III
Priority is given to the Ambrosian hymns in this discussion, not because they are the most ancient forms of liturgical chant, but because they form the most easily demarcable point of transition from Græco-Roman music to Christian ecclesiastical music. The most ancient forms of the liturgy undoubtedly had their genesis in the Orient. There, of course, the influence of Greek music was also active, though to what extent it affected the Hebrew traditions we cannot even surmise. We find, too, the vogue of the kitharœdic chant even greater among the Roman citizens of the Orient than among the inhabitants of Italy. The former carried their passion for this form of expression to the extent of engraving the songs with their melodies on funeral monuments. It may again be remarked, however, that the first Christians were not of the class likely to be influenced easily by extraneous culture. Acquainted with foreign music they undoubtedly were. The apostles, for instance, speak of the Greek ‘zither’ as a familiar instrument.[54] But this acquaintance was in all probability superficial. Humble and uneducated for the most part, those pioneers of a new cult were of the sort with whom custom and tradition die hard. They were reared in the atmosphere of the synagogue; and it must be remembered that they were not iconoclasts of the Hebrew faith, but rather professed reformers and purifiers of it. The Temple of Solomon, the Ark of the Covenant, the patriarchs and prophets were subjects as sacred to them as they were to older generations of the children of Israel. Their quarrel was not with the Jews, but with such Jews as refused to recognize their new king. While, therefore, they had every reason for avoiding the music of the Pagan Greeks and Romans, they had no reason whatever for abandoning that which had been handed down to them from David. They certainly took over the texts of the Old Testament psalmody, and it is a natural assumption that with them they adopted the music to which these texts were sung. We may conjecture with some plausibility that the psalmodic solo, responsorial chant, and antiphonal chant—all ancient Hebrew liturgical forms—passed directly from the Temple and Synagogue into the first Christian communities, with such minor changes as may have been necessitated by the new ritual and attendant upon the transference of its conduct from trained cantors to untrained laymen.
The psalmodic solo has no special significance in the development of the Christian liturgy. Of more importance is the responsorial chant, which consists of a solo interrupted periodically by the voice of the people.[55] It is very probable that this form of psalmody was in use among the first Christians, though we have no direct evidence on the point. We learn, however, from church historians that psalms were sung in this fashion at Alexandria in the time of Bishop Athanasius in the early part of the fourth century. The antiphonal chant, which is the most interesting and important of liturgical forms, is of extreme antiquity. David, we know, divided the singers of the Temple into two choirs. Whether this form passed directly and without interruption from the Temple and Synagogue into the religious services of the first Christians we have no means of knowing. It was, however, adopted at a very early date by Christian communities in the Orient. Eusebius, bishop of Cesarea (third century) reproduces a text of Philo in which occurs the following description: ‘Suddenly all rose on both sides ... and formed two choirs, men and women. Each choir chose its coryphee and soloist ... then they sang to God hymns of different melodies and metres, sometimes together and sometimes answering each other in suitable manner.’ As showing the early expansion of this style of singing throughout the Christian world we may quote from a letter of St. Basil (fourth century) to the inhabitants of Nova Cesarea. ‘The people rise in the night,’ he writes, ‘and go to the house of prayer; when they have prayed they pass to the psalms. Sometimes they divide into two alternate parts, sometimes a soloist sings and all answer; and having thus passed the night in divers psalms they intone all together, as one voice and one heart, the penitential psalm.... If it is for this reason [the organization of the psalmody] you wish to separate from me you must also separate from the Egyptians and Lybians, from the inhabitants of Thebes, Palestine, Arabia, Phœnicia, Syria, and the banks of the Euphrates—in a word, from all those who hold in honor vigils and psalms performed in common.’ It may be remarked that the antiphon originally was merely the alternate singing of two choirs. Later it came to mean the solo refrain intoned by the high priest before the biblical psalm or canticle and repeated by the choir when the psalm or canticle is finished. According to the rules of St. Benedict this solo refrain was intended to give (imponere) the melody to the singers. Musically, says Gevaert, it forms the introduction and finale of the psalmodic chant to which it is bound by a community of mode. It probably took the place of an earlier instrumental introduction and finale, as, for some reason or reasons upon which it is idle to speculate, instruments were excluded from the services of the primitive church.
It was in the monasteries of the East, of Syria and Egypt, that the forms of the liturgy first began to take shape, and in Antioch and Alexandria there developed schools of singing which were to the Greek churches of the East what the schola cantorum was to the Latin churches of the seventh and eighth centuries. In the fourth century, as we may gather from the canons of the council of Laodicea, they had already trained singers in the churches of Syria, and St. Augustine speaks of the singing of St. Athanasius as if the latter must have had a careful schooling in the art. Silvia, the Gallic pilgrim, mentions the singing of antiphons and psalms in the church at Alexandria (385-88). In the fifth century, as we learn from a letter of Sidonius Apollinaris, Syrian cantors were used in Italian churches.
The prejudice against Pagan music, which must have excluded all Greek or Græco-Roman influences from the Christian services of apostolic times, proved hard to kill. We find it cropping out even in Clement of Alexandria, who admits only ‘modest and decent harmonies’ and excludes harmonies that are ‘chromatic and light, such as are used in the lascivious orgies of courtesans.’ By that time, however, the prejudice apparently had become discriminating. The extraordinary popularity of the kitharœdic songs was bound to have its influence. The heresiarchs were not slow to recognize the hold of profane melodies on the people, and composed dogmatic chants to the melodies of popular songs, much in the manner of the Salvation Army of our day. Arius, for instance, the great heresiarch who was condemned by the council of Nicea (325), reproduced in his Thalia the lascivious musical forms of the Ionian Sotades—to the great scandal of Athanasius. St. Ephraem (320-79), adopting the same idea, turned the Syrians from the songs of Harmonius by writing hymns in the Syrian language on the same melodies, and Gregory of Nazianza (328-89) composed canticles to take the place of the heterodox psalms of the Apollinarists.
While probably there was never any break in the communication between the churches of the East and those of the West, it is likely that they developed their liturgical forms more or less independently until about the middle of the fourth century. Then the floodgates of Oriental influence seem to have been opened by St. Hilarius and St. Ambrose. The former, who was bishop of Poitiers, is said to have introduced into his church the antiphonal and other forms of psalmody then practised in the churches of Asia, where he had lived in exile for four years (356-60). He is supposed to have introduced the Syrian hymnody into the Western Church. ‘Hymnorum carmine floruit primus,’ Isidor of Seville said of him. He is credited with having been the pioneer of the metrical style of hymn known as Ambrosian, though the three hymns from his pen which have been preserved hardly bear out this contention. They are crude in rhythm and not likely to have served as models for the cultured Ambrose. From all available evidence one is impelled to award to St. Ambrose the honor of having first introduced antiphonal psalmody to the West.[56] Indeed there is little doubt that he was the real founder of the Latin chant in general. Ecclesiastical songs, as we have already seen, had already developed, both in the East and in the West, to something like a formal art; but Ambrose seems to have been the first to gather together the various elements composing it and lay the foundations of a strictly ordered liturgy. From Milan the antiphonal psalmody spread through all the churches of the West. Even Rome, which until the twelfth century excluded the Ambrosian hymns, adopted antiphonal psalmody in the time of Pope Celestine I (422-32).[57] It is to Rome that one must look for the subsequent development of liturgical song; though until the time of the great schism the formative influences were more Byzantine than Latin. St. Leo the Great (440-61) established in the immediate vicinity of the Basilica of St. Peter a monastic community especially entrusted with the service of the canonical hours, under the patronage of Saints John and Paul, and this was followed in the second half of the seventh century by the community of St. Martin and, under Gregory III (731-41), by that of St. Stephen.