Vere dignum

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Conmee is beginning his walk to Artane to see if the O'Brien Institute for Destitute Children will admit Paddy Dignam's orphaned son Patsy. He pauses to remind himself of the family name––clearly these Dignam people are not quite so immediately available to his consciousness as "Brother Swan," "Mr Cunningham," and "the wife of Mr David Sheehy M.P."––and then his thoughts drift off into a reverie about the Mass. "Vere dignum et justum est" (or iustum in ancient Latin) opens the Preface that begins the central section of the ceremony. Gifford supplies a translation of the complete sentence: "It is indeed fitting and right, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Lord, Holy Father, Almighty and Eternal God."

Joyce's internal monologue here captures a perfectly ordinary occurrence in human cognition, the brain's tendency to seize on casual identities and similarities. But "Vere dignum" sounds enough like "very Dignam" to make readers of Wandering Rocks halt their progress and wonder what the priest may be thinking about the boy. The priest is not thinking about the boy at all, and the narrative is leading its readers down a blind alley. The confusion is entirely typical of this chapter.

For fans of Catholic arcana, however, the alley may not be entirely blind. While anyone familiar with the Latin Mass would immediately recognize the words Vere dignum, few would recognize their presence in the cruciform monogram shown here in a 12th century manuscript. The text to the right of the monogram begins "et iustum est" because the monogram (which appears in at least three different medieval manuscripts) contains the letters UEREDIGNUM. (Ancient Romans used just one letter, U or V, derived from the Greek upsilon, to represent both the u-vowel and the v-consonant. Only in the Renaissance did scholars begin to distinguish them with two characters, as they did also with I and J.) In a brief 1 June 2013 article on Corpus Christi Watershed (www.ccwatershed.org/2013/06/01/uere-dignum-truly-right-just-preface-vere), Jeff Ostrowski offers a visual explanation of how the cryptogram works.