Let me ask you about a couple of words, and one three-word phrase. Do you know what a dirge* is? How about a placebo**? You probably know both those words, the one a funeral lament, and the other a fake medicament, as illustrated in a couple of quotations in the notes. How about the phrase “benefit of clergy”? One of Rudyard Kipling’s most arresting stories is entitled “Without Benefit of Clergy.” It has been much admired, and twice made into a movie, but it is by no means easy to describe or to understand. Its setting is British India of the Victorian period. Its subject is the socially impossible union of an unmarried English civil servant engineer (John Holden) and a young Muslim girl (Ameera) whom he has purchased from her mother! Given its date (1890) its themes seem prophetically relevant to many current discussions of race, gender, religious identity, and cultural diversity. Holden has to hide his chattel-love out of sight of the British community. The whole situation is dangerous and doomed, as Holden knows. The phrase “benefit of clergy” is one not infrequently found in historical literature. When I first encountered it and tried to make sense of it, I supposed it referred, as it seems to in Kipling’s title, to an irregular sexual union outside the religious sanction of marriage: cohabitation, “common law marriage”. It is a frequent ploy of the mind to try to force the unfamiliar into submission, however absurdly, into categories of the familiar. The phenomenon includes words and phrases we hear but do not understand. I wrote an essay sometime ago about the phrase “to beg the question,” for which the absurd new meaning has become “to pose a question”. But of course if it works, it is no longer absurd.
It is the title of Kipling’s story rather than the troubling issues raised in it that is the stuff of this essay. Its subject will be aspects of the reflection of the biblical book of psalms in odd corners of the cultural landscape—including the phrase “benefit of clergy”. Returning to dirge and placebo, most people know the words, but few are likely to know their etymological origins. Both of them come from the Vulgate, the medieval Latin translation of the Book of Psalms! The first two “hours” (or parts) of the Office of the Dead were known as Dirige and Placebo. These were the initial words of the first antiphon (liturgical chant) in the morning “hour” of the Office: Dirige me, Domine Deus meus… This is a paraphrase of a verse in the fifth psalm. “Dirige” means guide or lead in the imperative mood. “Guide or direct me O Lord my God…” A dirigible airship was so-called because it could be steered. The Latin imperative dirige eventually wandered off into the English noun dirge, meaning a funereal lament. Placebo means I shall please or be pleasing. A psalm verse (114:9), Placebo domino in regione vivorum… (“I will please the Lord in the land of the living…”) likewise was prominent in the liturgy of death. The English language swallowed placebo whole, so to speak, though the specialized medical application is pretty oblique! You are pleased to think that the vacuous pill is making you feel better. The Book of Psalms has had an enormous cultural influence over the last two thousand years. In terms of musical “albums” judged in the long view of history, it would be a platinum encased diamond disk like no other.
And what has any of this to do with benefit of clergy, the English translation of a medieval Latin legal phrase, beneficium clericale? An ordained churchman (cleric) was someone with education or (in Anglo-Norman French) clergie, English clergy. Hence, clergyman. In medieval Europe there were two parallel but separate systems of law. There was the ordinary secular law, in England called the common law; but there was a separate set of ecclesiastical courts. Lay people could be hauled before these courts for certain infractions--Chaucer’s Summoner makes a good living from this racket—but mainly they were used to adjudicate cases involving the clergy. In general, the punishments meted out for convictions in the ecclesiastical courts were less severe than those in the King’s court, in which capital punishment was very common. So if you were in serious trouble, there was a great advantage, privilege, or benefit to being tried in church court, for which all clergy were eligible. The term benefit of clergy properly refers to this ecclesiastic privilege. There were plenty of clerical felons to claim it, not to mention plenty of lay malefactors who sought to escape their just fates by claiming to be clerics. Q: How can you to tell that someone is clergy (of clerical status)? A: by demonstrating that he has clergy (learning, education). He does that by reading aloud and correctly translating something from the Latin Bible.
The canonical text for this purpose was the initial verse of the fiftieth psalm: Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam. “Have mercy upon me, God, according to thy great mercy.” This psalm was usually called simply the Miserere. Its exegetical “story” is that it was written by an abject King David as he contemplated his sinful behavior with Bathsheba—adultery aggravated by homicide. As the most important of a group of seven poems within the Psalter known as the penitential psalms, the Miserere has a rich liturgical and musical history. According to one famous anecdote, the fourteen-year old Mozart was so taken by hearing the version of the Italian composer Gregorio Allegri (1582-1652) that he transcribed it from memory! This verse has also a colorful legal history. It was commonly if irreverently known as the neck verse because an accused malefactor who could read it in plausible-sounding Latin and translate it correctly into the vernacular, might establish his “clergy” and claim its benefit: being tried not in the secular but in the ecclesiastical courts, thus probably saving his neck. There are many reflections of it and its spiritual implications in European literature. The first three words actually spoken by any character in the Divine Comedy (Inferno 1:59)—the address of the terrified Dante to the shade of Virgil—are “Miserere di me”! The first word is good Latin, the next two an accurate translation of Latin to Italian. This lost soul knows he is in desperate trouble; so he recites the neck verse!
The special homage paid by law to erudition survived the medieval church and even the Reformation. There are some interesting episodes from English literary history. The theatrical world of Elizabethan England could get rowdy. Christopher Marlowe was killed in a barroom brawl in 1593. Details, as they say, are lacking. Five years later the then fledgling playwright Ben Jonson fought a duel with an irascible actor named Gabriel Spencer and killed him dead. We know a few more details about this incident, which was in the eyes of the law manifestly a capital manslaughter. Jonson was arrested, imprisoned, and almost certainly headed for the gallows. But he miraculously produced a kind of Get-Off-the-Scaffold card. Jonson was a bricklayer, but a particularly erudite one. He made a plea for benefit of clergy. He could read and write Latin—which is what the word literate then chiefly meant. Remember that the word clergy meant both the clerical caste and the learning for which they were distinguished. The plea was accepted. He would not be subjected to the jurisdiction of the common law courts. We see here the laicization of a medieval religious privilege that a college professor must necessarily applaud. That did not shield Jonson from all criminal liability, but it saved his neck. How he wiggled out of the remaining situation is not entirely known.
*”A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young”: E. A. Poe, in Lenore
**”Research shows that if patients believe they are taking the real drug, they are more confident of improving and, so, improve even if they are actually on the placebo.” John Cornwell
