The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

Francis had died in 1226, but whether Thomas was actual witness of his last days, or derived his knowledge of them from others, his is recognized as the authentic account of the saint’s departure. His own death is said to have occurred in 1255, but what events filled up the meantime, besides the biographic labors we have mentioned, is not known. Perhaps it was in those years that he composed his great sequence, as his mind, when less directly brightened by the influence of his master, would be more likely to revert to those trains of thought which corresponded to his natural disposition. Possibly it was as his own life was drawing to a close, and the shadows of the Great Day gathered nearer him, that he poured out his soul in his great hymn—the greatest of all hymns, unless we except the Te Deum.

Besides the Dies Irae, there are ascribed to Thomas two other sequences—

Fregit victor virtualis

and

Sanctitatis nova signa,

both in commemoration of Francis. As the founder of the Minor Friars was canonized two years after his death by Gregory IX., there was a demand very early for the hymns of this character. And as there was no one better fitted to write them than the poet who had known Francis so well, and whom the Pope had directed to prepare a life of the saint, there is no inherent improbability in the tradition which ascribes them to him. But they do not take rank beside the Dies Irae. They are poems written to order, not the spontaneous outpouring of the mind of the singer in the presence of the overwhelming realities of the spiritual universe.

There are no less than nine persons for whom the honor of the authorship of the Dies Irae has been claimed. Two of these are excluded as having lived too early to have written a poem of its structure and metrical character; they are Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux. Two others, Augustinus Bugellensis (ob. 1490) and Felix Hammerlein (ob. 1457) are excluded by the fact that the hymn is mentioned in a work written in 1285. This leaves four rivals to Thomas of Celano in his own century, viz., John Bonaventura (ob. 1274), his brother Cardinal, Latino Frangipani, a Dominican (ob. 1294), Humbert, a French Franciscan, who became the fifth general of his order (ob. 1277), and Matthew of Acqua-Sparta in Umbria, a Franciscan, who became Bishop of Albano and cardinal (ob. 1302). But it is to be noticed that for not one of these is there a witness earlier than the sixteenth century. The first and last are named as having had the authorship ascribed to them by Luke Wadding, the historian of the Franciscans in 1625; but he ascribes it to Thomas of Celano. The other two are named by the Jesuit, Antonio Possevino (1534-1611) and the Dominican, Leandro Alberti (1479-1552), the latter, of course, claiming the hymn for the Dominican cardinal, as to whom there is not the smallest evidence that he ever wrote any poetry whatever. Besides this, the Dies Irae is a Franciscan, not a Dominican poem. It deals with the practical and the devotional, not the doctrinal elements in religion. Had a Dominican written it, he would have been anxious only for correct doctrinal statement.

Thomas’s claim to its authorship does not rest on the weakness of rival pretensions. In the year 1285, when Thomas had been dead about thirty years and Dante was twenty years old, the Franciscan Bartholomew of Pisa wrote his Liber Conformitatum, in which he drew a labored parallel between the life of Francis of Assisi and that of our Lord. Having occasion to speak of Celano in this work, he goes on to describe it as “the place whence came Brother Thomas, who by order of the Pope wrote in polished speech the first legend of St. Francis, and is said to have composed the prose which is sung in the Mass for the Dead: Dies irae, dies illa.”[11] This testimony out of Thomas’s own century is confirmed by parallel evidence. Wadding, whose big folios in clumsy Latin give us the tradition which prevailed within the order, says: “Brother Thomas of Celano sang that once celebrated sequence, Sanctitatis nova signa, which now has gone out of use, whose work also is that solemn one for the dead, Dies irae, dies illa, although others wish to ascribe it to Brother Matthew of Acqua-Sparta, a cardinal taken from among the Minorites.” Elsewhere Wadding says: “Thomas of Celano, of the province of Penna, a disciple and companion of St. Francis, published ... a book about the Life and Miracles of St. Francis ... commonly called by the brethren the Old Legend. Another shorter legend he had published previously which used to be read in the choir...; three sequences, or rhythmic proses, of which the first, in praise of St. Francis, begins, Fregit victor virtualis. The second begins, Sanctitatis nova signa. The third concerning the dead, adopted by the Church, Dies irae, dies illa. And this Benedict Gonon, the Coelestine [in 1625] rendered into French verse and ascribed to St. Bonaventura. Others ascribe it to Brother Matthew, of Acqua-Sparta, the cardinal; and others yet to other authors.”[12]

These direct testimonies are confirmed by local tradition in the province of Abruzzi, in which Celano is situated, and the Franciscan origin of the hymn by its existence as an inscription on a marble tablet in the church of St. Francis at Mantua, where it was seen by David Chytraeus, a German Lutheran, who visited Italy in 1565. That the author was an Italian is indicated by the peculiar three-line stanza, which approximates to the terza-rima structure of their poetry, but is not found in poetry of the Northern nations, except in later imitations.

The statement of Bartholomew of Pisa, that already in 1285 the Dies Irae was employed in the service for the dead, shows how early it made its way into church use. In earlier times there was no sequence in that service, for the reason that the “Hallelujah,” which the sequence always followed, being a song of rejoicing, was not sung in the funeral service. This enables us to form an opinion on the controversy as to whether it was written directly for church use, or adapted for that after being written as a meditation on the Day of Judgment for private edification. It would seem most probable that it was the wonderful beauty and power of the hymn which led the Church to break through its rule as to the sequence following a Hallelujah necessarily. The Dies Irae was not written to fill a place, but when written it made a place for itself.