The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

“VEXILLA REGIS PRODEUNT.”

The royal banners forward fly;

The cross upon them cheers the sky;

That cross whereon our Maker hung,

In human form, by anguish wrung.

For he was wounded bitterly

By that dread spear-thrust on the tree,

And there, to set us free from guilt,

His very life in blood he spilt.

Accomplished now is what was told

By David in his psalm of old,

Who saith,[5] “The heathen world shall see

God as their King upon the tree.”

O tree, renowned and shining high,

Thy crimson is a royal dye!

Elect from such a worthy root

To bear those holy limbs, thy fruit.

Blessèd upon whose branches then

Hung the great gift of God to men;

Whose price, of human life and breath,

Redeemed us from the thrall of death.

Thy bark exhales a perfume sweet

With which no nectar may compete;

And, joyful in thine ample fruit,

A noble triumph crowns thy root.

Hail, altar! and thou, Victim, hail!

Thy glorious passion shall not fail;

Whereby our life no death might lack,

And life from death be rendered back.

O Cross, our only hope, all hail!

In this the time when woes assail,

To all the pious grant thy grace,

And all the sinners’ sins efface!

At this time Fortunatus also composed a long poem of thanks to Justin and Sophia for gifts sent to himself, by which it would appear that he was tolerably well identified with the interests of Radegunda and her convent.

From this date onward his friendship with Agnes and Radegunda exposed both him and them to very considerable comment. He even refers to it in one of his poems, addressed to the abbess, in which he protests the purity of his conduct. But it is not hard to see how his expressions might be misunderstood. They are frequently fervid beyond the courtesies of compliment, and they remind us all the while of those singers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries who begin with William, Count of this very city of Poitiers (1071-1127), and who have made the name of “troubadour” synonymous with the praise of love and beauty. Fortunatus calls on Christ, and Peter, and Paul, and Mary to witness the entire propriety of his love for Agnes and Radegunda, but he follows it with lines which Bertrand de Born or Alain Chartier might have composed.

Really there is a great deal of this exuberant poetry in the worthy chaplain. He wrote every sort of odd acrostic on the holy cross, reminding us in more ways than one of Damasus, or of the later cavalier poets of England. He tells Radegunda, who seems his principal star, that everything is alike when he does not see her; that although the sky is cloudless, yet, if she is absent, “the day stands without a sun.” He excuses himself in other verses for sending her violets instead of lilies and roses. Any incident in which Radegunda plays a part is enough to turn the poetic stream upon the mill-wheel of his verse. If there are flowers on the altar; if there are flowers sent by her to himself; if she has retired from the world to perform her vows; if she has returned again to the public gaze, and especially if he has been at a little dinner or has received some agreeable little dishes—then the bard strings his harp!

It is quite amusing to read some of these effusions. He advises Radegunda, as Paul did Timothy, to drink wine on occasion. And when the queen and the abbess conspire to make his life pleasant he has plenty of metrical gratitude to offer. They send him butter (butyr) in a lordly dish; they furnish chestnuts in baskets woven by their own hands; they provide milk, and prunelles, and olives, and eggs. For all these he renders thanks in kind. Never were eggs and butter sung in a loftier strain! But sometimes the poet descends a trifle from his elevated phrases. He says pathetically in one of these effusions that they sent him “various delicacies for his full stomach” (tumido ventre), and that he got asleep after it and failed to furnish the appropriate verses. He laments this in proper metre, declaring that he had opened his mouth and shut his eyes (the old gormandizer!) and had eaten on, regardless of his duty. And for this he craves forgiveness from his beata domnia [it ought to be domina] filia—his blessed queen-daughter. But be good enough to observe that his own gifts in return are very small, and that he is always apologizing and hoping that they may not be rejected. Truly this was such a man as Sir Walter Scott has sung, for

“The best of good cheer and the seat by the fire

Was the undenied right of the barefooted friar.”

Only it may be safely questioned whether our Fortunatus was any more of an ascetic than Damasus himself. One almost wishes for an historical picture—and it should be a good theme, by the way—in which Fortunatus and his two friends appear. It should be that celebrated feast which he describes [J. P. Migne: Patrologia; Opera Fortunati, Lib. xi., cap. ii.], where Agnes had adorned the tables and the apartment with “every species of blossoming plant;” where the rich wines, and the generous fare, and the crystal, and the gold, and the flowers should brighten the fine hall of the chateau; and where, perhaps, the ecclesiastic should take his small harp and strike its strings with a delicate hand, while the fair face of Agnes and the darker beauty of Radegunda should inspire his song.

One traces to this mellow undercurrent of human life the swing of his best lyrics—the Pange lingua gloriosi praelium certaminis and those hymns to the Virgin of which he was the earliest promoter. No ene can doubt the influence of these women upon the Ave maris stella or the Quem terra pontus aethera. Say what we please about his piety, he has written what will live with the best. And to compare him to the melancholy Cowper, as Mrs. Charles has done, can only be characterized as a most amusing misconception.

We know nothing of him as bishop further than the fact that the office became vacant in 599, and he was an available as well as distinguished candidate. Surviving Radegunda, who passed away in 587, he died about 609, full of years and honors—the last of the classics and the first of the troubadours; the connecting link between Prudentius and the Middle Ages; the biographer of some of the saints and the interested collector of many legends of their miracles; and, finally, the first of Christian poets to begin that worship of the Virgin Mary which rose to a passion and sank to an idolatry. Venantius Fortunatus was neither a bad man nor, in the highest sense, a holy man. But he was a poet in spite of his barbaric Latin, and a writer of hymns which live to-day, long after the particulars of his career are forgotten.

CHAPTER X.
GREGORIUS MAGNUS [540-604].

The materials which are at hand for the life of Gregory the Great are, if anything, too numerous. In their original form they include all that Paul the Deacon (quoted by the Venerable Bede) and John the Deacon (quoted by everybody) have chosen to relate. And these have been so anxious to do entire justice to the great Pope that they fill their pages with miracles, wonders, and signs, as well as with the authentic facts of history. But Gregory carved for himself such a niche in the temple of fame that we are not likely to go very far astray in searching for the proper estimate of his work.

It may be safely assumed that from this pontificate dates the supremacy of the Roman see. It was Gregory whose missionary spirit opened the doors of Britain to the truth. It was he who, without asserting any superior claim, opposed successfully the encroachments of the Greek patriarchs. And it was again he who gave to the Church her sacred melodies.

He was born, says Paul the Deacon, in the city of Rome, of a father named Gordianus and a mother named Sylvia. These people were of the Anician family and were also of distinguished religious descent. Felix—fourth of the name and Pope under the title of Felix III.—was his atavus, or great-great-great-grandfather. The very name Gregorius our worthy deacon declares to be the Greek equivalent of the word “Watchful.”

The child of such a house would be well nurtured in all the learning of the time. Hence, he was trained in grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics—the ancient trivium or complete course of liberal education. Naturally, too, he became an excellent scholar. And when he grew up he was called to an important post in Roman civil affairs. He became praetor of the city—a city which was subject to Byzantium and exposed to incursions of various barbarian invaders. The Lombards, indeed, attacked it during his praetorship.

At this period of his life his love for display was as remarkable as his subsequent simplicity. He delighted in rich attire and surrounded himself with the pomp and circumstance of his position. A rich man and a rich man’s son, he was thoroughly in sympathy with passing affairs, and as Rome bloomed the more vigorously above her own decay, he was himself one of those “flowers of evil” whose gaudy hues brightened the scene. But at the same time he became accustomed to the management of large affairs, and his administration secured to him the good will of his associates and subordinates. It can often be noticed that these early Fathers came to their power in the Church after having been strictly and carefully trained in the world. Hilary and Ambrose were as conspicuous examples of this foreordination as was Gregory the Great.

Not long previous to this time—for it had been about the year of Gregory’s birth—Benedict had reformed the monastic order. His work, to put it briefly, consisted in guarding the entrance to monasticism and in regulating the hours, habits, and customs of those celibates who professed such a vocation for the religious life. From his wise and systematic arrangements, which have been but little improved upon though often reinforced by “reformations,” monasticism derived that adaptation to the active and practical life of the West, which it had lacked in the preceding centuries. Indeed, he so far reacted against the contemplative idleness of the East, as to aim rather at an industrial than a learned order. But his successors corrected this defect, and gave the order the literary and educational character which has been its greatest claim to the gratitude of Christendom. Thus it came to be that the Benedictine Fathers became the order of scholars, the editors of the Fathers, of the Acta Sanctorum, and of the Histoire Litteraire de France. The permanent revenues, the fixity and quiet of these monastic lives, the slow coral-building of these unknown workers, have resulted in gathering for us all that the mediaeval historian can desire upon the religious side. And it is here that, delving amid the dust of these mountainous masses of literature, the student of Latin hymnology will find his rarest delight. For these acute scholars have literally picked up and printed, yea, and what is more to the purpose, they have indexed and classified—whatever he can wish in the way of productions in prose and verse by any known author. The old MSS. are strained through into readable type. Their contents are sorted and sifted. And he who pores over these pages will rise from them at length with a profound conviction that the scholarship of the Latin Church, and particularly the Benedictine Order, deserves well from the world of letters and merits the admiration of the Church Universal.

Into such an order as this—an order of which he was to be one of the most illustrious lights—a divine impulse was pressing Gregory. He grew more closely attached to the Benedictines of Monte Cassino. His religious relatives encouraged his evident zeal. And thus after vibrating like a bee between the odorous rose and the honey-giving clover, he settled upon the humbler and sweeter flower and let the world go by.

The Arian Lombards had encamped upon that region which we after their name now call Lombardy. The Roman bishops were already the prop of the heathen state against the semi-Christian invaders; but with Lombards, and those whose religion was only a fiction, their influence was deplorably slight. Yet as Christianity increased, according to George Herbert’s simile,

“Like to those trees whom shaking fastens more,”

the Church became doubly influential through the skill of Gregory. He felt religion to be the source of the truest strength and thus he turned his wealth and his life into its treasury.

In the year 575 he took his great revenues and endowed six new monasteries in Sicily. Then he established a seventh, devoting it to the honor of St. Andrew; and this was at Rome, in his own palace on the Coelian hill. The populace who had seen him in silk and jewels now beheld him, a poor monk of the Benedictine Order, serving the beggars at the gate. In humility of demeanor and in simplicity of food he became a model to his fellow-monks. He attended the sick in his new hospital. He ate only the dried corn, or pulse, which his mother sent to him already moistened in a silver bowl. This bowl or porringer was the only relic of his departed splendor, and we are told that he did not keep even this, but gave it at last to a shipwrecked sailor for whom he had no money, and who begged importunately from him when he was writing in his cell.

The intensity of his devotion led him into great austerities of fasting and prayer and study of the Scriptures. He outdid the others in his abstinence from food and ended by ruining his health, so that he entered the papacy with a broken constitution. When he most needed the support of a vigorous body it was therefore denied to him.

The history of his gradual elevation is suggestive. Pope Benedict I. made him one of the seven cardinal deacons, and gave him charge of one of the seven principal divisions of the city. Pelagius II. chose him to head an embassy to Constantinople in 578 to congratulate Tiberius on his accession to the throne. For six years he remained abroad on this and similar service, and returned to Rome to be elected abbot of St. Andrew’s monastery. Here he was perfectly happy. In his Dialogues he speaks of the serene life and death of several of his brethren, and his latest biographer (Rev. J. Barmby) is never tired of relating how the great Pope perpetually looked back with regretful love to those quiet and happy days of peace with God and man.

It was then that the famous incident occurred which has made historic his missionary zeal, and has handed down three Latin puns as a proof that a man can be witty as well as earnest.

The slave market at Rome had received some new captives—alas! when was it not the scene of fresh wretchedness in those awful times? But these were of remarkable beauty and fairness of skin, and John the Deacon shall tell us of them in his own words:[6]

“Perceiving among the rest certain boys for sale, white of body, fair in form, and handsome in face, distinguished moreover by the brightness (nitore) of their hair, he asked the merchant from what country he had brought them. He answered, ‘From the island of Britain, whose inhabitants all display a similar beauty (candore) of face.’ Gregory said, ‘Are those islanders Christians or do they yet hold to their pagan errors?’ The merchant replied, ‘They are not Christians, but are entangled in their pagan delusions’ (laqueis). Then Gregory, groaning deeply, said, ‘Alas! for shame! that the prince of darkness should own those splendid faces; and that such glorious foreheads (tantaque frontis species) should express a mind vacant of the inward grace of God!’ Then he asked the name of their tribe. The merchant responded, ‘They are called Angli.’ Then he said, ‘They are well called Angli, as though they were angels (angeli) for they have angelic faces; and such as these should be fellow-citizens of the angels in heaven.’ Again, therefore, he inquired what was the name of their province. The merchant told him ‘Those provincials are called Deiri.’ Then Gregory said, ‘They are well called Deiri, for they must be snatched from wrath (de ira) and gathered to the grace of Christ. The king of that province,’ he continued, ‘how is he named?’ The merchant replied, ‘He is called Aelle.’ And Gregory, alluding to the name, said, ‘It is well that the king is called Aelle. For Alleluia in praise of the Creator must be sung in those parts.’”

Such was the commencement of that Christianizing process which eventually brought Anglo-Saxon monks to Rome for education—not that Rome was the chief source and centre from which the work of Christianizing the English was effected. That strangely organized Church, which Patrick had established in Ireland and Columcille (Columba) had propagated to Celtic Scotland, was the missionary Church of that age. Its zeal carried the faith to Scandinavia in the person of its royal converts, the two Olafs, besides Christianizing the Norsemen of Ireland and the lesser islands. Its missionaries poured southward across the lines that sundered Saxon from Celt, and co-operated mightily with the more languid efforts of the Kentish Church established by Augustine. And up to the Synod of Whitby in 664, Patrick rather than Peter was the saint who stood the highest in the esteem of English Christians.

Yet it would be unfair to rob Gregory and Augustine of the honor of having begun the work, and begun it on a higher and more permanent level than was possible to the Irish Church. After all, Rome stood for a wider conception of Church and social order and a broader Christian culture. It is to her victory that we owe Bede and the great Churchmen, who adapted the learning and lore of the Latin world to the needs of English Christendom. And so in Augustine’s mission we may see the apostolic succession, in a broader sense of the word than the technical, carried to England, to be transmitted in turn to America. England acknowledged the gift in the establishment of the tax called “Peter’s Pence” for the care and support of pilgrims to Rome, and the support of clerics, who went to study in the Saxon school established in Rome. To this we may trace, perhaps, the spread of hymn-writing from Rome to England, whose results are gathered into the Missals and Breviaries of Sarum, York, and Hereford, and that elaborate compilation, “The Hymns of the Anglo-Saxon Church,” which Rev. J. Stevenson edited for the Surtees Society.

The mission of Augustine led to far-reaching consequences. One was that the higher classes of Great Britain turned toward Rome as the centre of the world, and one of the remoter consequences of this missionary expedition was the recognition of the papal supremacy. But in his highest flight of authority Gregory the First never assumed nor felt the consciousness of power which caused Gregory the Second to write to Leo, the Isaurian: “All the lands of the West have their eyes directed upon our humility; by them we are considered as a God upon earth.” No, nor did he press his claims as did his other successor, Gregory VII., some times known as Hildebrand.

Indeed, Gregory I. in his desire to save these beautiful captives offered himself to Pope Pelagius as a missionary, and even obtained his consent to the expedition. But we are informed that the people surrounded the pontiff on his way to St. Peter’s and begged him to recall their favorite. So that Gregory had gone but three days’ journey before he was overtaken and brought back, almost forcibly, to his monastic home. The scheme of saving Britain was thus deferred but not given up; and when the cardinal-deacon became Pope it was again revived, and with success.

In the year 590 Pelagius II. died of the plague. His chair was no sooner empty than Gregory was seen to be the choice of everyone—senate and people and clergy. He was accordingly elected, and then—for such was the feeling in those days—he resisted the honor with all his might. Like Ambrose he fled from the city; he disguised himself; he even wandered in the woods. But it was one of the old principles that the more the elect refused the more their calling and election were to be made sure to them. And therefore, he was found at last, after a thorough search, and was led, literally in tears, back to Rome. He had begged the Emperor Maurice not to confirm this appointment, but it was to no effect that he pleaded for release. His quiet, peaceful days were over, and he was placed at the helm of the ship of the Church to steer her, and the commonwealth which was her freight, through floods of barbarians and into safer seas. I am using his own figure: “I am so beaten by the waves of this world,” he wrote, to his friend Leander, “that I despair of being able to guide to port this rotten old vessel with which God has charged me. I weep when I recall the peaceful shore which I have left and sigh in perceiving afar what I cannot now attain.”

He took his seat in the midst of the plague. Eighty persons in the processions which he organized at seven points in the city to pray at the church of Santa Maria-Maggiore for its cessation, died of the disease during their very progress. Each procession met the others at this church of St. Mary. One consisted of secular clergy; another of abbots and monks; a third of abbesses and nuns; a fourth of children; a fifth of laymen; a sixth of widows, and a seventh of matrons. And thus arose the story about the angel whom Gregory believed that he saw above the summit of the Mole of Hadrian, and who there stood and sheathed his sword. This legend gave to that structure the name of the Castello di San Angelo, the Castle of the Holy Angel.

The Lombards were Gregory’s first care. He corresponded with Theodolinda, their queen, and she became his constant friend and his advocate with the king. He finally obtained from King Agilulf (her second husband) a special truce for Rome and its neighboring territory—a most delightful relief from the terrors of the last thirty years.

Moreover, he directed his attention—as Hormisdas had done before him—to the struggle which was never at rest between the Greek and Roman churches. The Patriarch of Constantinople was determined to assert his own superior claims to the veneration of the faithful. Hormisdas had avowed—but never vindicated—the supremacy of the Pope. But his title of Papa was the result of mere adulation and never of general consent. And the patriarch happened to be at this time the strong-willed John the Faster—an austere and pugnacious man. It was natural therefore that he should claim the title of Universal Bishop, and it was equally natural that Gregory, without demanding anything especial for himself, should resist John.

In this controversy—and in those others where his works bear testimony to his literary and political skill—we see Gregory at his best. He is not deficient in satire; occasionally he indulges in playful humor; but he never forgets principle nor flinches from the prosecution of his cause. It cannot be said of him that he proposes to overrule the civil authorities, but he unquestionably tells them some exceedingly plain truths. To the Emperor Maurice he wrote remonstrating against his refusal to allow a soldier to become a monk: “To this by me, the last of His servants and yours, will Christ reply, ‘From a notary I made thee a count of the body-guard; from a count of the body-guard I made thee a Caesar; from a Caesar I made thee an emperor; nay, more, I have made thee also a father of emperors; I have committed My priests into thy hand; and dost thou withdraw thy soldiers from My service?’ Answer thy servant, most pious lord, I pray thee, and say how thou wilt reply to thy Lord in the judgment, when He comes and thus speaks.” In this style he alternately appealed and remonstrated in his dealing with the powers that be.

To John the Faster, however, he administered gall and honey—sometimes separately and sometimes mixed together. “Your holy Fraternity,” he says, on one occasion, “has replied to me, as appears from the signature of the letter, that you were ignorant of what I had written about. At which reply I was mightily astonished, pondering with myself in silence, if what you say is true, what can be worse than that such things should be done against God’s servants and he who is over them should be ignorant?” Two monks had in fact been beaten with cudgels for heresy and finally resorted to Rome in defiance of John, where Gregory pardoned and restored them. The Pope continues: “But, if your holiness did know both what subject I wrote about and what had been done, either against John, the Presbyter, or against Athanasius, monk of Isauria and a presbyter, and have written to me, ‘I know not,’ what can I reply to this, since Scripture says, ‘The mouth that lies slays the soul?’ I ask, most holy brother, has all that great abstinence of yours come to this, that you would, by denial, conceal from your brother what you know to have been done?”

If we are, in spite of this plainness, disposed to be severe upon Gregory’s subservience to the civil power of the Byzantine Court, we shall find an instance in his behavior toward Phocas. This man had murdered the Emperor Maurice, gouty and helpless as he was; and had previously put his six sons to death before his eyes. The good old emperor died like a hero, repeating the words of the psalm, “Thou, O Lord, art just, and all Thy judgments are right.” And we need only to turn to Gregory’s writings to prove that the dead man was his friend and had done him many a kindness.

Notwithstanding these gracious and excellent memories of the late emperor, the Senate and people had hailed the advent of Phocas with rapturous delight. His image and that of his wife had been sent to Rome, and now, with the uproar rising to his windows, Gregory descended to the common level of detestable approbation, and caused these images to be carried into the oratory of the Lateran palace. “This,” says one of his biographers, “is the only stain upon the life of Gregory. We do not attempt either to conceal it or to excuse it.” True, Maurice had been a vexatious old man, and his piety, while it was undeniable, was nevertheless somewhat acrid. But the Bishop of Rome should have had sufficient strength at least to repress any tumultuous joy over an act of murderous ambition and hateful selfishness. This, however, is the weakness of many a prelate. In the hour of trial he bends like a reed to the blast, when we should expect him to be an oak, and trust to his roots to grapple him safely down to the firm earth of principle. This great blot, conceded by all candid historians, remains upon his memory.

It is a better picture for us to view when, forsaking his trust in the mercy of barbarians or the senility of despotic power, Gregory looked outward to the new nations and sought to furnish the Roman Church with fresh vigor and vital help from this unwasted source of strength. He corresponded with Childebert II., the unfortunate young King of Austrasia, the son of the notorious but intellectual Brunehilda. With him and with the French bishops he labored to secure the destruction of “simony,” by which was meant the bargain and sale of ecclesiastical positions. He also strove to prevent laymen from being elevated to the episcopate, though he should have remembered that Hilary of Poitiers was a notable argument against his fears.

He also attended to the religious matters of Spain. This province had ceased to be Arian in 587 with the accession of Recared; and with it and with Istria he was entirely successful in his methods of unity and peace. He also overcame the Donatist party in Africa, who had for years been ordaining their own bishops side by side with the regular succession, and sometimes in actual alternation with them.

To crown all, he organized a mission to the distant island of the fair-faced Angli in 596, the very date at which the young Childebert perished by poison in the twenty-sixth year of his age. Then it was that Augustine, after one recoil which showed that he was not quite up to the mark of Gregory’s zeal, finally set out in earnest with forty companions. The month was July. The mission was almost an embassy. It went through the intervening kingdoms endorsed to and by their kings. And it went to cheer the little feeble remnant of the Celtic Christians who had escaped the Saxon sword, and to draw from the Venerable Bede his grateful tribute to the man who had already well deserved the title of great. “For,” says Bede, “if Gregory be not to others an apostle, he is one to us, for the seal of his apostleship are we in the Lord.”

When we remember, also, his secular services in saving Rome from sack and pillage, we cannot but perceive that he was laying, broad and deep, the foundations of that temporal authority which the Pope of Rome was soon to claim. The revenues of the Roman bishop were growing enormously. He had in Sicily and elsewhere his agents and stewards (defensores). He was rapidly arising to a position of almost independent dignity. His deference to kings was only that of Christian courtesy and love. In another man some of this might have been disfigured by self-seeking and moral obliquity of purpose. In Gregory we find, throughout his career, a noble integrity which was certainly austere enough, but which was in the main pure and free from spot. His weakness was that of overconciliation, of which the case of Phocas is a flagrant example. But his strength was in his just judgment and in his masterful manipulation of the materials before him.

In his way, too, he saved Christian art as well as Christian music. He condemns the Bishop of Marseilles (Massilia) for having broken some statues of the saints. And while his remonstrance may perhaps be quoted in favor of image-worship, it certainly cannot be quoted for that blind iconoclasm which would destroy pagan beauty before the shrine of Christian ugliness. In the association of his name with the Gregorian chant he did almost as great a kindness to the Church as did Ambrose when he brought to her services the Greek hymns of the East.

He was a sick man while he labored at these matters of devotion and duty. Rheumatic gout attacked him and crippled his joints. We must add to this that he was not without enemies, and not without many a little sting and thrust of vicious tongues and pens. But he endured to the end, and he probably was sincere when he wrote himself down as Servus servorum—though there have been other popes since his day to follow the custom, and who were the “servants of servants” only according to the “devil’s darling sin, the pride that apes humility.”

Thirteen years he held the keys of St. Peter. Busy until the last moment, he wrote or dictated the correspondence which was required. But the disease which was upon him steadily increased until, on March 12th, 604, he was released from suffering and from care. His portrait shows him as a man with high and wrinkled forehead; a thin beard around the cheeks and chin; large, deep-set eyes; straight and manly nose, and a singular lock—almost like that in the conventional portrait of Father Time—upon his brow. There are a great many doctors of divinity who do not a little resemble him to-day. It is a good face, but a somewhat stern and severe one—of the sort to make credible the story that he had a special whip for his choristers, and used it when it was needed.

His works fill several volumes in the Patrologia. His Morals, a commentary upon Job, is the very best of his books; but he was probably ignorant of both Hebrew and Greek, and hence his comments on Scripture are rather more homiletical and practical than scholarly. The Pastoral Rule was translated into Saxon by King Alfred, who admired its practical wisdom, and sent a copy to every bishop in his kingdom; under Charles the Great also it was much esteemed in France. His Letters are the great mine of information upon his personal opinions and methods. The Dialogues were addressed to Theodolinda, and in these we find some superstition; and indeed a fondness for saints’ miracles and a weakness for relics were characteristic of his otherwise sensible conduct. He wrote but nine hymns which are authentically traceable to his pen. They are the Primo dierum omnium; the Nocte surgentes vigilemus; the Ecce jam noctis; the Lucis Creator optime; the Clarum decus jejunii; the Audi benigne Conditor; the Magno salutis gaudio, the Jam Christus astra ascenderat, and the Rex Christe, factor omnium. With a lesser degree of probability he has been named as the author of the Aeterne Rex altissime; the En more docti mystico; the Lignum crucis mirabile; the Noctis tempus jam praeterit; the Nunc tempus acceptabile; and the Summi largitor praemii.

Of these the Rex Christe, factor omnium delighted Luther so much that he declared it in his impetuous way “the best hymn ever written”—an opinion which he would find few nowadays to endorse. Gregory disliked pagan literature and cultivated the style and prosody of Ambrose. It is possible, therefore, that among the Ambrosian hymns there may be those which he has written and which are credited to an earlier date. But the cause of hymnology suffers little by the loss. He was not a poet; but as the man who made the papacy a thing and not a name—as the man who evangelized Britain—and as the man who gave the Gregorian tones to the praises of the Church, he will be held in kindly and lasting remembrance. There was in him a vein of peculiar sarcasm as well as of deep earnestness and of great sagacity, yet his literary merits are not to be weighed against those words and actions written viewlessly on the air, but which still effectually vibrate through the polity of the Roman Catholic Church.

CHAPTER XI.
THE VENERABLE BEDE.

It happened with Bede as with some other Latin hymn-writers—there were several persons who had the same name as himself. Hilary and Fortunatus and Notker are not the only cases of confusion, for there were certainly three Bedes, and they were not long removed from each other in point of time. Beda Major—the elder or greater Bede—was a presbyter and monk of Lindisfarne, commemorated by his more celebrated namesake. Another was a holy man of the time of Charles the Great. But our own Beda or Bedan was a presbyter and monk of Jarrow, and is distinguished from the rest by the title of “Venerable,” which he shares with Peter the Venerable of Cluny.

There are few finer figures in early English history. Sprung from pagan and utterly illiterate ancestry, he has taken his place as an historian, a scholar, a natural philosopher, and a poet; and in every department of this varied knowledge he has shown his ability and industry. English literature recalls him; English history praises him; English scholarship has elaborately edited his writings, and English patriotism has affectionately honored his memory.

Cuthbert, his disciple, who wrote his life, begins his narration in the following words:

“The presbyter Beda, venerable and beloved of God, was born in the province of Northumbria, in the territory of the monasteries of the Apostles Peter and Paul, which is in Wearmouth and at Jarrow, in the year of our Lord’s incarnation the six hundred and seventy-seventh, which is the second year of the solitary life of St. Cuthbert.” It also was the ninth year after the reduction of Saxon England to the Roman obedience at the Synod of Whitby.

Bede himself relates that when he was seven years of age the care of his education was committed by his relatives to the Abbot Benedict and afterward to the Abbot Ceolfrid. He adds that from that date to the time at which he prepared the accompanying list of his works he had spent his days in the same place. His existence was passed in meditating upon the Holy Scriptures; and he “found it sweet,” in the midst of his observance of the conventual discipline and daily chanting in the church, “either to learn, or to teach, or to write.” The choice of this word “sweet” (dulce) is significant, for no man could more carefully have mingled the sweet with the useful. A gentle spirit breathes across his studious pages, as over the rough beards of the yellow grain a breeze moves and sways them, harsh though they are, in graceful waves. For he loved learning with a perfect avidity. His works reveal his desire to accumulate it—to teach it again in plain and simple fashions—and this benevolent desire redeems many a tedious discourse.

This life of his was devoid of personal incident. He includes nothing of his individual history in the little notices which he makes of contemporary events, and he is singularly silent even about the affairs of which we should think he would naturally speak. The light which we get upon his surroundings and circumstances we must, therefore, derive from other sources, but fortunately these are at hand. We know, for example, that Benedict Biscop, who founded those twin monasteries in which Bede dwelled all his life, was himself a remarkable person. He was of noble birth, and gave up place and ambition in the court of the king to proceed to Rome, there to be trained as a monk, and then to return and found Wearmouth in 674 and Jarrow in 682. To the second of these religious establishments, situated upon the Tyne, Bede was transferred under Ceolfrid, its first abbot, and there thenceforth he remained. We are even able to determine his usual food as a school-boy, for, says his latest biographer, Rev. G. F. Browne, “we have a colloquy in which a boy is made to describe his daily food in his monastery. He had worts (i.e., kitchen herbs), fish, cheese, butter, beans, and flesh meats. He drank ale when he could get it, and water when he could not; wine was too dear.” There is, indeed, in these Saxon monasteries the honest and hearty food which belonged to their age and people. Cedric the Saxon, in Sir Walter Scott’s novel of Ivanhoe, represents very fairly the popular feeling on the subject. Chaucer, too, can be quoted upon this same profusion and the generosity of the time. Of the Franklin he says:

“It snowed in his house of meat and drink.”

With such a patron as Biscop the monasteries never lacked any good thing. He brought back from the Continent the best matters of the period—books, pictures, relics, skilled mechanics, makers of stained glass, and choir-masters. He saw before him a land in which the monk was to be the conservator and promoter of learning. And in carrying out this purpose he did more than plant a monastery, for he planted and reared a man. We have the word of that historian whose life and death so nearly approach those of his favorite author, when we declare that “prose took its first shape in the Latin history of Baeda.” For John Henry Greene closed his history of the English people much as Bede ended his own career, weary with his labor and yet completing what he had begun.

That which lies before us is what Greene finely styles “the quiet grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge.” It was no hoarding, avaricious, trilobite life to be fossilized for future ages in the dead strata of ecclesiastical records. Instead, it concerned itself with all learning; and though it perished in the blackness of a general ignorance, it is a source of light and force to-day.

But let us return to Bede’s brief points of change. While he was still a boy, the monastery was desolated by one of the great plagues which followed the Synod of Whitby, and every monk who knew how to sing in the choir, except the Abbot and Bede, were among the victims. Unaided these two struggled with the double task of teaching the others to sing and keeping up the monastic services in the mean time. The antiphons they had to abandon, but they struggled through the Psalms, often weeping and sobbing as they sang. At nineteen—six years before the usual age—he became a deacon; at thirty he was a priest; at fifty-nine he died. He acquired his Greek through the agency of Archbishop Theodore, who had come from Paul’s city of Tarsus in Cilicia. There were many in England who actually spoke in that tongue, owing to his encouragement of it. And Bede was no mean nor small factor in its diffusion, for he taught at Jarrow a school of six hundred monks, besides an uncounted number of strangers who sought his instruction. The genealogy of school masters is truly suggestive. From Bede to Alcuin, from Alcuin to Rabanus Maurus, from Rabanus and his liberal methods on to the times of Abelard and the free inquiry; so the torch of learning passes down the generations. And when we remember Alcuin’s commendation of Bede and Rabanus Maurus’s instruction by Alcuin, we cannot doubt the close connection of these three earliest names. Abelard really revived the bolder and broader style which had been opposed at first in the Abbey of Fulda.

How the monk ever found time for his accomplishment of study and writing among his constant labors—his chanting and his teaching and his frequent preparation of homilies—it is indeed hard to discover. But he wore away the thin scabbard of the body by the keen edge of his sheathed and unsheathed mind, until he died before his days were truly done. How often must we lament the incredible monotony and weary routine of these noble lives! How much more, we say to ourselves, they could have achieved under better and freer conditions! But perhaps not. Perhaps this very constriction was a source of strength; and perhaps the severe stress which finally broke this noble student was, after all, the creator of his best powers and the director of his finest energy.

Did he ever visit Rome? Monks from the Anglo-Saxon monasteries went on pilgrimage back and forth, but if he went with them neither he nor they have mentioned it. Yet there is a letter of Pope Sergius to Ceolfrid which hints at such a journey, and might easily furnish a ground for the opinion. On the whole, we must consider Bede as an unflickering light, burning itself away at Jarrow, but illuminating all England with its rays. It is not because of deficiency in acquirement that we deny these traditions. He knew all that was then current. His writings are an encyclopaedia of universal learning. Honorius of Autun says of him, scripsit infinita—he wrote incalculably much. Lanfranc cites his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Alcuin compares him to the Younger Pliny, and quotes him with great delight as “Magister Beda.”

The hymns ascribed to the Venerable Bede, on what appears to be good authority, are the following:

Adesto, Christe, vocibus, Apostolorum gloriam, Emitte, Christe, Spiritum, Hymnum canamus gloriae, Hymnum canentes martyrum, Illuxit alma seculis, Nunc Andreae sollemnia, Praecessor almus gratiae, Praecursor altus luminis, Primo Deus coeli globum, Salve tropaeum gloriae.

Also, but more doubtfully:

Apostolorum passio, Inter florigeras.

His Ascension hymn,

Hymnum canamus gloriae,

in its abbreviated form, spread beyond the bounds of English use, and found favor with the Churches of the Continent. It has simplicity and directness, if not much poetic force and is too prolix for Church use in its original form. Mrs. Charles’s version, “A hymn of glory let us sing,” is well known. Next to it stands his

Hymnum canentes martyrum,

known to English readers by the admirable version in Hymns Ancient and Modern, which begins, “A hymn for martyrs sweetly sing.” A third notable hymn is that to the Cross:

Salve tropaeum gloriae,

in which he embodies the beautiful legend of St. Andrew’s death.

The notable thing about all Bede’s hymns is the influence which the old forms of Teutonic poetry—the alliterative staff-rhyme—have exerted on their construction. We can even trace an approximation to alliteration in his verses, while rhyme is rather an accident than an object. The verses of Beowulf and of Caedmon were in his mind when he wrote. That he could use the classic metres also, we see from his poem in hexameters on the life of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, the great Scoto-Irish saint, whose deeds still filled the North with their echoes.

CHAPTER XII.
RABANUS MAURUS, AUTHOR OF THE “VENI, CREATOR.”

None of the great Latin hymns is more regarded than the Veni, Creator Spiritus. The Dies Irae may be grander; the Veni, Sancte Spiritus may be sweeter; the Ad perennis vitae fontem may be lovelier; the Stabat mater may be more pathetic, but, after all, the Veni, Creator holds a place of equal honor in the estimation of the Church. The Church of England, while rejecting every other Latin hymn from her services, nevertheless retained this in the offices for the ordering of priests and consecration of bishops. This is only the carrying out, indeed, of the account given by the famous but unknown monk of Salzburg who rendered so many of the Latin hymns into the old High-German tongue. He says, “Whoever repeats this hymn by day or by night, him shall no enemy visible or invisible assail.” This has always been the repute of the hymn, and there is no doubt that this attended it on its journey down the ages in the worship of the Church.

Its authorship, however, has been less carefully preserved than its text, which is notably free from mutilation and obscurity. It is really singular to find a hymn which has been so universally employed, and which has escaped in such a marvellous manner from the profane meddling of prosaic or bigoted revisers. Its doxologic final stanza is one which is not often to be found elsewhere—as though the hymn had taken and maintained a place apart. If it were the product of the Ambrosian age this would not be likely to have occurred, for all those doxologies are formal and interchangeable to a marked degree. But this is the appropriate conclusion of a unique ascription of praise to the third person of the Trinity.

Its date is thus, to some extent, fixed for us. We cannot refer it to the days of Ambrose, and, since it is found in nearly all the twelfth to fourteenth-century breviaries, we are unable to attribute it to the period of the Renaissance. Its very verse would prevent this, if nothing else did. The word spiritalis is a barbarism—an altogether post-classical expression. The true usage is that in which the genitive case is employed, thus “spiritual delight” would be animi felicitas, not spiritalis (or spiritualis) felicitas. Perpetim is also a word which purists of the new classic revival would avoid if they could. So, too, there is a certain amount of stress to be put upon the scanning of Paraclitus—where the i is long, though Prudentius in the fifth century and Adam of St. Victor in the twelfth both make it short. It has therefore been said that the hymn was composed by a person who was skilled in the Greek language. This altogether depends on the question whether he pronounced the word by accent or by quantity. But still it is not to be denied that the prosody of the poet gives us reason to think that he did pronounce the word with the accent on the η. If this be so, it would follow that he was a man of rare and fine scholarship in comparison with the contemporaneous learning.

Another criticism is purely theological and aids in fixing the date by the history of doctrine itself. At the Council of Toledo A.D. 589, the word filioque was added to the Creed to indicate the faith of the Church in the procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son. This hymn preserves this point of the orthodox belief with such care that there can be no doubt of its being subsequent in time to the date of that council.

In coming more particularly to the various authors who have been credited with its composition, it may be well to attend to each claim as it is put forward in some sort of chronologic order.

George Fabricius of Chemnitz (1564) was ready enough to ascribe it to Ambrose himself. The only ground for this conjecture is the structure of the verse. And this is no more a proof of authorship than that a hymn written in what we call “long metre” must be, because of that fact alone, the production of Isaac Watts. On the other hand, it is plain that the theological allusion and the doxology, when taken together, remove the hymn far enough away from the days of the great Bishop of Milan.

In later times of more critical scholarship the learned and accurate Professor Hermann Adalbert Daniel has devoted much study to the hymn, and has reached the conclusion that it belongs to that king whom the Germans are never tired of praising—Charles the Great (Karl der Grosse), by the French called Charlemagne. Led by his illustrious opinion the compilers and translators have, without another question, set it down for Charles’s work. So it has gone; the minor German collators, like Königsfeld and others, following peacefully in the rear of an original investigator. This was not true, however, of men who hunted for proof on their own account, as, for instance, Mone and Wackernagel. But it is distinctly true of the English scholars, among whom Archbishop Trench appears to carry the most prevalent influence. They usually assent without a murmur to this conjecture of Daniel indorsing Thomasius, who was, so far as can be discovered, the parent of the opinion. The only real exception is the Scotch hymnologist, Dr. H. M. MacGill, who doubts, but conforms to the opinion which is in vogue.

The grounds of this general confidence in Charles’s authorship it may be proper to mention here in brief. We know it is said that he was a patron of learning, a friend of scholars, and a devout believer in the orthodox theology. In the year 809 he took an active part in a synod at Aquisgranum which affirmed the doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son. There is, furthermore, a statement, quoted by Cardinal Thomasius from the Acta Sanctorum, which goes in the direction of a positive assertion. In the life of the Blessed Notker it is said that this hymn was composed by Carolus Magnus.

Now it has never been established that Charles was even a ready writer of prose, to say nothing of verse. Berington, following Einhard, Charles’s secretary, says in his History of the Literature of the Middle Ages (1814), that Charles was not a literary man. “He seems never to have acquired the easy practice of writing,” is his strong language (p. 102). The hymn, on the contrary, bears the evident marks of accustomed skill and practice in the art of verse as well as the accuracy of a mind trained in theologic discriminations. Moreover, if Maitland (he of the Dark Ages) is to be credited, then this life of the Blessed Notker, by Ekkehard Junior, is full of errors, of ignorance, and wilful design. It naturally celebrates whatever is likely to add to the credit of St. Gall. Hence we need not be astonished when it tells us that Notker composed the sequence, Spiritus Sancti adsit nobis gratia, and sent it to Charles the Great, receiving in return his composition the Veni, Creator Spiritus. Nor should we be surprised when this turns out (as it is now conceded to be) a mere legend without any historic basis. When Thomasius follows this story, and Daniel follows Thomasius, and Trench follows Daniel, and the compilers follow Trench, it really appears that but little independent judgment has been exercised on the subject.

Notker died in 912, and as Charles the Great was dead in 814, the absurd anachronism of the Ekkehard legend is clear to a glance. It should perhaps be added that Trench, although allowing Charles as author, believes the hymn to be possibly of earlier date.

Mone takes a new departure when he gives up the common opinion and announces that the hymn ought to be assigned to Gregory the Great (540-606). In his first volume he taxes Daniel with having been altogether too prompt to agree to the cardinal’s dictum. He finds no reason to give the hymn to Charles, but he regards the classical style of its composition to be very fitting to the culture and well-known powers of Gregory. He rejects the doxology Sit laus, etc., and considers, very justly, that the stanza Per te sciamus, etc., is the true conclusion of the hymn.

Wackernagel agrees with Mone. He thinks that the only way in which Charles could have secured the authorship would have been by getting the composition effected by the intervention of Alcuin. He therefore believes that Gregory was the poet of the Veni, Creator, and so publishes it in his exhaustive work upon the German church hymns. Professor March, always careful and scholarly in his assignments, adopts this opinion also.

Against the Gregorian authorship, supported as it is by such eminent and independent scholars, one must be slow to contend. But in fact there is no great similarity between the hymn before us and those of Gregory. The great Pope is not a great poet. He has not written one hymn which has really endured. The Audi benigne Conditor is quoted freely, and the Rex Christe, factor omnium received Luther’s highest approbation. But these and other hymns from his pen are imitations of Ambrose—almost slavish imitations. The lofty and grand largeness of the Veni, Creator is wanting to them all. The argument, good as it may seem, is only negative. The inference is that the hymn was written by him—nothing more. On the same grounds we might as well go back to old George Fabricius and give it into the hands of Ambrose as he did. The truth is that Gregory’s writings do not contain it, and why they should not, if he were its actual author, it is hard for any one to understand.

But we are not at the end of the inquiry yet. We positively know certain facts. These are: That the earliest mention of the hymn is in the Delatio S. Marculfi, A.D. 898; that it is found in the breviaries of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries; that its author was a skilled theologian and probably a master of the Greek language; that he was a poet in the true sense and therefore quite certain to have written other hymns and poems; that it was so soon and so generally adopted as to prevent any corruption of its text; that all these ascriptions of it to this or that person are nothing but tradition; and, finally, that the hymn has such spiritual worth and power as to mark it for the production of a devout as well as scholarly mind. All these requirements are met in Rabanus Maurus, Bishop of Mainz, pupil of Alcuin, and laureate after Alcuin and Theodulphus.

There was a certain Christopher Brower, a Jesuit and a profoundly learned scholar, who was born in 1559 at Arnhem in Gelderland. In the year 1580 he went to Cologne in pursuit of his studies. Then he studied philosophy at Trier, and eventually became rector of the college at Fulda. Here he wrote four books upon antiquarian topics. His diligent, exhaustive style can be judged by the fact that he spent thirty years upon a history of Trier. His Antiquitates were printed in 1612, but in 1603 he had edited the writings of Fortunatus, and this book was reissued in 1617, the year of his death, by Joannes Volmar at Cologne. This edition has an appendix of 150 pp. 4to., in which is contained the entire series of hymns and other poetical compositions which were due to the aforesaid Bishop of Mainz, Rabanus Maurus. It was edited from a very old MS. of undoubted veracity, and it contains the Veni, Creator in the precise text which we now employ. It is to be noticed that it does not recognize the doxology Sit laus, etc., and this Mone assures us was composed at a later period by Hincmar of Rheims, and is, as we have said, unique. But it accents Paraclitus upon the second a and not upon the i.

The stanza Da gaudiorum, etc., was rejected some time ago by the best scholars. It is from a hymn of later date. And we therefore find the version which appears in Brewer’s editions of the poems of Rabanus Maurus to be consonant with the most intelligent criticism of the text of the Veni, Creator.

The hymn itself we can assign with very considerable certainty to the author in whose pages it again is apparent, and we may believe in the accuracy and scholarly acuteness of the Jesuit antiquarian.

It will not be amiss if we set our reasons in order, for a long-established delusion is as hard to overthrow sometimes as the stubbornest fact. They are such as the following:

1. The hymn is found in the writings of Rabanus Maurus, in a codex which Brower calls “very ancient and well approved.”

2. It is the precise paraphrase of the learned bishop’s chapter on the Holy Spirit. Thus he begins the chapter with an assertion of the procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son. He then calls this Spirit donum Dei, and several times repeats the phrase. He argues that the Spirit is coequal and coeternal God. He then discusses the term Paraclete, and proceeds to speak of the septiformis nature of His power. Next follows a most significant and unusual expression—namely, that the Holy Spirit is digitus Dei—the finger of God. And the consecution and coincidence of thought is still further increased by an allusion to the grace which bestowed the gift of tongues. He then speaks of the Spirit as fire—which accords with the word accende—and then he explains the simile of water, which corresponds with the word infunde and with the previous phrase fons vivus. He also quotes from the Gospel of John to show that this “living water” means no more nor less than the Holy Spirit. These coincidences are doubly remarkable, for they not only exhibit the same ideas—some of which, by the way, are quite uncommon—but they also set them forth in the precise order in which the good bishop employs them in his hymn. It is as if, being aroused and animated by his great and noble theme, he had turned to verse as an appropriate medium of lofty praise and had sung from his heart this immortal hymn.

3. To these reasons we may add a third—that the internal structure of the hymn shows its author to have been a person of theological soundness, spiritual insight, scriptural knowledge, genuine scholarship, and a natural poetical capacity. These facts again agree with what we know to have been the talents and learning of Rabanus Maurus.

4. If Gregory had written this hymn it would have appeared at an earlier date and would have been undoubtedly attributed to its illustrious author; whereas it is not in his carefully compiled writings nor is it accredited to him by Thomasius or any hymnologist before the time of Mone and Wackernagel.

5. Charles the Great had not the learning, and both he and his grandson, Charles “the Bald,” are named on the strength of a long-exploded and always anachronistic tradition.

6. Ambrose is out of the question by the theological limitation of the stanza Per te sciamus, etc.

7. Finally, we have the right to believe that a man whose other hymns have been so extensively, though anonymously, introduced into the worship of the Church, was entirely competent to frame this present hymn.

This last point is worthy of more than this terse remark. Rabanus composed the hymns, Adest dies sanctus Dei, Festum nunc celebre, Fit porta Christi pervia, Tibi Christe splendor Patris, Christe Redemptor omnium, and Jesu Salvator saeculi, all of which display great powers of sacred poetry and two of which are beyond any possible doubt his authentic productions. Of the twenty-nine hymns found in Brewer’s codex there are two which have been credited to Ambrose beside the Veni, Creator, and there are seven which are classed by Daniel and Fabricius as belonging between the tenth and fourteenth centuries and to unknown authorship. The codex adds to our previous list eight entirely new poems, and two others which raise a question on which we may pause for a moment before conceding the current opinion.

The first of these hymns is the Altus prosator, of which the codex gives us a much fuller and longer version. It is called ordinarily the “Hymn of St. Columba,” and was reprinted by Dr. Todd from the Liber Hymnorum of old Irish hymns in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. Our present line of inquiry would lead us to assign it to Rabanus, and thus do away with the mere conjecture which makes Columba its author.

The second hymn is that usually credited to Elpis, the wife of Boethius. But the designation of this hymn is as fanciful as the other. Brower in his loyalty to the Church will not impugn the authorship which is commonly received, but he is constrained to admit that a stanza is appended which the popular version entirely omits. It seems far more reasonable to think that Rabanus composed the whole hymn than that he only added a few verses at the end. What Rabanus Maurus really did was to construct an hymnodia which had an appropriate sacred song for every season. He was a poet and he lauded the verses of Hilary and of Ambrose. Had he intended to make selections he would not have omitted them. But he has certainly put his own compositions into this list. Therefore it follows that he may well have included more than was at first supposed. And when it is plain—for the index of hymns makes it plain—that not one single hymn of the twenty-nine is the undoubted and absolute property of any other poet, we are safe in assuming that they all are what the codex declares them to be—the actual productions of the Bishop Rabanus.

The hymn Fit porta Christi pervia occurs in the midst of the Ambrosian A solis ortus cardine, et usque, and was there inserted by the Benedictines of St. Maur. Daniel says it is an entire hymn as it stands. And so say we who find it standing alone in the codex of Brower.

At once, then, Rabanus Maurus ascends from comparative obscurity to a front rank among hymn-writers. And we are ready for all the light upon his personal history which we can obtain.