From the Agnus Dei I’ve chosen to move to the Mysterium Fidei.

1. Agnus Dei
2. Mysterium Fidei <-

Unlike the Agnus Dei, the Mysterium Fidei is not a linear translation to English. Here’s the Latin:

Priest: Mysterium fidei!

Congregation: Mortem tuam annuntiamus, Domine, et tuam Resurrectionem confitemur, donec venias.

Or, as we say it in English:

Priest: The mystery of faith!

Congregation: We proclaim your Death, O Lord, and profess your Resurrection, until you come again.

One of the unique and very misleading things about the Agnus Dei is how little it resembles modern English. There are only two words that even remotely resemble their English counterparts. Dei is likely the root of deity, but to be honest I’m not sure how common that word is outside of fantasy role-playing, and old-school fantasy gaming at that. Peccatorum is obviously related in some way to peccadillos in a slightly watered-down way¹ but I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word peccadillos spoken out loud. I’ve only seen it in books, and then rarely.

The Mysterium Fidei, on the other hand, is filled with words that look maddeningly familiar, even if you discount the word mortem which is mainly familiar because our justice system uses Latin extensively. Mysterium. Fidei. Annuntiamus. Domine. Resurrectionem. Confitemur. And for the most part, what they look like is what they are, vaguely. Annuntiamus is announce—or proclaim. Resurrectionem is in fact resurrection. Confitemur… well, that’s a little different. But if you squint you can see it.

So let’s take it phrase by phrase:

Mysterium fidei!

If you’ve read my Agnus Dei post you probably already recognize what these words are and how they fit into a sentence. Mysterium is the subject. It is the nominative form of the Latin noun that means “mystery”. Latin, of course, eschews articles, and in this case the true English translation is “the mystery”.

Fidei is the genitive of the Latin word fides, or, in English, “faith”. The genitive means, in English, putting “of” in front of the word. So mysterium fidei is “mystery… of faith”, in the same way that amicus curiae, which I wrote about last time, is “friend… of the court”.

Mortem tuam annuntiamus, Domine

Taken literally and linearly, this phrase means “death your we proclaim, O Lord.” Obviously, we can’t take it linearly. Reading the Agnus Dei one might get the impression that other than word order modern English doesn’t take much from Latin. But that’s doubly misleading: not only does English get a lot of its words from the Latin via various other languages, the one thing that made the Agnus Dei easy to translate, that it is practically a word-for-word linear translation into English, is very uncommon. Latin word order is nothing like English word order.

Many languages have stronger or weaker natural word order. In English we might say:

He is coming home for Christmas soon.

In general, in English we put the subject first, then the verb, then the direct object and indirect object, and then the adverb, although the latter is more freeform. “He is coming home soon for Christmas” is nearly as legitimate.

In Latin, however, we would instead say:

He for Christmas home soon comes.

Latin, in general, also puts the subject first. But then it also puts the indirect object, and then the direct object, and then the adverb, before it gets to the verb.

We could say that in English, too. Most English speakers would know exactly what it meant. But it’s very unnatural.

However, Latin nouns also contain their purpose in the sentence. The subject uses the subject form (i.e., the nominative). If a word is the direct object, it uses the accusative form. And there are a couple of forms for various indirect object uses as well. This means that order is much less important in Latin than in English. If a noun uses the accusative form, it’s the direct object, whether it precedes the verb or follows it. The same with the nominative form. No matter where it appears, it is the subject.

Further, all of the Latin I’ll be talking about in this series is either from lyrics or verse. As in English, word order rules in Latin are weakened even further for poetic language.

Mortem tuam: Mortem is the accusative, or direct object, form of mortis. That makes it the direct object of the upcoming verb annuntiamus. Tuam is the accusative form of tua, or “your”. Because death is a feminine noun, the adjective must also be feminine. Mortem tuam is literally “your death”, although the adjective in this case follows the noun, as they often do in Romance languages in general. That’s not always the case in Latin, as we’ll see in the next line.

Annuntiamus is the first-person plural of the verb annuntio. Where annuntio would be “I proclaim”, annuntiaumus is “we proclaim”. The subject of the sentence is “we”, and when the subject is a pronoun implied by the form of the verb, that pronoun is usually left out.

Domine is the vocative form of Dominus, “the Lord”. The vocative form of a noun is a calling out or crying out to that noun. Usually it’ll be a name, but it is possible in Latin to cry out to the stars just as it is in English, especially in poetic language. In the context of prayers, “O Lord” will usually be in the vocative. We are crying out to God.

The vocative is usually just the nominative, probably with an exclamation point. If you were calling out to Death, for example, you’d just use Mortis!, which would be the way to start the famous quote from Corinthians 15:55 “Oh Death, where is thy sting?”.

For nouns ending in -ius, however, the locating ending is -i, and for nouns ending in -us it’s -e. Thus, the vocative of Dominus is Domine.

So, taken in full, Mortem tuam annuntiamus, Domine is “Your death we proclaim, oh Lord.” Or, as we would say in English, "We proclaim your death, oh Lord.”

et

The word et is “and”. It’s very similar to the “and” in both Italian (e or ed) and French (et). You probably already know it: it’s the “et” in “et cetera” where cetera is the nominative plural of ceterum, “the rest” or “the other things”.²

Tuam Resurrectionem confitemur

Tuam Resurrectionem: Resurrectionem is the accusative form of resurrectio, or “rise again”. Obviously very recognizable to us as “resurrection,” this is the direct object of the upcoming verb. We’ve already met tuam. It’s the feminine accusative form of “your”. In this case, even though it comes in reverse order to Mortem tuam, it means the same thing. As in other Romance languages, since resurrection is a feminine noun, its adjectives must match, so we have to use the feminine form of tu-. And it also has to match the form of the noun, so it has to be the accusative of tua.

Thus, tuam resurrectionem or resurrectionem tuam mean “your resurrection”.

As I wrote above, Latin order is weaker than English order because nouns naturally carry their purpose. You might just as likely come across “tuam mortem” as “mortem tuam”, as you can see right here. While it’s sort of true that one order is more correct, the form of the words tells us what their purpose is.

“Death your” sounds pretty weird in English. For us, it makes it lot more sense for the adjective to come before the noun it’s describing. In Latin, as in many Romance language, it’s the opposite. But Latin doesn’t need either order. Since we know that “tuam” matches the form of mortem or, in this case, of resurrectionem, it’s obvious that this is “your death” or “your resurrection” no matter what order the words appear. Resurrectionem is the accusative form of a feminine noun. Tuam is the accusative feminine form. They match. Thus, they belong together.

Confitemur is the first-person plural form of confiteri, which is, “to acknowledge”—or the old meaning of “to confess”, which is ironically the modern meaning of “profess”. The first person plural, if, like me, you are far from your high school English, is the “we” form. “We acknowledge” or “we profess”.

So the full phrase is “Your resurrection we profess”, or, as we would say in English, “We profess your resurrection.”

Donec Venias: Donec is the preposition “until”. Venire is the verb “to come” and venias is the second-person singular subjunctive of venire. That is, something on the order of until you have come. The subjunctive is one of those things whose meaning is harder to describe than to use. It’s a contingency clause: we will be acknowledging your resurrection until we no longer need to, because you’ve returned.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Agnus Dei had no prepositions other than those implied by the form of the nouns. Mysterium Fidei only has one preposition: donec, “until”. Prepositions are weird things in any language. The same preposition usually carries many meanings decipherable only by context and sometimes completely contradictory. Sometimes the order of the words will change the meaning of a preposition. Sometimes it’s literally only the context that tells us the meaning of a preposition.

Where there happen to be fewer meanings, order becomes less important. Consider “to you, death” vs. “death to you”. There are differences in intent, but in each case we know what direction the prepositioned word is going. We know who death is going to.

But then consider “roses of red” and then “red of roses”. One is talking about red roses; the other is talking about something other than a rose that is red like a rose.

Latin avoids much of that ambiguity by using different forms of the noun in place of the preposition we would use. In Latin “roses of red” would be rosae rubi. And “the red of roses” would be ruber rosarum. So it really doesn’t matter if you say rosae rubi or rubi rosae, ruber rosarum or rosarum ruber even if it does mark you as either a non-Latin speaker—or a poet.

All the Pretty New Words

Here’s a more complete summary of the declinations and conjugations of the words in the Mysterium Fidei. Declinations are for nouns. When we alter a noun’s endings according to its purpose in the sentence we “decline” the noun. When we alter a verb according to who or what is acting, we “conjugate” the verb.

Nouns

Verbs