O DEUS, EGO AMO TE.
O Lord, I love thee, for of old
Thy love hath reached to me.
Lo, I would lay my freedom by
And freely follow thee!
Let memory never have a thought
Thy glory cannot claim,
Nor let the mind be wise at all
Unless she seek thy name.
For nothing further do I wish
Except as thou dost will;
What things thy gift allows as mine
My gift shall give thee still.
Receive what I have had from thee
And guide me in thy way,
And govern as thou knowest best,
Who lovest me each day.
Give unto me thy love alone,
That I may love thee too,
For other things are dreams; but this
Embraceth all things true.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE HYMN-WRITERS OF THE BREVIARY.
There are three principal liturgical books in use in the Roman Catholic Church. Originally there were two: the Ritual, which contained all the sacramental offices, and the Breviary, which contained the rest. But for convenience the eucharistic office in its various forms now has a book to itself called the Missal, and the other six sacraments recognized in the Church of Rome make up the Ritual.
It is with the Breviary, however, that hymnology is especially concerned, as it is in it that the hymns of the Church are mostly to be found, while the sequences belong to the Missal. It contains the prayers said in the Church’s behalf every day at the canonical hours by the priests and the members of the religious orders. Originally there were only three of these canonical hours, and they were based on Old Testament usage. These were at the third, sixth, and ninth hour of the Scriptures (nine o’clock, noon, and three in the afternoon), and in the Western Church are called Tierce, Sext, and Nones, for that reason. The number afterward was increased to five and then to seven. To these three day hours were added three night hours, with two at the transition from night to day (Prime), and from day to night (Vespers). But to get up thrice in the night was too much for even monastic discipline, so they said two night services together at midnight, and then they slept till dawn. As this daily service differs in its contents according to the seasons of the Church year, and also is adapted to the commemoration of the saints of the Calendar, the Breviary is the most voluminous prayer-book known to Christendom. It generally is published in four substantial volumes, one each for the four natural seasons. It is used in such public services as are not accompanied by a celebration of any sacrament and in the choir service of the religious houses. In theory, however, the Church is present even at the solitary recitation of the hours by a secular priest; and when two say them in company they must say them aloud.
Hymns were not in the services of the Breviary from the beginning. As late as the sixth century there was a controversy as to admitting anything but the words of Scripture to be sung. We find a Gallic synod sanctioning their use, and a Spanish synod taking common ground with our Psalm-singing Presbyterians. But in the next century even Spain, through the Council of Toledo (A.D. 633), appeals to early precedent in behalf of hymns, and decides that if people may use uninspired words in prayer, they may do the same in their praises—Sicut ergo orationes, ita et hymnos in laudem Dei compositos nullus vestrum ulterius improbet—which went to the core of the question and silenced the exclusive Psalm-singers. Twenty years later another Council of Toledo required of candidates for orders that they should know both the Psalter and the hymns by heart. Yet in the Roman Breviary no hymns were introduced before the thirteenth century, when Haymo, the General of the Franciscan Order, reformed it in 1244 with the sanction of Gregory IX. and Nicholas III.
In the view of Roman Catholic liturgists, the Psalms set forth the praise of God in general, while hymns are written and used with reference to some single mystery of the faith, or the commemoration of some saint. This harmonizes with their use in the Breviary, and their division into hymns de tempore for the festivals of the Church year, or the days of the week, or the hours of the day; and hymns de sanctis for the days of commemoration in the Church Calendar. Even when the same hymn is used on a series of days, its conclusion is altered to give it a special adaptation to each of these days. This classification, of course, does not describe the whole body of the Latin hymns. Some few even of those in the Breviary, as, for instance, the Te Deum, have to be classed as psalms, and are called Canticles (Cantica); and many outside it will not fit into any such definition of what a hymn is. But it illustrates the general character and purpose of the hymns of the Roman and other breviaries, as designed for a special temporal or personal application by way of supplement to the Psalter.
At present the Roman Breviary, prepared with the sanction of the Council of Trent, has driven nearly all the others out of use. But at the era of the Reformation there was a great number of breviaries, every diocese and religious order having a right to its own. Panzer enumerates no less than seventy-one which were printed before 1536, some of them in several editions.[18] Even now the Roman Breviary is supplemented by special services in honor of the saints of each order or country, and by services of a more general kind which are peculiar to some localities. But in Luther’s time the endless variety in breviaries and missals formed a striking feature of the confusion which to his mind characterized the Church of Rome.
With the development of a more fastidious taste, through the study of the Latin classics as literary models, there arose in the sixteenth century, and even before the Reformation, a demand for a reformation of the Breviary. Besides its defects of form, such as violations of Latin grammar, the constant use of terms which grated on the ears of the humanists, and the use of hymns in which rhyme rather added to the offence of want of correct metre, the contents of the Breviary were found faulty by a critical age. The selections from the Fathers to be read by way of homily were in some cases from spurious works; and the narratives of saints’ lives for the days dedicated to them were not always edifying, and in some cases palpably untrue. It became a proverbial saying that a person lied like the second nocturn office of the Breviary, that being the service in which these legends are found. But the badness of the Latin and the metrical faults of the hymns counted for quite as much with the critics of that day. We hear of a cardinal warning a young cleric not to be too constant in reading his Breviary, if he wished to preserve his ear for correct Latinity.
As might have been expected, it was the elegant Medicean Pope Leo X. who first put his hand to the work of reform. He selected for this purpose Zacharia Ferreri, Bishop of Guarda-Alfieri, a man of fine Latin scholarship and some ability as a poet. By 1525 Ferreri had the hymns for a new Breviary ready, and published them with the promise of the Breviary itself on the title-page.[19] Clement VII., also of the house of Medici, was Pope when the book appeared, and he authorized the substitution of these new hymns for the old, but did not command this.
The book is furnished with an introduction by Marino Becichemi, a forgotten humanist, who was then professor of eloquence at Padua. It is worth quoting as exhibiting the attitude of the Renaissance to the earlier Christian literature. He praises Ferreri as a shining light in every kind of science, human and divine, prosaic and poetical. He cannot say too much of the beauty of his style, its gravity and dignity, its purity, its spontaneity and freedom from artificiality. “That his hymns and odes, beyond all doubt, will secure him immortality, I need not conceal. Certainly I have read nothing in Christian poets sweeter, purer, terser, or brighter. How brief and how copious, each in its place—how polished! Everywhere the stream flows in full channel with that antique Roman mode of speech, except where of full purpose it turns in another direction.” That means how Ciceronian Ferreri’s speech, except where he remembers that he is a Christian poet and bishop writing for Christian worshippers. “More than once have I exhorted him that it belonged to the duty and dignity of his episcopal (pontificii) office to make public these Church hymns.”
“You know, my reader, what hymns they sing everywhere in the temples, that they are almost all faulty, silly, full of barbarism, and composed without reference to the number of feet or the quantity of the syllables, so as to excite educated persons to laughter, and to bring priests, if they are men of letters, to despise the services of the Church. I say men of letters. As for those who are not, and who are the gluttons of the Roman curia, or who have no wisdom, it is enough for them to stand like dragons close by the sacred ark, or to drift about like the clouds, to live like idle bellies, given over to the pursuit of sleep, good living, sensual pleasures, and to gather up the money by which they make themselves hucksters in religion and plunderers of the Christian people and practice their deceits upon both gods and men equally, until the vine of the Lord degenerates into a wild plant.”
The Italianized Greek would see no difference between a Tetzel and a Ferreri. But there still were sincerely good people who relished the old hymns better than the polished paganism of the Bishop of Guarda-Alfieri. Ferreri’s hymns struck no root in spite of the favor of two Medicean popes. They seem never to have reached a second edition. Their frankly pagan vocabulary for the expression of Christian ideas seems to have been too much for even the humanists.
Bishop Ferreri does not seem to have lived to prepare his shorter and easier Breviary after the same elegant but unsuitable fashion as his hymns. So Clement VII. put the preparation of a new Breviary into the hands of another and a better man, Cardinal Francesco de Quiñonez. He was a Spanish Franciscan, had been general of his order, and was made Cardinal by Clement in acknowledgment of diplomatic services. He enjoyed the confidence of the Emperor Charles V., and used it to rescue the Pope from his detention in the Castle of San Angelo, when he was besieged there after the taking of Rome by the Imperial troops in 1529. This is hardly the kind of record which would lead us to look for a reformer under the red hat of our cardinal. But, so far as the Breviary was concerned, he proved himself too rigorous a reformer, if anything. His work was governed by two leading principles. The first was to simplify the services by dropping out those parts which had been added last. The second was to use the space thus obtained to insert ampler Scripture lessons and more Psalms, so that, as in earlier times, the Bible might be read through once a year and the Psalter once a week. It is this last feature which has elicited the praise of Protestant liturgists, and it is known that the Breviary of Quiñonez furnished the basis for the services of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, excepting, of course, the Communion Service. But unfortunately hymnologists are not able to join in this praise. To get the Psalms said or sung through once a week, he dealt nearly as ruthlessly with the hymns as if he were a Seceder.
His Breviary appeared in 1535,[20] and for thirty-three years its use was permitted to ecclesiastics in their private recitation of the hours. It appeared in a large number of editions in different parts of Europe, so that its use must have been extensive. But it did not pass unchallenged. The doctors of the Sorbonne at Paris hurried into the arena with their condemnation of it before the ink was fully dry on the first copies. They declared it a thing unheard of to introduce into Church use a book which was the production of a single author, and he—as they wrongly alleged—not even a member of any religious order. Furthermore, he had so shortened and eviscerated the legends for the saints’ days, besides omitting many, that nobody could tell what virtues and what miracles entitled them to commemoration. Above all he had omitted Peter Damiani’s Little Office of the Blessed Virgin! Much better founded was the objection to the omission of parts long established in use, such as the antiphons and many of the hymns. Here we must side with the Sorbonne against Quiñonez.
It was not until 1568 that the present Roman Breviary appeared. When the Council of Trent met in its final session in 1562, the first drafts of a reformed Breviary and Missal were transmitted to the Fathers by Pius IV.; but they were too busy with questions of discipline to do more than return these with their approbation. The work was published by Pius V. in July, 1568, and its use was made obligatory upon all dioceses which had not had a Breviary of their own in use for two hundred years previously. This is in substance the Breviary now in use throughout the Roman Catholic Church. It underwent, however, two further revisions. That under Clement VIII., finished in 1602, was by a commission in which Cardinals Bellarmine, Baronius, and Silvius Antonianus were members. That under Urban VIII., completed in 1631, concerns us more directly, and especially the part of it which was effected by three learned Jesuits: Famiano Strada, Hieronimo Petrucci, and Tarquinio Galucci, who had in their hands the revision of the hymns.
The three revisers, all of them poets of some distinction, and the first famous for his history of the wars in the Low Countries, had to steer a middle course in the matter of revision. None of them were radical humanists after the fashion of Zacharia Ferreri; that fashion, indeed, had gone out with the rise of the counter-reformation and of the great order to which they belonged. Yet in the matter of “metre and Latinity,” of which Ferreri boasted on his title page a hundred years before, the revival of classical scholarship had established a standard to which the old hymns even of the Ambrosian period did not conform. The revisers profess their anxiety to make as few changes as possible; but Pope Urban, in his bull Psalmodiam sanctam prefixed to the book, announces that all the hymns—except the very few which made no pretension to metrical form—had been conformed to the laws of prosody and of the Latin tongue, those which could not be amended in any milder way being rewritten throughout. Bartolomeo Gavanti, a member of the Commission of Revision, but laboring in another department, tells us that more than nine hundred alterations were made for the sake of correct metre, with the result of changing the first lines of more than thirty of the ninety-six hymns the Breviary then contained; that the three by Aquinas on the sacrament, the Ave Maris stella, the Custodes hominum, and a very few others, were left as they were.
This, then, is the genesis of the class of hymns designated in the collections as traceable no farther back than the Roman Breviary. Some of them are original, being the work of Silvius Antonianus, Bellarmine, or Urban VIII. himself, or of authors of that age whose authorship has not been traced. But the greater part are recasts of ancient hymns to meet the demands of the humanist standards of metre and Latinity.
It is not easy to give a merely English reader any adequate idea of the sort of changes by which Strada and his associates adapted the old hymns to modern use. But for those who can read Latin some specimens are worth giving. Take first the great sacramental hymn of the eighth or ninth century:
Ad coenam Agni providi
Et stolis albis candidi,
Post transitum maris Rubri
Christo canamus principi,
Cujus corpus sanctissimum
In ara crucis torridum,
Cruore ejus roseo
Gustando vivimus Deo
Protecti paschae vespero
A devastante angelo
Erepti de durissimo
Pharaonis imperio.
Jam pascha nostrum Christus est
Qui immolatus agnus est,
Sinceritatis azyma
Caro ejus oblata est.
O vera digna hostia
Per quam fracta sunt tartara
Redempta plebs captivata,
Reddita vitae praemia
Cum surgit Christus tumulo
Victor redit de barathro,
Tyrannum trudens vinculo,
Et reserans paradisum
Quaesumus, auctor omnium
In hoc paschali gaudio:
Ab omni mortis impetu
Tuum defende populum.
Ad regias Agni dapes
Stolis amicti candidis
Post transitum maris Rubri
Christo canamus principi:
Divina cujus charitas
Sacrum propinat sanguinem,
Almique membra corporis
Amor sacerdos immolat
Sparsum cruorem postibus
Vastator horret angelus:
Fugitque divisum mare
Merguntur hostes fluctibus.
Jam Pascha nostrum Christus est
Paschalis idem victima,
Et pura puris mentibus
Sinceritatis azyma
O vera coeli victima
Subjecta cui sunt tartara,
Soluta mortis vincula,
Recepta vitae praemia
Victor subactis inferis
Trophaea Christus explicat,
Coeloque aperto, subditum
Regem tenebrarum trahit.
Ut sis perenne mentibus
Paschale, Jesu, gaudium:
A morte dira criminum
Vitae renatos libera.
Now it is impossible to deny to the revised version merits of its own. Not only does it use the Latin words which classic usage requires—as dapes in poetry for coena, recepta for reddita, inferis for barathro—but it brings into clearer view the facts of the Old Testament story which the hymn treats as typical of the Christian passover. The (imperfect) rhyme of the original is everywhere sacrificed to the demands of metre, which probably is no loss. But the gain is not in simplicity, vigor, and freshness. In these the old hymn is much superior. The last verse but one, for instance, presents in the old hymn a distinct and living picture—the picture Luther tells us he delighted in when a boy chorister singing the Easter songs of the Church. But in the recast the vividness is blurred, and classic reminiscence takes the place of the simple and direct speech the early Church made for itself out of the Latin tongue.
Take again the first part of the dedication hymn, of which Angulare fundamentum is the conclusion:
Urbs beata Hierusalem
Dicta pacis visio
Quae construitur in coelis
Vivis ex lapidibus
Et angelis coronata
Ut sponsata comite
Nova veniens e coelo
Nuptiali thalamo
Praeparata, ut sponsata
Copulatur domino,
Plateae et muri ejus
Ex auro purissimo
Portae nitent margaritis
Adytis patentibus,
Et virtute meritorum
Illuc introducitur
Omnis, qui pro Christi nomine
Hoc in mundo premitur
Tunsionibus, pressuris
Expoliti lapides
Suis coaptantur locis
Per manum artificis,
Disponuntur permansuri
Sacris aedificiis.
Coelestis urbs Jerusalem
Beata pacis visio
Quae celsa de viventibus
Saxis ad astra tolleris,
Sponsaeque ritu cingeris
Mille angelorum millibus.
O sorte nupta prospera,
Dotata Patris gloria,
Respersa Sponsi gratia
Regina formosissima,
Christo jugata principi
Coelo corusca civitas.
Hic margaritis emicant
Patentque cunctis ostia,
Virtute namque praevia
Mortalis illuc ducitur
Amore Christi percitus
Tormenta quisquis sustinent.
Scalpri salubris ictibus
Et tunsione plurima,
Fabri polita malleo
Hanc saxa molem construunt,
Aptisque juncta nexibus
Locantur in fastidia.
Daniel in his first volume prints fifty-five of these recasts in parallel columns with the originals, and to that we will refer our readers for further specimens. It is gratifying to know that not all the scholarship of that age was insensible to the qualities which the revisers sacrificed. Henry Valesius, although only a layman and a lover of good Latin—as his versions of the historians of the early Church show—uttered a fierce but ineffectual protest in favor of the early and mediaeval hymns. And the Marquis of Bute, a convert to Catholicism, who published an English translation of the Breviary in 1879, says that the revisers of 1602 “with deplorable taste made a series of changes in the texts of the hymns, which has been disastrous both to the literary merit and the historical interest of the poems.” He hopes for a further revision which shall undo this mischief, but in other respects return to the type furnished by the Breviary of Quiñonez.
The translations from the hymns of the Roman Breviary have been very abundant. Those by Protestants have been due to the fact that the texts even of ancient hymns were so much more accessible in their Breviary version than in their original form. Among Roman Catholics, of course, other considerations have weight; and in Mr. Edward Caswall’s Lyra Catholica and Mr. Orby Shipley’s Annus Sanctus will be found some very admirable versions. The latter book is an anthology from the Roman Catholic translators from John Dryden to John Henry Newman.
From the Breviary text Mr. Duffield has made the following translations of two hymns by Gregory the Great: