The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

TRINITAS, UNITAS, DEITAS.

Trinity, unity, Deity

Eternal;

Majesty, potency, purity

Supernal!

Stone and mountain, rock and fountain,

Breath and bridge most certain,

Travelled way;

Sun and light and brightness, snowy peak in whiteness,

Perfect day!

Thou art lover and giver,

Creator, receiver,

Redeemer,

And door unto life;

Thou art favor and fitness

And splendor and brightness

And fragrance,

Where deadness is rife.

Thou art highest and nighest;

Of monarchs the king, and of statutes the spring,

And the judge—

Whom angels adore:

These laud thee, applaud thee,

And chant in their song, as they praise loud and long,

Whom they love—

Thy saints evermore.

Thou art greatness and oneness—

The flower as it shineth, the rose as it twineth;

Then rule us and save us

And bring us before thee

In glory

And joy, we implore thee.

Thou art God in thy justice

And trueness and goodness;

Thou art wholly and solely

The Lord!—

To thee be the glory

Which saints, in the highest, accord.

Pietro Gonella, a Franciscan monk of Tortona in Piedmont, is the reputed author of a long meditative poem on the miseries and follies of life and the certainty of death and judgment, which Du Méril found in a manuscript of this century. If he be not mistaken as to the date of the manuscript, of course, Eug. de Levis (Anecdota Sacra, Turin, 1789) is wrong in ascribing it to Pietro, as there were no Franciscans in the twelfth century. The chronology is important because of the relation of the poem to the Dies Irae. In point of metrical form they differ only in this Heu! Heu! mala mundi vita (better known as the Cum revolvo toto corde, from the opening line of its second part), having four lines to the verse instead of three. In point of sense the resemblances are so striking as to suggest that Thomas of Celano has ploughed with the heifer of his earlier countryman. In proof of this take these stanzas:

Terret me dies terroris,

Irae dies et furoris,

Dies luctus et moeroris,

Dies ultrix peccatoris.

Veniet Judex de coelis,

Testis verax et fidelis,

Veniet et non silebit,

Judicabit nec timebit.

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Expavesco quidem multum

Venturi Judicis vultum,

Cui latebit nil occultum,

Et manebit nil inultum.

Juste quidem judicabit,

Nec personam acceptabit,

Pretio non corrumpetur,

Sed nec precibus flectetur.

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Et quis nostrûm non timebit,

Quando Judex apparebit,

Ante quem ignis ardebit,

Peccatores qui delebit.

Judicabit omnes gentes

Et salvabit innocentes,

Arguet omnes potentes

Et deliciis fluentes.

Especially notable are the stanzas:

Dies illa, dies vitae,

Dies lucis inauditae,

Et mors ipsa morietur,

Qua nox omnis destruetur.

Jam festinat rex coelestis,

Judex noster atque testis,

Festinanter apparebit,

Omnis caro quem videbit.

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Ecce Rex desideratus

Et a justis expectatus

Jam festinat exoratus,

Ad salvandum praeperatus.

Apparebit nec tardabit,

Veniet et demonstrabit

Gloriam, quam praestolantur,

Qui pro fide tribulantur.

If nothing whatever had been known as to the date of the two poems, we should have pronounced this an expansion of the Dies irae, dies illa by a later poet, who had two objects in view: the first, to sharpen to the conscience of his readers the warnings of the impending judgment; the second, to complete the poem by bringing the joys of the judgment more prominently into view. And with all respect for Edelestand du Méril’s judgment, we would like to have more light on the date of his manuscript.

A manuscript still preserved at Liege in Belgium contains the letters of Guido of Basoches, which is either Bas-oha, a village near that city, or, as Mone thinks, a place near Châteaudun in France. Among these letters are given a number of hymns, which he sends to his correspondents. They show some power of versification, but nothing more, and are defaced by conceits and puns. Thus he puts the name of Stephen through the six cases of the Latin grammar in as many verses of a hymn.

There are five writers of this century, each of whom is credited with a single hymn. Rudolph of Radegg, a schoolmaster of Einsiedeln, wrote a hymn in honor of St. Meinrad, which begins Nunc devota silva tota. To Thomas Becket is ascribed the Gaude Virgo, Mater Christi, Quia.... It is said to be his in a manuscript of the fifteenth century. To another Englishman, Bertier, is ascribed the only Latin hymn in the collections which relates directly to the Crusades, Juxta Threnos Jeremiae. It first appears in the chronicle of Roger of Hoveden, with the statement that Bertier wrote it in 1188. Last is Aelred (1104-66), who seems to have been a lowland Scotchman by birth, and to have shared the education of Henry, son of King David of Scotland. King David wished to make him a bishop, but he preferred the life of a monk. He made his way to the Cistercian monastery at Rievaulx in Yorkshire (not Revesby in Lincolnshire, as some say), and there spent his days, becoming abbot in 1146. That he was a most lovable man we must infer from his sermons to his monks. He is one of the few preachers in Dr. Neale’s Mediaeval Preachers and Preaching (London, 1856), of whom we wish for more. His epitaph likens him, among others, to Bernard of Clairvaux, and the comparison is apposite. He was an English Bernard, with less personal force and grasp of intellect, but with the same gentleness and friendliness. His one hymn is the Pax concordat universa, which is found in his works, but not in any of the collections. The theme is congenial.

The thirteenth century, the century of Francis and Dominic, of Aquinas and Bonaventura, of Thomas of Celano and Jacoponus, is the age of the giants.

Its anonymous hymns worthy of special mention are few in number. One of the most beautiful is the Easter hymn, Cedit frigus hiemale, in which the coincidence of Easter with spring furnishes the starting-point. It is probably French. The Ave quem desidero is a rosary hymn, which rehearses our Lord’s life, with a verse for each of the beads, which surely is better than the usual Ave Marias. The use of rosaries is very ancient—pre-Christian even—but it was with the rise of the Dominican Order in this century that it became a sanctioned practice. The Jesu Salvator seculi and the O Trinitas laudabilis have been traced no further back than to this age; but they preserve the tone and style of the school of Ambrose. So the Mysteriorum signifer, in honor of the Archangel Michael, recalls an earlier age, while the Jesu dulce medicamen suggests the school of Bernard. This beautiful hymn has both thoughtfulness and unction to commend it. It represents the sounder tradition of Christian teaching in the mediaeval Church, and has been neglected unduly by Protestant translators. Mr. Crippen is the only one who has rendered it, and also the Juste judex Jesu Christe, a hymn of the same age and much the same character. Notable Marian hymns are the Gaude virgo, stella Maris, Salve porta chrystallina, and the Verbum bonum et suave; with which may be named that to St. John, Verbum Dei Deo natum, often ascribed to Adam of St. Victor, and certainly of his school. Also of that school is the vigorous hymn in commemoration of St. Paul, Paulus Sion architecta. We add the terse and forceful hymn in commemoration of Augustine of Hippo, Salve pater Augustine, and the still finer in commemoration of the martyrs of the Church, O beata beatorum martyrum certamina, which has found translators in both Dr. Neale and Mr. Chambers. It is defective, as making them and not Christ the central theme.

St. Edmund, the archbishop who gave up the see of Canterbury because his heart was broken between the demands of the Pope and the exactions of the king, and died (1240) an exile in a French monastery, is credited with two Marian hymns, one of which is a “psalter,” or hymn of one hundred and fifty stanzas. They are not of great importance. Another is ascribed to Robert Grosstete, Bishop of Lincoln (died 1253), one of the great Churchmen who spoke the truth to the see of Rome. He was the friend of Simon de Montfort and of the Friars, and the foremost Churchman of England in his time, as zealous for the reformation of the clergy of his diocese and the maintenance of the Church’s rights against the King as for its relative independence of the Roman curia. The Ave Dei genetrix ascribed to him exists only in a revised and not improved shape. Its twelve verses each begin with a word from the angelic salutation. The author seems to have borrowed from a hymn of Peter Damiani.

To Hugo, a Dominican monk, who was Bishop of Strasburg toward the close of the century, and had taught theology with success, is ascribed the Ave mundi domina, in which Mary is greeted as a fiddle—Ave dulcis figella!

The fourteenth century, like the seventh, furnishes us with the name of not a single hymn-writer of real eminence, and of very few who are not eminent. Yet this century and the next exceed all others in the number of the hymns, which either certainly were written in this age, or can be traced no farther back. But the quality falls short as the quantity increases. Mary and the saints are the favorite themes; and those two great repositories of perverted praise, the second and third volumes of Mone’s collection, bear emphatic witness to the extent to which the hierarchy of saints and angels had come to eclipse the splendors of the White Throne and even of the Cross. There is not a single hymn of the highest rank which we can ascribe to these centuries of decay, when the Middle Ages were passing to their death, to make way for the New Learning and the Reformation. But the great revival, which first swept over Italy and then reached Germany about 1470, which showed its power in the revival of “strict observance” in the mendicant orders, in the multiplication of new devotions and pilgrimages, and the accumulation of relics—that revival which laid such a powerful grasp on young Martin Luther and made a monk of him—bore abundant fruit in hymns both in Latin and the vernacular languages. It is a sign of the new age that the language consecrated by Church use no longer has a monopoly of hymn-writing, but men begin to praise as well as to hear in their own tongues the wonderful works of God.

The reverence for the Virgin reaches its height in the Te Matrem laudamus and the Veni, praecelsa domina, parodies of the Te Deum and the Veni, sancte Spiritus, which have nothing but ingenuity and offensiveness to commend them to Protestant readers. Of genuine poetical merit are the Regina coeli laetare and Stella maris, O Maria. Of the deluge of hymns in commemoration of the saints, we notice only the Nardus spirat in odorem, which indicates the growing worship of our Lord’s grandmother, by which Luther was captivated; the Collaudemus Magdalena of the Sarum Breviary, which Daniel calls “a very sweet hymn” (suavissimus hymnus). From it is extracted the Unde planctus et lamentum, of which Mr. Duffield has made the following translation. Both Mr. Chambers and Mr. Morgan have translated the whole hymn.