"The Lord has reigned from the Tree".
As Neale translates this stanza of the Vexilla Regis:
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.
You will not find the words from the tree [literally, wood] in any version of the psalter that reposes upon your bookshelves ... nor in any translation ... unless you are lucky and learned enough to possess a copy of the 'Psalterium Romanum': where it does occur in verse 10 of psalm 96MT/AV=95LXX/Vg. This psalter was used by many in the time of Venantius, as well as much earlier. S Justin Martyr knew the reading a ligno, and accuses the Jews of deliberately censoring these words from their text because of the embarrassing Christian resonances. Tertullian, S Cyprian, Lactantius, and S Augustine knew it, but S Jerome could not find it in a Hebrew text. Nor is it in the Septuagint, except in one single bilingual manuscript ('apo xulou') where it might have crept across from the Latin side.
Despite this, could it be original? Well, the discovery of Hebrew Biblical manuscripts much earlier than the medieval Hebrew 'Masoretic text' which Jewry treats as authentic, has shown a much greater diversity in the textual tradition than most people expected ... especially in the poetic books. (I counted some 28 occasions on which the producers of the New Vulgate adopted a reading from the Qumran Isaiah, supported by early translations, in preference to a reading from the Masoretic Text.) And it has become very obvious (not least to that admirable Methodist Margaret Barker) that elimination of 'Christian' verses did occur. If this phrase is original, it could originally have referred to the wood of the ark of the Covenant, victorious over the Philistine god Dagon. That's quite a nice piece of typology anyway, isn't it?
This, however, is not in my view the big question. Texts , before the invention of printing, were inherently unstable (look at the apparatus criticus of the OCT Homer), and this phrase, 'original' or not, is quite simply part of our Biblical tradition (just as is the story in S John of the Woman Caught in Adultery); canonised by the Fathers who were fed by it ... and by the use of Venantius' hymn throughout the Latin Christian centuries. Dom Lentini, in his first draft of the revised Breviary hymns, retained the stanza, and admirably added in a footnote "We do not dare [audemus] to suppress the strophe nor to change the line". Good for him.
However, by the time the Liturgia Horarum was published, a more radical and philistine attitude held sway; a determination to 'dare' to make the Great Tradition less visible; a hermeneutic of rupture. It is the prayer of all right-thinking people that Papa Ratzinger has been successful in starting a process of turning the Philistines back. The restoration of this stanza to the Liturgy is overdue.
Fr John Hunwicke
was for nearly three decades at Lancing College; where he taught Latin and Greek language and literature, was Head of Theology, and Assistant Chaplain. He has served three curacies, been a Parish Priest, and Senior Research Fellow at Pusey House in Oxford. Now incardinated into the Personal Ordinariate of our Lady of Walsingham, he has his base within the Oxford Ordinariate Group. This blog now replaces the Blog Father Hunwicke's Liturgical Notes. Its main purpose is to explore, ad mentem Summi Pontificis, the possibilitiesfor mutual enrichment between three forms of the Roman Rite: the Extraordinary Form, the Ordinary Form, and the Anglican Use. I have been told that my previous blog was disliked because of some the comments on the 'thread'. I take the point. In this blog, all comments will be moderated, and anything which is even implicitly critical of the English Hierarchy or of any member of it, will not be published.
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2 comments:
The Liber Hymnarius allows the old version "ad libitum",the third verse reading:
Impleta sunt quae concinit
David fideli carmine,
dicendo nationibus:
"Regnavit a ligno Deus."
It also gives the older tune (the one I know, anyway).
Regnavit a ligno Deus! God reigned from the Wood [of the Cross]! One can only agree with your perceptiveness in the matter of this felicitous phrase, Father, sung every day in the Passiontide. To which i should like to add, that, alas, the leading motive of the Bugnigni philistines in removing this verse from the hymn in Liturgia Horarum (which i have never used, as in seminary we used the old Breviary, which i kept on using even after LH replaced it), is not so much their slavish and uncatholic following of the Masoretic text, but rather, a post-conciliar Arianism which succeeded in wiping out nearly every liturgical and catechetical reference to the Godhead of Jesus Christ, and to the Holy Trinity. ''Regnavit Deus a ligno'' simplly does not sound politically correct in an era of interrelgious dialogue ‘’uber alles’’, does it?
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