# Jesu, Rex admirabilis



## leandere

Hi! Could someone help me with the translation of this choral, please?

_Jesu, Rex admirabilis
et triumphator nobilis
dulcedo ineffabilis
totus desiderabilis

*Mane* nobiscum, Domine,
et nos illustra lumine,
pulsa mentis caligine,
mundum reple *dulcedine*_

This is what I have so far:

_Jesus admirable king
and noble achiever
ineffable sweetness
wholly desirable.

In the morning (?) with us, sir,
and enlighten us with your light
push the darkness away from our minds
and fill the world with sweetness_


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## Xavier61

leandere said:


> Hi! Could someone help me with the translation of this choral, please?
> 
> _Jesu, Rex admirabilis
> et triumphator nobilis
> dulcedo ineffabilis
> totus desiderabilis
> 
> *Mane* nobiscum, Domine,
> et nos illustra lumine,
> pulsa mentis caligine,
> mundum reple *dulcedine*_
> 
> This is what I have so far:
> 
> _Jesus admirable king
> and noble achiever
> ineffable sweetness
> wholly desirable.
> 
> In the morning (?) with us, sir,
> and enlighten us with your light
> push the darkness away from our minds
> and fill the world with sweetness_


Your translation is very good. Which problem do you have? Mane=in the morning, dulcedine=with sweetness, that's right, as far as I know.


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## metaphrastes

Well, though far from an expert on Latin, I would note a few points on style.



leandere said:


> et triumphator nobilis


I would suggest _"and noble conqueror"_, since _triumphator _bears some heroic character - it was an epithet given to Hercules or to Roman emperors - and in early Christian theology Christ is called the conqueror of death and Hades. _Achiever _is weaker in meaning and force.



leandere said:


> In the morning (?) with us, sir


The Latin _Dominus _is traditionally rendered as _Lord - _and the termination in _-e - Domine - _makes it a vocative, that is, _"O Lord".
_
Regarding _mane_, it _may _bear also the meaning of _early in the morning_, and the Greek Gospels use many expressions to refer to the dawn, or the moments preceding dawn, when light was just beginning to rise, when Christ rose from the dead. Thus, here maybe some poetic freedom would be fine, in order to give the idea that Christ's light is present with us from the sunrise or the dawn - or rather, the sunrise is a physical image or metaphor of His presence in us (Scriptures are not in lack of such references).

Besides that, I guess the form _Jesu _may be a vocative form of _Jesus (O Jesus), _but Lewis-Short does not mentions it and it would need some search. Besides that, you may consider using _Thy _instead of _Your_, but this is a controversial matter for many - I like that, and here, given the simplicity of the text, there is no risk of messing up Elizabethan grammar, that has its own rules.


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## wandle

leandere said:


> Hi! Could someone help me with the translation of this choral, please?


 _Jesu_ is certainly vocative: it is the Latinised version of the Greek vocative. The form _Jesu_ is_ e_ven retained as a traditional usage in hymns and prayers in other European languages, such as German and English.

The symmetrical pattern of each stanza, as well as the balance and structure of the whole, makes me sure that _mane i_s the imperative of _maneo_ (stay): 'Stay with us, Lord ...'
_
Pulsa mentis caligine_ cannot be the correct text, [not correct: see below] because _caligine_ is ablative.  It can only mean 'drive with the darkness of the mind'. The sense requires 'drive away the darkness of our mind' and for that it needs to be _pulsa mentis caliginem_ (accusative).

Edited.


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## djmc

Pulsa mentis caligine would be an ablative absolute construction - the blackness of our mind having been banished, fill our wourld with sweetness. It may not be what Cicero would have said, but this is medieval Latin.


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## wandle

djmc said:


> Pulsa mentis caligine would be an ablative absolute construction


Ah, that must be right. I ought to have spotted it. I would be inclined to take it with the line before rather than the line after:
'Drive away the darkness of our mind and illumine us with your light'.


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## metaphrastes

wandle said:


> _Jesu_ is certainly vocative: it is the Latinised version of the Greek vocative


Yes it makes all sense, and I doubted my somewhat vague impression for it not having the more common vocative ending in _-e_, but I forgot the possibility of direct Greek influence and the irregular inflection of Ἰησοῦς. And now that you referred also German and English usage, I may recall a few cases of that, as in Bach's cantatas. But it is good to link the dots as you did and to know exactly whence it came and where it is present.



wandle said:


> The symmetrical pattern of each stanza, as well as the balance and structure of the whole, makes me sure that _mane i_s the imperative of _maneo_ (stay): 'Stay with us, Lord ...'


Yes, that makes much more sense in the verse and in the whole context - and much more sense than my rambling thoughts about early morning or dawn.

Then, let me see if this is what may sum up all considerations through the thread:


leandere said:


> Jesu, Rex admirabilis
> et triumphator nobilis
> dulcedo ineffabilis
> totus desiderabilis
> 
> *Mane* nobiscum, Domine,
> et nos illustra lumine,
> pulsa mentis caligine,
> mundum reple *dulcedine*



_O Jesus admirable king
and noble conqueror
ineffable sweetness
wholly desirable.

Remain (stay, abide) with us, O Lord,
and enlighten us with [your] light
push the darkness away of (from) [our] mind
and fill the world with sweetness_

Now one doubt of mine: _pulsa mentis caligine _should actually be rendered as _pushing darkness *of *the mind away _(that is, the darkness is seen as _belonging _to the mind or being inherent to it) or the syntax allows reading it rather as _pushing darkness away *from *the mind - _that is, the mind is imaged as being the "place" whence darkness is pushed away, indicating rather the figurative origin of movement, as when one says _"I went from Rome to Milan" _or _"my thoughts went from a dark valley of despair to a bright mountain of hope"_, to use figurative language.



wandle said:


> I would be inclined to take it with the line before rather than the line after:
> 'Drive away the darkness of our mind and enlighten us with your light'.


I am not sure if I actually got your fine point about absolute ablative, here, but anyway, from a merely interpretative point of view and not from any solid syntactic ground, I would say that _driving away darkness of or from our mind _is not a precondition so that the mind may be enlightened, because the very thing that drives away darkness at once is light itself, as when one opens the windows and the daylight enters a room. Then, in the hymn, it is the very act of God enlightening the mind with light that pushes away the darkness - and this is I think an empirical universal experience that the hymn poetically describes.

Thanks for any further thoughts, and for all previous ones.


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## wandle

metaphrastes said:


> I am not sure if I actually got your fine point about absolute ablative


To translate the ablative absolute literally, it means: 'the darkness of the mind having been driven away'. The participle is not a finite verb, which means that grammatically this phrase cannot stand as a sentence in its own right, but is dependent upon a finite verb in another part of the sentence.

My initial mistake, being misled by the commas, was to treat the stanza as a sequence of four imperatives and I therefore took _pulsa_ as singular imperative of _pulsare_, making it parallel to the other imperatives _mane_, _illustra_ and _reple_. That created an apparent symmetry of four lines, each containing a brief imperative sentence or clause. On that basis, if _pulsa_ was imperative, it needed an object and that is why I thought it should be _caliginem_.

However, since _pulsa mentis caligine_ is really an abl. abs., we now have three finite verbs in the stanza, _mane_, _illumine_ and _reple_, and we have to decide which one the abl. abs. is dependent on. Because _pulsa_ is the past participle passive (from _pellere_, not _pulsare_), it means 'having been driven away'. That means that the action of driving away must have taken place before the action of the verb it depends on.

Now _mane_ is the first action of the stanza, both grammatically and logically. The abl. abs. cannot go with _mane_. We are left with _illustra_ and _reple_. The abl. abs., lying between the two, could grammatically go with either. The question is therefore one of logic. If we take it with _illustra_, the meaning is: 'having driven away the darkness of our mind, illumine us with your light'. This may seem redundant, as if it were two formulations of the same meaning, but that is quite a typical mode of expression in Latin. There is no doubt that the two ideas are logically connected.

On the other hand, there is no necessary logical connection between driving out the darkness of our mind and filling the world with sweetness. The sweetness is a distinct idea. It is something additional given by God to the world, over and above the relief and enlightenment of people's minds or souls. Therefore I think it is better to assign the abl. abs. to _illumine_.


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## metaphrastes

@wandle: Thank you very much for your thorough and very clear explanation!


wandle said:


> That means that the action of driving away must have taken place before the action of the verb it depends on


Thus it works exactly as a Greek past participle, past in relation to a main verb and not to the time the sentence is uttered. Clear.


wandle said:


> On the other hand, there is no necessary logical connection between driving out the darkness of our mind and filling the world with sweetness


Yes, sure. Now, taking as a reference the usage of Greek past participle, with which I am more familiar, I would think that the characteristic between past participle and main, finite verb, is temporal: the past participle comes or happens or acts or is acted _before _the main, finite verb. Now, this temporal relation often implies a relation of cause and effect, because cause always precede effect in time. But then, it may imply also a relation of a given precondition so that some event may come to be - then, though a precondition is not strictly a cause, it is a circumstance that must precede the outcome, in time.

Now, from this point of view, it is not hard to find some kind of relation between _having pushed away darkness from the mind _and _filling the world with sweetness. _Either it is an image of a renewed condition of soul that then becomes able again to see the world's beauty and goodness and to be filled with gratitude - well, that is a sweet thing! - and this exterior sweetness simply reflects a different state of mind and therefore a different vision of world itself.

Other way to put things is that when darkness is pushed away from the mind, this reflects on how one relates to the world and to his neighbor, and this objectively brings sweetness, such as reconciliation, brotherly love, respect, lack of rancor, &c. Sure I had here to elaborate a lot, and somewhat to speculate, because the hymn in its own concision does not interpret itself and there is no clear or strict correlation between the clauses - it seems kind of a jump where one guess what was left unsaid and to link the dots.



wandle said:


> This may seem redundant, as if it were two formulations of the same meaning


Actually, I did object to this correlation not because of redundancy - sacred language is full of seeming redundancies for the sake of emphasis - but because I cannot think of _pushing away darkness _as the cause of _being illumined with light_, and not even as a precondition, as if: 1. _darkness is pushed away;_ and 2. _light now can enter_. Actually, it is the presence of light the only cause or precondition for darkness being pushed away, since darkness has no ontological reality, being simply the absence of light, either in the realm of physics as well in realms beyond sensorial perception.

Actually, if we think in terms of authorial intent, I am not sure if the author of the hymn had all of this in mind, since it seems to be a popular work, meant to be sung in a regular meter of eight syllables, using rhymes, plenty of laudatory adjectives in the first stanza, and not too elaborate or too dense theologically. Anyway, I am afraid of being condescending or patronizing towards people of old - it would be silly! - and then I try to draw from the hymn the best possible theology, so far my weak lights allow me to do.


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## wandle

The ablative absolute does not have to imply either causation or precondition. It may in principle convey a wide range of adverbial senses, including the simple time relation.
It is worth asking, What is the correct punctuation of the text? This obliges us to clarify the grammatical sense.

It is certainly true that the hymn gives us a succession of ideas with little apparent grammatical complexity.
On reflection, I have changed my mind about the reference of the ablative absolute and would punctuate as follows:

_Jesu, Rex admirabilis
et triumphator nobilis,
dulcedo ineffabilis,
totus desiderabilis,

Mane nobiscum, Domine,
et nos illustra lumine.
pulsa mentis caligine,
mundum reple dulcedine._

This punctuation implies (a) that there are two sentences here: (1) from _Jesu_ to _lumine _and (2) from _pulsa_ to _dulcedine; _(b) that everything in the first stanza is part of the vocative expression addressed to _Jesu Domine_; and (c) that the second sentence means: 'After driving away the darkness of our mind, fill the world with your sweetness'.

I would see the abl. abs. as simply temporal in sense, so that the second stanza just expresses the sequence: (1) stay with us Lord; (2) illumine us with your light; (3) after dispelling our mental darkness (meaning that this is the same action as 'illumine us with your light'), fill the world with your sweetness.

Apparently the last two actions are foreshadowed in the first stanza. There, Jesus is called _triumphator nobilis_ and _dulcedo ineffabilis_: he is said to be a 'noble conqueror' and to be 'inexpressible sweetness'. Then in the second stanza, the action of illumination and dispelling darkness expresses his conquest and triumph; the action of 'filling the world with his sweetness' expresses his presence throughout the world.


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## leandere

Thank you both! Latin is a beautiful language and your explanations were really interesting and useful.


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