israel”.
Cranmer provided the collect and the Gospel for today (Luke 2.22-27a), but no special epistle. His reticence is odd, but could also be explained by the incontrovertible fact that, through the Middle Ages, the Marian accretions had grown to such an extent that 2 February had come to be thought to be a feast of our Lady. Cranmer, who in lots of respects was a cautious reformer, will need to have decided to retain the title by which it had come to be known, the Purification of St Mary the Virgin, as a concession to public opinion. It is odd that he didn’t restore the day to its original status as a feast of our Lord — in spite of everything, his familiarity with ancient liturgies would have given him the fabric to achieve this — but we had to attend greater than 500 years until the Liturgical Commission put things right.
THE other name for today — Candlemas — is an ancient title restored in Common Worship. The custom of candlelit processions incurred the censure of Cranmer, who believed that it introduced into worship a component of frivolity. The origin of the Candlemas procession is uncertain. It could have been adopted from earlier pagan custom. We do know, nonetheless, that, as early because the seventh century, Christians marked the occasion by processing concerning the town carrying lit torches and singing hymns. Alcuin (c.735-804) refers in one in every of his homilies to a Candlemas procession: “the entire multitude of the town collecting together . . . bearing an enormous variety of wax lights, and nobody enters any public place in the town with out a taper in his hand” (The Annotated Book of Common Prayer, John Henry Blunt, 1866).
Four centuries later, in 1153, St Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: “We go in procession, two by two, carrying candles in our hand, that are lighted not at a typical fire, but at a fireplace first blessed within the church by the Bishop. . . We carry lights in our hands; first, to suggest that our light should shine before men; secondly, this we do today especially in memory of the Wise Virgins (of whom this Blessed Virgin is the chief) that went to satisfy the Lord with their lamps lit and burning. And from this usage and the various lights arrange within the church today, it known as Candelaria, or Candlemas.”
The Revd Adrian Leak is a retired Anglican priest, whose recent publications include The Golden Calves of Jeroboam and After the Order of Melchizedek.
