URBS BEATA, VERA PACIS.
Blessed city, vision true
Of sweet peace, Jerusalem,
How majestic to the view
Rise thy lofty walls, in them
Living stones in beauty stand,
Polished, set, by God’s own hand.
Every several gate of thine
Of one pearl effulgent is,
Golden fair thy wall doth shine,
Blended lustrously with this,
And thy wall doth rest alone
Upon Christ the Corner-stone.
Thy sun is the martyred Lamb,
God thy temple. Angels vie
With the saints, a joyful psalm
Ever lifting up on high,
And the Holiest worshipping,
Holy, Holy, Holy sing.
Evermore stand open wide,
Heavenly city, all thy gates.
But, who would in thee abide,
Who thy walls to enter waits,
Must, that meed of life to win,
Agonize to conquer sin.
To the Father, to the Son,
Endless adoration be!
Spirit, binding both in One,
Endless worship unto thee!
Hallowed by thy chrism divine,
We become thy living shrine.
Along with Coffin should be named one of his friends, a young advocate named Combault, who possessed something of the spirit and energy of Jean Santeul. How far he contributed to the Breviary of 1736 I am unable to say, but a well-founded tradition designates him as the author of a splendid rhetorical hymn in commemoration of the Apostles Peter and Paul (Tandem laborum gloriosi Principes), which has been much admired. Combault died in 1785.
The whole impression which this school of hymn-writers makes upon us is like that of the Greco-French architecture of our own age. Both reflect the critical and useful, but somewhat exclusive spirit of the Renaissance. Both are capable of fine effects, great structural beauty, and a certain grandeur not of the highest order. But a Greco-French church will not bear comparison with Notre Dame; and the hymns of Santeul and Coffin will hardly better endure a comparison with the Christian singers who wrote when Notre Dame was new.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE UNKNOWN AND THE LESS KNOWN HYMN-WRITERS.
[Fourth to Tenth Century.]
The known is but a fragment broken from the unknown. This is eminently true as regards the authorship of the Latin hymns. When we have dealt as tenderly as the historical conscience will permit with the traditions which assign hymns to this and that author, we still find ourselves unable to affix any name to the great majority. And while it is true that the most part of the very great hymns are not left in this plight of anonymity, it is true that no small number of the best are on the record like Melchizedek—“without father or mother,” and many of them also “without beginning of years,” for we can determine only approximately the century of their origin. Nor is this at all surprising. Fame was neither the object nor the expectation of the writers of the Latin hymns of the early and Middle Ages. Their utmost expectation, probably, was to be valued a little by their brethren in their own and their sister monasteries as the author of a fine sequence or an appropriate hymn for a yearly festival. It was enough for that purpose that the report of their authorship passed from mouth to mouth in the choir, without any record made of it. The love of glory as a literary motive, came in, as Mr. Symonds reminds us, with the Renaissance, which borrowed it from the old pagans. Many a devout singer of the centuries before that practised the wisdom of à Kempis’s saying, Ama nesciri, “Love to be unknown.” They wrote not for gain in renown, but for use in the edification of their brethren and of the Church. And to live for use rather than gain is to live Christianly, for, as Swedenborg says, “The kingdom of heaven is a kingdom of uses.”
This and the next chapter we shall give partly to some of these orphaned hymns, touching only on the greatest. And as we come down the centuries we shall speak also of the less notable hymn-writers, some of them not less notable as men or as Churchmen, but such as have made less of a mark in hymnology.
At the outset we are met by two of the greatest of the sacred songs of the Church, which are none the less hymns although classed technically as canticles. Who wrote the Gloria in Excelsis and the Te Deum laudamus? As everybody knows, the opening words of the former are the song of the angels who brought the good news to the shepherds—words which authenticate their heavenly origin by their simplicity, beauty, and force—“a master-song,” as Luther says, “which neither grew nor was made on earth, but came down from heaven.” But the much longer supplement, which evidently reflects the situation of the Church in the days of the Arian controversy, must either have originated in the fourth century and in the East, or must have been altered to adapt it to that time. The original still exists in Greek, but in three forms, which differ somewhat; and the Latin version is defective in that it follows a later form than that which is given in the so-called Apostolical Constitutions; and, of course, the English follows the Latin, except in the part taken from the Gospel, where “good will to men” takes the place of “to men of good will” (hominibus bonae voluntatis), the latter being the reading adopted by the English translators of 1611, but rejected by the revisers of 1883.[22]
Who made the Latin version? An untrustworthy tradition ascribes it to Telesphorus, who was Bishop of Rome in 128-38. It is possible that he prescribed the chanting of the Scripture words in the Church service; but the whole hymn is of later date in Latin. There is much more likelihood that it was, according to a tradition recorded by Alcuin in the ninth century, the work of Hilary of Poitiers, the first Latin hymn-writer.
The Te Deum laudamus has some claims to be regarded as the greatest of Christian hymns. Like the Gloria in Excelsis it belongs to that first period of Christian hymn-writing, when the Hebrew psalms still furnished the models for Christian poets, and the same free movement of rhythmical prose was all that was required or even tolerated. There is no mention of it in Church literature before the sixth century, when the monastic rules of both Caesarius of Arles (c. 527) and of Benedict of Nursia (c. 530) prescribe its use, and the Council of Toledo mentions it. As it uses the words of the Vulgate in verses 22-25 and 27 to the end, it cannot, as it now stands, be much more than a century older than this, as the date of the Vulgate is 382-404. Yet a tradition recorded by Abbot Abbo of Fleury in the ninth century, ascribes this hymn also to Hilary of Poitiers, who died fifteen years before Jerome put his hand to the work of revising the Latin Bible. Daniel thinks to reconcile the discrepancy by ascribing it to Hilary of Arles, who was born the year before Jerome had finished his work, and by regarding it as a translation from the Greek, as verses 22-26 certainly are. They are found in the Appendix to the Alexandrian manuscript of the Greek New Testament, where they follow the Gloria in Excelsis with the interruption only of an Amen. But is it not possible to regard the last eight verses as a separate hymn, made up, with the exception of the strong verse—
26. Dignare, Domine, die isto sine peccato nos custodire—
of verses from the Scriptures? These last verses have no internal connection with the first twenty-two, and they differ decidedly in style, form, and source. Those contain no Scripture quotations, except the Ter-Sanctus in verses 5 and 6, which is not taken from the Vulgate version,[23] but apparently from the Itala. If, therefore, we consider those twenty-two verses as a hymn by themselves, this may have been the work of Hilary of Poitiers, and there is no necessity for assuming that it was not an original Latin hymn. This becomes more probable if we drop out verse 13, which interrupts the flow of the Christological thought, and evidently was interpolated to make the hymn complete from a Trinitarian point of view. When the Gloria in Excelsis and the Te Deum were composed, it was the relation of the Son to the Father which occupied the mind of the Church. Both hymns are the expression of “the present truth” on that subject; the mention of the Holy Spirit in both is probably by interpolation at a later date.
As the form, and in some places the meaning of the Te Deum is misrepresented in the current version, it may be worth while to reproduce the original in a more literal version:
1. Thee as God we praise,
Thee as Lord we own,
2. Thee as eternal Father all the earth doth worship,
3. Thee all the angels—
To thee heaven and all its powers,
4. To thee cherubim and seraphim with unceasing voice cry aloud,
5. Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth,
6. The heavens and the earth are full of the majesty of thy glory!
7. Thee the glorious choir of the apostles,
8. Thee the praiseworthy company of the prophets,
9. Thee the white-robed army of the martyrs praiseth.
10. Thee, through the circle of the lands, the Holy Church confesseth
11. Father of unbounded majesty;
12. Thy adorable, true and only Son.
13 (14). Thou King of glory, O Christ,
14 (15). Thou of the Father art the Son eternal.
15 (16). Thou, to deliver us, tookest manhood,
Thou didst not dread the Virgin’s womb.
16 (17). Thou, since thou hast overcome the sting of death,
Hast opened to believers the kingdom of heaven.
17 (18). Thou, at the right hand of God, sittest in the glory of the Father;
18 (19). As our judge thou art believed to be coming.
19 (20) Thee therefore we beg,
Assist thy servants whom thou hast redeemed with precious blood.
20 (21). Cause us to be gifted, among thy saints, with eternal glory.
Amen.
There are no other unfathered hymns known to be of this century, and few less notable hymn-writers. To Jerome is ascribed a hymn, Te Bethlehem celebrat, which is not in any of the collections. His great contemporary, Augustine of Hippo, has had more than one fine hymn assigned to him, probably because his works have furnished the suggestion for so many. Notably Peter Damiani and Hildebert of Tours drew upon him. But the great theologian was not a poet, as we can see from his one essay in that form, viz., his “psalm” against the Donatists, in which he gives a popular and metrical exposition of the parable of the net (Matt. 13:47-50). It is quite enough to prove that he did not write the Ad perennis vitae fontem (Damiani), or the Quid, tyranne, quid minaris (Damiani), or the O gens beata coelitum, or even the Domine Jesu, noverim me, all of which have been given to him at times.
To the fifth century—the century of Prudentius and Ennodius—we may ascribe the earlier in the large group of hymns classed as Ambrosian, which are the work of a series of writers who may be described as constituting a school. It is one of the hardest problems in Latin hymnology to distinguish between Ambrose’s own work and that of his imitators, and to arrange the hymns composed by the latter between the fifth and the eighth century in any chronological order. What can be said positively has been shown in Chapter V. The chief authorities on the subject are the early collectors, Clichtove, Cassander, and Thomasius. Of considerable importance is the MS. given by Francis Junius in the seventeenth century to the University of Oxford, and published in 1830 by Jacob Grimm. It contains a collection of twenty-six hymns by Ambrose and the Ambrosians, with a translation into old High German, probably made at St. Gall in the ninth century. But these do not exhaust the list. Others have been pointed out by Mone and other collectors, as proving their kinship to the school by their metrical form or their contents and style. Schletterer enumerates ninety hymns of the school, and of these he assigns fifteen to Ambrose himself.
Closely related to the group, and yet not assigned to it, are several hymns to which a very early date is assigned by Mone at least. To this fifth century he gives the Unam duorum gloriam, which he also claims as of German origin, and describes as one of the oldest hymns of the German Church. It is in commemoration of two martyrs, to whose honor a church near Münster was dedicated, and is strictly classic in metre. Here also he assigns the Christi caterva clamitat, an Advent hymn of classic metre and primitive tone. He probably would agree with Wackernagel in selecting the same century for the hymn on Stephen, the protomartyr, Primatis aulae coelicae, in which he finds reminders of the style of Prudentius. Lastly, he assigns this date to the Paschal hymn, Te lucis auctor personat, which became obsolete when its special reference to Easter as the time of the baptism of adult catechumens lost its significance. It was used in France and probably other countries.
To the same fifth century belongs Paulinus, Bishop of Nola (353-431), who has many better claims to remembrance than his hymns. He was one of those men of whom their contemporaries cannot speak without enthusiasm, and as Augustine, Jerome, and Ambrose are among his eulogists we may assume that the praise was not undeserved. He came of a noble Gallic stock; he inherited wealth and acquired from the teaching of the poet Ausonius all the culture of his time; he filled high office in Italy and Spain; he spent the last twenty-two years of his life in administering with a faithful laboriousness the affairs of a Campanian bishopric. He did not receive baptism until his thirty-fifth year, so that he may have been brought up a pagan, although the inference is not necessary. In 378 he was made Roman consul to fill an unexpired term (consul suffectus), and was sent into Campania at the end of the year. There he was so deeply impressed by a festival in honor of the martyr Vincent of Nola, that his affections were drawn strongly to the city. But soon after he married a Spanish wife and went to live first at Bordeaux and then at Barcelona. At the former in 389 he was received into the membership of the Church; at the latter he and his wife, after the death of their infant son, resolved to renounce the “secular” life and to give themselves to asceticism and charity. He was ordained to the priesthood in response to a general demand of the people during the Christmas festivities. He removed to Nola, where he and his wife lived in the service of the poor, in an age when the incursions of Goths and Vandals were producing frightful wretchedness. He seems to have held right views of the responsibility of property, and instead of divesting himself of it at once, he kept it to use for his brethren. Nor did he separate from his wife after the fashion of Ennodius and others of the age. They labored together to the end. About 409 he was elected Bishop of Nola, and occupied that see until his death. Among his gifts to his people was a new aqueduct to supply their town with pure water, an evidence of his breadth of mind and genuine humanity. When he died he was added to the list of the recognized saints, and few with better right.
His literary achievement was not great, although everything he has written has its interest. His epistles and poems are reflections of both his excellence and his faults. They show at once the good heart of the man and his proneness to superstition. But his contemporaries thought his poems wonderful, and even some of the moderns have re-echoed this estimate. Erasmus calls him “the Christian Cicero,” a title more frequently assigned to Lactantius. Caspar Barth, in his Adversaria (1624), declines to rank any other Christian poet above him. His poems exhibit the decadence of Latin verse, in that quantity is often neglected and accent used to replace it. Only a few of them are hymns in any sense, and these are narrative or reflective rather than lyric. Bjorn gives two of them in his collection.
This fifth century also brings us the first woman among the Christian singers. Elpis, identified by a somewhat doubtful tradition with Helpes, the first wife of the pagan philosopher Boethius, has left a florid hymn in honor of the Apostles Peter and Paul, which holds its place in modified form in the Roman Breviary, and is divided into two hymns. She employs accentuated verse, while the verses in Boethius’s classic work, De Consolatione Philosophiae, conform to the quantitative prosody of classic poetry. Another hymn on the same Apostles, Felix per omnes festum mundi cardines, is ascribed to her and also to Paulinus of Nola. The Breviary hymn, Miris modis repente liber, is a recast of part of it.
There are several poems and chronicles which are ascribed to Prosper Tyro, whom some identify with Prosper of Aquitaine (403-65), the Gallic champion of strict Augustinian orthodoxy against the semi-Pelagian party in that province—John Cassian, Vincent of Lerins, etc. This is the more likely, as Prosper loved to “drop into poetry” even in his controversial treatises. George Cassander includes a hymn from Prosper Tyro’s works in his collection.
Many of the finest of Ambrosian hymns, which have taken rank among the favorites of Western Christendom, as sharing the noble spirit and the torrent-like power of utterance of the great Bishop of Milan, are credited by the hymnologists to the sixth century—the age of Benedict of Nursia, Caesarius of Arles, Belisarius, and Gregory the Great. We give Mr. Duffield’s translation of two of the finest, regretting that he did not live to translate others which he had marked with that view in his Index: