The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

This is the Deus creator omnium of the great bishop of Milan; and this, in consequence of Augustine’s quotation, is among the best authenticated and earliest hymns of the Latin Church.

But there were more ancient hymns than the Ambrosian or Augustinian. They bear the name of Hilary, and with them Latin hymnology really begins. It is true that in the previous century—the third—Cyprian of Carthage had written religious poetry, but he composed nothing which could be sung. There is, indeed, nothing previous to Hilary.

And now let us go back to the creation of this first and noblest light. For Hilary had been a heathen—a heathen of the heathen—in Roman Gaul. He was born in Poitiers (Pictavium) about the beginning of the fourth century. His father’s name was Francarius, whose tomb—although he must at first have lived as an idolater—is said by Bouchet to have been “for upward of fifteen hundred years” in the parish church of Clissonium (Clisson, near Nantes). We are indebted to Jerome for the main facts of Hilary’s life, and to Fortunatus for a large share in the filling up of the outlines. Hilary was so celebrated a man that contemporary references are more abundant and helpful in his career even than in that of Shakespeare. In those days he was at the summit of renown, a notable exception to the case of the prophet, “not being without honor save in his own country.” “For who,” says Augustine, “does not know Hilary the Gallic bishop?” And Jerome wrote to St. Eustacia that Hilary and Cyprian were the “two great cedars of the age.”

He was doubtless well educated. His Latin was good and copious, without possessing very great polish. His Greek was sufficient to fit him to translate the creeds of the Eastern Church, and to become familiar with their hymns. We have his own testimony that he lived in comfort, if not in luxury; and the inference is plain that his family were of consequence in the place. It was in his leisure that he took up Moses and the prophets; and there, in that famous old town of his birth, the mists of his idolatry thinned away. We do not know that any external pressure was brought to bear upon his mind, or that he was led by anything except a natural curiosity into this new learning.

Poitiers itself is a noble situation for such an intellect. It is perched on a promontory, and surrounded on all sides by gorges and narrow valleys. The isthmus, which joins it back to the ridge, was once walled and ditched across. The Pictavi, and afterward the Romans, understood the military advantages of the spot. It has always been the abode of scholars and of warriors. Here Francis Bacon once studied. Here Clovis, founder of the Merovingian dynasty, beat Alaric II., in 507, in fair battle. Here Radegunda the Holy lies buried. Here Fortunatus, the poet-bishop, dwelled. Here Charles Martel hammered the Saracens in 732. Here, in the Cathedral of St. Pierre, rest the ashes of Richard Coeur de Lion. Here, beneath these walls, fought Edward the Black Prince against King John of France, in 1356, when the English had the best of the day. For they had learned—as Bishop Hugh Latimer says that he himself was taught—how to draw the cloth-yard shaft to a head, and let it fly with a deadly aim. “In my tyme,” said Latimer, “my poore father was as diligent to teach me to shote as to learne anye other thynge, and so I thynke other menne dyd theyr children. Hee taughte me how to drawe, how to laye my bodye in my bowe, and not to drawe with strength of armes as other nacions do, but with strength of the bodye. I had my bowes boughte me accordyng to my age and strength; as I encreased in them, so my bowes were made bigger and bigger; for men shall never shoot well excepte they be broughte up in it.” (Sixth sermon before Edward VI.) It was such archery as this that laid the flower of France in the dust, and put John, their king, into prison.

Poitiers is thus a noble and appropriate birthplace for one who before the time of Charles the Hammerer was called the “Hammer of the Arians” (Malleus Arianorum), and who combined fighting with praying all through his life. Places and circumstances and the untamable blood of heroes have more to do with the making of men than we suppose; and Hilary was so distinctly a son of Caesar’s Gaul that he became its large, true, and free expression, appropriate to its landscape and harmonized to its atmosphere.

And as to his emergence from heathenism, there can be nothing more satisfactory to us than his own story. He has recorded that when he found, in Exodus, how God was called “I am that I am,” and when he read in Isaiah (40:12) of a deity who “held the wind in His fists,” and again (66:1) of Him who said, “Heaven is My throne and earth is My footstool,” then this Deus immensus surpassed all his heathen conceptions of grandeur and power. And when he read (in Ps. 138:7) how this great God loved and cared for His children, so that one could say, “Though I walk in the midst of trouble, Thou wilt revive me; Thou shalt stretch forth Thine hand against the wrath of mine enemies, and Thy right hand shall save me”—then he was drawn toward this mighty being by a sentiment of confidence and trust. He also—turning the pages of the Wisdom of Solomon (13:5) in the Apocrypha—found it written that “by the greatness and beauty of the creatures proportionately the Maker of them is seen.” And then, encountering the Gospel of John, its opening sentences clarified his mind. All became plain. He accepted with calmness, firmness, and dignity the great doctrines of the Christian faith. He was imbued with John’s conception of that Word, “which was in the beginning” and “which was God.” From that moment he had a theology which was as pure as crystal and as indestructible as adamant. There is no muddiness about his ideas from this time onward, though Arians buzz and sting, and calamities rain upon him, and the path of duty is deep with mire and the future is dark. Every one of these things passes away. His own language as to this great change in his belief is as characteristic as it is beautiful: “I extended my desires further, and longed that the good thoughts I had about God, and the good life which I built on them, might have an eternal reward.” Like one of his own favorite saints in the Gospel and the Apocalypse of John, he was thus “led by the Spirit of God” to become one of the chanting choir before the throne.

It matters very little, therefore, to us of to-day, that, in 1851, Pius IX., himself a man of sweet and gentle temper, made Hilary a “Doctor of the Church”—a distinction reserved for those greatest ones, like Augustine and Chrysostom, whose learning and eloquence are world-renowned. The dead bishop did not need this posthumous distinction. He has long been recognized—to quote Professor Dorner—as “one of the most original and profound,” albeit not the easiest to understand at all times, of the great teachers of the Christian Church. We may hereafter attach more value to his work even than we do at present.

This then was the man who had determined to enter upon a Christian life. He was already married and had one daughter—Abra by name—and possessed a certain repute as a man of reading and of affairs. His origin protected him from a contempt of pagan learning; and his marriage protected him from that one-sided development which has Romanized the once Catholic Church. The period in which he lived was one of transition—from classic literature to Christian literature, and from the Latin of far-off Virgil and Cicero to the Latin which was to become the uniting tongue of all scholars in that Babel of the Middle Ages. This language was now shaping itself to its new work and becoming, like English under the genius of Chaucer, a living speech. In the moulding hands of these first Christian writers it became flexible, not always fluent or graceful or even strictly grammatical, but capable at least to carry what would otherwise have been lost. Greek was gone, and French and German and English had not yet appeared. As a Gallo-Roman, then—a post-classic Latinist—Hilary gives in his allegiance to Christianity, and his wife and daughter are baptized with him into the true faith.

So far much is conjectural; and more is vague and to be derived from the shadows cast upon the screen of history by the “spirit of the years to come yearning to mix itself with life.” We emerge, however, into historical certainty about the year 351. Then, on the death of their bishop—who is thought to have been Maxentius, the brother of St. Maximin of Trier—his townspeople clamored for Hilary. The Histoire Litteraire de la France sets this election down for the year 350; but that authority, in this and a great many other instances, is profuse and multitudinous and not absolutely safe. We are certainly not far out from the correct date in saying 351.