The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

The position of Thomas Aquinas in history is determined by the fact that he is the greatest of the scholastic philosophers. What his master and other earlier thinkers had attempted, he more nearly did than ever has been done by any one else. He took the two great bodies of knowledge, secular and sacred, and fused them into a system more nearly consistent with itself than any other. On the one side was the encylopaedic philosophy of Aristotle, and the parallel but less perfect tradition of Platonic speculation; on the other the Scriptures, the dogmatic decisions of the councils and popes, and the teachings of the recognized authorities among the ecclesiastical writers, especially as these had been summarized by Peter Lombard. To blend these into one great system of theology, to subsidize the weapons of the Greek philosophy in defence of Christian truth, and to draw the line with accuracy between what reason can prove and faith accepts without proof—this was what he undertook in the Summa. And never was a more acute intellect employed on the great task of reconciling faith with reason. If he failed, it is not because he shrank from anticipating any and every kind of objection to the truths he was defending; his works are a perfect storehouse of such objections. If he failed, it was not from any want of confidence in the powers of the human mind to deal with the highest subjects of thought. No modern rationalist ever surpassed him in that respect. He failed because neither then nor now do the materials exist for such a work, and because his truths lost and his errors gained force by being worked into a system.

It would take a whole chapter even to describe the Summa. Of its three parts, the first, concerning God, and the second concerning man, were completed in the four years he gave to the work. In the third, which treats of the God-Man, he got no farther than the ninetieth question, and the discussion was completed by extracts from his commentary on Peter Lombard. But the completed part contains nearly two million Latin words, or with the supplement, two million one hundred thousand. It is six times as large as Calvin’s Institutio, or four times as large as the Latin Bible! And the Summa fills only two of the seventeen folios of his works, all written within the space of twenty-six years by a man actively engaged in teaching, lecturing, and advising popes and princes.

That so much of the formative period of his life was spent in a controversy, in which he was the applauded spokesman of a party whose cause he regarded as the cause of God, could not but affect his intellectual character. Professor Maurice thinks the delay in obtaining the master’s degree worked in the same direction. The master in those days was expected to pronounce decisions; those who had not attained that rank were occupied in disputations only. “Thus our author was a trained arguer,” and “the old habits remained with him when his decisions were most accepted as authorities. From first to last he was thinking of all that could be said on both sides of the question he was discussing.” I believe that he was conscious of the narrowing and dwarfing tendency of this habit of mind, even though he did not detect the source of the evil. We read of his seeking to prepare himself for his work by humble devotion. But to the last line of his last work the controversial habit and attitude of mind clings to him. It is only in his catechetical expositions, written before he left Koeln for Paris, that you find a different atmosphere, and escape the heretic-crushing Aristotelian dialectic of the scholastic disputant.

Even in his few hymns, which constitute his title to rank among the sacred poets, he is the great scholastic doctor, with his eye on the heresies which may distract the believer. He writes with the full panoply under his singing robes. All his hymns are concerned with the greatest of the Christian sacraments. It was in 1215, a year before the confirmation of the Dominican Order, and twelve years before Thomas was born, that the fourth Lateran Council made the transubstantiation of the elements into the body and blood of Christ an article of faith. But a Belgian ecstatic, Juliana of Liege, had a vision which called for a special annual festival in honor of the mystery. Urban IV. complied with this request in 1261, by requiring that the Thursday next after Trinity Sunday should be observed as Corpus Christi Day. This involved the preparation of an additional services for the Missal and Breviary, with suitable prayers and hymns, and the work was laid upon Thomas. For the Missal he wrote the sequence

Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem;

and for the Breviary the three hymns

Pange, lingua, gloriosi Corporis mysterium, Sacris solemniis juncta sint gaudia,

and

Verbum supernum prodiens, Nec Patris.

The Paris Breviary connects a fifth hymn of his with the same festival, the