The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

A single line of inquiry has been left to the American student. We have lists of the MSS. in the various libraries of Europe. If it were only possible to examine these with reference to the Veni Sancte the matter could be definitely settled. The Rheinau (Reichenau) library is rich in hymnaries. Haenel’s “No. 53”—whose library number is 91—is, for instance, a Liber hymnorum of the tenth to the twelfth centuries. There are several others—breviaries and collections of hymns—dating to the twelfth century; and one book, “No. 124” (Lib. No. 75), which is marked Sequentiae propriae, etc., and which is likely to have the Veni Sancte. In the eleventh century at St. Gall they have “No. 381” (St. Gall No. 486) which is a codex insignis—a very beautiful MS.—containing the “earliest collection of hymns and poems of writers dwelling at St. Gall.” In this same century appears the Anselm, which is noted as a codex nobiliter scriptus ab Herimanno, qui se hoc libri decus ex voto perfecisse testatur (pag. 6), a manuscript elegantly written by Hermann [“Herimann” is his own spelling of his name in the Chronicon, by the way], who says on page 6 that he has accomplished this excellent volume in pursuance of a vow. Among these St. Gall MSS. can be found the Salve regina, bearing the date 1437. If it were made a point of investigation it might be discovered that in both Reichenau and St. Gall the Veni, Sancte Spiritus is in codices which utterly remove it from the perplexity of its authorship, and positively join it to the name of Hermann.

One can sum up the whole discussion in a few sentences. Robert wrote no other valuable hymns; Hermann did write several. Robert was not specially skilled in metrical science; Hermann was the author of a treatise on the subject. Robert was a poet and a musician; Hermann was his superior in both departments. Robert had trouble and sorrow and Christian experience; Hermann must certainly have had as much as he, and more. Robert has had poems attributed to him which have failed of proof, and none of his own verses seem ever to have been misappropriated or missing; Hermann has had more taken from him than given to him.

In the matter of authority we are to note:

1. That the historians of St. Gall and of Reichenau claim for Hermann the Veni Sancte.

2. That the hymn is found in the earliest codices of both places; and of Einsiedeln, which is in the neighborhood.

3. That Clichtove is in doubt and Daniel is in doubt; that J. A. Fabricius and Du Meril incline toward Egon’s statement; that Trithemius is not entirely unprejudiced; and that Migne, gathering nearly everything (as I have verified from the originals), leaves a strong presumption in Hermann’s favor.

I may appear to make a good deal too much of this matter of mediaeval jealousy. But no student of those times needs to be told that the jealousy between the various cloisters was excessive. There is a letter of the Reichenau monk Gunzo, written in 960. (Martene, I., 296.) It is addressed to the “holy congregation at Reichenau” and describes his journey to St. Gall. The distance was great enough to exhaust the learned brother; he was lifted off of his beast and carried in by hospitable hands. Notwithstanding which he vents his indignation upon their methods and their lack of scholarship. They are self indulgent; they are a fraud on the face of the earth. Nihil inde sed fraudis molamina parabantur—they do nothing there except contrive a great mass of deception, says the angry Gunzo. They attacked him on his grammar; and he attacked them in turn on their loquacity. The epistle is grimly humorous at this distance of time; but the bitterness was altogether too genuine to be pleasant.

Far away from the most of these noises—separated by the waters of the lake from the trampling pilgrim-bands who went to and fro between the East and West—Hermann of Reichenau passed his quiet hours. His convent was rich. Its abbot was said to be able to journey to Rome and not sleep anywhere on the way except upon his own soil. It had been founded in 724 under the auspices of Charles Martel. Such was the admirable situation of this religious house—sufficient to itself in the midst of all changes.

They buried Hermann in his ancestral tomb at Altshausen. In 1631 “three bones” of him were exhumed and carried “by force” to the monastery of Ochsenhausen, but who took them and who resisted the taking of them, we are not told. These are the meagre particulars of a life gentle, patient, and unassuming—the life of a scholar and of a poet—who mastered great obstacles by the genius of faith.

Three hundred years before Christ there came into Ceylon the Buddhist missionary Mahinda. The king received him kindly and built for him and his monks a convent on the hill Mihintale, to the east of the royal city. On the western face of this hill Mahinda had his own retreat cut out from the living rock. Still can be seen—though after two thousand years—this study in which the great teacher of Ceylon “sat and thought and worked through the long years of his peaceful and useful life.” Under the cool shadow of his rock, with his stone couch on which to repose, and with the busy plain, so far removed from him, sending its faint noises up from below, there wrought the sage. And there he died at last and was buried in the neighboring Dagāba. Modern times have nearly forgotten him, but no story of that valley or that island is complete without his name.