SHOULD WE ADDRESS
GOD
AS THOU OR AS YOU ?
The ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN COMMENT brings to the attention of its World readers, and in a particular manner to its English speaking readers and Orthodox Christian worshippers, the anguish and controversy that for many long years has provoked the style and nature of translations from Greek and Slavonic of the Liturgical Texts to the, what we should call, a Liturgical Official English.
Great hopes existed, a few years ago, with the setting up of an Archiepiscopal Committee to translate the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom for the use in the Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain. High names of scholarship were sited in it! Then,... its result became published with the apocalyptic trumpets of the Patriarchal blessing and the drum kit of Oxford University Press...! The scholarship had become contemporary ...! "It had to be accessible to the simple Cypriots," as a leading member of that committee explained then to our Editor.
The translation had its critics from multiple angles. And it was heard that a committee member resigned from the committee. This resignation was explained at the time, as caused by the adopted tendencies in the committee to parallel the new English language usage by the Roman Catholic, Anglican and other churches. This can be seen objectively in the published translation of the Our Father, amongst others.
Therefore, there was no need of English memorable beauty or spirituality! And, of course, following the liberal aggiornamento of Vatican II, let us go with the world of 'Denominations' with a soft theological ambiguity; in this way our venerable hierarchy may assist the ecumenical heat with the refreshing wind from the flow of their top hat's veils.
SHOULD WE ADDRESS GOD AS THOU OR AS YOU ?
By
Deacon Ian
Thompson
This is part of a wider debate
on the accessibility of liturgical language – which in turn raises questions,
about the linguistic ‘tension’ between the Church and the world. Forty years
ago the case for accessibility was argued in its most extreme form by the
Anglican bishop John Robinson. He pleaded for an end "to churchiness and
religiosity and everything that sets apart the sanctuary from society." He
wanted to see "the decor, the music and the architecture [of the Church]
speaking the language of the world it is meant to be transforming." Curiously
Robinson did not mention liturgical language in that particular context but his
ideas had a big effect on Western liturgical thinking. Altar rails were removed,
celebrants adopted the ‘west-facing’ position, and the language of the
service books was drastically rewritten.
I
mention Robinson simply because he helps as a focus. From an Orthodox viewpoint
his logic seems very curious. How do you transform the world by conforming to
the world’s taste? What would Robinson have said about icons, Orthodox church
music, etc? Accessibility on Robinson’s terms would involve the destruction of
almost everything that the Orthodox Church holds dear. Although he talked of
‘transforming’ the world he clearly didn’t expect it to be transfigured.
For Robinson, accessibility is all about meeting the world on its own terms in
order to get one’s message across.
A different kind of accessibility is to be found in the BCP (Miles Coverdale) version of the Psalms.
‘Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.’
Fifteen words, twelve of them with only one syllable, and the rest
with only two. This is the shortest version that I know of that particular text,
and the most limpid. No ‘message’ here – just a simple, direct appeal from
the heart to God, in words that defy improvement. Of course it has aged
slightly. We wouldn’t nowadays say ‘Make
me a clean heart...’ but does that matter? We all know exactly what it means.
Interestingly that particular phrase was already archaic by the time the Cambridge team came to translate the Psalms for the King James bible. They therefore substituted
‘Create in me a clean heart...’
This is still good (and simple) but neither as good nor as simple as Coverdale. Perfection has been sacrificed (however marginally) to contemporary idiom. Here we encounter a basic tension which has bedevilled translation ever since. Granted that texts need to be accessible, which is more important: perfection or contemporary usage? Moreover since we must weight the scales on one side or the other, how heavily do we weight them? For example we do not nowadays generally use the vocative ‘O’. Must we therefore eliminate it here? ‘God, create in me a clean heart...’? And what about ‘right spirit’? Proceeding further down the path of contemporary relevance we might say,
‘God, create in me a clean heart and thoroughly renew my nature.’
We might – but would we want to? Are
we not trivializing and secularizing a great text? In particular, ‘thoroughly
renew my nature’ is devoid of all spiritual ‘charge’. But it illustrates a
point. If we depart too far from linguistic perfection and traditional Christian
phraseology do we not tend to defeat our own purpose – ie. by ending up with
something which is neither beautiful, memorable nor spiritual, and which
doesn’t speak to anyone? Where, therefore, do we draw the line?
This brings me finally to the
question of Thou v You.
In favour of the latter it may be urged that the second person singular is now
obsolete – or almost obsolete – even in those contexts which were its last
refuge, like school assemblies, RE and English lessons, and most church
services. To people under 40 (and certainly under 30) it is therefore apt to
sound strange and remote, at least to start with. Even within an Orthodox
context God is now often referred to as YOU, especially in books and for
purposes of private prayer. Thyateira has already gone ‘contemporary’ and so
has OCA. The case for contemporary idiom cannot just be dismissed. Also (an
important point): it is getting stronger.
Yet the
arguments are not all one way. A big limitation of modern English is its lack of
grammatical anchorage. This means that certain sentence constructions cannot be
used in liturgical contexts although they have always formed the backbone of
liturgical prayer. Moreover this limitation has a knock-on effect since it tends
to influence the mood and ambience of worship. Statements begin to assume a more
direct, explicit and even assertive quality, and the production of rhythmical
prose becomes more difficult.
These
problems are further exacerbated by a marked tendency among contemporary
liturgical translators to outlaw obsolescent words like the vocative ‘O’,
UNTO, LO, BEHOLD, etc., thus narrowing one’s options especially in matters of
rhythm and sentence construction. The literary quality of texts goes into
decline.
(A partial answer to these problems may well be a radical new
grammar of liturgical prayer. There are occasional glimpses of a tendency that
way in the new Thyateira translations, but the whole subject requires much more
thought and research.)
Another argument commonly
urged in favour of traditional idiom is that in religious contexts, THEE and
THOU have a spiritual quality which YOU does not. This is not (as some
translators claim) a historical accident resulting from the disuse of the 2nd
singular in everyday speech, for the distinctive religious THOU, with its own
special overtones, can be traced back at least to pre-Reformation times. Thus by
using contemporary idiom, it may be argued, we are depriving ourselves of a word
which, perhaps more than any other word in the language, is capable of
engendering awareness of those special qualities of transfigured life and
visionary perception which it is the aim of the Liturgy to cultivate. Whether
the special associations of THOU can survive the general disuse of the 2nd
singular is of course another matter. However it seems to be widely valued at
the moment, at any rate among older worshippers.
A final argument in favour of
Thou
is that the use of the second person plural introduces an element of
theological ambiguity into liturgical texts.
The Orthodox Church has always taught, clearly and unambiguously, that
there is one God. The trouble
with you is that it can refer to
one person or to a number of persons. The
American theologian Constantine Cavarnos probably articulates an uneasinesss
felt by many people when he says:
…in
the original (Greek- language) Divine Liturgy and hymnography of the Orthodox
Church, as well as in the Greek Holy Scripture, the pronouns of Sy and Soi
(Thou and to Thee) are used in addressing God. The unwarranted innovation of addressing God as a You instead
of a Thou may be taken to imply that we Orthodox now … accept the heresy of Tritheism – the doctrine that the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not one God, but three distinct Gods.
(Orthodox Christian Terminology,
pp.17-18)
One general point by way of
conclusion. Although most people would surely agree that liturgical taste now
requires something simpler than (say) Florence Hapgood and that a degree of
textual revision was therefore necessary, it is possible to feel that the
process has been too protracted and that it has spawned far too many variants.
Crucial to the effectiveness of liturgical prayer is that words which are said
or sung in church should sink into the memory so that they may be fed upon in
the heart. ‘Ongoing’ textual
revision hinders this process and is thus an impediment to the spiritual life.
Different versions float around in the brain, get mixed up, create appalling
tautologies (‘Behold I was conceived in sins and in sins hath my mother
conceived me’) or just destroy each other like colliding electrons. Arguably
what we now need is a period of stability and consolidation so that we may grow
to love the sacred texts and allow them to transform us from within.
Copyright © Deacon Ian Thompson, 2005, who read English at Durham University and taught for 34 years in a secondary school. He is now a part-time tutor with the WEA.
First published in Vol 18 No 2 Winter 2005 of ORTHODOX NEWS, from St George Orthodox Information Service, U.K.
Presentation and editorial emphasis by ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN COMMENT.
We would like correspondence on this subject, which will be answered by the author: mailto:editor@orthodox-christian-comment.co.uk .