The Hymn as Propaganda.
The inferiority of the popular hymnody became ever more pronounced as the hymn was employed by heretical sects as a means of propagating their pernicious doctrines. Bardesanes and his son Harmonius in Edessa, Asia, a little later composed an entire psalter of one hundred and fifty psalms, “deserting David’s truth and preserving David’s numbers,” as Ephrem Syrus expressed it.
The Gnostic hymns during the third century were slowly undermining the faith of the people, but it was not until Arius appeared with his denial of the deity of Jesus Christ and spread broadcast his “Thalia,” a collection of practical hymns emphasizing practical duties and the value of the daily life of the people, as well as magnifying the humanity of Jesus, that the full extent of the revolution in the religious sentiment of the people became evident. He fitted his measures to well-known popular tunes, sung only by those “who sing songs over their wine with noise and revel.”
Arius, an ungainly giant of tremendous force of personality and unbounded energy, thus began a movement that was to convulse with its controversy the whole Roman Empire through many generations, even down to our own times, and was to prepare Asia and Northern Africa for the superimposition of the Mohammedan personality and cult upon an emasculated Christianity.
In 269, Paul of Samosata, an Arian Bishop, banished from his churches the hymns that had come down from the second century because they were addressed to Christ as God and “as being innovations, the work of men of later times.” He began the Arian fashion of propaganda by means of hymns. As an answer to this came the great hymnic outburst of the fourth century, headed by Gregory of Nazianzus and participated in by St. Chrysostom.[3]
It is not surprising, therefore, that the Synod that met in Laodicea in 363 ordered that “psalms composed by private men must not be read in the church, nor uncanonical books, but only the canonical of the New and Old Testament.”
Nor need we wonder that with the Arian fanatics interrupting orthodox services by starting their heterodox hymns, the same Synod decided that “beside the psalm singers appointed thereto who mount the ambo and sing out of the book, no others shall sing in church.”
This robbing the lips and the hearts of the congregation of its share of the public praise, in order to prevent Gnostic and Arian heretics from profaning public services with their strife and contention, hardened into a perpetual prohibition, and in the Greek church the people are mute to this day.[4]
It should be remembered that these prohibitions applied only to public services and their liturgies. Outside the walls of the larger churches the people were still singing. Indeed, the popular song was used by the orthodox to displace the heretical songs of the Arians, as was done by Chrysostom in Constantinople, in order to stem the tide of attack on the doctrine of the deity of Christ.