Whose resurrection?

The Collect for the Fourth Sunday of Advent is especially well known because it is also the concluding prayer of the Angelus, and consequently recited by many people three times every day. Our current official translation bids us pray that we, through the Passion and Cross of Christ, may be brought to the glory of his resurrection. This version goes back at least as far as Challenor.

A few years ago, attending the Angelus recited by Pope Benedict XVI at noon on a Sunday in Rome, I was struck by a discrepancy between our familiar English version and the text recited by the Pope, who prayed ut . . . ad resurrectionis gloriam perducamur. This translates as that we may be brought to the glory of the resurrection, or even that we may be brought to the glory of resurrection.

I realise that the latter version, though accurate, would be distasteful to many, who would find it unacceptably vague. But the former brings out more clearly, I would suggest, that we are thinking here of the General Resurrection, in which we hope to participate. This is not a separate, second resurrection, but the resurrection of Christ extended to embrace us. The Latin speaks of his Passion and his Cross, but simply of the resurrection, indicating that the suffering was his, but the glory is his and ours.

The insertion of his in the English translation has necessitated a change in the conclusion to this Collect. Whereas the Latin uses the standard adverbial phrase beginning Per Dominum, the English ends with a relative clause: his resurrection. Who lives and reigns. (The CTS bilingual Daily Missal goes further, altering the conclusion in its Latin text to Qui vivis et regnas . . . as though the prayer were addressed to the Son, which it is not.)

The Anglophone preference for an insertion of his here seems to me to illustrate a more general point. Many of the prayers in our Missal originated in the first Christian millennium, before the Scholastic era. They are more content with allusion, whereas Scholasticism prefers definition. Modern translators, influenced by Scholasticism, tend to view earlier texts through scholastic spectacles, and so to produce a more definitive, less allusive translation than the texts warrant, losing subtleties offered by our oldest liturgical texts.