Part 2 — Chapter VIII THE POST-APOSTOLIC HYMN
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The Post-Apostolic Church a Singing Church.
Whatever conclusion we reach regarding the song service during the Apostolic age, because of the meager facts we have regarding it, we have sufficient information regarding the second, third, and fourth centuries to be sure that the hymn had become a more and more important feature of the religious life. The tide of song swells louder and higher as the generations pass. Clement of Alexandria, the reputed writer of the earliest surviving Christian hymn, “Shepherd of tender youth,” writes, “We cultivate our fields, praising; we sail the sea, hymning.” Jerome writes to Marcellus, “You could not go into the field, but you might hear the plowman at his hallelujahs, the mower at his hymns, and the vinedresser singing David’s psalms.” Tertullian, a little earlier, when the antiphonal singing was still in vogue, objects to the marriage of a Christian with an unbeliever, because they cannot sing together, whereas the Christian mates each would challenge the other “which shall better chant to the Lord.” The early church was, therefore, a singing church.
Tertullian was not a writer of hymns, for he declared “We have a plenty of verses, sentences, songs, proverbs.” We do not have their hymns, but we have the names of prominent hymn writers who sealed their faith with their blood: Ignatius, 110 Athenogenes, Hippolytus, and many others who did not win a martyr’s crown.
All these hymns blossomed out of the consuming love for the Lord Jesus Christ, for which the Jewish psalms could give no expression. That they were used for public worship we have the testimony of Pliny (A.D. 110). His report from Bithynia to the Emperor Trajan was that “the new sect have a custom of meeting before dawn on a stated day and singing by turn a hymn to Christ as God.”
The Earliest Surviving Hymns.
Unless we accept the Syriac “Odes of Solomon” as an apostolic hymnbook, none of the “spiritual songs” of that age survive. The hymn written (or quoted?) by Clement in 170 is accepted as the earliest hymn handed down to us, with the “Candlelight Hymn” as possibly contemporaneous.
Clement’s hymn “Shepherd of tender youth” is found in most of our hymnals and is in actual use.[1] Dr. Henry M. Dexter’s version, as generally used, is an attenuation suited to the taste of our day rather than a faithful reproduction of the original, which begins with a rather violent figure, “Curb for stubborn steed” (E. H. Plumptre).
The date of the “Candlelight Hymn” is very uncertain. It was so old in 370 that another St. Basil could throw no light on its origin: “It seemed fitting to our fathers not to receive the gift of light at eventide in silence, but on its appearing immediately to give thanks.” The version by John Keble is still in use:
“Hail, glad’ning Light, of His pure glory poured Who is the immortal Father heavenly, blest, Holiest of holies, Jesus Christ, our Lord! Now we are come to the sun’s hour of rest; The lights of evening round us shine; We hymn the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit divine.”
The Relation of Hymns to Psalms and Canticles.
In the very nature of the case, these individual songs and hymns and 111 psalms had no authority back of them. They were the “spirituals,” the Gospel songs of their day and generation. Most of them were improvisations for a single service—flying sparks from the anvil of the Spirit. Undoubtedly others had a longer life, were written out and passed from hand to hand and even from generation to generation.
These hymns were mostly in Greek, though some were in Syriac, and as far as they were given a standard form they used Greek classical meters. Some were modeled on the Septuagint psalms and were known as “private psalms.” Many were odes, like the “Odes of Solomon.”
But it is quite evident that this body of song was never regarded as on an equality with the Psalms of the Jewish church, or with the Canticles of the New Testament. These had the sanctions of the rapidly crystallizing canon of the New Testament, and the established canon of the Old, which gave an authority that was lacking in the current hymnody. The relation was even more pronounced than that in our own day between the body of hymns surviving through the generations recognized as “standard” and the current religious songs of the hour.
In addition to the Psalms taken over from the Jewish psalter (not over one-half of which were ever sung) and the Canticles of Luke’s Gospel, there gradually rose a subsidiary body of canticles which by the fourth century had been for the most part fully formulated. They were developments of passages from both the Old and New Testament. In addition to the ejaculatory responses, “Alleluia” and “Hosanna,” the following were hymns authorized to be used in Christian services:
1. The Gloria in Excelsis, developed from the song of the angels as found in Luke, known as the Greater Doxology.
2. The Ter Sanctus, based on Isaiah 6:3, possibly later associated with Revelation 4:8, and called the Cherubical Hymn.
3. The Benedicite, the song of the three Hebrew children 112 in the furnace, a paraphrase of the forty-eighth Psalm, likely taken from the Apocrypha.
4. The Gloria Patri or Lesser Doxology, apparently handed down from the Apostolic time, developed from the baptismal formula. It was expanded during the Arian controversy, adding “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”[2]
The Hymn as Propaganda.
The inferiority of the popular hymnody became ever more pronounced as the hymn was employed by heretical sects as a means of propagating their pernicious doctrines. Bardesanes and his son Harmonius in Edessa, Asia, a little later composed an entire psalter of one hundred and fifty psalms, “deserting David’s truth and preserving David’s numbers,” as Ephrem Syrus expressed it.
The Gnostic hymns during the third century were slowly undermining the faith of the people, but it was not until Arius appeared with his denial of the deity of Jesus Christ and spread broadcast his “Thalia,” a collection of practical hymns emphasizing practical duties and the value of the daily life of the people, as well as magnifying the humanity of Jesus, that the full extent of the revolution in the religious sentiment of the people became evident. He fitted his measures to well-known popular tunes, sung only by those “who sing songs over their wine with noise and revel.”
Arius, an ungainly giant of tremendous force of personality and unbounded energy, thus began a movement that was to convulse with its controversy the whole Roman Empire through many generations, even down to our own times, and was to prepare Asia and Northern Africa for the superimposition of the Mohammedan personality and cult upon an emasculated Christianity.
In 269, Paul of Samosata, an Arian Bishop, banished from his churches the hymns that had come down from the second century because they were addressed to Christ as God and “as being innovations, the work of men of later times.” He 113 began the Arian fashion of propaganda by means of hymns. As an answer to this came the great hymnic outburst of the fourth century, headed by Gregory of Nazianzus and participated in by St. Chrysostom.[3]
It is not surprising, therefore, that the Synod that met in Laodicea in 363 ordered that “psalms composed by private men must not be read in the church, nor uncanonical books, but only the canonical of the New and Old Testament.”
Nor need we wonder that with the Arian fanatics interrupting orthodox services by starting their heterodox hymns, the same Synod decided that “beside the psalm singers appointed thereto who mount the ambo and sing out of the book, no others shall sing in church.”
This robbing the lips and the hearts of the congregation of its share of the public praise, in order to prevent Gnostic and Arian heretics from profaning public services with their strife and contention, hardened into a perpetual prohibition, and in the Greek church the people are mute to this day.[4]
It should be remembered that these prohibitions applied only to public services and their liturgies. Outside the walls of the larger churches the people were still singing. Indeed, the popular song was used by the orthodox to displace the heretical songs of the Arians, as was done by Chrysostom in Constantinople, in order to stem the tide of attack on the doctrine of the deity of Christ.
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