There is a three-way tie for the
shortest word in the English language composed entirely of vowels, because
three of the vowels themselves are complete words: a, I, and o.
What are
you, the giraffe asked the zoo-keeper?
O, I am a
man.
My favorite two-letter,
two-vowel word is ai. That’s a three-toed tree sloth that inhabits
mainly the Guianas and crossword puzzles.
There’s no doubt about the longest such word: euouae. This shaggy-dog lexicography brings me to my subject.
We have an excellent adult
education program at our parish church, which often exploits the resources
provided by the faculty and students of the Princeton Theological
Seminary. Just at the moment we have
four student “interns” on intellectual loan, and for the brief Advent season
they are offering a four-part course on the Advent antiphons—antiphon being the fancy, churchy word
for the short musical embellishment of a psalm.
The Advent antiphons are sometimes called the “O” antiphons on account
of their monoliteral beginnings. They
were developed in the early phase of the Benedictine tradition, in which the
psalter in its entirety is communally recited during the course of each
week. There are seven of them, and,
addressing Christ by various of his poetic names, they express the fervent
desire that he come into the world. The
antiphon under consideration this week happened to be my favorite, Oriens (dayspring, dawn, sunrise, sun of
righteousness, light from the East).
O Oriens, splendor lucis æternæ, et
sol justitiæ: veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.
O Dawn of the East, Brightness of the
Light Eternal and Sun of Justice, come and enlighten them that sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death.
It
is hardly surprising that a metaphorical vocabulary of solar illumination is to
be found in the world’s great religious texts and in its myth systems, but its
saturation of early Christian texts is so prominent that one famous
anthropological philosophe,
Charles-François Dupuis, concluded that Jesus Christ was not an historical
personage but a sun myth. I myself
choose to stop short of this conclusion, though I certainly admit the ubiquity
of the vocabulary of light and dark. To
view the pattern, we need look no further than the most famous of medieval
poems, Dante’s Divine Comedy. It begins with the pilgrim-narrator lost in a
dark wood at the beginning of “Hell” and bathed in a sea of photons at the end
of “Paradise”. In Dante’s poem, the
moral valences of benightedness and illumination are probably too obvious to
require comment, but I won’t let that stop me, for they have a vivacity that is
probably unavailable to us. The potency
of poetic metaphor, after all, cannot be far removed from some apprehension of
the material reality in which it is grounded.
Ancient texts, codified in the material conditions of pre-modern
agrarianism, grow farther from us with each generation. The Lord may be my Shepherd, but if I don’t
see sheep on a daily basis and perhaps have never seen an actual shepherd,
there is a certain ethereality to the idea.
And when it comes to the dark, practically none of us in the modern West
has ever actually been there.
I
mean, of course, really in the
dark—hours upon end with no access to light switch, flashlight, matchbox, or at
least some little button on our keychains or watches to create a feeble flicker
or beam. But if the year were 1400, and
you were living at near-subsistence level beneath the cloudy sky of a Flemish
village, you did indeed know what the dark was.
This was also true of the monks who were singing “O Oriens,” though even
the poorer ones could usually scrounge up a candle for the night office. When the Carmelite John of the Cross wrote of
the dark night of the soul, we have
to presume he knew what he was talking about.
The invention of the
electrical light has for many of us essentially erased the distinction between
night and day, leaving us in a state of almost pathetic technological
dependence in comparison to which the mere impoverishment of metaphor may seem
slight. The Great Blackout of November
9, 1965 in the northeastern United States—a temporary and partial failure of
the main electrical grid that left untouched huge resources of battery power
and emergency and reserve capacity for electrical generation, caused chaos and
in some instances panic that is remembered to this day. It shut down America’s greatest city, called
out the National Guard, fostered a rich anthology of urban legend, and led to a
noticeable uptick in the birth statistics for August, 1966, among other things.
But the darker the
night, the brighter the dawn. That is
what Advent and its antiphons are all about.
O, what about euouae? (Note the ending of the musical passage at
the top.) Well, I’m being a bit
fast-and-loose in calling it a word, let alone an English word. In fact, it is a kind of coded directive to
the monks chanting the antiphon. The
formulaic end of many ancient prayers is “…world without end, amen.” This is a translation of the more vivid Latin
phrase in saecula saeculorum, amen. In monastic chant, there were various “tunes”
that might be used for this formulaic conclusion. The euouae tells the chanter what particular
notes to use for the final six syllabus: saEcUlOrUm
AmEn. Cunning fellows,
those old monks.
