TO THE HOLY SPIRIT.
Veni jam veni
Benignissime,
Dolentis animiae
Consolator,
Promptissimus
In opportunatibus
Et tribulationibus
Adjutor!
Veni fortitude fragilium,
Relevator labentium
Veni doctor humilium
Destructor superborum,
Pius pater orphanorum,
Dulcis vindex viduarum.
Veni spes pauperum,
Refocillator deficientium!
Veni navigantium
Sidus,
Naufragantium
Portus!
Veni omnium viventium
Singulare decus,
Morientium
Unica salus,
Veni Sancte Spiritus!
Come, yea and quickly come,
Thou gentlest guest,
To them of sorrowing mind,
Consoler blest!
Thou swiftest help and guide
In every chance,
And in our sharp distress
Deliverance.
Come, courage of the coward breast,
Who raisest them that sink oppressed!
Come, teacher of the humble, thou
Who bringest pride to dust,
Thou Father of the fatherless,
The widow’s stay and trust.
Come, thou hope of poverty,
Reviving from despondency.
Come, thou of sailing souls
The Star;
Come, thou the port of them
Which shipwrecked are!
Come, thou the one renown
Of all that live;
Come, thou the single trust
Which death can give;
Come, Holy Spirit!
Another Anselm of this century is the Bishop of Lucca, who died 1086, and to whom is ascribed a long meditative poem on our Lord’s life, in a kind of rhymed verse which is much more frequently met in the narrative or humorous poems of the next century, called Goliardic. It does not belong to the lyric poetry of the Church, although a spirited hymn has been extracted by Herbert Kynaston from the passage given by Trench. (See Lyra Messianica, pp. 283, 284.) Anselm was a weak man caught in the storm of the controversy over investitures, and would have ended his days as a monk of Cluny, if Gregory VII. had not forbidden him. It is said that, although he had written in defence of the claims of Gregory against the anti-pope Guibert, he finally joined Guibert’s party before his death.
Godefroy or Geofroy, Abbot of Vendome, is another hymn-writer who was mixed up in that controversy, but remained steadfast on the papal side. He belongs both to this and the next century, having been made abbot in 1094, and lived on till 1129 at least. Twelve times he crossed the Alps in the interest of the papacy, and was rewarded for his zeal by a cardinalate. His letters still preserve for us the picture of a zealous ultramontane churchman; but his four “proses”—one about our Lord’s mother and three on Mary Magdalene—are of less importance.
To Heribert (ob. 1042), Bishop of Eichstetten, in modern Baden (anciently part of Swabia), Migne (Patrologia, 141) ascribes a number of hymns, which previously had borne no other name in the collections. His dominant tendency as a hymn-writer is shown by the fact that he wrote five hymns beginning Ave Maria, gratia plena, none of which, however, is the well-known hymn beginning with those words. That belongs to a later century. The best of his hymns are that to all saints, Omnes superni ordines, and that to the cross, Salve crux sancta, salve mundi gloria, of which Prior Aylward has furnished a spirited version to Mr. Shipley’s Annus Sanctus. Of the author we can learn nothing more than his date and location.
The succession of sequence-writers in Southern Germany was kept up through this century by Gottschalk and the fourth Ekkehard of St. Gall. Of Gottschalk we know little more than that he studied under a master, Heinrich, in an unnamed monastery of South Germany, to whom Schubiger (Die Sängerschule St. Gallens, 1858) assigns the Ave praeclara Maris stella (see [p. 163]), on the authority of a manuscript he believes to be older than Hermann Contractus. Of Gottschalk’s own sequences there are but three which certainly are his, and they all are prosy. If he and not some French Gottschalk of this century be the author of the O Deus, miseri misereri servi, which Daniel (IV., 173) copies from Du Méril, it is better than any of his sequences. Du Méril inclines to ascribe it to the Gottschalk of the ninth century, whom we met in the history of Rabanus Maurus. Ekkehard IV. is memorable only for his Latin version of the German hymn by Ratpert in honor of St. Gall, of which the original is lost.
The twelfth century is that of the great Crusades, of Bernard and Abelard, and Peter the Venerable, and Hildebert and Adam of St. Victor. The age also of Thomas Becket, Peter Lombard, and Saladin. The Civil Law was rediscovered at Amalfi; the Canon Law digested by Gratian; the age-long conflict of Guelphs and Ghibellines began, to end only with the political ruin of Germany and the dismemberment of the Empire.
It was a time of great intellectual activity in Western Europe. The universities took their rise now, although not known by that name till the next century. In the national literatures of France and Germany it was the springtime of a new age—the age of the troubadours and the trouvères, of the Minnesingers, and the popular romances. In Latin hymnology no century was more fertile in great things than this.
Of the anonymous hymns traced to this century there are several of great beauty. The hymn on the Apostles, Exultet coelum laudibus, holds its place in the Roman Breviary in a much diluted revision. It shows a close study of Scripture and great command of terse expression. The Easter hymn, Finita jam sunt praelia, generally is given with a double Alleluia prefixed. Daniel refers it to this century; Neale to the next. It is known to English readers by the versions of Rev. Francis Pott (“The strife is o’er, the victory won!”) and of Dr. Neale (“Finished is the battle now”), both of great merit. Exactly the same difference of authorities we find as to the date of the O filii et filiae, another Easter hymn of great beauty and still more honored by the preferences of the translators, but ignored by the collectors, Professor March excepted. The Passion hymn, Patris Sapientia, veritas divina, has been bandied about among many supposed authors, two popes of the fourteenth century included. It is in the “Goliardic” metre we find in Anselm of Lucca, which was widely used in the satirical poetry of this century. It therefore probably belongs here, and may be the work of the “Egidius Episcopus” specified in one copy of the hymn. A third Easter hymn, the Surrexit Christe hodie, may be as old as this century, as there is a German hymn of this century which borrows from it, Christus ist erstanden. In its Latin, indeed, lies the germ of many later Easter hymns, including that of Charles Wesley, “Christ the Lord is risen to-day.” It is itself the simplest and truest expansion of the Easter morning greeting of the early Christian Church, when its members, as they met each other on the street on that Sunday, substituted “Christ is risen!” for the usual “Peace be with you!” That was the word of confession by which the Church’s Easter joy in the triumph of good over evil, light over darkness, the spiritual springtide over spiritual winter, was proclaimed to a joyless and despairing world.
To this century also belongs the Advent sequence, Veni, veni Emmanuel! So Dr. Neale thinks, but Professor Daniel hesitates. It undoubtedly is based on the eight “Greater Antiphons,” which were sung at the Vesper service on the eight days preceding Christmas (O Sapientia, etc.), of which a metrical version by Lord Nelson and others is in the Hymnal of the Episcopal Church. At least as old as this century is the very beautiful sequence on the life of Christ, In sapientia disponens omnia, which Mone found in a MS. of this century, and Trend (Lyra Mystica) and Crippen have translated. The two halves of the sequence differ in a marked way in their metrical structure.
Of the lesser hymn-writers of the century, Marbod is the most productive. Like Fulbert and Odilo, he might as well be credited to the last century as to this. He was the son of a fur dealer at Angers, named Robert, became Bishop of Rennes, and died a monk at St. Aubin in 1123. He had the fighting qualities of the Angevins, whose churches are full of the tombs not of saints, but of armed warriors, Michelet says. He took such an active and aggressive part in a dispute over the election of a bishop of Angers that the other party made him their prisoner and carried him out of the mélée. But it was his eminence as a Latin poet for which his age most valued him. When he died the monks of St. Aubin announced the fact in a circular letter, and Ulger, Bishop of Angers, anticipated the extravagance of Dryden’s epigram on Milton in his praises of his friend:
“Cessit ei Cicero, cessit Maro
Junctus Homero.”
Beaugendre in 1708 collected his poems and published them along with those of his contemporary, Hildebert of Tours. They are mostly versified legends of the saints, with a long poem, De Gemmis, interesting and curious as showing the “mystical” associations of the mediaeval mind with precious stones. From this Mone gives the interpretation of the precious stones in the heavenly Jerusalem, beginning Cives coelestis patriae. More hymn like in character is the Deus-Homo rex coelorum, which Chancellor Benedict has translated from Trench’s anthology:
Deus-Homo, Rex coelorum,
Miserere Miserorum;
Ad peccandum proni sumus,
Et ad humum redit humus;
Tu ruinam nostri fulci
Pietate tua dulci.
Quid est homo, proles Adae
Germen necis, dignum clade.
Quid est homo nisi vermis,
Res infirma, res inermis.
Ne digneris huic irasci,
Qui non potest mundus nasci
Noli Deus, hunc damnare,
Qui non potest non peccare;
Judicare non est equum
Creaturam, non est tecum;
Non est miser homo tanti,
Ut respondeat Tonanti.
Sicut umbra, sicut fumus,
Sicut foenum facti sumus;
Miserere, Rex coelorum,
Miserere miserorum.
Thou God-man in heaven above us,
Look upon us, Lord, and love us.
We to sin are always tending,
Earth with earth is always blending.
Thou, O Lord, from ruin save us
Through the hope thy goodness gave us.
What is man from Adam springing?
Born of sin, destruction bringing.
What is man but worm degraded,
Weak and helpless when unaided?
Make not him thy wrath inherit,
Who cannot thy favor merit.
Born to be a sinful being;
Damn him not, thou God all-seeing.
To condemn thy helpless creature
Is not worthy of thy nature;
Wretched man is not sufficient,
Lord, to answer the omniscient.
Made like smoke and shadow fleeting,
Like the hay the tempest meeting,
Pity, Lord in heaven above us,
Wretched sinners! save and love us.
There are two notable sequences attributed to the nun Hildegard of Bingen (1104-78), a visionary and prophetess who commanded the respect of Bernard and his pupil, Pope Eugenius, by her castigations of the disorders of Christendom, as did Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Sienna in a later period. There is extant a letter of hers to Bernard, written during his visit to Germany to preach the second crusade, in which she explains in very imperfect Latin the nature of her gift. Her life was begun by Gottfried and finished by Theodorich, monk of Trier. A comparison of her works—the Scivias and the Liber Divinorum Operum—with the letter to Bernard on the one hand, and Theodorich’s part of the biography on the other, makes it very evident that the monk wrote her works as well as her life; and how much of her genuine prophecies he worked into them we are unable to say. It therefore is not decisive as to her authorship that the O ignis Spiritûs Paracliti and the O virga ac diadema are found in the manuscripts of her works, and that Theodorich vouches for the former. The author of these sequences had no acquaintance with the metrical principles of the school of St. Gall, and seems to have taken the Latin psalter as a model. Dr. Littledale, in his version of the former, substitutes a stricter metrical form.
Pierre de Corbeil was successively teacher of theology at Paris—where he had Innocent III. among his pupils—Bishop of Cambray, and in 1200 Archbishop of Sens. Innocent employed him on important missions, and he was a man of note in the Church and State of his age. A manuscript still preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris contains a satire on married men which is ascribed to him (Satyra adversus eos qui Uxores ducunt). But it is a very different kind of poem which entitles him to mention here, his hymn