The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

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.