Deus, qui hanc sacratissimam noctem

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Deus, qui hanc sacratissimam noctem is the incipit of the oration at Christmas ( in nocte "in the night") in the Roman rite .

text

Deus, qui hanc sacratissimam noctem veri luminis fecisti illustratione clarescere, da quaesumus, ut, cuius in terra mysteria lucis agnovimus, eius quoque gaudiis perfruamur in caelo.

Translation in the German missal :
“Lord, our God, on this holy night the true light shone on us. Let us grasp this mystery in faith and keep it until we see in heaven the undisguised splendor of your glory ”.

Translation in the Roman Missal :
“God, you have made this holy night as bright as day through the rising of the true light; so let us, we ask you, taste the bliss [happiness] of that light in heaven too, the secrets of which we have recognized here on earth. "

history

The prayers of the vigil and the three Christmas masses go back at least to the oldest collections of the Roman liturgy from the 4th to 6th centuries. The focus of the prayer is surprisingly not on the birth of a child, but on light in the night: The light of the liturgical space in the middle of the night is a reflection of the “ glory of the Lord ” (כָּבוֹד, δόξα), which the shepherds in the Gospel of Christmas Mass shines around. Prayer captures Christmas as an essentially Theophane event. The prayer can thus be read as a reflex to the gospel of the Christmas mass ( Lk 2,1-14  EU ).

The second liturgical connection point is the Isaiah reading of the Christmas mass ( Isa 9 : 1-6  EU ): The light that appears to the people in this is - even after the deletion of verse 4 ( Isa 9,4  EU ) in the renewed liturgy - politically connoted; this aspect can also be found in the Gospel as the census of the foreign ruler Augustus ( Lk 2.1  EU ). When it came into being, prayer did not update this messianic and political aspect. Rather, it is linguistically linked (veri luminis) to the gospel of the coming festival mass in the , the prologue of the Gospel of John Jn 1,1-18  EU . In various editions of the Vetus Latina is found there, the place lux vera the Vulgate Translation lumen verum. The content of the second part of the prayer also ties in with this point. In the gospel of the day the world does not recognize the light ( John 1,10  EU ); the believers of the Christmas mass, however, have already recognized this light (mysteria lucis agnovimus) . However, knowledge is (still) bound to earthly boundaries and signs in word and sacrament; the request of prayer is directed towards the completion of this vision of light in heaven. This can be interpreted as a shift in the political expectations of Messiah to heaven, known in Feuerbach's and Marx's criticism of religion (cf. Opium of the People ) .

The translation of the German missal weakens the Latin version in some points: the knowledge of the secrets of light becomes the request for belief in them. In this translation, heaven does not appear as perfect happiness, but as the limit of earthly faith.

literature

  • Alex Stock : Orations. The daily prayers of the feast days translated and explained again . Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-7917-2613-7 , pp. 29-34 .
  • Andreas Heinz : Christmas piety in the Roman liturgy and in the German hymn . In: LJ . tape 30 , 1980, pp. 215-229 .
  • Reiner Kaczynski : The ministerial prayers of the priest in Advent and at Christmas time. A comparison of the texts before and after 1970 in the Missale Romanum . In: LJ . tape 28 , 1978, p. 65-85 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alex Stock: Orations. The daily prayers of the feast days translated and explained again . Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-7917-2613-7 , pp. 29 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Alex Stock: Orations. The daily prayers of the feast days translated and explained again . Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-7917-2613-7 , pp. 29-34 .