The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

but not on sufficient authority. His best known hymns are the

Christum Ducem, qui per crucem,

and

Recordare sanctae crucis,

of which latter we have English versions by Dr. Henry Harbaugh, Dr. J. W. Alexander, and E. C. Benedict. Five other hymns are ascribed to him in the collections. They all have the Franciscan note; they turn on our Lord’s human sympathy and sufferings. This explains the ascription to him of a long hymn on the members of our Lord’s body as affected by the passion, which is found in Mone (I., 171-74), but which is more frequently and quite as erroneously ascribed to Bernard of Clairvaux. It is not worthy of either, although Mone thinks the ascription to Bonaventura “worthy of attention.” The hymn furnishes the point of contact of the Latin hymnology with that of the later Moravians, the Franciscans of Protestantism.

So we leave the two great scholars, thinkers, doctors, and poets, each representing one of the two chief streams of spiritual influence in the Church of the thirteenth century. “They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in death they were not divided.”

CHAPTER XXV.
JACOPONUS AND THE “STABAT MATER.”

Jacoponus, known to us sometimes as Jacobus de Benedictis, and sometimes as Jacopo di Benedetto, or as Giacopone da Todi from his Italian birthplace, is a most quaint and singular singer. The name Jacoponus is a mere title of reproach, and signifies either “Big James” or “Silly James.” It was called after him on the street and he adopted it in a spirit of humility and as a badge of self abnegation. The man himself was an Italian jurist and nobleman, who lived in the thirteenth century. He led a wild life, lost his property, and eventually regained it by industry and ability. Evidently he neither cared nor scrupled about his ways of making money. A crisis came in his life in consequence of his wife’s sudden death. She was killed at the city games of Todi in the year of grace 1268, where with other women she had been watching the sports from a scaffold of wood. It was insecure and fell, killing her instantly. Poor Benedetto, on hurrying to the spot, found that beneath her garments she had been wearing a hair girdle next to the skin—according to the harsh custom of the time—and he was deeply affected by this evidence of her anxiety to please God. In those days such an action spoke volumes for the victim’s piety, and no one was more open to conviction than this erratic, sensitive, and brilliant man.

But it would seem that for a long time he struggled against his feelings, since we have a record that by 1298 he had been a religious person about twenty years. Indeed, there is a story that he was not received at once by the Minorites, and that he finally produced certain poems before they grew satisfied to take him in. However, when he was fairly within their walls he outdid all the other Franciscans in austerity. He had given up his position as Doctor of Laws and had surrendered his property; now it would appear that he was determined to advance beyond the rest in ascetic devotion. His penances and prayers were greatly in excess of prescribed rules, and he must have proved as sore a trial to any easy-going brother, as Simeon Stylites was when he too led the whole convent to denounce his ascetic habits. There is small doubt that the brain of Jacoponus was decidedly off its balance, even in these earliest days, and his subsequent conduct gave full evidence of his insanity. Still, we find in this self-abasement of his nothing that looks like pride or egotism. Where others display a complacency which is very Pharisaic, he only shows the monomania of a gifted soul. Some of his expressions are remarkable for their spiritual depth and power. Thus when he was pressed to explain how a Christian can be sure that he loves God, he replied, “I have the sign of charity; if I ask God for something, and He refuses me, I love Him notwithstanding; and when He opposes me I love Him twice as much.” “I would,” he says, “for the love of Christ, suffer with a perfect resignation all the toils of this life, every grief, anguish, pain, which word can express or thought conceive. I would also readily consent that, on leaving life, the demons should bear my soul into the place of tortures, there to endure all the torments due to my sins; to those of the just who suffer in purgatory, and even of the reprobates and demons if this could be; and that until the day of the last judgment, and longer still, according to the good pleasure of the Divine Majesty. And, above all, it would be to me a great pleasure and supreme satisfaction that all those for whom I should have suffered should enter heaven before me, and, finally, if I came after them that all should agree to declare to me that they owe me nothing.” Surely no modern theologian has ever stated the doctrine of “self-emptiness” in any shape which at all compares with this!

Nor was he deficient in wit. “I enjoy the realm of France,” he once said, “more than does the King of France; for I take part in all the happiness that comes to him and I haven’t the care of his business.” At another time he entered the market-place on all fours naked, a saddle on his back and a bit between his teeth, for what symbolic purpose no one has ever explained. Again, he literally tarred and feathered himself, covering his body with a sticky oil and then rolling in feathers of various colors and kinds. In this elegant wedding attire he made his appearance at his brother’s house to honor the marriage of his niece. The guests, as might be expected, departed in confusion and disgust. But to all remonstrances upon his conduct he retorted, “My brother thinks to illumine our name by his magnificence; I shall do it by my folly.” He was really a leaf taken out of Rabelais or Boccaccio—a jester whose folly and wisdom were mingled unequally, much in the fashion of that Wamba son of Witless, immortalized for us in the pages of Ivanhoe.