Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Introduction

Opening Passage:

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.

Summary: Tristram Shandy's life is filled with mishaps, and four, in particular, rule his fate. Tristram's father, being of philosophical temperament, had (like many an early modern philosopher) turned his attention to the best way to educate children, and concluded that there were certain basic things that were essential to a successful life. First, the animal spirits and humors must be properly balanced at conception; second, a successful man must have a large and attractive nose; and third, he must have an auspicious name, like Trismegistus, and not a name that will be a burden on him, like Tristram. Alas, at the time his parents were conceiving him, his mother suddenly asked his father whether he had wound the clock; and when he was born, his nose was crushed by forceps; and the maid and his mother got the name mixed up, and so he was christened Tristram. The fourth mishap occurred when he was accidentally circumcised due to the forgetfulness of the chambermaid.

The work is, as one might expect, both bawdy and satirical all the way through; one can see everywhere Sterne's taking of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought to an extreme and he never passes up a sexual innuendo if he can repeat it into the ground. Fully appreciating the satire requires, I think, having shared the same background reading as Sterne. There is no need for this with the bawdy jokes, although they get to be a bit wearing after a while. Where the book excels is in characterization. Every character is vividly unique -- Walter Shandy, Tristram's mother, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Yorick (Sterne's own stand-in), and many of the secondary characters. MrsD noted that there was a Theatre Royal radio drama from the 1950s based on the book. Without the bawdy and with only a limited timeframe, it is not at all like the book. But it makes an excellent tribute to the charm of Sterne's Uncle Toby, a former soldier so gentle that he literally would not hurt a fly:



The work can be seen as satirizing any pretension of realism on the part of a novel. If we actually wrote up your life as a novel, what would it really include? A lot of bickering over extraordinary silly topics, a lot of obsessing over trivial hobby-horses, a lot of distractions, a lot of digressions, a lot of time doing nothing worth narrating; ridiculous embarrassments, ridiculous plans, failures to attend to matters of importance for ridiculous reasons. And, most of all, ridiculous opinions, in endless supply, the human brain being a sort of opinion-factory, producing ten opinions a minute on every subject under the sun. One of the mottos Sterne puts on the title page of some of the volumes is from Epictetus's Enchiridion: "We are bothered with opinions about things, not by things themselves." In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, we get very little of the actual life of Tristram; but we have endless opinions from everyone, and it is the endless variety of opinions that give interest to the snippets of action.

To the limited extent one can say that Tristram Shandy is 'about' anything, it can be said to be about the physical experience of writing and reading books. Sterne revels in the physical aspects of a book, giving us a black page as an elegy, a blank page as a portrait, a marbled page as a description of the book itself, various illustrative lines, shifts of font. He plays with the seriality of a book by displacing and misplacing parts of it, and its episodic character by using chapter divisions as punctuation. He plays at length with the fact that books are in part made up out of other books. And writing a book is not neglected, either. As Walter Shandy thinks of the conception of a child, so a writer tends to treat the conception of a book, planning and trying to get the start of the 'child' just right (Sterne repeatedly mocks the idea of writing according to a plan); just as Walter Shandy thinks a magnificent name essential to success, so people put a great emphasis on the titles of books. No one who has ever had a book seem to become more complicated faster than he or she could write it will fail to recognize the Tristra-paedia -- or Tristram Shandy itself.

Favorite Passage: From Volume I, Chapter XXXVI:

Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all;—so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good-breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.

For my own part, I am eternally paying him compliments of this kind, and do all that lies in my power to keep his imagination as busy as my own.

Recommendation: Highly recommended, but you have to be in the mood for most of it.

The Vindication of the Byzantine West

Today (July 28) in the Maronite calendar is the memorial for the Fathers of the Holy and Ecumenical Third Council of Constantinople. While it occurred, of course, in Constantinople, and was attended mostly by Eastern bishops, and dealt with theological disputes that were almost entirely Byzantine, it is in many ways the most Western of the Seven Ecumenical councils of the first millenium, for it was the triumph of the Byzantine West.

To understand the council, one must get out of one's head any nonsense about the Greek East as some kind of opposition to the Latin West. In the seventh century, there were no such sharp lines. In Italy, Greek and Latin rites were all jumbled together -- Italy in a north-ish and west-ish was largely Latin due to the influence of Rome and Milan, but the church in southern Italy was very decentralized, and churches were generally founded by local patronage, and while each church would generally be either Byzantine or Latin rite, it was just a matter of whichever the local patrons happened to decide that they wanted. There was a slow latinization under the southern Lombards, but it was very slow and barely noticeable at this early a date. And Italy was not entirely under Lombard rule; the other major power was the Exarchate of Ravenna, which was firmly Byzantine. Nor were the boundaries between the two powers neat and clean, as you can see from this map of the Lombard/Byzantine division of Italy at the end of the sixth century, shortly after the Lombard invasions:



Nor, for that matter, did the boundaries necessarily mean much; being in Lombard territory still could mean considerable direct Byzantine influence, depending on the particular political situation. Moreover, from 642 to 752 (from John IV to Zachary) there were eleven Popes whose native language was Greek -- either from Sicily, or from Syria, or from Greek-speaking parts of Italy, or (in one case) from Ephesus. The only exceptions, I believe, were the Popes who had been born in Rome itself. What is more, Muslim invasions both east of Italy (Syria) and west of Italy (Sicily) had led to a very significant influx of Greek-speaking refugees. There was a broader Latin world, to the north and to the west, over which Rome had extraordinary influence; but Rome itself in the seventh century lived in a world that was in a great many ways more Greek than Latin, more Eastern than Western.

The Emperor, Heraclius, was faced with a serious set of problems; he was very concerned with recovering territory that had been lost to the Persian Empire and preventing yet more territory from being lost, and the disunity between Christians who followed Chalcedon and those who rejected it was interfering with the formation of a unified front against the Persians. With the support of Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople, he attempted to push a compromise position: if the Monophysites would accept the formula that Christ had two natures, divine and human, the Chalcedonians would accept the formula that Christ had one operation or will (Monothelitism). It seemed to many to be a viable solution to a serious problem, a way to bring peace to a fight of which everyone was tired. Alexandria and Antioch signed on. The East was coming together -- or so it seemed. Nobody had reckoned on St. Sophronius. Sophronius was a widely respected monk; in 633 he traveled to Alexandria and to Constantinople in an attempt to convince their respective patriarchs that the compromise was unacceptable. He failed. But the next year he was elected Patriarch of Jerusalem, and from that position he began actively opposing the Monothelite compromise.

So now began the maneuvering. Patriarch Sergius wrote to the Pope at the time, Honorius I, insisting that the relevant phrase, one operation (energy) of Christ, had been used in a letter by Patriarch Mennas to Pope Vigilius (the letter was actually a forgery, but Sergius was not in a position to know this), and that the compromise was making it so that people who had before repudiated the words of Pope St. Leo I to Chalcedon were now singing his praises: unity was being achieved. However, he was willing to drop the precise formula he had been using, if Sophronius would also drop his. In the face of this argument (it is explicitly the unification of the East that the Pope found impressive), Honorius replied that this was probably for the best, and affirmed Sergius's position, or at least something like it; later, people will suggest that Honorius took Sergius to be denying that Christ had two contrary wills, and possibly that's what he was thinking, although it's hard to say. But it still made the dispute one of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome against Jerusalem. Or so it seemed. A synod met in Cyprus with representatives from all sides; and it came down in Sophronius's favor. And with that the whole compromise began to fall apart.

But Sergius was not deterred. The formula could be tweaked; and he tweaked it. This modified version is what would become known as the Ecthesis, and Sergius got Heraclius to sign off on it -- Heraclius would later say reluctantly, but how much this is actually true is difficult to say. All this happened in 638. Why 638? Because St. Sophronius died in March of that year. Patriarch Sergius would die in December of the same year -- but by the time he had done so, all four eastern sees had signed on to the new compromise, in part because Sergius was now able to use Honorius's letter. Eastern unity was now within reach. Or so it seemed.

Honorius had died in October 638, after what had seemed at the time to be a quite competent and relatively uneventful thirteen years of papal rule. Three days after his death, Severinus was elected Pope. But at the time, it was expected that no pope would take office until he received confirmation documents from the Emperor. Heraclius made it a requirement that Severinus could not receive the documentation until he signed on to the Ecthesis. Severinus had already refused to do so, but after some negotiation they were able to get Heraclius to agree to confirm the election on condition that they would show the Ecthesis to Severinus and ask him to sign it if he agreed with it. So the Exarch of Ravenna was to make sure that Severinus did sign it and then issue the confirmation in the Emperor's name. Severinus, however, refused. More negotiations followed and finally in 640, Heraclius, who was very ill, gave in, and confirmed the election. Severinus immediately called a synod and condemned the Ecthesis. Because of the long negotiation to get Imperial confirmation, which had led to his practically being a prisoner in the Lateran Palace for a year, it was about all he was able to do, as he died two months after the confirmation. But the momentum was now set: John IV (from Greek-speaking Dalmatia), Severinus's successor, also refused to accept the Ecthesis. And after John IV came St. Theodore I, a Greek-speaking Syrian from Jerusalem, and with him the foundations of the Third Council of Constantinople began to be laid. Theodore was very much against Monothelitism, and attempted to depose Patriarch Paul II of Constantinople for his support for it.

Of St. Maximos the Confessor in his early life we know relatively little for certain, although there is excellent reason to think that he was from Constantinople, served for a while as a civil servant there, and, after he became a monk, studied under Sophronius. He became involved in the Monothelite controversy while in Carthage, and he began a correspondence with Pope Theodore in 646, shortly before journeying to Rome to meet the Pope in person. He and Theodore planned a council to handle the matter. But it was not just any ordinary synod. Maximos's plan was for the Pope to call an ecumenical council. This was a bold move, because all ecumenical councils up to that point had been called by Emperors. Maximos was the one who did much of the practical work of planning for the council. Two things, however, would complicate matters.

The first was that in 648, the Emperor Constans I issued a decree called the Typos, which prohibited any discussion of Monothelitism at all -- quite literally, it commanded by law that everyone should go back to the way things were before the dispute arose. The second was that Theodore died suddenly in 649, before the council could actually be convened. He was succeeded by St. Martin I, who had spent much of his career in Constantinople. This put the council temporarily under a bit of doubt, but, as it happened, Pope Martin was of the same mind as Pope Theodore had been, and he did not wait for any imperial confirmation of the election; he called the council into session almost immediately, and the council began almost immediately because almost all of the planning had been done for it. Thus came about the Lateran Council of 649, the almost-ecumenical council. While there was a judicious selection of Latin bishops from Italy and North Africa, almost all of the major movers of the council were Greek-speaking, and perhaps as many as a quarter of all the bishops, as well. The council claimed that the bishop of Rome had full authority to eliminate heresy, and it condemned both the Ecthesis and the Typos. Martin promulgated the acts of the council by an encyclical claiming that the council had ecumenical authority.

Needless to say, Emperor Constans empowered the Exarch of Ravenna to arrest both Pope Martin and Maximos. Both were eventually caught in 653. Martin was exiled without trial and died in 655. Maximos was tried for heresy, found guilty, and as punishment had his tongue and right hand cut off; he was then exiled, and died in 662. The quieter St. Eugene I did not push the matter of the council with Constantinople, nor did St. Vitalian afterward, although both were opposed to Monothelitism. Adeodatus II did not involve himself with the question at all, and we have very little information about what Domnus, the next pope, did on this matter. But in 678, St. Agatho, from Sicily, became pope, and he was of a more energetic mettle.

And the timing was right, as well. The Emperor Constantine IV had a number of successes against the Muslim armies that had arisen and distracted imperial attention from the question of schism, and thus having a space to breathe, he wrote a letter to Pope Domnus proposing an ecumenical council to resolve the matter. Domnus was already dead, but Agatho wasted no time at all; he had synods throughout the West called to discuss the matter and arranged to send a large delegation -- the largest delegation of Western bishops that had to that point ever been sent to an ecumenical council -- and the Third Council of Constantinople officially opened in 680. A letter from Agatho was read at the council that came down strongly against the Monothelite heresy; it was accepted by the council and helped to consolidate the opinion of the council against Monothelitism. The council condemned Monothelitism and the major Monothelites, including Pope Honorius. Sophronius is explicitly upheld as orthodox in the Acts of the Council. The council held under Pope Martin is explicitly referred to in the letter of Agatho, which was accepted as orthodox by the council.

Pope Agatho did not live to see the triumph; by the time the decrees of the council had been sent back to Rome, he had died, after less than three years as Pope. He was succeeded by St. Leo II, who was Pope for less than a year, but who confirmed the decrees of the Third Council of Constantinople and arranged to have them promulgated throughout the West. Leo was very careful to explain in his letters to bishops that he took Honorius to be condemned not for heresy as such but for negligence in opposing it. Leo's successor, St. Benedict II, would do further work in making sure that the West was all on the same page with regard to the council. In the East, the council had fewer problems than ecumenical councils had usually had before, and became widely accepted very quickly.

The Third Council of Constantinople had as its primary and immediate effect the consolidation of Chalcedonian orthodoxy. But the council often shows up in other contexts too -- most notably in discussions of papal authority. There are two reasons for this. The first is the condemnation of Pope Honorius, by a council that Catholics accept as orthodox. The condemnation is quite harsh, as well:

And in addition to these we decide that Honorius also, who was Pope of Elder Rome, be with them cast out of the Holy Church of God, and be anathematized with them, because we have found by his letter to Sergius that he followed his opinion in all things and confirmed his wicked dogmas.

The reason for the condemnation seems to have been that Macarius of Antioch, one of the Monothelite holdouts, repeatedly appealed to Honorius in his defense.

On the other hand, the council accepted as orthodox the letter of Agatho, which makes very strong claims about the Roman see, e.g.:

Therefore the Holy Church of God, the mother of your most Christian power, should be delivered and liberated with all your might (through the help of God) from the errors of such teachers, and the evangelical and apostolic uprightness of the orthodox faith, which has been established upon the firm rock of this Church of blessed Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, which by his grace and guardianship remains free from all error, [that faith I say] the whole number of rulers and priests, of the clergy and of the people, unanimously should confess and preach with us as the true declaration of the Apostolic tradition, in order to please God and to save their own souls.

It's doubtful that the Greeks paid much attention to such claims, but Rome has always taken things like this seriously, as more than mere rhetoric. Prior to Agatho, the popes had already considered the case of Honorius; John IV, for instance, had argued, when opposing Monothelitism, that Honorius was simply confused, and thought that Sergius was condemning the notion that Christ had two opposed wills. When Leo II affirmed and promulgated the decrees of the III Constantinople, he also made very clear that he took it to be condemning him not for teaching heresy but for failing to oppose it and thus giving it encouragement. One should not get the wrong idea about this -- Leo's condemnation of Honorius for failing to do his duty in preserving the faith is quite as sharp as anything put forward by the council, and the papal oath that it was common for new popes to take included at some point a condemnation of Honorius for assisting heretics. But it's also clear that they at no point saw this as inconsistent with continuing to affirm, as Agatho puts it, that the Roman see remained "free from all error". The case became an issue, however, in the Reformation, since Protestants regularly appealed to Honorius as an example of papal heresy; the Counter-Reformation was not able to come up with a unified response to this argument, but the conclusion that has since come to dominate is that Honorius was not in fact teaching ex cathedra, but simply stating a private opinion, albeit in official correspondence.

Regardless, the Third Council of Constantinople stands as the great achievement of the Byzantine West, and one that could arguably have never come about except by the impetus of people who in culture were both Western and Greek. The Latin West knew almost nothing about it. The Greek East could do almost nothing about it. But the Greek West both understood the problem and laid the foundations for solving it.

Arda Unmarred

'For Arda Unmarred hath two aspects or senses. The first is the Unmarred that they discern in the Marred, if their eyes are not dimmed, and yearn for, as we yearn for the Will of Eru: this is the ground upon which Hope is built. The second is the Unmarred that shall be: that is, to speak according to Time in which they have their being, the Arda Healed, which shall be greater and more fair than the first, because of the Marring: this is the Hope that sustaineth. It cometh not only from the yearning for the Will of Ilúvatar the Begetter (which by itself may lead those within Time to no more than regret), but also from trust in Eru the Lord everlasting, that he is good, and that his works shall all end in good. This the Marrer hath denied, and in this denial is the root of evil, and its end is in despair....'

Manwë in "Laws and Customs Among the Eldar (A)" in J.R.R. Tolkien, Morgoth's Ring, Christopher Tolkien, ed., HarperCollins (London: 2015) p. 245. This is from one of the drafts of the Quenta Silmarillion, the material of which was being reworked after the publication of The Lord of the Rings.

UGCC Catechism

I've mentioned it was coming several times before, so since it has come (after considerable delay), I thought I'd put something up -- the Ukrainian Catholic Catechism, Christ Our Pascha, is now out and available. You can buy a copy here and no doubt elsewhere as time goes on.

Ray of Sunshine

Another priest in the same deanery, Father Aime Remi Mputu Amba, pastor dean of Sotteville-lès-Rouen, recalled that whenever Father Hamel came into the room for meetings, “it was always a ray of sunshine.”

“Despite his advanced age, he was still invested in the life of the parish. I often told him, jokingly, ‘Jacques, it’s time to take your pension.’ What he always answered, laughing: ‘Have you ever seen a retired pastor? I will work until my last breath.'”

(ht)

A Poem Draft

Intellectual Discovery

The altivolant splendor of the sunlight of the mind,
and all the shining glory of the radiance of its dawn,
illuminate with wonder a world endowed with grace,
the land of human reason in its variegated charm.

There rivers wash on banks with albinal lilies laid
and trees soar up to heaven with fair trunks of living gold.
The roses drip their dew like a sky of argent stars,
the breeze is clean, the grass is thick, beside a diamond road.

And underneath the tracing of bright branches formed of light,
beneath a tree of glory like an angel in its gleam,
a fountain leaps with waters, full of laughter and of life,
of truth, of hope, of poetry, of logic, and of dreams.

Retributivism

From Bedau and Kelly's SEP article on punishment:

The best justification of punishment is also not purely retributivist. The retributive justification of punishment is founded on two a priori norms (the guilty deserve to be punished, and no moral consideration relevant to punishment outweighs the offender’s criminal desert) and an epistemological claim (we know with reasonable certainty what punishment the guilty deserve) (Primoratz 1989, M. Moore 1987).

This is not, in fact, true of retributivists in general, though. The commitment generally shared by most people called retributivists is that punishment may only be imposed on the guilty. It is logically possible to have a retributivism committed to the claim that all the guilty should be punished, but no one seems actually ever to have held such a view. Even very hardcore retributivists usually concede something to other moral considerations -- and, indeed, not just moral considerations but practical considerations, as well, like how much trouble it would take to do the punishing, or the dangers of giving certain people the authority to punish in certain ways, or whether doing so would consistently require you to punish huge numbers of people. Retributivism in general doesn't normally tell you why you should punish this particular person but only why you can be punishing people at all; this does set up a default, but there might be any number of things that qualify this default, ranging from difficulty, to the feasibility of consistency, to the common customs of society, to general welfare.

Nor do any of these qualifications make the position less retributivist; if you consider utility, for instance, this doesn't mean that you have a utilitarian theory of punishment, since you may have a retributivist theory of punishment which recognizes that utility is a concern for the specifics of how society operates.

It is also a mistake to think of the matter in terms of "what punishment the guilty deserve". Punishments are not related to deserts in a one-to-one manner. Being deserving of punishment is something that we all recognize can be determined even when we don't know yet what punishment, specifically, should be given; while some penalties may be more appropriate than others, the question of what, precisely, the punishment should be is a different question from that of what justifies some kind of punishment in the first place. It is entirely possible to be a retributivist who thinks that there are many different ways you could legitimately go in punishing a particular kind of crime.

Wabbling Back to the Fire

The Gods of the Copybook Headings
by Rudyard Kipling

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Geometer and Jurist

A mind well disciplined in elementary geometry and in general jurisprudence, would be as well prepared as mere discipline can make a mind, for most trains of human speculation and reasoning. The mathematical portion of such an education would give clear habits of logical deduction, and a perception of the delight of demonstration; while the moral portion of the education, as we may call jurisprudence, would guard the mind from the defect, sometimes ascribed to mere mathematicians, of seeing none but mathematical proofs, and applying to all cases mathematical processes. A young man well imbued with these, the leading elements of Athenian and Roman culture, would, we need not fear to say, be superior in intellectual discipline to three-fourths of the young men of our own day, on whom all the ordinary appliances of what is called a good education have been bestowed. Geometer and jurist, the pupil formed by this culture of the old world, might make no bad figure among the men of letters or of science, the lawyers and the politicians, of our own times.

[William Whewell, Influence of the History of Science Upon Intellectual Education: A Lecture, pp. 24-25.]

(Whewell goes on to note, however, that this would give a purely deductive education, and thus that there would be a need to add inductive approaches to these. Whewell notes that you could do this by picking some natural science, but his recommendation is a focus on the study of the history of natural sciences. One cannot help noticing that geometry, jurisprudence, and history of science would describe a very large portion of Whewell's oeuvre.)

Maronite Year LXII

Eleventh Sunday of Pentecost
Ephesians 2:17-22; Luke 19:1-10

O Christ, You came to find and save us who were lost;
You do not desire the sinner's destruction,
but seek for repentance from evil conduct,
uniting all in one Spirit to the Father.
Strengthened by Your kindness, O Hope beyond hope,
we who falter under sin's weight cry for You.
Do not turn Your face; receive us despite our sin;
Savior of the fallen, have mercy on us,
purify our souls, join us to Your Father,
that we exiles may be made children of Your house.

By Your resurrection, You build a great temple;
apostles and prophets are its foundation,
saints are its stones, and You are its cornerstone.
By the Spirit's anointing You consecrate it.
Only Son of God, You brought us salvation,
favoring us with a compassion divine.
Thieves upon the world's cross, You gave us paradise,
covering us with Your grace of compassion,
justifying the poor and the penitent,
and opening the gates to the garden of light.

O Source of life, we acknowledge Your divine gifts;
In forgiving mercy, You chose to be man,
even descending to the realm of the dead,
to bring rejoicing to the nations of the earth.
Your Father poured forth His renewing Spirit,
dividing His grace among the apostles,
that they might go forth and recall nations from sin.
By destroying death, You awakened our joy,
assembling nations that they might adore You,
that all might joyfully proclaim Your salvation.