St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek 391, 11. |
Compline/Daily devotions at the close of day, 1979 Book of common prayer.
Lord, we beg you to visit this house and banish from it all the deadly power of the enemy. May your holy angels dwell here to keep us in peace, and may your blessing be upon us always. We ask this through Christ our Lord.
Night prayer after Evening prayer on Sundays and solemnities, Liturgy of the hours.
Visita, quaesumus, Domine, habitationem istam et omnes insidias inimici ab ea longe repelle; angeli tui sancti habitent in ea, qui nos in pace custodiant, et benedíctio tua sit super nos semper. Per Christum.
Completorium, Post II vesperas dominicae et solemnitatum, Liturgia horarum.
This is not, of course, present in either Bruylants or Corpus orationum, nor have I yet tried to push it back behind the "980+" given in CANTUS (e.g. St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek 391, 11 (above, initial 4 ("V")), where it is associated with the dedication of a church), though Rubén M. Leikem, cited below, finds it "outside of the Divine Office" in the context of an "Order for the visitation of the sick" as no. 1029 of the mid 9th-century sacramentary of Monza (in Monza, Kapitelsbibliothek cod. F1/101), albeit, according to the 1957 critical edition ed. Dold and Gamber, as a later interpolation ("The following [three prayers] stands (in place of a prayer 'In hospitale'?) on a many-lined erasure in a clumsy later script with many errors:") (258n42). (Not that, given the interpolation, it matters, but the sacramentary of Monza is said to belong to the second group of "Gelasians of the 8th-century" that includes St. Gall (above?), Triplex, Rheinau, Phillips, Angoulême, and Monza, and that derives from a systematic revision of the first, namely the Gelasian and Gregorian-Paduan (257n40).)
Nikolaus Gihr (whose theological commentary may be worth a look) says of the date of composition only that "The wording shows clearly that this oration stems from a time when Compline was still prayed not in the church but in the cloister or the dormitory immediately before going to bed" (Prim und Komplet des römischen Breviers, liturgisch und aszetisch erklärt (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1907), 333).
This, I'm assuming, is nothing more than a translation:
Ἐπισκέψαι ἱκετεύομεν κύριε τήνδε οἴκησὶν, καὶ πάσας τὰς τοῦ ἐχθροῦ ἐνέδρας αὐτῆς ἄπωσον· οἱ ἄγγελοί σου οἰκῶσιν ἐν αὐτῇ ἐν εἰρήνῃ φυλάττοντες ἡμᾶς. Καὶ ἡ εὐλογία σου ἀεὶ ἐφ' ἡμᾶς εἴη. Διὰ Χριστοῦ.
Bibliography (as noticed only; I have not conducted a proper search):
- Leikam, Rubén M. "La oración Visita, quaesumus, Domine, habitationem istam." Ecclesia orans 19, no. 2 (2002): 247–64. I have not yet completely mastered this one, which provides, on p. 260, a critical edition limited to the 8th/9th-century-and-following (mostly following) sources covered by the article.
- Alonso García, Ireneo. "Edicion Tridentina del Manual Toledano y su incorporacion al Ritual Romano." Salmanticensis 6, no. 2 (1959): 323–99. Gives, on p. 58, an example of the incorporation of this prayer into a 16th-century "Exorcism of a house vexed by a demon [(Exorcismus domus a demonio vexatae)]". Apparently the exorcism that includes this prayer was present in the Rituale Romanum current in 1959 (on which, see also Leikam, 258 ff.). Whether it remains in De exorcismis et supplicationibus quibusdam (1999) I don't know.
- Gihr, Nikolaus. Prim und Komplet des römischen Breviers, liturgisch und aszetisch erklärt. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1907.