Nunc dimittis

Based on Wikipedia: Nunc dimittis

The Old Man Who Was Ready to Die

Imagine waiting your entire life for one moment. Not a wedding, not a birth, not a promotion—but a promise. A promise whispered to your soul that you would not close your eyes in death until you had seen something extraordinary.

This was Simeon's life.

He was an old man in Jerusalem, devout and patient, carrying a secret that must have felt heavier with each passing year. The Holy Spirit had told him—somehow, in whatever way such messages arrive—that he would live to see the Messiah. The one Israel had been waiting for. The one who would change everything.

And so he waited. Through ordinary days that stretched into ordinary years. Through watching friends and neighbors die without such promises fulfilled. Through the slow accumulation of age in his bones, wondering perhaps if he had misheard, misunderstood, or simply imagined it all.

Then one afternoon, he walked into the Temple, and there they were: a young couple from Nazareth, poor enough that they couldn't afford a lamb for the purification ritual, carrying instead two turtledoves. And in the mother's arms, a baby boy, forty days old.

Simeon knew. Somehow, instantly, completely, he knew.

Words That Changed Evening Prayer Forever

What Simeon said next has been repeated every night for over sixteen centuries. In monasteries and cathedrals, in small parish churches and grand basilicas, in languages living and dead, his words close the day for millions of Christians.

The Latin version begins "Nunc dimittis"—literally, "Now you dismiss" or "Now you let depart." This became the name of the entire prayer, following the ancient tradition of naming texts by their opening words. It's why we call the Lord's Prayer the "Pater Noster" in Latin contexts, or why scholarly references to papal encyclicals use their first few words as titles.

In English, the prayer reads something like this:

Lord, now you let your servant depart in peace, according to your word. For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all peoples—a light to reveal you to the nations, and the glory of your people Israel.

That's it. Four verses. Maybe thirty seconds to speak aloud. Yet these words have been set to music by hundreds of composers, parsed by thousands of theologians, and whispered by countless believers at the edge of sleep for nearly two millennia.

What Makes This Prayer Remarkable

To understand why the Nunc dimittis mattered so much, you need to understand what death meant to ancient Jews. It was not, generally speaking, something to look forward to.

As one early twentieth-century theologian, Friedrich Justus Knecht, put it: "Pious Israelites closed their eyes in death, weary of life and submissive to God's will; not altogether hopeless, but full of horror of the future. Death was a thing to be feared, and each new day of life which was granted was looked on as a gain."

Sheol—the shadowy underworld where the dead resided—was not a place of punishment exactly, but neither was it a place of joy. It was simply where people went, a dim existence cut off from the God who dwelt among the living. The Psalms are full of pleas to be rescued from death precisely because the dead cannot praise God. They've left the land of the living.

This is what makes Simeon's words so shocking.

He's not merely accepting death. He's welcoming it. He's essentially telling God: "I've seen what I needed to see. You kept your promise. I can go now—in peace." The phrase "in peace" isn't just pleasantry. It's a theological earthquake. Simeon has discovered something that transforms the ultimate enemy into a door.

One tradition holds that Simeon died before he even left the Temple that day, so eager was he to depart. Whether literally true or not, the image captures something essential about this moment: here is a man for whom living and dying have been reordered around an encounter with a six-week-old baby.

Why We Pray It at Night

The early Church had a genius for liturgical placement. They took Simeon's words—this prayer of someone ready to depart—and made it the closing prayer of the day. The office of Compline, from the Latin "completorium" meaning "completion," is the final service before sleep. And what is sleep, after all, but a small rehearsal for death?

Every night, for centuries, monks and nuns and ordinary Christians have prayed Simeon's words before bed. "Now you let your servant depart in peace." It's both a prayer and a practice—a way of making peace with the possibility that this night might be your last, that you might not wake in the morning, and if you don't, that's acceptable. You've seen enough. You can go.

This isn't morbid. Or rather, it is morbid in the original sense of that word—it deals honestly with death. But it deals with death the way Simeon did: not with horror, but with something approaching gratitude.

The Nunc dimittis appears in virtually every Western Christian tradition's night prayer. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer includes it in Evensong. Catholic Compline features it prominently. Lutheran churches sing it after receiving Communion, connecting the prayer not just to the end of the day but to the sacramental encounter with Christ. The Eastern Orthodox include it in their Vespers service.

Three great "Gospel canticles" structure daily prayer in the Christian tradition: the Benedictus (Zechariah's song) in the morning, the Magnificat (Mary's song) in the evening, and the Nunc dimittis at night. Each comes from Luke's first two chapters, that remarkable overture to his Gospel where humble people burst into prophetic poetry.

The Musical Legacy

A prayer repeated millions of times over sixteen centuries tends to attract composers. The Nunc dimittis has been set to music so often that listing all the versions would be its own scholarly project.

Thomas Tallis, the great sixteenth-century English composer, created a plainchant setting that remains one of the most familiar versions in Anglican churches. Plainchant—that ancient, unaccompanied, single-melody style—suits the text perfectly. It's simple, severe, and slightly haunting. The kind of music that sounds like it's coming from somewhere older than memory.

Heinrich Schütz, the most important German composer before Bach, wrote multiple settings. One appears in his "Musikalische Exequien"—funeral music composed in 1636 for a prince who had requested these specific texts for his memorial service. The prince, like Simeon, wanted to depart in peace.

Johann Sebastian Bach never set the Nunc dimittis directly, but he composed several cantatas for the Feast of the Purification—the church holiday commemorating the very Temple scene where Simeon spoke. His cantata "Ich habe genug" ("I have enough") from 1727 draws on the same emotional territory. Its text includes the lines: "I have enough. My comfort is this alone, that Jesus might be mine and I be his." Like Simeon, the singer has encountered Christ and is ready to depart.

Bach's cantata "Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin" ("In peace and joy I now depart") goes further—it's based directly on Martin Luther's German paraphrase of the Nunc dimittis, composed in the early days of the Reformation. Luther had transformed Simeon's words into a congregational hymn.

Herbert Howells, one of the twentieth century's finest English church composers, wrote twenty different settings of the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis pair. Twenty. Each for a different cathedral or chapel, each shaped by the acoustic space it would inhabit. His Gloucester Service and St Paul's Service remain staples of Anglican choral evensong.

Charles Villiers Stanford's setting achieved perhaps its most public moment when it was sung as the recessional at Margaret Thatcher's funeral in 2013. The Iron Lady, Britain's first female Prime Minister, departed St Paul's Cathedral to words first spoken by an old man in the Jerusalem Temple two thousand years earlier.

Sergei Rachmaninoff's setting, part of his All-Night Vigil composed in 1915, is famous among choral singers for its final measures. The basses descend through a scale that ends on a low B-flat, nearly two octaves below middle C. It's a note so low that many bass sections simply cannot produce it with any authority. The effect, when executed properly, is of music sinking into the earth—a sonic burial.

An Unexpected Pop Culture Presence

In 1979, the BBC adapted John le Carré's espionage novel "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" into a seven-part miniseries starring Alec Guinness as the aging spy George Smiley. The production needed closing credits music, and composer Geoffrey Burgon provided a setting of the Nunc dimittis.

It was an inspired choice. The series deals with betrayal, the waning of empire, the exhaustion of Cold War professionals who have given their lives to a shadow war. Smiley is Simeon-like in his patience, his waiting, his final unmasking of the mole who has corrupted British intelligence. The Latin words over the closing credits add gravitas without explanation. Most viewers couldn't translate the text, but the music communicated something essential about departure, completion, and the peace that comes when long struggles end.

Le Carré was not done with Simeon's prayer. It appears again in his 2001 novel "The Constant Gardener," sung at the funeral of Tessa Quayle, a young diplomat's wife murdered for knowing too much about pharmaceutical company malfeasance in Africa. The prayer at a funeral connects most directly to its original meaning—Simeon was ready to die, and so, inevitably, are we all.

The neoclassical electronic group Mannheim Steamroller—best known in America for their synthesizer-heavy Christmas albums—used the Nunc dimittis text on their 1983 album "Fresh Aire V," an ambitious concept album based on Johannes Kepler's seventeenth-century science fiction novel "Somnium." The song "Lumen" weaves the Latin words through electronic textures, connecting ancient prayer to space-age speculation.

Literary Echoes

Writers have long found the Nunc dimittis irresistible. The prayer's themes—waiting, fulfillment, the readiness for death—resonate with fiction's eternal concerns.

T.S. Eliot, whose conversion to Anglo-Catholicism shaped his later poetry, wrote "A Song for Simeon" in 1928. The poem inhabits Simeon's perspective with characteristic Eliot density:

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.

Eliot's Simeon is tired. He has waited through "eighty years and no tomorrow." He sees what is coming—not just the infant Messiah, but the violence that will follow: swords, stations of the cross, a passion not his to suffer. He asks only to be allowed to die before the worst arrives.

Roald Dahl, better known for children's books like "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "Matilda," wrote an adult short story titled "Nunc Dimittis" that first appeared in 1953. It's a tale of revenge served cold—a wealthy man discovers his lover has been mocking him behind his back and arranges an elaborate, devastating payback. The title is bitterly ironic: the protagonist feels ready to die in peace only after destroying someone else.

Walter Miller's science fiction masterpiece "A Canticle for Leibowitz," published in 1959, takes its title from the liturgical term. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where the Catholic Church has preserved fragments of scientific knowledge through a new dark age, the novel is saturated with liturgical reference. The Nunc dimittis fits naturally in a book concerned with civilization's death and possible rebirth.

Thomas Jefferson quoted the prayer in multiple letters late in his life. To the Marquis de Lafayette, to Joseph Cabell, to Andrew Jackson—the Founding Father expressed his readiness to depart now that the American experiment was underway. Jefferson was not conventionally religious; he famously edited his own version of the Gospels, removing all miracles. But Simeon's prayer transcended its supernatural context for him. It became simply a statement of fulfillment, of having lived to see the thing one hoped to see.

The Opposite and the Similar

If the Nunc dimittis represents peaceful acceptance of death after fulfillment, its opposite might be Dylan Thomas's famous injunction: "Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Thomas's poem, written for his dying father, insists on resistance. Death is an enemy, not a door. One should fight it even when the fight is hopeless.

Both positions have their truth. The question of how to face death has occupied human beings since we became capable of knowing we would die. Simeon represents one answer: that under the right circumstances, with the right encounter, death loses its terror. Thomas represents another: that life is too precious to surrender without struggle.

Similar to the Nunc dimittis in spirit are other "departure" texts from various traditions. The Tibetan Buddhist tradition has the Bardo Thodol, often called the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which guides the dying through the process of death and rebirth. The ancient Egyptians had their Book of the Dead, spells to navigate the afterlife. Judaism has the Vidui, a confession recited by the dying.

But the Nunc dimittis differs from these in crucial ways. It's not guidance for the dying person—it's words spoken while still very much alive. It's not concerned with what comes after death—no descriptions of afterlife, no instructions for the soul's journey. It's simply a statement of readiness based on what has been seen and experienced in life.

What Simeon Saw

We should be clear about what Simeon saw. He saw a baby. Six weeks old, probably crying at intervals, certainly not displaying any obvious signs of being the salvation of Israel. Mary and Joseph were poor—they brought the offering of the poor, two birds instead of a lamb. Nothing about the scene would have attracted notice from anyone not already looking.

Yet Simeon looked at this unremarkable infant and declared that his eyes had seen salvation. A light to reveal God to the nations. The glory of Israel.

This is either profound faith or profound delusion, depending on one's theological commitments. But even skeptics might find something valuable in Simeon's example. He looked at something small and saw it as sufficient. He didn't need to see the ministry, the miracles, the resurrection. He didn't need proof or evidence or fulfillment of prophecy in any obvious sense. He saw a baby and said: "This is enough. I can go now."

There's a word for this capacity to find completion in the seemingly incomplete. Some might call it faith. Others might call it gratitude, or wisdom, or simply the gift of knowing when you've received what you needed.

Praying at the Edge of Sleep

Tonight, as darkness falls in time zones around the world, the Nunc dimittis will be sung and spoken. In Anglican cathedrals where choirs process out under echoing stone. In Catholic monasteries where monks gather for Compline before the Great Silence. In Lutheran churches where the congregation has just received bread and wine. In Eastern Orthodox parishes where incense still hangs in the air from Vespers.

Each repetition connects the person praying to Simeon in the Temple, to the sixteen centuries of Christians who have used these words to make peace with the night. To pray the Nunc dimittis is to practice dying a little, to rehearse the final departure that each of us will eventually make.

This might sound grim. But Simeon wasn't grim. He was joyful. He'd seen what he'd spent his life waiting to see. The promise had been kept. He could go.

And perhaps that's the prayer's deepest gift—not just the words themselves, but the question they provoke. What would you need to see before you could say "I can go now"? What encounter, what achievement, what moment of grace would be enough?

Simeon had his answer. The Nunc dimittis invites each of us to find our own.