Undergraduates resist disgracing the college
The master of the art of running double agents during the Second World War, JC Masterman, spent 15 years as Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, where his ashes were scattered in the lake. He chose to call his guidebook to Oxford To Teach the Senators Wisdom, a title that is nearly a quotation from Psalm 105, in which it is a task given to Joseph.
In that phrase, “senators” means “elders”. The Junior Common Room at Worcester has now been trying to teach wisdom to its elders in the governing body by insisting on standing up out of courtesy when the fellows enter Hall at formal dinner. They also voted for the traditional grace in defiance of the fellows’ “progressive” vote “to include texts from other religions and cultures”.
The undergraduates were keen on “the theatre that reminds them of this place’s history”. In such a history Christianity is implicit.
The long grace it uses at formal Hall begins: Nos miseri homines et egeni (“We unhappy and unworthy men”). Here homines, “men”, means “human people”. If it meant “male people” it would be viri. So in that respect it is inclusive.
It goes on to relate, in a traditional Christian way, the food at dinner to the bread of heaven, that is, the Eucharistic body of Christ, by which, it says, “we may be sustained, nourished and strengthened”.
As Reginald Adams pointed out in his College Graces of Oxford and Cambridge, it is impossible to know the date when a grace was taken up at a college. Such daily rituals were not much recorded. Tracing them is harder than it may be in future centuries to tell when plastic coffee cups came in and went out.
But in 1660 Christ Church, Oxford, included its grace in its own edition of the Book of Common Prayer in Latin (a language allowed to stay in use for worship at the universities and learned foundations such as Eton). To judge from an anthology that draws upon these prayers, Christ Church (a college incorporated in a cathedral) had been using the grace since 1584.
Worcester took over this grace in full some time after its foundation in 1714. (It used the old buildings of Gloucester Hall, but I don’t know that it took over any of its customs.) The grace reads like the work of a reformed churchman, focusing as it does initially on the miserable state of mankind.
It’s not easy to write a convincing grace in Latin. The best recourse is to adopt lumps of scripture or existing prayers. Most graces of colleges founded in the 19th century use variants of Benedic, Domine, nos... In 1965, St Cross College incorporated a reference to “those whom thou makest to rejoice in honour of the Holy Cross”. Green College (1979) praised God pro cibo et sodalitate (“for food and fellowship”).
In 2009, Newnham College, Cambridge, adopted a grace with no reference to the God of Christianity. It said Pro cibo inter esurientes, pro comitate inter desolatos, pro pace inter bellantes, gratias agimus (“For food in a hungry world, for companionship in a world of loneliness, for peace in an age of violence, we give thanks”).
This strikes me as smug. Esurientes, the hungry ones, are precisely the people singled out for blessings from God in the canticle of praise by the Virgin Mary called the Magnificat: “He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.” The women of Newnham must count as comparatively rich in the things of this world.
Graces serve as thanks for the sort of things seen as gifts. Gifts imply a gift giver. The undergraduates of Worcester have struck upon a fine cultural battleground.