Because of its wealth of meaning, it is tempting to provide a detailed commentary on the Creed. We resist this temptation for two reasons: first, the Lost in Translation series limits itself to questions of, well, translation; and second, it would be difficult to top Msgr. Ronald Knox’s The Creed in Slow Motion.
But we will say three things about the Creed and its place in the Mass before moving on to linguistic issues.
First, by being recited after the readings, the Creed “forms the answer and the echo to the voice of God, who has spoken to us by His prophets and apostles, yea, by His own Son.” [1] In other words, the Creed distills the grand biblical narrative—a portion of which we have just heard in the Epistle and Gospel—into a core of essential beliefs (the “echo”), which we go on to affirm personally in the opening line: “I believe” (the “answer”).
Second, by being recited before the Offertory, which is only for fully initiated Catholics, the Creed is our key into the Mass of the Faithful. In the early centuries, the non-baptized could only attend the so-called Mass of the Catechumens, from the beginning of the Mass until the homily. When the Mass of the Faithful began at the Offertory Rite, they were dismissed from the congregation. As a tie-in to our baptism, the Creed reminds us of the sacrament that enables us to participate in the Sacrifice of the Mass.
And the metaphor of a key is not random. Commenting on Christianity’s unique preoccupation with the truth, Chesterton writes:
This is why the faith has that elaboration of doctrines and details which so much distresses those who admire Christianity without believing in it. When once one believes in a creed, one is proud of its complexity, as scientists are proud of the complexity of science. It shows how rich it is in discoveries. If it is right at all, it is a compliment to say that it's elaborately right. A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident. But a key and a lock are both complex. And if a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key. [2]
Even the appearance of the Creed on a page resembles a key: assuming that it is left-justified, it is like a key that is smooth on one side and jagged on the other. The Creed is our key into the mysteries of truth and the mysteries of the altar.
Third, the Creed may be a distillation of the biblical narrative, but it is still a narrative. It has a Trinitarian structure, proceeding from Father to Son to Holy Spirit; it begins with the beginning of time, the creation of Heaven and earth, and ends with an anticipation of the Resurrection of the Dead at the end of time; and it contains a brief biography of the life of Jesus Christ. The various truths of the Creed are called “articles.” In Latin, an articulus is a joint or the portion of a limb or finger that is in between two joints. Either way, the Creed is a narrative skeleton which the other parts of the body (virtues, gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit, etc.) fill out to make a complete and living person.
The first line of the Creed, which is the only article about God the Father, is:
Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factórem cæli et terræ, visibilium omnium et invisibilium.
Which the 2011 ICEL edition of the (new) Roman Missal and many others translate as:
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. [3]
The translation is a significant improvement over the earlier ICEL translation, which has two flaws with respect to this article:
We believe in God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. [4]
First, it is true that the original Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of A.D. 381 begins with “we believe” rather than “I believe”, because it is a statement issued by the assembly of Council Fathers on behalf of the entire Church. But in the Rite of Baptism, the opening is changed to “I believe,” for when a person is baptized, his personal belief is crucial to receiving the sacrament. This is true even in the case of an infant, whose godparents recite (in the old rite) the Creed on his behalf, for they are acting as surrogates of the child’s intellect and will until they reach a proper state of development. By using “I believe” in the Creed at Mass, we are being reminded of our baptism and the importance of our personal affirmation of the truths proclaimed by the Catholic Church.
Second, the early ICEL translation failed when it translated visibilium omnium et invisibilium as “of all that is seen and unseen.” There is an important difference between an object that is unseen and an object that is invisible. An unseen object has the potential to be seen even though it is not being seen right now, while an invisible object is incapable of ever being seen. Rocks buried below the earth’s surface are unseen; Angels are invisible. The Nicene Creed clearly affirms that God made not only material objects, but spiritual subjects as well—that is, celestial beings and immortal human souls. The early ICEL translation, on the other hand, leaves the door open for a materialist world view, the ideology that denies a spiritual realm.
Pietro Perugino, God the Creator and Angels, 1507-8
Finally, both ICEL translations were correct in translating factorem as “maker.” Curiously, the Nicene Creed calls God the Father this word rather than the Apostles’ Creed’s “Creator.” The Greek poiētḗs, which the Latin translates as factor, does indeed mean “maker,” but its obvious relation to our word “poet” tempts us to call God the Father “the Poet of Heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” For is not the entire cosmos one vast and exquisite epic?
Notes
[1] Gihr, 483.
[2] Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Ignatius Press, 2005), 89.
[3] 2011 Roman Missal, 10.
[4] 1985 Sacramentary, 368.
[5] We will leave it to another day to discuss how this statement is true even though Angels appeared to many in the Bible and even wrestled with them.
