Book 4, lines 968-980

[Previous: lines 879-967]

John narrates. Jesus, preaching from a boat on Galilee, ends his sermon with a prayer.

“Talia dicta dabat, cœli super omnia regem
placandum non visceribus, non sanguine caeso;
sed votis precibusque iubens exposcere pacem.      [970]
Et modus orandi quisnam foret ipse canebat:
‘Omnipotens genitor, sedes cui lucidus aether,
sic nomen laudesque tuae celebrentur ubique,
et promissa orbi incipiant procedere lustra;
cùm tua non minùs in terris gens iussa facessat      [975]
mortalis, quàm cœlicolae tibi in aethere parent.
Nos divina hodie cœlo dape reffice ab alto:
parce dehinc bonus, ut nostris ignoscimus ipsi
hostibus; ac nullis adversis obiice inermes
tentando, prohibe à nobis sed cuncta pericla.’”       [980]

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“So he spoke, instructing us the king above
no longer wanted sacrifice of blood and bone,
bidding us rather to offer prayers for peace.               [970]
He himself told us how to pray to Him:
‘Almighty Father, throned in the bright sky,
may your name and deeds be hymned everywhere,
and may the promised age come to the world
when your will is obeyed across the earth                   [975]
by mortals, as the celestial angels do.
Refresh us with our daily meal from heaven.
Mercifully pardon us, as we pardon
our enemies; don’t send us helpless into
temptation, but protect us from danger.’”                    [980]

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This, obviously, is Vida’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, from Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 11:2-4. As with the previous post, it’s unclear to me what is gained by decontextualizing this from the Sermon on the Mount and relocating it to Jesus standing on a boat and preaching at people on the shore. But that’s what Vida has done. The intense familiarity to me of the Book of Common Prayer version of this text makes the little changes Vida introduces into his paraphrase stick out, rather, sorethumbwise:

Our Father, which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name;
Thy kingdom come;
Thy will be done
in earth, as it is in heaven:
Give us this day our daily bread;
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive them that trespass against us;
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil;
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
For ever and ever.
Amen.

For reference, here’s the Vulgate version, which is the specific text from which Vida was working:

1. pater noster qui es in cælis
2. sanctificetur nomen tuum
3. adveniat regnum tuum
4. fiat voluntas tua sicut in cælo et in terra
5. panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie
6. et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris
7. et ne nos inducas in tentationem sed libera nos a malo.

The most obvious change, perhaps, is that Vida was swapped out the bread (panis) from ‘give us this day our daily bread’. Instead we have a daily daps (line 977), which means ‘a meal, banquet, feast’, but more often means ‘a sacrificial or solemn feast, religious banquet.’ Rather grander than a loaf, I suppose, and more fitting, perhaps, for the epic idiom. Instead of ‘hallowed be thy name’ (‘hallowed’, here, meaning sanctified sanctificetur nomen tuum) Vida goes with celebro (line 973) which really doesn’t mean the same thing: ‘I celebrate, hold (a festival); honor, praise, celebrate in song’ and also ‘I proclaim, publish, make something known.’ I’ve gone with ‘hymned’, in an attempt to keep both the singing and the religious sense. I could have gone a different road, and translated the lines as ‘may your name and deeds be proselytised everywhere’, but that would have been awkward to fit into my metre.

Given how central the ‘Pater Noster’ is to Christian worship today it interesting to note that it seems to have come relatively late to church ritual.

A remarkable fact is that references to the Lord's Prayer are almost totally absent in the earliest writings. Only from the time of Cyril of Jerusalem, during the fourth century (315-386), is there sufficient proof that it was used in connection with holy communion. [F J Botha, ‘Recent Research on the Lord’s Prayer’, Neotestamentica 1 (1967), 43]

Relatedly, a great deal (ignorant of this fact and poking my nose into online discussion of this matter I now realise, a very great deal) has been made of the ‘Sator Square’. This grid is found in various places, written or inscribed, and was present in Pompeii which means that it dates at least to AD 79, and presumably earlier too.

It's is a little bit of wordplay fun. ‘Arepo’ isn’t a word, but the rest are: so, with a bit of stretching and pinching of Latin grammar, and assuming ‘Arepo’ to be a name, it means: ‘Farmer Arepo holds to his work as he wheels’—wheels his plough, we assume. It reads the same horizontally, vertically, and back to front. Ah, but could it be more than mere fun? Some have argued this square actually encodes Christian worship (the 70s in Pompeii would be rather early, but not impossibly so, for this to be true; although it still strikes me as unlikely). That’s because you can rearrange the letters in this square to spell ‘Pater Noster’.

Some folk have read a lot into this:

By repositioning the letters around the central letter Ν, a Greek cross can be made that reads Pater Noster (Latin for ‘Our Father’, the first two words of the Lord's Prayer) both vertically and horizontally. The remaining letters – two each of A and O – can be taken to represent the concept of Alpha and Omega, a reference in Christianity to the omnipresence of God. Thus the square might have been used as a covert symbol for early Christians to express their presence to each other. … In the Latin Vulgate version on Ezekiel one finds the words “rota” and “opera” in 1:16, as well as the plural form “rotae”. This is a central Merkabah mysticism text which speaks of wheels within wheels. The outer wheel of the [original] square spins as SATOROTA or ROTASATO (O: oh, sat: sufficient, rota: wheel) while the inner wheel spins as PERE (per: through, throughout) or REPE (rēpe: you crawl). Ezekiel 1:18 mentions that the wheel’s “rims were immense, circled with eyes”, and interestingly on the outer portion of the square the letter A can be considered to be a depiction of an eye viewed from a horizontal angle while the letter O considered a depiction of an open eye viewed from the front.

On it goes. (‘An example of the Sator Square found in Manchester dating to the 2nd century AD has been interpreted according to this model as one of the earliest pieces of evidence of Christianity in Britain. The Coptic Prayer of the Virgin in Bartos describes how that Christ was crucified with five nails, which were named Sator, Arepo, Tenet, Opera and Rotas.’) Blimey. I have to say, the balance of probabilities is that the Sator Square was around long before this AD 79 earliest known example, it's likely it predates Jesus, and that therefore its connection with Christianity is purely coincidental. But what a coincidence!

Back to Vida. In about AD 330, a Roman priest of Spanish family, one Gaius Vettius Aquilinus Juvencus, versified the four Gospels into Latin hexameters. I don't know if Vida knew of this work, but comparing its version of Matthew 6: 9-13 with Vida's is interesting. Juvencus adheres much more closely to the Vulgate text, which shows that it can be done (I mean: that it can be fitted neatly into hexameters) and that, therefore, Vida is deliberately gussying-up his version:

Sidereo genitor residens in vertice caeli,
Nominis, oramus, veneratio sanctificetur
In nobis, pater alte, tui, tranquillaque mundo
Adveniat regnumque tuum lux alma recludat.
Sic caelo ut terris fiat tua clara voluntas,
Vitalisque hodie sancti substantia pañis
Proveniat nobis; tua mox largitio solvat
Innúmera indulgens erroris debita pravi;
Et nos haud aliter concedere faenora nostris.
Taetri saeva procul temptatio daemonis absit
Eque malis tua nos in lucem dextera tollat. [Juvencus 1: 590-6]

At the head of this post: a rather lovely ink and watercolor Lord's Prayer by John Morgan Coaley (1889) currently in the Library of Congress.

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