O Rex Gentium

O King of the nations and cornerstone of the Church: come and save humanity, whom you formed from the clay!

O Rex Gentium, et desideratus earum, lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum: veni, et salva hominem, quem de limo formasti.

O King of the nations and cornerstone of the Church: come and save humanity, whom you formed from the clay! (Translation used as Gospel acclamation at Mass)

O King of the nations, and their desire, the cornerstone making both one: come and save the human race, which you fashioned from clay. (A more literal translation from the Customary of Our Lady of Walsingham.)

As has been discussed in earlier articles on the O Antiphons, their essence is the attributing of titles given in the Old Testament to Jesus. The coming (Advent) of Jesus the Christ is thus filled with an expectation rooted in the Old Testament. In ‘O Rex Gentium’, we have a King of the Nations who saves humanity and who saves it as a creature of clay. What are we to make of these three elements?

In Romans 13, St Paul urges obedience to the ‘principes’ (princes or chiefs):

For princes are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good: and thou shalt have praise from the same. For he is God’s minister to thee, for good. But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God’s minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil. (All quotes from the Douai-Rheims version.)

A King, as a princeps, is therefore a principle of order in the state, and to be obeyed as a servant of God. But beyond this general status as a principle of order, a King also partakes of what Chesterton in Orthodoxy calls the ethics of Elfland:

[T]he fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness.

When applied to kings, the ethics of Elfland remind us that government is a good and necessary thing, but also that it is slightly odd. We can all see the oddness and even fairy tale quality of kings, but Chesterton thinks this magical aura is quite a good thing, while modernity is all for stripping out the magic.

Kings, however, do not just live in fairy tales. We live in a monarchy, and (according to ChatGPT) so do the citizens of roughly 27% of European states, including Denmark, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Luxembourg and the Vatican City. Monarchies manage to combine glitter and fairy dust and also the hard realities of twenty-first century states. That strikes me, with Chesterton, as rather a wonderful combination of magic and effectiveness, even if it seems to send progressive politicians into paroxysms of republicanism. ‘O Rex Gentium’ gives us an opportunity to reflect on both kingship as a description of God, and divinity as manifested in rulers generally, but more specifically in kings.

Yet, this is not just any king, but a King of the Nations. Numbers 24:20 refers to Amalek as ‘the beginning of nations’. In Patristic and Rabbinical commentary, Amalek is often seen as the eternal spiritual enemy. Yet, as the ‘principium gentium’ (the beginning of nations), he is also the symbol and cause of a disorder which, according to Psalm 2: 1-8, is destined to be remedied by Christ:

Why have the Gentiles [gentes] raged, and the people devised vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the princes met together, against the Lord and against his Christ. Let us break their bonds asunder: and let us cast away their yoke from us. He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them: and the Lord shall deride them. Then shall he speak to them in his anger, and trouble them in his rage.

But I am appointed king by him over Sion his holy mountain, preaching his commandment. The Lord hath said to me: Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I will give thee the Gentiles [gentes] for thy inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for thy possession.

So as ‘Rex Gentium’, Christ brings the sinful disorder of Amalek into the salvation of God, the disorder of the nations into God’s kingdom. As King of the Nations, with all that might hint at a unifying of what is broken in our public life and our souls, God allows an elfin, magical Kingship to break into the grey of a world dominated by technology. To put it another way, he allows a re-enchantment of a world stripped bare both of the divine and of the fully human.

And finally, to save the human race which you fashioned from clay. The reference here is to the fashioning of Adam in Genesis 2:7 de limo terrae (from the clay of the earth; limus meaning clay or dust or mire or slime). We are made from nothing very much, and yet, through God as King, we can be saved. Through God as King, the wretched of the earth, the Gentiles, the tribes which constantly besiege Israel, can be made part of that Israel. The Rex Gentium will save us. But will he save us despite ourselves and our character as the gentes, the tribes outwith Israel? Or can God take that national clay and make something of it? ‘Limus’ is not pure nothing: it is a something which can be transformed, particularly if it is given the meaning of clay. Specifically, what can the nation of Scotland contribute as its clay? What part of our identity and history can provide the material for God’s kingdom?

I’m afraid that if I’m being honest, for me, Christmas and its preparation in Advent is a time of childishness. And I do mean childishness, not childlikeness which, preachers tend to remind us, is what Christ asks us to be:

And said: Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. (Douai Rheims Matthew 18: 3)

Instead, I do tend to become childish, with all its good connotations of trustfulness and lack of guile, but also with erratic temperament, odd obsessions, and an inability to be left long alone with packets of sweets. In other words, a certain excitable disorderliness which it is part of adulthood to bring under some control. In ‘O Rex Gentium’, we are presented with this dialectic of order and disorder, of the maker and of the clay. It seems wrong to reflect too intellectually at this time of year as we wait for the coming of Christ. But feeling our way through some of the issues and images we’ve touched on above might well seem an appropriate way to greet Jesus as we enter the final days of our preparations.

What sort of order do we need in our personal and national lives? What sinfulness needs to be transformed for us to be saved both as a society and individually? What is it specifically in Scottish culture and history that might fruitfully co-operate with Christ our King?

By Stephen Watt