What Does The Prayer Really Say?
W D T P R S

Oh, thank you so much for clarifying this! I’ve heard this over and over again being attributed to St. Augustine, but since I couldn’t find the actual quote, I didn’t like to use it.

But who did write orat qui bene cantat… “he who sings well prays twice”? Any clue?

Certainly makes you think, in reference to how horizontal the liturgy has become.

It seems that in the first line he is saying that something happens to our praise when it is sung, before he moves on to talk about how the song and singing is transformed by the praise.

“He who sings praise, praises twice”?

(Nothing about singing it well, either—Deo gratias, since my singing certainly wouldn’t qualify)

I always heard that the “prays twice” thing was St. Gregory the Great. In fact, I think we had a poster or banner or plaque to that effect in my home parish’s choir loft, back in the late 70’s – early 80’s. I didn’t understand at the time what some Pope had to do with singing, but it seemed like a good saying.

Last week I saw it attributed to St. Basil!

Okay Patristibloggers! Let’s get to the bottom of this!

I can’t find the place where it was attributed to Basil. I do recall that it was an Orthodox source, so it might have been a knee-jerk re-assignment on the part of the citer. After all, anything worthwhile in Augustine had to be lifted from Basil, right? ;-)

My guess is that this passage—like “Roma locuta” and “In necessariis unitas”—is just the crystallization of one of Augustine’s arguments. Good teachers tend to distill long treatises into simple, memorable principles. Augustine himself did this, and I think he inspired other teachers to do the same for him down the centuries. It was a habit (and useful mnemonic) in the Middle Ages, when I’ll wager these three sayings found their lovely form. Yes, they can be misused, but so can everything, from St. John’s Prologue to the errand list my wife hands me on Saturday morning. (But woe to the man…)

Though I’m a proud patristiblogger, I’m also a good son of my medieval forebears. I’ll continue to attribute these three principles to Augustine. He deserves the credit.

OK… so what about another line attributed to Augustine that was super popular in the 60s… “A Christian should be an Alleluia from head to toe!” You or anyone know the provenance of that gem???

I’m so glad I missed the 60s. I read these “Augustinisms” without the hippie associations, and they seem reasonable and even Augustinian to me—even the Alleluia bit. By the time the flakier teachers got around to me, they had lost any sense of obligation to invoke Augustine’s authority. I can assure you that in that decade after Humanae Vitae I never heard “Roma locuta, causa finita”!

LOL!!

If St A is saying that when one sings, something happens to the song that makes it more than a song, then couldn’t this be used to justify all kinds of liturgical crap?

To William Sheley:

“OK… so what about another line attributed to Augustine that was super popular in the 60s… “A Christian should be an Alleluia from head to toe!â€Â You or anyone know the provenance of that gem???”

I believe that would be the painfully hip Sister Mary Felix Culpa who served, if memory serves correctly, at The Church of What’s Happenin’ Now, Baby! from sometime in the late 60s to sometime in the late 70s, at which time she left religious life for membership in Jefferson Airplane.

Dim Bulb: People who want to foist liturgical crap on others don’t need quotes from St. Augustine to justify the foisting.