Feast of the Ascension

To where you, glorified, have ascended,
—To that place you, now leading the way, may we follow in mind and heart.

Quo tu ascendisti glorificatus,
—illuc te nunc prævium mente sequamur et corde.

"Where you have gone before us in glory,
—may we follow you in mind and heart."

     From the Intercessions for the Feast of the Ascension, Liturgy of the hours.

"He has not said we rejoice, but 'we live,' the life to come", "life indeed".

"he has not said, we breathe again, nor we are comforted, but what?  'Now we live,' showing that he thinks nothing is either trial or death, but their stumbling, whereas their advancement was even life [(ὄπου γε καὶ ζωὴν τὴν ἐκείνων προκοπήν)]. How else could any one have set forth either the sorrow for the weakness of one’s disciples, or the joy?  He has not said we rejoice, but 'we live,' the life to come [(ζωὴν λέγων τὴν μέλουσαν)]."

οὐκ εἶπεν, ἀνεπνεύσαμεν, οὐδὲ, παρεμυθήθημεν·  ἀλλὰ τί; Νῦν ζῶμεν·  δεικνὺς ὅτι καὶ πειρασμὸν καὶ θάνατον οὐδὲν ἄλλο ἡγεῖται, ἢ τὸ σκάνδαλον τὸ ἐκείνων, ὄπου γε καὶ ζωὴν τὴν ἐκείνων προκοπήν.  Πῶς ἄν ἄλλος τις ἢ τὴν λύπην τὴν ἐπί τῇ τῶν μαθητῶν ἀσθενείᾳ, ἢ τὴν καρὰν ἐδήλωσεν; Οὐκ εἶπε, χαίρομεν, ἀλλὰ Ζῶμεν, ζωὴν λέγων τὴν μέλουσαν.

     John Chrysostom, Homily 4 on 1 Thessalonians, at 1 Thess 3:8 ("for now we live, if you stand fast in the Lord"), as trans. Broadus.  =PG 62, col. 418.

     "The ptc. of μέλλω is used abs. in the mng. future, to come", with a wide variety of nouns, and not infrequently by contrast with opposites like "this" or "now" (BAGD, 501, citing Mt 12:32 ("either in this age or in the age to come [(οὔτε ἐν τούτῳ τῷ αἰῶνι οὔτε ἐν τῷ μέλλοντι)]"); Eph 1:21 ("not only in this age but also in that which is to come [(οὐ μόνον ἐν τῷ αἰῶνι τούτῳ ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐν τῷ μέλλοντι)]"); 2 Clement 6:3 ("the world that is, and the world to come [(οὗτος ὁ αἰὼν καὶ ὁ μέλλων)]"); Barnabas 4:1 ("the things which now are, and . . . those which are able to save us"); 1 Tim 4:8; ("for the present life and also for the life to come [(ζωῆς τῆς νῦν καὶ τῆς μελλούσης)]"); 2 Clement 20:2 ("the life which now is, . . . that which is to come [(τῷ νῦν βίῳ, . . . τῷ μέλλοντι)]"); and so forth)).

     To me it seems likely that Chrysostom introduces μέλουσαν in order to set up a play on precisely this traditional contrast; precisely, that is, in order to introduce the latter into the former in such a way as to make it clear that the life Paul experiences in the "now" ("for now we live") as a consequence of the proclamation of the exceedingly good news of Thessalonian fidelity (1 Thess 3:1-10) is in fact "the life to come".

     This does not mean that Chrysostom has gone to the lengths that the Franciscan Béda Rigaux (Saint Paul:  les épitres aux Thessaloniciens, Études bibliques (Paris:  Librairie Lecoffre; Gembloux:  Éditions J. Duculot, 1956), 480) seems to want to accuse him of having gone.  For surely it is possible to experience in the "now" the life "to come" without experiencing it in some sense definitively.  Indeed, surely Chrysostom, too, is pitching his tent somewhere in between, rather than at the first of the two extremes ("Il ne s'agit point de [1] la vie éternelle (Chrysostome . . .), mais ce n'est pas non plus [2] simple figure de rhétorique"), if closer to the former than Rigaux and most other modern commentators would.  (And note also the range of possibilities across which, in context, the Chrysostomic commentary extends:  "feel nothing of"; "were comforted", "confirmed", "anointed"; "caused us to breathe again"; "not suffered us to feel"; "further softening the expression"; etc.)

"When, therefore, God marks out our life, he does not look to what we can do, but requires from us what is above our strength, that we may learn to ask from him power to accomplish it."

     John Calvin, Commentary on the First Epistle to the Thessalonians (1551) at 3:12, trans. Pringle.  =CO 52, col. 159 (cols. 133-180):

Ergo Deus quum vitam nostram format, non respicit quid possimus, sed quod supra vires nostras est, a nobis exigit:  ut a se petere discamus praestandi facultatem.

"I plight thee my troth"

     Middle English pops up in the midst of the pre-Reformation Latin of the Salisbury rite at precisely the point at which groom and bride "plight" each other their "troth" (as well as say "With thys ryng I the wedde"):

I N. take the N. to my weddyd wyfe, to have & to holde, for better for wurs, for rycher for porer, in sykenesse & in helth, tyll deth vs departe, & thereto I plyght the my trouth. 

I N. take the N. to my weddyd husbonde, to have & to holde, for better for wurs, for rycher for porer, in sykenesse & in helth, to be bonoure & buxum, in bed & at borde, tyll deth vs depart, & thereto I plyght the my trouth.

Ed. Dickinson (cols. 831*-832*).  Or as trans. Pearson (but with a somewhat differently spelled Middle English intact).  Cf. Brightman.  Update, 12 October 2019:  cf. also Fr. Hunwicke.
     Legg (pp. 413 ff.) is based on the manuscripts (and especially John Rylands MS Latin 24, which, according to Legg, has to have been written between 1150 and 1319 (John Rylands itself narrows this down to "executed in the scriptorium of Salisbury Cathedral c.1240–60 and presented to Exeter Cathedral in or before 1277")) and does not reproduce the English.  So by how much, precisely, does unmistakable evidence for the use of English antedate the 1549 Book of common prayer?  According to Dickinson (col. 831* note e, above), the English is there in print in editions published as early as [14]97 (the English here is based on 4L, a [190]4 edition printed in L[ondon]), but inserted by hand into editions published in [14]92 and [14]94 and into H, an "editione antiqua Coloniae impressa" (an old [undated] edition [probably] printed in Cologne) that matches the printed edition of [14]94.  (Dickinson is thus an edition based on 14th- and 15th-century (including post-Reformation) printed editions, whereas Legg is an edition "edited from three early manuscripts".)
     See also the note about the source of the (somewhat differently spelled Middle) English in Pearson, above, who cites [vol. 1, pp. 50 ff. of] William Maskell, Monumenta ritualia ecclesiae Anglicanae (1846; 2nd ed., 1882), and the Manual of 1537 (Manuale ad vsum percelebris ecclesie Sarisburiensis:  from the edition printed at Rouen in 1543 compared with those of 1506 (London), 1516 (Rouen), 1523 (Antwerp), 1526 (Paris), ed. Collins, Henry Bradshaw Society 91 (1958)).

     Eyal Poleg, A material history of the Bible, England 1200-1553 (Oxford University Press, 2020) is billed as "revealing, for example, evidence of Church worship in English prior to the Reformation."

     Note, too, the rubric immediately preceding the "wilt thou have this woman/man?", which reads, in Latin, "After this let the priest say [(dicat)] to the man, in the mother tongue [(in lingua materna)], in the hearing of all:  'N., wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife [(vis habere hanc mulierem in sponsam)] . . . ?'"  Because this is accompanied by no note specifying which printed edition it comes from (it, too, being absent from Legg), it must come from Dickinson's default editions of class D ([15]13 especially, but also [15]26 (xvii)).  Note, however, that Dickinson believes that the fuller rubrics set down after 1500 were probably not innovations driven by Reformation-era concerns, but a committal of long-established practice to writing motivated by the new print technology (ix, xv, etc.).  In any case, [15]13 antedates the Reformation proper.


     A side note: in the pre-Reformation rite of Salisbury both groom and bride "plighted" their "troth". In the 1549 Book of common prayer, the groom "plighted" and the bride "gave".  See, for example, Brightman.  Hatchett notes the fact, but makes nothing of it.  Shepherd doesn't mention it.

     The wording as it appears in the 1928 BCP (for purposes of searchability):

I N. take thee N. to my wedded Wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God's holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth. 

I N. take thee N. to my wedded Husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God's holy ordinance; and thereto I give thee my troth.

King Arthur's adamantine shield of faith

But all that was not such, as seemd in sight,

Before that shield did fade, and suddeine fall:

And when him list the raskall routes appall,

Men into stones therewith he could transmew,

And stones to dust, and dust to nought at all;

     Edmund Spenser, The faerie queene I.vi.35, ll. 3-7.

"Cardinal Ratzinger's insistence that the Pope is but the humble servant of Tradition had me raising my glass to drink his toast. (Indeed, during his Pontificate I was rarely sober.)"

     Fr. John Hunwicke, "REMORA:  What exactly IS a pope?", 24 May 2014.

"We now live, if you stand fast in the Lord."

"The comfort of their Faith was so great to him, that it would be as life to him, if they stood fast in it. . . . Life is not only the Union of Soul and Body.  Comfort is the Life of the Soul, especially that which springs from Divine Causes.  And on the contrary the apostacy and degeneracy of a People doth kill the hearts of their faithful Teachers."

     [Matthew Poole] on 1 Thess 3:8.   Annotations upon the Holy Bible. . . . Vol. II. being a continuation of Mr. Poole's work by certain judicious and learned divines, 4th ed. (London:  1700).  So is this Poole?  And does it occur in the Synopsis criticorum aliorumque sacrae scripturae interpretum et commentatorum as well?