QUINQUAGESIMA
In the liturgical calendar. Quinquagesima Sunday is so called because it precedes Easter by fifty days. The Epistle for the day, in both the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican, is taken from the fifteenth chapter of St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. It is probably the most famous passage in all his writings. As printed in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, it reads:
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity”.
That passage reflects St Paul at his best — and most eloquent. At least, the eloquence of the original is well conveyed by the matchless translation of the King James Bible, which was incorporated verbatim in the Book of Common Prayer. Nowadays, of course, it is seldom heard by Anglican congregations. Their pastors have thrown out both books and replaced them with modern texts of unspeakable shoddiness. To excuse this vandalism, they claim that seventeenth-century English is incomprehensible to the modern ear — not that they ever advocate the rewriting of Shakespeare in pop-speak. Their motives are honourable enough, to the extent that they wish to make the meaning of the faith clear to the faithful. But it can certainly be argued that clarification is a part of their ministerial duty, which they should not slough off by resorting to rewrites. Indeed, it can be equally argued that they have a duty to glorify God by conducting services at the highest standard of language and music: anything less is to reduce worship to the level of Easy Listening.
The advocates of revision sometimes cite the Quinquagesima Epistle in support of their policy, honing in on the word charity. Those of them who know Latin (a shrinking minority) point out, accurately, that it is a translation of caritas, that it was correctly understood in the seventeenth century, but that in the twenty-first its meaning has changed, to connote the kind of handout needed by welfare recipients. That is just comment. But it fails to seize a pastoral opportunity. The Epistle for the day and the Gospel for the day are traditionally a subject for the homily that follows them. By retaining the King James text, complete with charity, the preacher can helpfully and clearly talk about all the subtle significances of caritas, which are much more precise than the ambiguous word love, so sloppily used in the modern rewrites. And if, at the same time, he or she touches on charity in its welfare connotation, that too is a useful theme: for any true account of the Christian message is bound to insist on the duty of loving-kindness, of making decent provision for the world’s poor and afflicted.
Therein, arguably, is the threefold strength of corporate worship at its optimum: first, a liturgy of surpassing nobility; second, music that does not pander to debased tastes, but captures beauty and truth as only the great composers can; and rounding this out, a sermon that speaks to the heart and mind — as St Paul said later in the same letter to the Corinthians, “Except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? For ye shall speak into the air”.
It is not only in St Paul’s letters that the word caritas needs to be properly understood when rendered into the vernacular. Notably that is so when one tries to translate the “Ubi caritas” saying of St Francis of Assisi, which begins, in English, “Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance”. Only the word charity, in its Pauline use, will serve. For caritas, as a Christian term, has multiple nuances. It refers to at least three things: to God’s love for humankind; to the responsive love of God by his people; and to the disinterested love of one person for another. All that is comprised in the one Latin word. In English, love cannot be used as a just equivalent. For that word carries too large a freight of other associations: gluttons, for example, love excess at table; sadists love inflicting pain; and corrupt persons love wealth or power. None of those traits are, by any definition, related to holy affection. Caritas, though, in any true account, is the core feature of all holy lives.
That feature is manifest, famously, in everything we know about St Francis. Having begun by giving away all his worldly goods to the poor, he exemplified charity, in the modern sense, at its best. But throughout his career, he lived by charity, in its Pauline sense, in every one of its meanings. That he was much loved by God is a given, and is self-evident in all his works and in his stigmata. Responsively, he loved God profoundly, and that is clear in his service to the life of prayer, his pure mysticism, and his laudi spirituali. Like many mystics, he was a highly practical person, and the sense of community he imparted to his Order was rooted in a love of his fellows which all who knew him bear witness to.
But it did not end there. One of the most attractive things about St Francis is the vast scope of his love and reverence for all of God’s created world. At a humble level, legend asserts, birds flocked to him out of kinship, as a fellow-creature: he was at home with them, and they with him. But that affinity embraced the universe: he saw Nature as a mirror of God; all beings were, to him, his brothers and sisters; and as a poet, in his famous “Canticle of the Creatures”, he wrote verses to his Brother Sun and his Sister Moon, and even (so whole was his vision) to Sister Death. In Christendom, this all-inclusive embrace was only matched, in modern times, by Teilhard de Chardin’s exalted sense of the universe as framework for the pilgrimage to God, and by David Jones’s comprehensive sense of kinship not only with all animate life, but also and even with the non-sentient things of this planet, the things of chemistry and physics. Both men were massively gifted intellectuals. But at heart there was something implicitly Franciscan about them.
Of such is the kingdom of Heaven.
