Part 2 — Chapter X THE LATIN HYMNODY

I. THE BEGINNINGS OF LATIN HYMNODY

The early disciples in the West were accustomed to use the Greek language, as may be gathered from Paul’s writing his Epistle to the Romans in Greek. It is probable that their religious services were largely in that language until there were Romans enough added to the churches to make the use of Latin necessary.

That great ode, the “Te Deum,” comes to us only in a Latin form. The tradition is that it was an antiphon improvised by Ambrose and Augustine on the occasion of the latter’s baptism, but that is doubtless a hero-worshiping fancy of the ninth century. That a good deal of it came from the Greek was to be expected and is quite certain, whether the Dacian Bishop, Nicetius of Remisiana, gathered up the Greek material or not (circa 400).

On the other hand, there is no Greek version extant, except a much later one which is evidently a translation from the Latin.

It may have been written (or compiled) during the Arian controversy as a creedal song to be sung by clerical or monastic choirs. It may have grown by gradual accretion, from generation to generation, like the Easter hymn “Jesus Christ is risen today,” which, begun in the fourteenth century, was not given final form until 1816.

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This magnificent ode, for it is a hymn only by a considerable extension of the definition, appears in our modern hymnals only as a chant, and is practically never sung in our non-liturgical congregations. It has been used as a choral text throughout all its history, never as a congregational hymn. It has had unnumbered settings by the greatest composers of Christendom.

It is the high festival ode of the ages, used in celebrating victories or other stately occasions of great public interest. Its comprehensiveness, nobility of thought, and elevated style befit the coronation of kings or the investiture of popes. For the mass of our churches, great as it is, it has only a historical interest. It might find impressive use as a responsive reading.

II. EARLY LATIN HYMN WRITERS

Bishop Hilary of Poitiers (circa 300-367), “the hammer of the Arians,” was exiled into Phrygia by Constantius because he called the Arian emperor “The Antichrist.” In his exile he came in touch with the fierce propaganda waged on both sides by means of hymns. His controversial zeal recognized the opportunity, and he wrote a great many anti-Arian hymns, which he gathered on his return to France into his Liber Mysteriorum. That his book was lost was no great calamity, for his fiery, combative spirit, valuable enough at the time, had no message for future generations. He woke a new interest in singing and furnished a more practicable model. He undoubtedly suggested the antiphonal singing he found in the “Hinterland” of Asia Minor and thus prepared the way for his fellow-countryman, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. If the latter is recognized as the father of Latin hymnody, and even of all the Western hymnody, Catholic and Protestant, Hilary is its grandfather.

Ambrose (340-397) had been a lawyer, not a product of the ecclesiastical system, and he brought to his office a freshness of insight and of resources that might have been atrophied 121 in the mechanical clerical education of his day. The value of song in supporting the spirits of his followers when besieged for days in his cathedral suggested to his practical mind, stimulated by his musical nature, its wider use when the battle was won.

Ambrose broke new ground for Latin hymnody in several essential particulars. He transformed the merely reading hymn, confined to the clergy, to a singing hymn for the congregation, writing hymns for the express purpose of promoting congregational song. He passed by the artificial classical meters for the simplest of lyrical meters, four lines of four iambic measures each, which has come down to us through the centuries as Long Meter. He also introduced the free use of rhymes.

Ambrose was not only a learned man of great ability, but—what is more to our present purpose—a man of great piety and devotion. He sought to vitalize and actualize the devotions, personal and collective, of the Christian Church, to make them genuine and heartfelt as against the formalists to whom the mere letter is all-important. His hymns are evidences of his spirituality. There is room for stanzas from only a few of them:

In spite of the opposition of the Roman See, and the later effort of Charlemagne, in his zeal for the Gregorian system, to destroy all copies of the Ambrosian hymns and tunes, the “Ambrosiani” still keep a small place in the Roman Breviary.

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Among the contemporaries of Ambrose, no hymnist stands out more conspicuously than the Spaniard, Prudentius (348-424). He also had been a lawyer and a man of affairs. He had more literary gifts than Ambrose, and his poems show more personality, more charm, more unaffected sincerity. Bentley calls him “the Horace and Virgil of the Christians.” A single stanza may illustrate his spirit and style:

Mention should be made of Fortunatus (530-609). He was, like the later Marot of psalm-version fame, “the fashionable poet of the day,” a precursor of the troubadours. Later in life he became religious, a priest, an almoner of a monastery, and finally Bishop of Poitiers. He wrote a processional to be used at the reception of a piece of the true cross presented by Queen Rhadegunda. The hymn “Vexilla regis prodeunt” has come down the ages. Dr. Neale calls it “one of the grandest in the treasury of the Latin church.” We make room for the first and last stanzas of Dr. Neale’s translation:

The influence and power of the Roman hierarchy were steadily exercised against the use of hymns and in behalf of the sole use of Scripture psalms and canticles. It is a far cry from Gregory the Great to John Calvin and John Knox, demanding the sole use of canonical material in the services of 123 the church; and a like far cry from the Council of Toledo in Spain in 633, which made a strong plea for the use of hymns in the church’s devotions, to Isaac Watts and his prefaces to his several collections of modified psalms and of hymns. It was only toward the end of the twelfth century that hymns of “human composure” were used in Roman churches, and then were sung by clerical choirs in the larger basilicas of the capital city. The people were still shut out from their use.

But the impulse to write devotional material for the church service persisted. The Venerable Bede (672-735), scholar, theologian, philosopher, historian, general encyclopedist, wrote both Latin and Anglo-Saxon hymns in his faraway monastery at Yarrow, England. Theodulph (d.821), Paulus Diaconus, Odo of Cluny, Cardinal Damiana, and other minor hymnists wrote hymns, some of which, transformed by skillful translators, have found use in our day.

Notker, called Balbulus (850-912), of St. Gall in Eastern Switzerland, became weary of the long-drawn-out notes of the cadences of the final syllable of the “Alleluia,” which was prolonged to enable the deacon to ascend to the rood-loft to chant the Gospel. It was suggested that a text be supplied, a syllable for every note. At first these texts had no metrical form and were called Proses. Later they were given a definite form and were called sequences, because they followed the “Alleluia.” These sequences continued to be written for over three centuries and were brought to technical perfection by Adam of St. Victor.

These sequences, however, were an evidence of the abiding urge for lyrical expression rather than a step in the progressive development of the Christian hymn.

III. GREAT LATIN HYMNS

A more important figure in our study of Latin hymns is Rabanus Maurus (776-856), archbishop of Mainz, Germany, a great scholar, an influential teacher, a profound theologian, a 124 voluminous writer, as well as a great hymn writer. He had been a notable figure in German church history before hymnological investigators proved that he was the writer of the great hymn, “Veni, Creator Spiritus,” the worthy successor of Fortunatus’ “Vexilla regis prodeunt.” Its authorship had been credited at different times to Ambrose, Gregory the Great, Charlemagne, and Notker Balbulus. It is the only metrical hymn officially recognized by the early English Church. It is sung at high ceremonies like the coronation of kings or the consecration of bishops. The accepted version is by Bishop Cosin. It appears in our leading hymnals.

The next bead in our rosary of great hymns is “Veni, Sancte Spiritus,” by the helpless little paralytic and humpback, Hermannus Contractus (1013-1054). An excellent historian, a renowned philosopher and theologian, a mathematician of unusual attainments, in short a universal and encyclopedic scholar, his chief glory now is that he wrote this hymn which Archbishop Trench rated “as the loveliest of all the hymns in the whole cycle of Latin sacred poetry.” There is space for one stanza only, the third of this great hymn:

The tide of the years had been flowing quietly with only here and there rapids or an eddy, but now the current was hastening toward the great whirlpool of the Crusades. Hildebert, Peter the Hermit, Bernard of Clairvaux, Abelard, Peter the Venerable, Adam of St. Victor, stand out as lighthouses on an uncharted sea.

Not the least of these was Bernard, the abbot of Clairvaux (1091-1153), scholar, orator, statesman, and man of affairs, of whom Archbishop Trent declares: “Probably no man during 125 his lifetime ever exercised a personal influence in Christendom equal to his; the stayer of popular commotions, the queller of heresies, the umpire between princes and kings, the counsellor of popes.” This does not suggest the writer of such a hymn as “Jesu dulcis memoria,”[1] the tenderest, sweetest sacred lyric of the Middle Ages. But he was credited with it for centuries until it was found in a manuscript of the eleventh century and there credited to a Spanish Benedictine abbess, an origin more consonant with its spirit and with its finished Latinity. Would we knew more about her, this medieval precursor of Anne Steele, Sarah F. Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth P. Prentiss, and Fanny Crosby! Dr. S. W. Duffield holds “Bernard to be the real author of the modern hymn—the hymn of faith and worship”; but now the iconoclastic modern hymnologist denies him even the authorship of the “Salve Caput Cruentatum.”[2]

We know very little about the other Bernard, who was a monk in the greater abbacy of Cluny; but his authorship of the great indictment of the Roman church of his time, “De Contemptu Mundi,” is undoubted. His great poem of three thousand lines[3] occupied itself with the vice and moral filth which his pure soul detested. In his disgust with the moral ordure in which his feet were immersed, he suddenly takes wing and rises to the heights to contemplate “the Heavenly Land.” Dr. Neale, out of scattered lines and phrases of the original, with additions of his own, constructed the wondrous mosaics which we delight to sing: “Brief life is here our portion,” “Jerusalem, the Golden,” “For thee, O dear, dear country.”

One thinks of Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274) as the Aristotelian logician, the profound Augustinian theologian, the philosopher, the invincible protagonist of medieval orthodoxy, rather than as a hymn writer; yet some of our present day hymnals contain two communion hymns of profound thought and deep feeling written by him. “Pange, lingua, gloriosi” is 126 perhaps the finer; here is one stanza of Edward Caswell’s version:

The other, “Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem,” has been rendered by Alexander R. Thompson, as follows:

IV. MEDIEVAL DEVOTIONAL POEMS

We now reach the consideration of hymns and poems of great excellence in themselves but without the appeal, or practicability as hymns, possessed by the foregoing. Some of them appear in liturgical hymnals, or in more formal hymnals of non-liturgical churches, but their use is limited.

Among these is Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of the Sun,”[4] not a hymn, but a psalm of praise for all created things. For our day it has chiefly literary and antiquarian interest.

His follower and biographer, Thomas of Celano (?-1255), however, wrote a sequence or hymn that has intrigued the interest of generation after generation. Mozart’s “Requiem” uses parts of it as its text. Goethe introduces it in his “Faust.” Unnumbered translations of it have been made into all civilized languages. Theodore Parker called it the “damnation lyric.” In the original “Dies irae” there were eighteen stanzas. The version of W. J. Irons has fourteen stanzas of three lines each, a few of which follow:

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Sir Walter Scott’s version is in four-line stanzas, three of which are used to make a practicable hymn. But who in our self-complacent age cares to sing any of these versions, portraying “The Last Judgment”?

Another famous hymn, written by a follower of Francis of Assisi, perhaps Jacopone da Todi, “the fool for Christ’s sake,” is the “Stabat Mater Dolorosa.” It celebrates the sufferings, not of Christ on the cross, but of Mary, his mother, standing at its foot. It is the supreme Mariolatrous hymn in sentiment and in diction. It is Roman, of course, not Catholic, and interests us only as marking the sincerity and the depth of the medieval sentiment and devotion to the Madonna.

This great hymn is noteworthy because of the many translations into modern languages which have been made, seventy-eight into German alone and as many more into English, in whole or in part. Its emotional possibilities have appealed to many music composers, including Palestrina, Pergolesi, Haydn, Rossini, and Dvorak—settings varied in style from Palestrina’s high dignity to Rossini’s almost theatrical treatment.

It must be remembered that the Greek hymns of the Eastern church, and the Latin hymns of the Western, were not in dead languages, as they appear to us, but in living languages, the vernacular of the persons producing and using them. While the common people may have spoken a different dialect, the monks and clergy used the classic speech as a very mother tongue. The hymns were for the most part a perfectly spontaneous expression of religious conviction and feeling, a 128 living product of vital experience, an instinctive expression of profound faith.

In closing this rapid survey of a thousand years of Greek and Latin hymns, one is impressed that they are all clerical—even monastic—in type and character. There are in many of them spontaneity, genuine feeling, and personal experience, a profound sense of spiritual realities; yet over all of them falls the shadow of the tonsured ecclesiastic, with his heart set on the impressiveness of the forms of worship rather than on the ultimate result in creating spiritual reactions in the individuals of the congregation.

V. MEDIEVAL POPULAR HYMNODY

Although the hymns whose origin we have been tracing were used in enriching the services of the Roman Church, and for guiding the meditations and devotions of the clerical spiritually-minded readers, we get hints of a people’s hymnody used privately and in public processions, usually in the common speech of the region. It was the age of the Troubadours, a time of universal song. It is unthinkable that a people in whose lives religion was a commanding influence should have no songs of their own about it.

But among the Albigenses and Waldenses and other pietistic sects in remoter regions there must have been a hymnody all their own. They had no clergy, no connection with the Romish Church—were in utter opposition to its forms and organization. Hence their natural impulse for worship and praise compelled the creation of hymns of their own. They were spontaneous utterances expressing their spiritual life in a native vocabulary all could understand and appropriate.

Although this people’s hymnody has perished, because it was produced and used by the populace and contemptuously ignored or denounced by the clerical custodians of the literature of their day, or by those of succeeding generations, the hymns were widely sung in the homes, on the streets, at popular 129 religious festivals, and even in the remoter village churches where the clerical choirs were wanting.

It was these popular religious songs, rather than the more stately hymns read and chanted by clerical and monastic choirs, that kept alive the vital spark of religious feeling and devotion to Christ. If most of the doves of song hovered over the head of the Madonna during this long period, it was because she was the mother of Jesus. It was as the representative of all motherhood that she brought home the true manhood of our Lord.

That this popular hymnody of the medieval period has failed to survive is no proof of its worthlessness. It is no condemnation of the sermons of Chrysostom, of Peter the Hermit, of Martin Luther, or of a thousand sermons preached every Sunday that they perish with the breath that gave them utterance. They served a good purpose in their brief hour. That hundreds of Watts’ hymns, and thousands by Charles Wesley, are no longer sung, does not establish their uselessness, but only that their spiritual as well as verbal idiom is not adapted to the needs of our day.

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