The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

PLAUSU CHORUS LAETEBUNDE.

(Translated by Dr. A. R. Thompson.)

With abounding joy applauding,

Now, the men our songs are lauding,

Who rung out the gospel sound.

Like the sun’s outstreaming glory

Chasing night away, their story

Carries life the world around.

For his flock the Shepherd careth,

And his law for them prepareth,

In a fourfold gift of love.

All the world shall know the healing

Of his law of life, revealing

Strength and beauty from above.

Toward the truth, complete in splendor,

Each a service has to render,

Given to him specially.

This is shown from forms created,

As it were anticipated

In a vivid prophecy.

Piercing through the clouds low lying,

John, upon an eagle flying,

Looks the very sun upon.

Rising to the height of heaven,

In the Father’s bosom even,

He beholds the Eternal One.

Face and form of man betoken

Matthew, for by him are spoken

Words, which tell that to our race

God himself has now descended,

And the God and Man, now blended,

Takes in David’s line his place.

Ox with open mouth, assigns he

Unto Luke, by him designs he

Christ a Victim to display.

Cross for altar he receiveth,

There our peace his death achieveth,

Olden rites have passed away.

Face of rugged, roused up lion

Is for Mark—’tis his to cry on

With an all-pervading sound,

Of the Christ, raised up victorious

By the Father’s power all-glorious,

With immortal splendor crowned.

In this fourfold way of wonder

To the world God cometh; under

Vestments such the ark is borne.

Forth from paradise are flowing

These new streams of mercy, going

To refresh the world forlorn.

Never will the house fall, surely,

Built on fourfold wall securely,

Thus the house of God doth rest.

In this house, oh wondrous story!

Dwells the Blessed in his glory,

God with man in union blessed.

CHAPTER XXIII.
THOMAS OF CELANO.

Hymnologists have their favorites among the sacred singers of the Middle Ages, but all concede the first place to the poet who gave the world the Dies Irae, the great sequence or “prose” sung in the service for the dead of the Latin Church. It has attracted more attention than any other single hymn. Whole books have been written about it. It is indissolubly associated in the history of music with Mozart’s wonderful “Requiem,” and in that of literature with the concluding scenes of the first part of “Faust.” More translations have been made of it than of any other poem in the Latin language, or perhaps in any language. All Christendom rejoices in it as a common treasure, the gift of God through a devout Italian monk of the thirteenth century.

It was in an age full of vitality that this “hymn of the giants” was written—the most interesting century in the history of Christendom, Matthew Arnold says. In all directions we encounter the play or collision of great forces. The Papacy, the Empire, the Crusades, the Mendicant Orders, and even, in its way, the Inquisition, give evidence of the working of a spirit of energy and movement, which places the century in sharp contrast to the less explicit development which had preceded, and the age of comparative exhaustion which followed. Nowhere was this more visible than in the characters of the great Churchmen of the thirteenth century. Popes like Innocent III. and Gregory IX., founders of orders like Dominic and Francis, theologians like Aquinas and Bonaventura, may excite our admiration or our censure, but they are men of such magnitude as are not to be found in other centuries in the same number. They were live men, and they have made a lasting impression upon the world by the force of their vitality.

Two of these, Aquinas and Bonaventura, we shall meet again as hymn-writers. But first we have to deal with one whose chief claim to recollection is a single great hymn. Thomas of Celano was an Italian at a time when Italy was stirred by the great battle of Pope with Emperor into an intellectual life, which was to culminate in Dante at the close of the century. Exactly in its last year the writing of the Divina Commedia was to begin. The troubles of his time must have come very close to Thomas. His native city of Celano, a town of the old Marsians, was one of the first to suffer under the hand of Frederick II. In 1223 it was forced to capitulate by the Count of Acerra, Thomas of Aquinas, the warlike uncle and namesake of the great theologian. The inhabitants were compelled to leave their houses, taking all their movables, and the place was burned to the ground, only the church of St John being left standing among the ruins. The people, to punish their disloyalty to the Emperor, were transported to Sicily, Malta, and Calabria, whence they returned to rebuild their town after their enemy’s death. How old Thomas was at the time of this calamity, and whether it had anything to do with his becoming a monk of the Order of Francis of Assisi, we do not know. But certainly it is not impossible that the spectacle of this dies irae, when the sanctities of his boyhood’s home were left desolate, or even the news of its occurrence in his absence, may have left a permanent impression upon his mind, and may have suggested more or less directly his great hymn.

Celano lay in the northern end of the Kingdom of Naples, as it was afterward called, across the Apennines from Rome and slightly north of it. It was not far from the northern boundary of Frederick’s hereditary dominions, across which lay the Umbrian region, where Assisi is situated. At some time and in some way Thomas made his way to Assisi, and came under the influence of the wonderful man whose personality has made the mountain town a place of pilgrimage even for those who are not of the Latin communion.

Francis of Assisi is one of the strangest, if also one of the most beautiful figures in the history of Christendom. Protestants vie with Catholics, Karl Hase and Margaret Oliphant with Frederic Ozanam and Joseph Goerres, in depicting this devout and childlike spirit, who took poverty for his bride and set himself to realize in the utmost literalness the command to go forth to preach repentance and forgiveness of sins, taking neither scrip nor purse, and possessing no more than the absolute necessaries of human existence. At first he had no thought of founding an order, but only of helping the poor and the suffering for Christ’s sweet sake. But the divine fire of loving humility and childlike simplicity in the man drew others inevitably to his side, until there arose in his mind the sense of a great vocation to gather men into a new form of brotherhood. “Fear not,” he said to his earliest disciples, “in that ye seem few and simple-minded. Preach repentance to the world, trusting in Him who hath overcome the world, that His Spirit speaks through you. You will find some to receive you and your word with joy, if still more to resist and mock you. Bear all that with patience and meekness. Take no heed for your simplicity or mine. In a short time the wise and the noble will come to preach with you before princes and people, and many will be turned to the Lord. He has shown it to me, and in mine ears there is a sound of the multitude of disciples who are to come to us out of every people. The French are on the way; the Spaniards are hurrying; the Germans and English run; and a multitude of other tongues hasten hither.” So Thomas of Celano records his words in his biography of the saint, which is the freest from exaggerations and the most trustworthy of them all.

As Thomas survived Francis some thirty years, there is no reason to regard him as one of the group of the first disciples who began to gather around the founder as early as 1209. He is not named among “the twelve apostles” who came first. But the relation between the two men seems to have been more than usually close and intimate. Perhaps it was the more so as being founded on contrasts rather than on resemblances in their characters. For Francis was distinguished from other teachers of his age by the bright and cheerful views he entertained of God and His love to mankind. This was the theme of his sayings and his songs; this he preached to the poor when they streamed out of the Italian cities to welcome him as one who brought comfort and joy to the downcast. They emphasized their sense of the difference between him and the ordinary preachers by saying, “He hears those whom even God will not hear!” Thomas, on the other hand, seems to have been constitutionally predisposed to look at the darker side of things, to sing of judgment rather than of mercy. But he, too, found comfort in the heart-sunshine of his master. “His words were like fire,” he says, “penetrating the heart.” “How lovely, splendid, glorious he appeared in innocence of life, in simplicity of speech, in purity of heart, in divine delight, in brotherly love, in constant obedience, in loving harmony, in angelic aspect.” He found in Francis the most perfect realization of the Christian ideal that he or his century could conceive of; and shall we not admit with George Macdonald that a perfect monk is a very fine thing in his way, although much less so than a perfect man?

Their sympathies as poets must have drawn them together. Francis, as Joseph Goerres well says, was a troubadour as well as a saint. In his youth he had won distinction as a singer of worldly songs in the provençal French, which was then the language of literature in Northern Italy. After his conversion he burst out singing the praises of God in this same foreign and exotic tongue. But as he became more directly interested in the welfare of his fellow-men, he began to use his gift of song in his native Italian. How many of the poems that are printed under his name are really his own, and how many are the work of his disciple, Jacopone da Todi, is matter of dispute. But even Father Affo (1777), the most negative of critics on this point, does not deny his authorship of the wonderful “Song of the Sun,” also called the “Song of the Creatures,” in which the childlike delight of the saint in God’s works finds such charming expression, that Matthew Arnold has singled it out as the utterance of what is most exquisite in the spirit of his century. Thomas, too, it was known, had the poetic gift, and indeed was recognized by his brethren as the man of most literary power in the order. Upon him they laid the duty of compiling the founder’s biography, and of writing the “legend” of his life, which should be read in the breviary service on the day of his commemoration.

Yet he also was recognized as possessing practical gifts. The order had spread into Germany as well as in the other directions of which Francis had prophesied. The first attempts to establish it north of the Alps, made in 1216, were not happy. The Italians sent on this mission knew only one German word, “Ja!” “Are you heretics?” (Sind Sie Ketzer?) was the first question put to them on Teutonic soil; and knowing nothing else to say, they said “Ja!” So they were marched across the frontier again in disgrace. But brethren better provided in the matter of their Ollendorff had been sent five years later, and now Thomas of Celano was one of those who had been selected for the German mission, to give stability and unity to the work there. He was made “custos” of the monasteries at Mainz, Worms and Koeln (Cologne), and even took charge of the whole province when its head returned to Assisi. We find Thomas himself back in Assisi by 1230, where Jordan, the “custos” of the Thuringian monasteries, came to see him.

Francis had died in 1226, but whether Thomas was actual witness of his last days, or derived his knowledge of them from others, his is recognized as the authentic account of the saint’s departure. His own death is said to have occurred in 1255, but what events filled up the meantime, besides the biographic labors we have mentioned, is not known. Perhaps it was in those years that he composed his great sequence, as his mind, when less directly brightened by the influence of his master, would be more likely to revert to those trains of thought which corresponded to his natural disposition. Possibly it was as his own life was drawing to a close, and the shadows of the Great Day gathered nearer him, that he poured out his soul in his great hymn—the greatest of all hymns, unless we except the Te Deum.

Besides the Dies Irae, there are ascribed to Thomas two other sequences—

Fregit victor virtualis

and

Sanctitatis nova signa,

both in commemoration of Francis. As the founder of the Minor Friars was canonized two years after his death by Gregory IX., there was a demand very early for the hymns of this character. And as there was no one better fitted to write them than the poet who had known Francis so well, and whom the Pope had directed to prepare a life of the saint, there is no inherent improbability in the tradition which ascribes them to him. But they do not take rank beside the Dies Irae. They are poems written to order, not the spontaneous outpouring of the mind of the singer in the presence of the overwhelming realities of the spiritual universe.

There are no less than nine persons for whom the honor of the authorship of the Dies Irae has been claimed. Two of these are excluded as having lived too early to have written a poem of its structure and metrical character; they are Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux. Two others, Augustinus Bugellensis (ob. 1490) and Felix Hammerlein (ob. 1457) are excluded by the fact that the hymn is mentioned in a work written in 1285. This leaves four rivals to Thomas of Celano in his own century, viz., John Bonaventura (ob. 1274), his brother Cardinal, Latino Frangipani, a Dominican (ob. 1294), Humbert, a French Franciscan, who became the fifth general of his order (ob. 1277), and Matthew of Acqua-Sparta in Umbria, a Franciscan, who became Bishop of Albano and cardinal (ob. 1302). But it is to be noticed that for not one of these is there a witness earlier than the sixteenth century. The first and last are named as having had the authorship ascribed to them by Luke Wadding, the historian of the Franciscans in 1625; but he ascribes it to Thomas of Celano. The other two are named by the Jesuit, Antonio Possevino (1534-1611) and the Dominican, Leandro Alberti (1479-1552), the latter, of course, claiming the hymn for the Dominican cardinal, as to whom there is not the smallest evidence that he ever wrote any poetry whatever. Besides this, the Dies Irae is a Franciscan, not a Dominican poem. It deals with the practical and the devotional, not the doctrinal elements in religion. Had a Dominican written it, he would have been anxious only for correct doctrinal statement.

Thomas’s claim to its authorship does not rest on the weakness of rival pretensions. In the year 1285, when Thomas had been dead about thirty years and Dante was twenty years old, the Franciscan Bartholomew of Pisa wrote his Liber Conformitatum, in which he drew a labored parallel between the life of Francis of Assisi and that of our Lord. Having occasion to speak of Celano in this work, he goes on to describe it as “the place whence came Brother Thomas, who by order of the Pope wrote in polished speech the first legend of St. Francis, and is said to have composed the prose which is sung in the Mass for the Dead: Dies irae, dies illa.”[11] This testimony out of Thomas’s own century is confirmed by parallel evidence. Wadding, whose big folios in clumsy Latin give us the tradition which prevailed within the order, says: “Brother Thomas of Celano sang that once celebrated sequence, Sanctitatis nova signa, which now has gone out of use, whose work also is that solemn one for the dead, Dies irae, dies illa, although others wish to ascribe it to Brother Matthew of Acqua-Sparta, a cardinal taken from among the Minorites.” Elsewhere Wadding says: “Thomas of Celano, of the province of Penna, a disciple and companion of St. Francis, published ... a book about the Life and Miracles of St. Francis ... commonly called by the brethren the Old Legend. Another shorter legend he had published previously which used to be read in the choir...; three sequences, or rhythmic proses, of which the first, in praise of St. Francis, begins, Fregit victor virtualis. The second begins, Sanctitatis nova signa. The third concerning the dead, adopted by the Church, Dies irae, dies illa. And this Benedict Gonon, the Coelestine [in 1625] rendered into French verse and ascribed to St. Bonaventura. Others ascribe it to Brother Matthew, of Acqua-Sparta, the cardinal; and others yet to other authors.”[12]

These direct testimonies are confirmed by local tradition in the province of Abruzzi, in which Celano is situated, and the Franciscan origin of the hymn by its existence as an inscription on a marble tablet in the church of St. Francis at Mantua, where it was seen by David Chytraeus, a German Lutheran, who visited Italy in 1565. That the author was an Italian is indicated by the peculiar three-line stanza, which approximates to the terza-rima structure of their poetry, but is not found in poetry of the Northern nations, except in later imitations.

The statement of Bartholomew of Pisa, that already in 1285 the Dies Irae was employed in the service for the dead, shows how early it made its way into church use. In earlier times there was no sequence in that service, for the reason that the “Hallelujah,” which the sequence always followed, being a song of rejoicing, was not sung in the funeral service. This enables us to form an opinion on the controversy as to whether it was written directly for church use, or adapted for that after being written as a meditation on the Day of Judgment for private edification. It would seem most probable that it was the wonderful beauty and power of the hymn which led the Church to break through its rule as to the sequence following a Hallelujah necessarily. The Dies Irae was not written to fill a place, but when written it made a place for itself.

This controversy connects itself with another as to the genuineness of certain verses which are prefixed or added to the eighteen of the text in the Missal. There are, in fact, three texts of the hymn: (1) That of the Missal, which is generally followed, and will be found at the end of this chapter. (2) That of the Mantuan marble tablet, which prefixes four verses:

1. Cogita, anima fidelis,

Ad quid respondere velis

Christo venture de coelis.

2. Cum deposcit rationem

Ob boni omissionem,

Ob mali commissionem.

3. Dies illa, dies irae,

Quam conemur praevenire

Obviamque Deo ire.

4. Seria contritione,

Gratiae apprehensione,

Vitae emendatione.

After these come in the Mantuan text the first sixteen verses of the Missal text, with slight and unimportant variations, but the seventeenth and eighteenth are omitted, and the following conclusion substituted:

17. Consors ut beatitatis

Vivam cum justificatis,

In aevum aeternitatis. Amen.

(3) The Hammerlein text, so called because found among the manuscripts of Felix Hammerlein after his death, which occurred about 1457. This also contains the first sixteen verses of the Missal text, but with far more variations than the Mantuan text shows, although not such as commend themselves by their merits. Then it proceeds, altering and expanding the seventeenth and eighteenth into three and adding five more:

17. Oro supplex a ruinis,

Cor contritum quasi cinis;

Gere curam mei finis.

18. Lacrymosa die illa,

Cum resurget ex favilla

Tanquam ignis ex scintilla,

19. Judicandus homo reus,—

Hinc ergo parce Deus,

Esto semper adjutor meus.

20. Quando coeli sunt movendi,

Dies adsunt tunc tremendi,

Nullum tempus poenitendi.

21. Sed salvatis laeta dies;

Et damnatis nulla quies,

Sed daemonum effigies.

22. O tu Deus majestatis,

Alme candor Trinitatis,

Nunc conjunge cum beatis.

23. Vitam meam fac felicem,

Propter tuam genetricem,

Jesse florem et radicem.

24. Praesta nobis tunc levamen,

Dulce nostrum fac certamen,

Ut clamemus omnes: Amen!

That neither of these additions at the beginning and end are parts of the original sequence, will be evident to any one who feels the terseness and power of the original. They are feeble, lumbering excrescences, and are fastened to it in such an external way as to destroy the unity of the poem, if left as they stand. The text in the Missal gives us a new conception of the powers of the Latin tongue. Its wonderful wedding of sense to sound—the u assonance in the second stanza, the o assonance in the third, and the a and i assonances in the fourth, for instance—the sense of organ music that runs through the hymn, even unaccompanied, as distinctly as through the opening verses of Lowell’s “Vision of Sir Launfal,” and the transitions as clearly marked in sound as in meaning from lofty adoration to pathetic entreaty, impart a grandeur and dignity to the Dies Irae which are unique in this kind of writing. Then the wonderful adaptation of the triple-rhyme to the theme—like blow following blow of hammer upon anvil, as Daniel says—impresses every reader. But to all this the supplementary verses add nothing.

Of the use of the hymn in literature I have spoken already. Sir Walter Scott introduces a vigorous and characteristic version of a portion into his “Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805). Lockhart, writing of the great Wizard’s death-bed, says of his unconscious and wandering utterances: “Whatever we could follow him in was some fragment of the Bible, or some petition of the Litany, or a verse of some psalm in the old Scotch metrical version, or some of the magnificent hymns of the Romish ritual. We very often heard distinctly the cadence of the Dies Irae.” So the Earl of Roscommon, in the previous century, died repeating his own version of the seventeenth stanza:

“Prostrate, my contrite heart I rend;

My God, my Father, and my Friend,

Do not forsake me in my end!”

Dr. Samuel Johnson never could repeat the tenth stanza without being moved to tears—the stanza Dean Stanley quotes in his description of Jacob’s Well. Goethe makes Gretchen in “Faust” faint with dismay and horror as she hears it sung in the cathedral, and from that moment of salutary pain she becomes another woman. Meinhold in his “Amber-Witch” (Die Bernsteinhexe), represents the very same verses as bringing comfort and assurance to a more stainless heroine in the hour of her sorest distress. Carlyle shows us the Romanticist tragedian Werner quoting the eighth stanza in his strange “last testament,” as his reason for having written neither a defence nor an accusation of his life: “With trembling I reflect that I myself shall first learn in its whole terrific compass what I properly was, when these lines shall be read by men; that is to say, in a point of time which for me will be no time; in a condition in which all experience will for me be too late:

‘Rex tremendae majestatis,

Qui salvandos salvas gratis,

Salva me, fons pietatis!!!’”

Justus Kerner, in his [Wahnsinnige Brüder], depicts the overwhelming power of the hymn upon minds hardened by long continuance in sin, but suddenly awakened to reflection by its thunders of the Day of Reckoning. Daniel well compares it to the picture of the Day of Judgment, which was the means of converting the King of the Bulgars to Christianity.

The translations of our hymn into modern languages, especially into German and English, have been numbered by the hundred. Partly no doubt this is due to the entirely Evangelical type of its doctrine, its freedom from Mariolatry, its exaltation of divine mercy above human merit, and its picture of the soul’s free access to God without the intervention of Church and priest. Lisco (1840 and 1843) was able to specify eighty-seven German versions. Michael (1866) brought this number up to ninety, of which sixty-two are both complete and exact; and Dr. Philip Schaff says he can increase the list beyond a hundred without exhausting the number. Among the German translators are Andreas Gryphius (1650), A. W. Schlegel (1802), J. G. Fichte (1813), A. L. Follen (1819), J. F. von Meyer (1824), Claus Harms (1828), J. Emmanuel Veith (1829), C. J. C. Bunsen (1833), H. A. Daniel (1839), F. G. Lisco (1840), besides partial versions by J. G. von Herder (1802) and J. H. von Wessenberg (1820).

The translations into English begin with one by Joshua Sylvester in 1621, that of Richard Crashaw in 1646 coming second. There are four of that century and two of the next, the most notable being the Earl of Roscommon’s in 1717. In the first thirty years of the nineteenth century there are but four, the notable being the partial version by Sir Walter Scott in 1805, and Macaulay’s in 1826. Since Isaac Williams published his in 1831, there has been a steady succession of versions, bringing the number for the United Kingdom in this century up to fifty-one. Of these the most noteworthy are by John Chandler (1837), Henry Alford (1844), Richard C. Trench (1844), William J. Irons (1848), Edward Caswall (1849), Frederick G. Lee (1851), John Mason Neale (1851), William Bright (1858), Elizabeth R. Charles (1858), Herbert Kynaston (1862), Richard H. Hutton (1868), Dean Stanley (1868), William C. Dix (1871), and Hamilton McGill (1876).

In point of numbers at least America surpasses England and approaches Germany. Since 1841, when two anonymous versions appeared in this country, there have been at least ninety-six complete versions by American translators, bringing the total of enumerated versions in the language up to one hundred and fifty-four. Of American translators may be named William R. Williams (1843), H. H. Brownell (1847), Abraham Coles (1847 and later), William G. Dix (1852), S. Dryden Phelps (1855), John A. Dix (1863 and 1875), Marshall H. Bright (1866), Edward Slosson (1866), E. C. Benedict (1867), Margaret J. Preston (1868), Philip Schaff (1868), Samuel W. Duffield (1870 and later), John Anketell (1873), Charles W. Elliot (1881), Henry C. Lea (1882), M. W. Stryker (1883), H. L. Hastings (1886), and W. S. McKenzie (1887). This certainly, both by the length of the list and the weight of many of the names, constitutes a tribute to the power of the Dies Irae such as never has been offered to any other hymn! Only Luther’s Ein’ feste Burg, of which there are eighty-one versions in English alone, can compare with it.[13]

Of these English versions, those by Rev. W. J. Irons and Dean Stanley in England, and those of General John A. Dix and Mr. Edward Slosson in America, have enjoyed the most popularity. They certainly are excellent, but every translator seems somewhere to fail of complete success. Nor do those who have returned again and again to the attempt seem to accomplish their own ideal of a perfect translation. Dr. Abraham Coles, who has made some sixteen or seventeen renderings, is no better off than when he began. Nor do I think my own sixth version has carried me one inch beyond my first. The truth is that not even the Pange lingua gloriosi, which Dr. Neale calls the most difficult of poems, is in this respect the equal of this alluring and baffling hymn. But the reader, who has had no access to the hymn except through the poorest version, has the means to discern the fact that in it a great mind utters itself worthily on one of the greatest of themes.

It happened to me once to enter a crowded church, where presently a distinguished German divine arose to speak. Others had addressed the audience in English; but he, turning to his fellow-countrymen, began to pour forth a trumpet-strain of lofty eloquence in his native tongue. He spoke of the “better valley,” of a happy and peaceful land. He seemed to see its broad and gentle river and to hear the chiming of its Sabbath bells. He peopled the air with its lovely citizens and created about us the presence of its glorious joy. Faintly and brokenly, as now and then he uttered some familiar words, I could catch glimpses of that besseres Thal, and its brightness and beauty, and the awe of its holy calmness came upon me—upon me, the stranger and the foreigner, in whose speech no word was said.

But they who were of the lip and lineage of the land, they whose country was brought so near and whose hopes were raised on such strong and familiar wings—they truly were moved to the soul. I saw tears in their eyes; I heard their suppressed and laboring breath; I beheld their eager faces; and the glory of that land fell on them even as I gazed. So, though we cannot here perceive the fulness of the Franciscan’s hymn, yet do we discern the stately splendor of Messiah’s throne, and

“Catch betimes, with wakeful eyes and clear

Some radiant vista of the realm before us.”

This alone can justify another attempt—the resultant of four previous versions—to express something of the grandeur of this majestic hymn:

1. Dies irae, dies illa

Solvet saeclum in favilla,

Teste David cum Sybilla.

2. Quantus tremor est futurus,

Quando judex est venturus,

Cuncta stricte discussurus!

3. Tuba mirum sparget sonum

Per sepulcra regionum,

Coget omnes ante thronum.

4. Mors stupebit et natura,

Quum resurget creatura,

Judicanti responsura.

5. Liber scriptus proferetur,

In quo totum continetur,

Unde mundus judicetur.

6. Judex ergo cum sedebit,

Quidquid latet, apparebit,

Nil inultum remanebit.

7. Quid sum miser tunc dicturus,

Que, patronum rogaturus,

Dum vix justus sit securus?

8. Rex tremendae majestatis,

Qui salvandos salvas gratis,

Salva me, fons pietatis!

9. Recordare, Jesu pie,

Quod sum causa tuae viae;

Ne me perdas illâ die!

10. Quaerens me sedisti lassus,

Redemisti cruce passus:

Tantus labor non sit cassus!

11. Juste judex ultionis,

Donum fac remissionis

Ante diem rationis!

12. Ingemisco tanquam reus,

Culpa rubet vultus meus:

Supplicanti parce, Deus!

13. Qui Mariam absolvisti,

Et latronem exaudisti,

Mihi quoque spem dedisti

14. Preces meae non sunt dignae.

Sed tu bonus fac benigne,

Ne perenni cremer igne.

15. Inter oves locum praesta,

Et ab haedis me sequestra,

Statuens in parte dextrâ.

16. Confutatis maledictis,

Flammis acribus addictis,

Voca me cum benedictis.

17. Oro supplex et acclinis,

Cor contritum quasi cinis,

Gere curam mei finis.

18. Lachrymosa dies illa,

Qua resurget ex favilla

Judicandus homo reus;

Huic ergo parce, Deus!

1. Day of wrath, thy fiery morning

Earth consumes, no longer scorning

David’s and the Sibyl’s warning.

2. Then what terror of each nation

When the Judge shall take his station

Strictly trying his creation!

3. When that trumpet tone amazing,

Through the tombs its message phrasing,

All before the throne is raising.

4. Death and Nature he surprises

Who, a creature, yet arises

Unto those most dread assizes.

5. There a written book remaineth

Whose sure registry containeth

That which all the world arraigneth.

6. Therefore when the Judge is seated

Each deceit shall be defeated,

Vengeance due shall then be meted.

7. With what answer shall I meet him,

By what advocate entreat him,

When the just may scarcely greet him?

8. King of majesty appalling,

Who dost save the elect from falling,

Save me! on thy pity calling.

9. Be thou mindful, Lord most lowly,

That for me thou diedst solely;

Leave me not to perish wholly!

10. Seeking me thy love outwore thee,

And the cross, my ransom, bore thee;

Let not this seem light before thee!

11. Righteous Judge of my condition,

Grant me, for my sins, remission

Ere the day which ends contrition.

12. In my guilt for pity yearning,

With my shame my face is burning—

Spare me, Lord, to thee returning!

13. Mary’s sin thou hast remitted

And the dying thief acquitted;

To my heart this hope is fitted.

14. Poorly are my prayers ascending

But do thou, in mercy bending,

Leave me not to flames unending!

15. Give me with thy sheep a station

Far from goats in separation—

On the right my habitation.

16. When the wicked meet conviction

Doomed to fires of sharp affliction,

Call me forth with benediction.

17. Prone and suppliant I sorrow,

Ashes for my heart I borrow;

Guard me on that awful morrow!

18. O, that day so full of weeping

When, in dust no longer sleeping,

Man must face his worst behavior!

Therefore spare me, God and Saviour!

CHAPTER XXIV.
THOMAS AQUINAS AND JOHN BONAVENTURA.

In Southern Italy, about midway between Rome and Naples, the road which connects these two cities passes near the site of the ancient city of Aquinum. It was a stronghold of the Volscians, although not mentioned in the account of their wars with the Romans. As a Roman municipality it rose to greater importance than the other cities of the district, and became the birthplace of the satirist Juvenal and other eminent men. But in the seventh century it was destroyed by the Lombards, and the site never re-occupied. What were left of its inhabitants found another site, more capable of defence in those wild days, and built Aquino on a mountain slope. It runs along the cliff in a single street, like our own Mauch Chunk, and the remains of its oldest buildings show that its mediaeval architects drew freely upon still earlier structures for their materials.

In one of these old structures, still known as the Casa Reale or royal house, lived the noble family who were the lords of Aquino. Here Thomas Aquinas was born in the year 1225, being one of the five children of Count Landulf of Aquino, and his wife, Theodora Caraccioli, Countess of Teano. The family was not a royal house, but it was connected by intermarriage with the royal caste of Europe. It is said, but I have not been able to verify the statement, that Thomas’s grandfather had married a sister of the Emperor Barbarossa. His mother was descended from the Tancred of Hauteville, whose sons, Roger and Robert Guiscard, effected the Norman conquest of the two Sicilies. Sibylla, Queen of the Tancred who ended the first line of Norman sovereigns, is said to have been a daughter of the family. But the real importance of the lords of Aquino was due to their strategic position on the northern frontier of Apulia and to their military spirit. Richard of Aquino, the grandfather of Thomas, was the mainstay of Tancred’s cause on the mainland of Italy, and merited, by his treachery and barbarity, the cruel death the Emperor Henry VI. inflicted on him after the final conquest of the two Sicilies. His father, Landulf, seems to have been a man of less warlike character; but his uncle, Thomas of Aquinas, who succeeded Richard in the countship of Acerra, was the ablest of the Ghibelline chiefs of Southern Italy, and one of Frederic the Second’s most trusted captains. That emperor enlarged the dominions of the family, and gave ample scope to their fighting propensities in his wars with the popes. And Thomas’s two brothers, who were older than himself, embraced the opportunity of a military life. His sisters formed illustrious alliances with the noble families of Southern Italy. Pope Honorius III. is said to have been his godfather.

Thomas’s youth seems to have been uneventful, with the exception of the calamity by which he lost a younger sister, who was killed by lightning while sleeping by his side. In his fifth year his education began. Less than five miles away, as the bird flies, lay the Monte Casino, the greatest and first of the monasteries of the Benedictine order. Here it was that Benedict of Nursia in 529 laid the foundation of the first great order of Western Christendom. And although Monte Casino had shared in the calamity of Aquino at the hands of the Lombards, and had lain desolate for a hundred and fifty years, it had been rebuilt with new splendor, and was at this time the grandest ecclesiastical establishment outside the city of Rome. And here, in 1227, Landulf Sinibald, himself of the Aquino family, had become abbot, thus attaining one of the highest dignities open to a Churchman. To his care the young Thomas was intrusted, and on Monte Casino he spent the next seven years of his life, undergoing the discipline and receiving the instruction for which the schools of the Benedictine fathers had always been famous. Probably it was the hope of the family of Aquino that the young man would enter the order and rise to the same dignity as his uncle, becoming a prince of the Church, and thus more powerful and wealthy than any of his uncles or brothers.

In 1239 the second outbreak of hostilities between the Pope and the Emperor led to the conversion of Monte Casino into a great fortress, in which were left but eight monks to carry on the routine of monastic services. The rest found a home in other Benedictine houses, the schools were suspended, and Thomas returned home. But the same year he seems to have proceeded to Naples to study in the university which Frederic had established in 1224, and amply endowed with wealth and privileges, and had revived in 1234, after its suspension during his first war with the papacy. He had forbidden his Italian subjects to leave the kingdom to attend foreign universities, and he had used every available means to make them contented with that of Naples, one of these being the employment of the ablest teachers he could secure in all the sciences then recognized as belonging to the higher education. We are told that Thomas pursued his studies two years in Naples, when the influence of his Dominican teachers led him to form the purpose to become a Dominican friar,[14] and to put on the garb of a novice. This step was a most momentous one. Whether his family looked forward to his becoming a Benedictine monk and abbot, or contemplated his embracing the offers of promotion in the civil service of the kingdom, which Frederic II. had held out to the graduates of his pet university, they could not but regard his adoption of the life of a mendicant friar with indignation and disgust. To be a Benedictine Pater was to be a gentleman and a scholar, to have a share in the influence, wealth, and power of the order, and possibly to rise to the dignity of the Dux et Princeps omnium Abbatum et Religiosorum, the Abbot of Monte Casino. But the Mendicant orders were affairs of yesterday, with all the rawness if also the effusive enthusiasm of youth. Francis of Assisi died within a year of Thomas’s birth; Dominic, five years earlier. And the mendicant mode of life was most offensive to the proud Italian nobles, who must have recoiled from the idea that one of their race should carry the beggar’s wallet in his turn, and live always upon alms. In this respect the requirements of the orders were far stricter and more humiliating than in later times, when the practice, if not the rule, was relaxed. Those who were unaffected by their enthusiasm thought of the Mendicants as the average man thinks of the Salvation Army, or thought of the Methodists at the middle of the last century.

No notice was sent to Aquino of the step Thomas had taken. The monks always had their share of the wisdom of the serpent, and they were to show it in this case. But some of the vassals of the family had recognized the young novice under his Dominican garb on the streets of Naples or in the church; and through them the news reached his family. Landulf seems to have been dead; I can find no mention of him later than 1229. But the Countess Theodora hastened, with all a man’s energy, to rescue her son from the career of a mendicant. The friars learned of her coming and hurried their novice off to Rome, and to Rome his mother pursued him. To avoid her he was sent forward to France, but he had to pass the lines of the imperial army then engaged in the war with the Lombards. The influence of the powerful Ghibelline family roused the vigilance of the imperial authorities. At Acquapendente, on the frontiers of Tuscany, Thomas and the friars who escorted him were arrested, and the young noble was sent back to his family at Aquino.

Every means, foul as well as fair, seems to have been used to break him from his purpose to join the Dominicans, while he remained a prisoner at Aquino, or in some of the mountain castles of the family. But Thomas was assured of his vocation, and he had a fund of obstinacy in his character which showed to good purpose. It is said that the Pope interfered in his behalf, but this is hardly probable, as the Pope was waging war at the time on the Emperor and his vassals, the Lords of Aquino. At last the countess and her children abandoned the attempt to influence him, and at least connived at his escape to Naples, where he took the vows of obedience, celibacy, and poverty, which sealed his connection with the Dominican order, in 1243.

We have looked at this step through the eyes of his family, and seen its offensiveness. But if we regard it more impartially, we are impressed with its wisdom. It was among the Dominicans, not the Benedictines, that Thomas could serve his day and generation the best. The Benedictines, in the new age which the era of the Crusades opened to Europe, had fallen behind the times. It was because of this that that century saw the rise of the two great orders founded by Dominic and by Francis, and their rapid growth, until “a handful of corn on the top of the mountains” shook like the forests which clothe Lebanon. The Dominican order was still in the blossom of youth; the Benedictine had rather “gone to seed.” Thomas felt the difference when he met the Dominicans as professors of theology in the Studium at Naples. Scholarship rather than thought had been the strong point with the Benedictines. They would be apt to meet the questions which welled up in the mind of the eager youth by an inapposite quotation from some Church father, or to repress them altogether, as tending to vanity. What, indeed, could Abbot Landulf and his brethren on the hill-top do with a deep-eyed boy, who went from one to another with the question, “What is God?” But at Naples, and in contact with the more lively intellectual life of his age, his acute and alert intellect found a satisfaction and an encouragement which the Benedictines could not give him. He was encouraged to ask questions instead of being snubbed. There were opened to him vistas of research and speculation, which could not but attract a hungry and active mind like his. The Dominicans were the order which had undertaken to face and answer the questions of the age, and in Thomas these questions were craving a solution. What wonder if he fell in love with the preachers, and they with him! They discovered what capacity lay in the young noble, and knew that they had better use for him than his hum-drum uncle on the hills and among the hawks. And any scruples as to his admission to the novitiate without the consent or against the will of his family were set aside by the belief that his “vocation” was directly from God, and therefore set aside all merely human authority.

Having secured their prize, the Dominicans showed that they knew how to use it. The order was, on one side of it, a great educational institution to select and train young men to fight the intellectual battles of the Church. The young Dominican at once put on the yoke of the “course of study” (Ordo Studiorum), which had been prescribed by the General Chapter, and proceeded as far toward the highest dignities and responsibilities of learning as his abilities were thought to warrant. The decision on this point rested with the General of the Order, who at this time was John of Germany, the fourth in the succession begun by Dominic. He selected for Thomas as his best teacher, Albert of Bollstadt, better known as Albert the Great (Magnus), who was teaching in the monastic school at Koeln (Cologne), and who had the reputation of having absorbed all that Aristotle knew, and worked up his teaching into a harmony of Christian theology with Greek philosophy. According to his biographers generally, Thomas was sent at once to Koeln in 1245, and accompanied Albert when he proceeded to Paris in that same year to take his degree as Doctor of Theology, returning with him in 1248. Dr. Heinrich Denifle, however, assigns 1248 as the year when Thomas came to Koeln from Italy, and limits their intercourse as master and scholar to the two years required by the rules of the order. Whether their relations as such extended over five years or were limited to two, they were enough for the formation of a life-long friendship based on mutual respect and admiration. Strangely enough the young Italian from the garrulous South was noted more for silence than for speech among the students at Koeln. He had found a teacher whom he thought worth hearing in silence, and he heard to better purpose than his associates. Bos mutus, a dumb ox, they called him. Albert foretold that “the sound of his bellowing in doctrine would yet go through the whole world.”

In 1250, the year when Frederic II. died, Thomas proceeded to Paris by direction of the General of the Order. In that mother university of Christendom the Dominicans were allowed by their rule to receive the doctorate—in that and no other. For one year the candidate must hear and dispute in the Dominican school on St. Jacques Street; for another he must teach, but without ascending the cathedra, from which authoritative decisions were expected. But in Thomas’s case these two years of his Parisian apprenticeship were prolonged to seven. The university quarrelled with the representatives of the Mendicant orders just as Thomas was about to take his degree, and in the five years’ struggle which ensued all ordinary relations and procedures were suspended. For some time, indeed, the university itself was dissolved, to evade the bull of excommunication which the Pope aimed at it in the interest of the Mendicants.

In 1656 William of St. Amour sent the Pope his treatise Concerning the Dangers of these Last Times (De Periculis Novissimorum Temporum), in which he pleaded the cause of the university against the Mendicants, and told some home-truths about the greediness, the lawlessness, and the encroachments of the friars, but in an angry and excited tone, which harmed his cause. Both the assailed orders put forward their ablest men to make answer. For the Franciscans spoke John Fidanza, better known as John Bonaventura, who had come to Paris in the heat of the conflict, and had been delayed, as Thomas was, in obtaining his degree.

John was older than Thomas by several years, having been born in 1221. He had been recovered from an apparently mortal illness through the prayers of Francis of Assisi in his third year, and then received the name Bonaventura from the good man’s own lips. He entered the order in his twenty-second year, and studied in Paris under Alexander of Hales and John of Rochelle. The devout humility of the man, and his purity of character, produced as deep an impression upon his teachers as Thomas had produced upon his by the force and keenness of his intellect. Alexander used to say that “in Brother Bonaventura Adam seems not to have sinned.” John was probably the most perfect exemplar of the spirit of Francis of Assisi that was to be seen in the second generation of the order. Not by intellectual force, but by humble ministry to the commonest human needs, by the infection of an all-embracing love and the close imitation of our Lord’s humanity, he would save the world from its wanderings. Thomas and he were the best possible representatives of their respective orders, and it speaks well for both men that their differences only bound them more intimately in friendship. Each reverenced what was strongest in the other. When Thomas asked to see the books by whose help John had acquired his Christian erudition, the Franciscan pointed him to a crucifix, and said that from that he had learned all that he ever knew.

Their answers to William of St. Amour reflect the character of the men. Bonaventura defended the mendicant form of the monastic life as an ideal; but without admitting the truth of the dark picture William had drawn, he conceded that serious abuses had crept in, and that already there was need of a reformation unless matters were to be let grow worse. Thomas makes no concessions whatever. He entitles his book Against those who Assail the Worship of God and the Monastic Life (Contra Impugnantes Dei Cultum et Religionem). William and all who hold with him are the enemies of God and of His Church. The critics of the Mendicant rule are standing in the way of the forces which are sent of God to win the world to Christ. The monk, and especially the mendicant friar, is the only thorough Christian who keeps to the “counsels of perfection” our Lord gave His disciples, as well as to the precepts of obedience obligatory upon all. William uttered false and damnable doctrine when he tried to limit them to a purely ascetic life. They have the right to teach as well as to pray and mourn, and the Pope has power to open to them the doors of every secular college by his mandate.

The controversy was brought to an end in 1257, when Pope Alexander IV. at Anagni formally condemned the book of William of St. Amour, and bound the plenipotentiaries of the university by an oath to admit the Mendicants to their former footing in the university. And to signalize the victory of the friars, Thomas and Bonaventura were admitted to the doctorate on the same day, October 23d, 1257.

From the masters the head of the school in St. Jacques Street was chosen by the General of the Order, and naturally the choice fell on Thomas. Usually the place was held for a year only, and its occupant then transferred to some other field of labor. Thomas held it for four years, lecturing, preaching at least every Lent in the adjacent church, and exercising the discipline of the order over its students. The number who heard his lectures must have been great. The school at Paris, unlike that at Koeln, being a branch of the university, its lectures were open to all comers, and the renown of the Italian who had been more than a match for the ablest of the secular doctors would draw hearers. And those who came once, if they had any love for the play of pure intelligence and the fearless handling of great questions, would come again. Thomas, with all his orthodoxy, was a pretty thorough rationalist. He had full faith in the capacity of the human understanding to deal fruitfully and safely with the deepest mysteries. If his conclusions always are with the Church, it is not because he has shrunk from attending to, and even suggesting, what might be said against the doctrine under consideration. It is because he has satisfied himself that the balance of logical argument, after all objections have been weighed, is on the side of orthodoxy. In this respect his writings represent the highest point reached by the rationalistic tendency in the Middle Ages, just as Abelard represents its initiation. We find Duns Scotus, his great Franciscan rival, shrinking from his rationalism, and removing some of the mysteries of theology out of the field of logical discussion.

Of course, his most devoted hearers were the young men of the order. Of these some ninety were sent up every year from the schools in the provinces outside France; and in addition to these picked men, who came for the master’s degree, Paris had the training of all the students of Northern France. Some of the former were from Spain, where the order was engaged in combatting the Mohammedan doctors. Their needs drew Thomas’s attention to the subject of his first systematic work, the Summa contra Gentiles. Thomas puts himself upon the level of one who has no Christian convictions, but argues simply from principles of philosophic truth and of natural religion accepted by both parties. Besides these and other literary labors he attended the annual General Chapters of his order at Valenciennes in 1259, where he and Albrecht drew up the new order of studies for the young Dominicans.

In 1261 Michael Palaeologus, the Greek Emperor of Nicea, conquered Constantinople, and thus put an end to the Latin Empire established by the Fourth Crusade. But the wily Greek feared a general movement in Latin Christendom to recover the city from him, and to gain time by diplomacy he opened negotiations for the reconciliation of Eastern and Western Christendom with Urban IV., then newly chosen to the papacy. The Pope summoned Thomas Aquinas from Paris to Rome, to aid in these negotiations by his erudition and acuteness. The subject was one into which his previous studies had not conducted him, but a scholastic philosopher must be prepared to write on any topic. De omni scibili was his scope. So Thomas wrote his Treatise against the Errors of the Greeks (Opusculum contra Errores Graecorum) by the papal order. In its preparation he became at once the victim and the instrument of one of the most memorable forgeries in ecclesiastical literature. The Dominicans had followed the Latin Empire into the East, but found themselves at a loss for authorities to prove to the Greeks that the autocratic papacy was a venerable, much less a primitive institution, of the Christian Church. One of them conceived the bright thought of manufacturing a supply. So he sent to Urban IV. a long catena of quotations from the Greek fathers, especially the two Cyrils and the Council of Chalcedon, in which the papal authority and infallibility were set forth with a boldness never used even in the West. The Pope fully believed in their genuineness and handed them over to Thomas, who incorporated many of them into his opusculum, besides using them in his greater work. He knew too much about the teachings of the Greek fathers not to be staggered by the quotations as to the Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, and he expressed his doubts in a letter to Urban. But he was not staggered by the forger’s showing that the Greeks accepted the universal jurisdiction and infallible authority of the papacy. In this way the notion of a universal episcopate and an infallibility in the Bishop of Rome, from being the audacious whim of a few canonists, passed into the dogmatic theology of the Church, and came to be made an article of faith in our own time. (See Acton-Döllinger-Huber’s book, Janus, or the Pope and the Council, chap, iii., section 18.)

Urban IV. having brought Thomas to Italy, Clemens IV. kept him there as long as he lived, making him a professor in the university established by Innocent IV. within the Roman Curia, and as such carried him about from city to city as the Papal Court removed, and had him lecture on theology wherever the Court was staying. He also set him to the work of writing commentaries on part of the Scripture: Job, the Psalms, Canticles, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Paul’s Epistles, besides his catena of comments on the Gospels gathered from the Latin fathers. Most important of all for our purposes, he asked him to prepare the service for Corpus Christi Day—a festival established in 1264. It was for this that Thomas wrote four of the hymns which have given him his place in the annals of hymnology, and those are his finest. And it is said that he also began his Summa in these years, but that I doubt. But in 1269 Clemens died, and it was two years before another Pope was elected. Thomas took the opportunity to escape out of the throng and noise of the Curia, and made his way back to France and to his old manner of life. He came back to Paris and lectured in St. Jacques Street, but not as the head of the school. At Paris he now found critics as well as admirers. His doctrine that individuality is dependent upon matter was censured as involving a denial of immortality, and in 1269 he wrote a treatise, Contra Averroistas, to show that this was not a necessary or even a fair inference. In the same year we find him in London attending a Chapter General of his order.

In 1271 the vacancy in the papacy ended with the selection of Gregory X., one of the best of the popes. Thomas was recalled to Italy and offered the Archbishopric of Naples, doubtless at the suggestion of Charles of Anjou, whose hands were red with the blood of the young Conradin. Thomas wisely declined it, and when, in 1272, he agreed to go to Naples as a teacher of theology, it was with the reservation that this should not bring him into close relations with the Court. Enough of his Ghibelline traditions clung to him to make him abhor the murderer of his kinsman. So in Naples he taught, and wrote at his Summa, and prayed and saw visions—his biographers say—until one day the Pope summoned him to a General Council at Lyons, with the view of proclaiming a new crusade. He obeyed the summons, but when he reached the Cistercian monastery of Fossa Nuova, on the hills above the Pontine Marshes, below Rome, he fell ill and died, March 7th, 1274. Of course the Italians knew he was poisoned, and even Dante countenances the report. The Pontine Marshes in spring are so wholesome that no other hypothesis could account for his death! His friend Bonaventura reached Lyons, but died during the sessions of the council. His earlier friend and master, Albert the Great, although his senior by thirty years, outlived him by six, dying in 1280.

The position of Thomas Aquinas in history is determined by the fact that he is the greatest of the scholastic philosophers. What his master and other earlier thinkers had attempted, he more nearly did than ever has been done by any one else. He took the two great bodies of knowledge, secular and sacred, and fused them into a system more nearly consistent with itself than any other. On the one side was the encylopaedic philosophy of Aristotle, and the parallel but less perfect tradition of Platonic speculation; on the other the Scriptures, the dogmatic decisions of the councils and popes, and the teachings of the recognized authorities among the ecclesiastical writers, especially as these had been summarized by Peter Lombard. To blend these into one great system of theology, to subsidize the weapons of the Greek philosophy in defence of Christian truth, and to draw the line with accuracy between what reason can prove and faith accepts without proof—this was what he undertook in the Summa. And never was a more acute intellect employed on the great task of reconciling faith with reason. If he failed, it is not because he shrank from anticipating any and every kind of objection to the truths he was defending; his works are a perfect storehouse of such objections. If he failed, it was not from any want of confidence in the powers of the human mind to deal with the highest subjects of thought. No modern rationalist ever surpassed him in that respect. He failed because neither then nor now do the materials exist for such a work, and because his truths lost and his errors gained force by being worked into a system.

It would take a whole chapter even to describe the Summa. Of its three parts, the first, concerning God, and the second concerning man, were completed in the four years he gave to the work. In the third, which treats of the God-Man, he got no farther than the ninetieth question, and the discussion was completed by extracts from his commentary on Peter Lombard. But the completed part contains nearly two million Latin words, or with the supplement, two million one hundred thousand. It is six times as large as Calvin’s Institutio, or four times as large as the Latin Bible! And the Summa fills only two of the seventeen folios of his works, all written within the space of twenty-six years by a man actively engaged in teaching, lecturing, and advising popes and princes.

That so much of the formative period of his life was spent in a controversy, in which he was the applauded spokesman of a party whose cause he regarded as the cause of God, could not but affect his intellectual character. Professor Maurice thinks the delay in obtaining the master’s degree worked in the same direction. The master in those days was expected to pronounce decisions; those who had not attained that rank were occupied in disputations only. “Thus our author was a trained arguer,” and “the old habits remained with him when his decisions were most accepted as authorities. From first to last he was thinking of all that could be said on both sides of the question he was discussing.” I believe that he was conscious of the narrowing and dwarfing tendency of this habit of mind, even though he did not detect the source of the evil. We read of his seeking to prepare himself for his work by humble devotion. But to the last line of his last work the controversial habit and attitude of mind clings to him. It is only in his catechetical expositions, written before he left Koeln for Paris, that you find a different atmosphere, and escape the heretic-crushing Aristotelian dialectic of the scholastic disputant.

Even in his few hymns, which constitute his title to rank among the sacred poets, he is the great scholastic doctor, with his eye on the heresies which may distract the believer. He writes with the full panoply under his singing robes. All his hymns are concerned with the greatest of the Christian sacraments. It was in 1215, a year before the confirmation of the Dominican Order, and twelve years before Thomas was born, that the fourth Lateran Council made the transubstantiation of the elements into the body and blood of Christ an article of faith. But a Belgian ecstatic, Juliana of Liege, had a vision which called for a special annual festival in honor of the mystery. Urban IV. complied with this request in 1261, by requiring that the Thursday next after Trinity Sunday should be observed as Corpus Christi Day. This involved the preparation of an additional services for the Missal and Breviary, with suitable prayers and hymns, and the work was laid upon Thomas. For the Missal he wrote the sequence

Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem;

and for the Breviary the three hymns

Pange, lingua, gloriosi Corporis mysterium, Sacris solemniis juncta sint gaudia,

and

Verbum supernum prodiens, Nec Patris.

The Paris Breviary connects a fifth hymn of his with the same festival, the

Adoro Te devote, latens Deitas,

assigning it for late (serotinas) services in the octave of Corpus Christi. So Newman; but Daniel declares he finds it in none of the breviaries of modern use, and in the missals only as a part of the priest’s private preparation for saying Mass. Even this rank has not been attained by the sixth hymn ascribed to him, the beautiful

O Esca viatorum,

which Dr. Ray Palmer has made familiar to American worshippers by his exquisite version, first published in the Andover Sabbath Hymn-Book:

O Bread to pilgrims given.

Moll denies that Thomas wrote this, and says it is by a Jesuit poet, which is most probable. March calls it “a happy echo” of the undisputed hymns of Thomas Aquinas. But the echo is softened; the hymn is less masculine. Lympha fons alone would serve as a note to show that Aquinas never wrote it.

It has been said by Dr. Neale that the

Pange, lingua, gloriosi

“contests the second place among those of the Western Church, with the Vexilla Regis, the Stabat Mater, the Jesu dulcis memoria, the Ad Regias Agni Dapes, the Ad Supernam, and one or two others, leaving the Dies Irae in its unapproachable glory.” But this judgment is the prejudiced one of a High Churchman, sufficiently in sympathy with the Roman doctrine of the sacraments to relish keenly Thomas’s concise and vigorous statement of that doctrine, and to mistake the relish for critical appreciation of the poetry. Dr. Neale even praises Thomas’s treatise On the Venerable Sacrament of the Altar as the finest devotional treatise of the Middle Ages, finer therefore than the Imitation itself! A calmer estimate will put the hymn decidedly below Bernard’s exquisite Jesu dulcia memoria, or the Veni, Creator Spiritus of Rabanus Maurus, or the Veni, Sancte Spiritus of Hermann Contractus. It is true that it excels all these in its peculiar qualities, its logical neatness, dogmatic precision, and force of almost argumentative statement; but these qualities are not poetical. In this respect it is not altogether unlike Toplady’s “Rock of Ages,” a hymn in which the intellect has cut a channel for the emotions to flow. That was written as a tail-piece to a controversial article in which Toplady discussed John Wesley’s doctrines in the matter of faith and works, and is a terse statement of theological discriminations on that point.

The Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem, as it is a much longer hymn, gives more scope for the exposition of the Roman doctrine. For this reason Martin Luther abhorred it, probably also because he had no good opinion of Thomas himself. He accuses him of perverting the Scripture in this hymn, “as though he were the worst enemy of God, or else an idiot.” But this harsh judgment did not succeed in expelling the hymn from the use of the Lutheran churches, and since the Oxford revival it has found its way into other Protestant churches. But the sixth, seventh and eighth verses express the doctrine of transubstantiation so distinctly, that one must have gone as far as Dr. Pusey, who avowed that he held “all Roman doctrine,” before using their words in any but a non-natural sense. In the fine version made by Dr. A. R. Thompson, first published in the Sunday-School Times in 1883, and included in Dr. Robinson’s Laudes Domini, only half the hymn is given, those verses being taken which deflect least from the general current of Christian thought about the sacrament. By the author’s kind permission, we give it here with his latest revision:

“Sion, to thy Saviour singing,

To thy Prince and Shepherd bringing

Sweetest hymns of love and praise,

Thou wilt never reach the measure

Of his worth, by all the treasure

Of thy most ecstatic lays.

“Of all wonders that can thrill thee,

And with adoration fill thee,

What than this can greater be,

That himself to thee he giveth?—

He that eateth, ever liveth—

For the bread of life is he.

“Fill thy lips to overflowing

With sweet praise, his mercy showing,

Who this heavenly table spread.

On this day so glad and holy,

To each longing spirit lowly

Giveth he the living Bread.

“Here the King hath spread his table,

Whereon eyes of faith are able

Christ our Passover to trace.

Shadows of the law are going,

Light and life and truth inflowing,

Night to day is giving place.

* * * * *

“Lo, this angels’ food descending

Heavenly love is hither sending,

Hungry lips on earth to feed!

So the paschal lamb was given,

So the manna came from heaven,

Isaac was his type indeed.

“O good Shepherd, Bread life-giving,

Us, thy grace and life receiving,

Feed and shelter evermore!

Thou on earth our weakness guiding,

We in heaven with thee abiding,

With all saints will thee adore.”

Thomas’s Franciscan friend, John Fidenza, better known by his nickname of John Bonaventura, was a hymn-writer also, but he did a good many other things better. To many Protestants his name has been made offensive through its association with the Psalter of Our Lady, a travesty of the Book of Psalms, with which he had nothing to do, and which was made in a later century. Indeed, as Martin Chemnitz pointed out three centuries ago, Bonaventura protested against the excessive reverence for the Virgin, which had already become common, as likely to lead to idolatry. That he was called the Seraphic Doctor shows that men felt in him a warmth of heart and a tenderness of devotion, which they missed in his greater contemporary, Thomas Aquinas, the Angelical Doctor. Indeed he was the incarnation of the Franciscan spirit of love and helpfulness, as Thomas of the Dominican spirit of theological research and orthodox defence. Yet Bonaventura’s Breviloquium has been praised by good judges as the best compend of Christian doctrine that the Middle Ages have left us.

Bonaventura’s Latin poems are rather devout meditations than hymns. They are not the voice of the Christian congregation in song, but of the monk meditating before his crucifix. To him is sometimes ascribed the Christmas hymn,

Adeste fideles,

but not on sufficient authority. His best known hymns are the

Christum Ducem, qui per crucem,

and

Recordare sanctae crucis,

of which latter we have English versions by Dr. Henry Harbaugh, Dr. J. W. Alexander, and E. C. Benedict. Five other hymns are ascribed to him in the collections. They all have the Franciscan note; they turn on our Lord’s human sympathy and sufferings. This explains the ascription to him of a long hymn on the members of our Lord’s body as affected by the passion, which is found in Mone (I., 171-74), but which is more frequently and quite as erroneously ascribed to Bernard of Clairvaux. It is not worthy of either, although Mone thinks the ascription to Bonaventura “worthy of attention.” The hymn furnishes the point of contact of the Latin hymnology with that of the later Moravians, the Franciscans of Protestantism.

So we leave the two great scholars, thinkers, doctors, and poets, each representing one of the two chief streams of spiritual influence in the Church of the thirteenth century. “They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in death they were not divided.”

CHAPTER XXV.
JACOPONUS AND THE “STABAT MATER.”

Jacoponus, known to us sometimes as Jacobus de Benedictis, and sometimes as Jacopo di Benedetto, or as Giacopone da Todi from his Italian birthplace, is a most quaint and singular singer. The name Jacoponus is a mere title of reproach, and signifies either “Big James” or “Silly James.” It was called after him on the street and he adopted it in a spirit of humility and as a badge of self abnegation. The man himself was an Italian jurist and nobleman, who lived in the thirteenth century. He led a wild life, lost his property, and eventually regained it by industry and ability. Evidently he neither cared nor scrupled about his ways of making money. A crisis came in his life in consequence of his wife’s sudden death. She was killed at the city games of Todi in the year of grace 1268, where with other women she had been watching the sports from a scaffold of wood. It was insecure and fell, killing her instantly. Poor Benedetto, on hurrying to the spot, found that beneath her garments she had been wearing a hair girdle next to the skin—according to the harsh custom of the time—and he was deeply affected by this evidence of her anxiety to please God. In those days such an action spoke volumes for the victim’s piety, and no one was more open to conviction than this erratic, sensitive, and brilliant man.

But it would seem that for a long time he struggled against his feelings, since we have a record that by 1298 he had been a religious person about twenty years. Indeed, there is a story that he was not received at once by the Minorites, and that he finally produced certain poems before they grew satisfied to take him in. However, when he was fairly within their walls he outdid all the other Franciscans in austerity. He had given up his position as Doctor of Laws and had surrendered his property; now it would appear that he was determined to advance beyond the rest in ascetic devotion. His penances and prayers were greatly in excess of prescribed rules, and he must have proved as sore a trial to any easy-going brother, as Simeon Stylites was when he too led the whole convent to denounce his ascetic habits. There is small doubt that the brain of Jacoponus was decidedly off its balance, even in these earliest days, and his subsequent conduct gave full evidence of his insanity. Still, we find in this self-abasement of his nothing that looks like pride or egotism. Where others display a complacency which is very Pharisaic, he only shows the monomania of a gifted soul. Some of his expressions are remarkable for their spiritual depth and power. Thus when he was pressed to explain how a Christian can be sure that he loves God, he replied, “I have the sign of charity; if I ask God for something, and He refuses me, I love Him notwithstanding; and when He opposes me I love Him twice as much.” “I would,” he says, “for the love of Christ, suffer with a perfect resignation all the toils of this life, every grief, anguish, pain, which word can express or thought conceive. I would also readily consent that, on leaving life, the demons should bear my soul into the place of tortures, there to endure all the torments due to my sins; to those of the just who suffer in purgatory, and even of the reprobates and demons if this could be; and that until the day of the last judgment, and longer still, according to the good pleasure of the Divine Majesty. And, above all, it would be to me a great pleasure and supreme satisfaction that all those for whom I should have suffered should enter heaven before me, and, finally, if I came after them that all should agree to declare to me that they owe me nothing.” Surely no modern theologian has ever stated the doctrine of “self-emptiness” in any shape which at all compares with this!

Nor was he deficient in wit. “I enjoy the realm of France,” he once said, “more than does the King of France; for I take part in all the happiness that comes to him and I haven’t the care of his business.” At another time he entered the market-place on all fours naked, a saddle on his back and a bit between his teeth, for what symbolic purpose no one has ever explained. Again, he literally tarred and feathered himself, covering his body with a sticky oil and then rolling in feathers of various colors and kinds. In this elegant wedding attire he made his appearance at his brother’s house to honor the marriage of his niece. The guests, as might be expected, departed in confusion and disgust. But to all remonstrances upon his conduct he retorted, “My brother thinks to illumine our name by his magnificence; I shall do it by my folly.” He was really a leaf taken out of Rabelais or Boccaccio—a jester whose folly and wisdom were mingled unequally, much in the fashion of that Wamba son of Witless, immortalized for us in the pages of Ivanhoe.

The man’s great mind had doubtless been shaken by his affliction and by the gloomy theology of his time. Otherwise these performances, so inconsistent with his genius, could never have taken place. The irregularity of his productions, sometimes delicate as the most graceful stanzas of the troubadours, and some times as coarse and rough as Villon at his worst, are in exact proof of this assertion.

In theology he was, to quote Ozanam, “no longer a dogmatic but a mystic.” He really became the leader of a band of pure and elevated minds which continued, by direct genealogy, through Hugo and Richard of St. Victor, and Tauler down to St. Theresa, Madame Guyon, Fénelon, and our own Thomas C. Upham. It is an honor of no slight consequence to have inspired so much of the spirit of the Apostle John into that turbid current of mediaeval religion. And it does not surprise us, therefore, to find the Cur mundus militat of Jacoponus credited to Bernard of Clairvaux, nor the Jesu, dulcis memoria of Bernard attributed to Jacoponus. The two men were very similar, but the opportunities of the French abbot were infinitely superior to those of the Italian monk. And after a very careful inquiry I remain convinced, like other hymnologists, that these two great hymns have already been properly assigned. It is certainly a staggering piece of testimony when the latter is found in an old MS. of Jacoponus’s poems, precisely in the form in which it appears in the most critical edition of the writings of Bernard. And it is equally unsettling for us to come upon the Cur mundus militat in the works of the saint, when we know, on no doubtful evidence, that this was the passport of the sinner into his Franciscan convent. Once more it is worth our while to repeat the warning that any positive designation of Latin hymns by their authors’ names must rest upon a firmer foundation than the mere fact that they can be discovered in this man’s or that man’s printed works.

Jacoponus also interests us in view of his Protestant spirit. He never fancied Boniface VIII., and when that pope had a dream in which he saw a great bell without a tongue, and consulted the keen-witted friar upon its meaning, he received the reproof valiant, “Know, your holiness,” said the undaunted monk, “that the great size of the bell signifies the pontifical power which embraces the world. But take heed lest the tongue be that good example which you will not give.” For this and other liberties which he took it is no wonder that he presently found himself in prison, where he suffered everything patiently, and announced that he would go out when Boniface was ready to come in. And this, indeed, actually occurred. He was excommunicated, too, but from this sentence Benedict XI. released him on December 23d, 1303.

I cannot refrain from quoting some more of his religious aphorisms and meditations which instinctively suggest to us the pious musings of À Kempis. Here is one: “I have always thought, and I think now, that it is a great thing to know how to enjoy God. Why? Because in these hours of joy, humility is exercised with respect. But I have thought, and I think now, that the greatest thing is to know how to rest deprived of God. Why? Because in these hours of trial, faith is exercised without evidence, hope without attempt at fulfilment, and charity without any sign of the divine benevolence.” And here is a fragment from his last poem: “Love, I see that thou art transfiguring me, and making me become Love like thee, so that I dwell no longer in my own heart and that I know no longer how to find myself again. If I perceive in a man any evil, or vice, or temptation, I am transformed and I enter into him; I am penetrated with his pain.”

It must not be supposed that these poems were in the Latin language in every instance. Very few of the entire number are truly within our own sphere of research, and all those composed in Italian are accessible to us only through a French prose translation. But his “Praise of Poverty” deserves a place even in these pages, for it reveals the nature of the poet and helps us to comprehend the pathos and tenderness of his unregulated genius:

“Sweet Poverty, how much in truth

Should we love thee!

For, child, thou hast a sister named

Humility.

A common bowl, for food and drink,

Is all thy need;

Bread, water, and a few poor herbs,

Suffice indeed.

“And, if a guest should come, she adds

A pinch of salt;

She travels fearless, and no foe

Can bid her halt;

Thieves do not plunder her; she dies

At length in peace;

She makes no will; no grasping hands

Clutch her increase.

“Poor little thing! Behold thou art

Heaven’s citizen;

No vulgar earthly wishes draw

Thee down to men;

Thine is the greatest sceptre, thine

The kingdom here,

For what thou carest not to seek

Still crowdeth near.

“O science most profound and deep!

For thus we rise,

And gain our freedom by the things

We most despise!

O gracious Poverty, supplied

With joy and rest,

Thine is the plenty of the heart,

And that is best!”

It is strangely incongruous with this almost idyllic gentleness for us to find such a man hanging a coveted bit of meat in his cell until the odor of its putrefaction disgusted the rest of the monks, as well as put an end to his own craving for the forbidden dainty. Then, too, we have several other anecdotes of his grim humor and bold denunciation of sin. Take, for example, the story told of his peculiar half-satirical conduct in an instance which Wadding, the historian of the Franciscan Order, relates with great gusto. A citizen of Todi, a relative of the poet, had bought a pair of chickens, and not wishing to be inconvenienced by them, he said to Jacoponus, “Take them and carry them for me, if you please; I don’t care to burden myself with them.” To which Jacoponus answered, “Trust me! I’ll carry your chickens home.” He then went direct to the church of Fortunatus, in which his own monument was afterward placed, and pulling up a gravestone he thrust the chickens in and replaced the slab. The worthy citizen on his return of course found no chickens, and therefore at once hunted out Jacoponus in the public square and reproached him. “I took them to your house,” retorted the Franciscan. “But I have just come from it and my wife says she has not seen you,” the Tudescan asserted. Thereupon Jacoponus took him to the church and having removed the stone, said to him: “Friend, isn’t that your home?” The citizen, says Wadding, took his chickens, being a man evidently of frugal mind, and, “not without fear, went his way absorbed in thought.”

This mad Solomon is at times so keen in his denunciations of the corruption of the Church, and so evidently sincere in his own religion, that more than one hymnologist has thought that his folly was largely assumed as a guise under which he had greater freedom. The court fool was a “chartered libertine” as to his language, and when we read the epitaph of Jacoponus it seems as if he had reversed the saying of Shakespeare and had stolen Satan’s livery to serve Heaven in. There is no question but that this satirical freedom actually cost the poor jester some considerable share of imprisonment, and this heightens the likelihood that he was playing Brutus in order to abolish Caesar. Boniface VIII., whom he had very plainly rebuked, was the one who imprisoned him, and he was not released before the case—as he had indeed predicted—was precisely reversed. Let me record my own conviction, based upon the poem of which I append a translation, and upon the other facts of his life, that this view of his career has much in its favor. Those days and these are not to be compared in respect to liberty. Where Bernard of Cluny swung his sling about his head and let the pebbles fly to right and left with no very tangible result, Jacoponus took bow and arrows and drove his shaft into the target. No one meddled with Bernard; but Jacoponus, a century later, was a Tell for the ecclesiastical Gessler.

Of the Stabat Mater Dolorosa, carried by the Flagellants into every corner of Europe as they flogged themselves in public to its anthem, it can be said that it is one of the very greatest hymns—if not actually the greatest—of the Roman Catholic Church. The Dies Irae, the Veni, Sancte Spiritus, and the Hymn of Bernard of Cluny, are catholic rather than Roman. This is Roman rather than catholic. It is full of Mariolatry. Take a stanza from a prose translation by way of example:

“Virgin of virgins, illustrious, be not now bitter to me, make me mourn with thee, make me carry about the death of Christ, make me a sharer in His passion, adoring His suffering.” And again: “O Christ, when I go hence, give me, through Thy mother, to attain the palm of victory,” etc.

For this reason the Protestant metrical versions of the Stabat Mater are few in number and generally accompanied by disclaimers of one kind or another. Of course the music, on whose wings the hymn has now flown world-wide, will need no word of mine. If the Stabat Mater itself receives commonly the second rank among hymns, it follows that Rossini, Pergolesi, Palestrina and Haydn have not detracted from its glory. And though in the terse language of one of our best hymnologists, we say, “It is simple Mariolatry, most of it,” the human pathos of the verses appeals strongly to those who refuse the added errors of the poem.

Of the Stabat Mater Speciosa I confess to a decided doubt. It is in the nature of a paraphrase, almost of a parody. It is unworthy of the brain that formed the Mater Dolorosa, and the jester must have gone beyond common folly if he descended to this imitation of himself. It is more likely—and there is good ground for the opinion—that it is the work of some later hand. Archbishop Trench, by the way, will not include either of them in his collection.

Of the other writings of Jacoponus it may be interesting to say that he composed hymns and satires in great abundance, both in Latin and in Italian, which were collected by Franciscus Tressatus, a Minorite brother, and published in seven books. The Cur mundus militat (which Wadding quotes at length) meets this editor’s highest praise. Of the Italian poems we can say that they are now regarded by Symonds and others as the fountain-head of Italian literature, and that they contained many of the crude expressions of the common people mixed with an elegance of phraseology to which Dante and Petrarch were accustoming their mother tongue. Indeed, I know no other similar poet, unless it be John Skelton, rector of “gloomy Dis” in England, who about a century later shot the same kind of shafts at the same manner of target and with much the same bitter, gibing wit.

But of all the compositions of our mad monk which I have seen, I am most especially interested in this Cur mundus militat. Its attractiveness consists, first of all, in its dactylic measure and in its singular adaptation to the character of Jacoponus. It is hard, in the translation, to catch that strange jingle of the cap and bells and that tossing of the fool’s bauble which accompany the exhortation. Only in the last stanza does it appear as if he deigned to be serious. All that precedes this is the quaint world-weariness of the man too wise for his time, and who is therefore well pleased to be stultus propter Christum—a “fool for Christ’s sake.”