The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

“The bones of the blessed Jacoponus de Benedictis of Todi, who, a fool for Christ’s sake, deluded the world by a new art and took heaven by force.”

There is in the Lenox Gallery a small picture by Zamacois, which represents a jester leaning against a head of Pan. The rude, broken bust stands on an antique pedestal, its mouth, in its half-tragic, half-comic curves, appearing to whisper into the ear of its companion. He, scarlet-clad and with his bauble swinging idly in his hands, inclines his head toward it and seems in a sad gravity to listen to its words. There, indeed, do I see Jacoponus! The eager heart of the great misunderstood, inconsistent, vain, and empty World tells him of its nothingness—a broken and abandoned deity deserted in its garden of Eden. An inexpressible sadness comes over me. Quietly I put by the Stabat Mater; I do not love it!—but I close the page softly over the poor mad prophet who rests his weary head on the steps of Solomon’s throne.

CHAPTER XXVI.
THOMAS À KEMPIS.

The contributions of Holland to the devotional poetry of Christendom have not been extensive; but in the Middle Ages she could show several Latin hymn-writers. The best known of these, however, is by far more famous for his prose works. Thomas Hemerken, called afterward Thomas à Kempis, was not by birth a Hollander. He was born in 1379 or 1380 at Kempen, a small city in the diocese of Koeln (Cologne), not far from what became the boundary line between the two nations. But in those days, and, indeed, until the Peace of Westphalia, Holland, like Switzerland, was reckoned a part of Germany. His father, John Hemerken, was an artisan of the poorer class, probably a silversmith; and both his parents were devout and God-fearing people. His elder brother John had gone to Deventer to obtain an education, after the fashion of the times, when boys wandered from city to city in search of instruction, and supported themselves by singing, begging, and sometimes by thieving. But at Deventer John had fallen in with some good people who had pity upon these wandering scholars, and had made arrangements to furnish them lodgings and copying-work in addition to what they would earn by singing in the choir.

The chief person in this group was Gerard Groote, a man of wealthy family and some strange vicissitudes in life. He had studied at the universities of Paris and Prague, and had taken minor orders to qualify himself to hold the two canonries family influence secured to him, but without giving any indication of a vocation to the sacred office. He seems even to have led a dissolute life. Then a great change came over him, chiefly through the influence of a friend of his youth named Henry Eger, now the prior of a Cistercian convent at Munkhuisen. Gerard resigned his benefices, and spent five years in a monastic retreat, from which he emerged as a zealous preacher of the Gospel to the clergy and people of what now is Holland, using both Latin and Dutch as occasion served. He especially dwelt on the utter worldliness of that dreary time, when priests, nobles, and tradesmen alike had lost all idea of serving God and men, and had set up gain and pleasure as the recognized ends of life. His sharp rebukes, and his exaltation of humility, simplicity, and poverty, attracted the lower classes, but roused the opposition of both the burghers and the Mendicants against him. After a brief and stormy career he was silenced by the Archbishop of Utrecht, and was obliged to find vent for his zeal in some other channel.

His purity and unworldliness had gathered around him, in his native Deventer, men and women like-minded with him, who, according to the tendency of the time, drifted naturally into a kind of monastic life. Brother-houses and sister-houses were organized, and they became known as the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life. They took no vows, and yet practised celibacy, common ownership and labor, and obedience to the rector of the house. They adopted no common dress, but came to wear the simplest gray robe of the same cut. Both laymen and clergy lived together in the brother-houses, and each took his turn in the common services of the brotherhood. They observed no canonical hours beyond what the Church exacted of the priests among them. They assumed none of the professions of the monks, and yet they realized the monkish ideal better than did the monks themselves. The four principles which governed Gerard’s own life and became the four corner-stones of this fraternity, were “contempt of the world and of self, imitation of the lowly life of Christ, good-will, and the grace of devoutness” (contemptus mundi et sui ipsius, imitatio humilis vitae Christi, bona voluntas, gratia devotionis). All this was summed up in the phrase moderna devotio, used both by the brethren and the outside world to designate the distinctive character of the order.

The experience Christendom had had of the results of mendicancy led Groote and his associates to base the new brotherhood on honest labor. The shape this took reflects his own character. He was a great book-lover—semper avarus et peravarus librorum, he says himself. When in peril of his life in a storm by sea, he managed to save the six books he had with him. He possessed a considerable library, and when the brotherhood came to adopt the principle of community of goods, he and the rest put their books into the common stock. And all who were able to write were to labor in copying books for sale—the clergy in Latin, the laymen in Dutch. It was this employment he extended to the poor scholars of the Deventer school. Indeed, it seems not improbable that he began it with them, and that the first brotherhood was composed of young friends of this class, who had grown to manhood in this employment. It is certain that in Deventer, in Zwolle, and for all we know in the other cities where the brotherhood took root, near by the brother-house stood a poor-scholars’ house, in which the boys attending the school of the city were lodged, kept under discipline, and to some degree given work also. But the Brethren of the Common Life were not an educating body, as has been very generally supposed. They aimed only at saving boys from the moral injury which too often attended their homeless life, at keeping good discipline over them, and at imparting moral and religious training. They aimed to do for the school-boys what the founders of colleges in the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris tried to do for the myriads of students who lived like vagrants in those seats of learning.

But before Gerard Groote died the question was raised whether it would not be advisable to establish a strictly monastic order of life for those of the brethren who felt a vocation to it. To this he agreed, but dissuaded his friends from adopting the severe rules of the Cistercians and the Carthusians for the new order. Rather he suggested that of the Canons Regular under the rule of St. Augustine as preferable, since it would be more in keeping with the spirit of the brotherhood, and would bind on no one too heavy burdens. This advice marks an advance upon Dominic, Francis, and the “reformers” of the Benedictine and Mendicant orders, in an evangelical direction. They all sought progress to perfection in deeper austerity. In his case the preference perhaps was caused by his friendship for the monastery of Canons Regular at Groenendal, in Flanders, whose prior was Jan Rusbroek, the great Flemish mystic. Gerard made several visits to Groenendal after his conversion, and translated two of his friend’s books into Latin.

Gerard Groote was carried off by the great pestilence of 1384, in his forty-fourth year. But he left the work in good hands, for a Deventer priest named Florens Radewinzoon succeeded him as rector of the brother-house, and proceeded with the building of the new monastery at Windesheim, near Deventer. It was opened in 1386, and John à Kempis, who had become a member of the brotherhood, was one of the six who first assumed the monastic vows.

It was six years later, in 1392, that Thomas set out to seek his brother at Deventer; for although the distance was not much over a hundred miles, he had heard nothing of John’s profession at Windesheim, so uncertain and irregular were the means of communication. On learning what had happened, he proceeded to Windesheim, where his brother welcomed him warmly. But there was no school at Windesheim, and John advised him to return to Deventer to attend the city school and place himself under the care of Florens. He did so and became an inmate of the poor-scholars’ house, which had been given to the brotherhood by a devout matron of the city. Here he lived for six years, attending school under Master Johann Boehme, singing in the choir of the church of which Florens was vicar, and earning a little money by copying books for him. The good rector showed him very great kindness, and in 1398, when his school studies were complete, he received him into the brotherhood. The year before this another pestilence had visited Deventer, carrying off Johann Kessel, the saintly cook of the brother-house, and prostrating Thomas himself, who recovered with difficulty. Indeed, it seemed as though the brotherhood would become extinct, and Florens and six others withdrew for a time from the plague-smitten city to guard against this catastrophe.