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 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:
“O most blessed Light divine,
Shine within these hearts of thine,
And our inmost being fill;
Where thou art not, man hath naught,
Nothing good in deed or thought,
Nothing free from taint of ill.”
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 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 perhaps the finer; here is one stanza of Edward Caswell’s version:
“Now, my tongue, the mystery telling
Of the glorious body sing,
And the blood, all price excelling
Which the Gentile’s Lord and King
Once on earth amongst us dwelling
Shed for this world’s ransoming.”
The other, “Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem,” has been rendered by Alexander R. Thompson, as follows:
“Zion, to thy Saviour singing,
To thy Prince and Shepherd bringing
Sweetest hymns of love and praise,
Thou wilt never reach the measure
Of thy most ecstatic lays.”