The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

Embraceth all things true.

CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE HYMN-WRITERS OF THE BREVIARY.

There are three principal liturgical books in use in the Roman Catholic Church. Originally there were two: the Ritual, which contained all the sacramental offices, and the Breviary, which contained the rest. But for convenience the eucharistic office in its various forms now has a book to itself called the Missal, and the other six sacraments recognized in the Church of Rome make up the Ritual.

It is with the Breviary, however, that hymnology is especially concerned, as it is in it that the hymns of the Church are mostly to be found, while the sequences belong to the Missal. It contains the prayers said in the Church’s behalf every day at the canonical hours by the priests and the members of the religious orders. Originally there were only three of these canonical hours, and they were based on Old Testament usage. These were at the third, sixth, and ninth hour of the Scriptures (nine o’clock, noon, and three in the afternoon), and in the Western Church are called Tierce, Sext, and Nones, for that reason. The number afterward was increased to five and then to seven. To these three day hours were added three night hours, with two at the transition from night to day (Prime), and from day to night (Vespers). But to get up thrice in the night was too much for even monastic discipline, so they said two night services together at midnight, and then they slept till dawn. As this daily service differs in its contents according to the seasons of the Church year, and also is adapted to the commemoration of the saints of the Calendar, the Breviary is the most voluminous prayer-book known to Christendom. It generally is published in four substantial volumes, one each for the four natural seasons. It is used in such public services as are not accompanied by a celebration of any sacrament and in the choir service of the religious houses. In theory, however, the Church is present even at the solitary recitation of the hours by a secular priest; and when two say them in company they must say them aloud.

Hymns were not in the services of the Breviary from the beginning. As late as the sixth century there was a controversy as to admitting anything but the words of Scripture to be sung. We find a Gallic synod sanctioning their use, and a Spanish synod taking common ground with our Psalm-singing Presbyterians. But in the next century even Spain, through the Council of Toledo (A.D. 633), appeals to early precedent in behalf of hymns, and decides that if people may use uninspired words in prayer, they may do the same in their praises—Sicut ergo orationes, ita et hymnos in laudem Dei compositos nullus vestrum ulterius improbet—which went to the core of the question and silenced the exclusive Psalm-singers. Twenty years later another Council of Toledo required of candidates for orders that they should know both the Psalter and the hymns by heart. Yet in the Roman Breviary no hymns were introduced before the thirteenth century, when Haymo, the General of the Franciscan Order, reformed it in 1244 with the sanction of Gregory IX. and Nicholas III.

In the view of Roman Catholic liturgists, the Psalms set forth the praise of God in general, while hymns are written and used with reference to some single mystery of the faith, or the commemoration of some saint. This harmonizes with their use in the Breviary, and their division into hymns de tempore for the festivals of the Church year, or the days of the week, or the hours of the day; and hymns de sanctis for the days of commemoration in the Church Calendar. Even when the same hymn is used on a series of days, its conclusion is altered to give it a special adaptation to each of these days. This classification, of course, does not describe the whole body of the Latin hymns. Some few even of those in the Breviary, as, for instance, the Te Deum, have to be classed as psalms, and are called Canticles (Cantica); and many outside it will not fit into any such definition of what a hymn is. But it illustrates the general character and purpose of the hymns of the Roman and other breviaries, as designed for a special temporal or personal application by way of supplement to the Psalter.

At present the Roman Breviary, prepared with the sanction of the Council of Trent, has driven nearly all the others out of use. But at the era of the Reformation there was a great number of breviaries, every diocese and religious order having a right to its own. Panzer enumerates no less than seventy-one which were printed before 1536, some of them in several editions.[18] Even now the Roman Breviary is supplemented by special services in honor of the saints of each order or country, and by services of a more general kind which are peculiar to some localities. But in Luther’s time the endless variety in breviaries and missals formed a striking feature of the confusion which to his mind characterized the Church of Rome.

With the development of a more fastidious taste, through the study of the Latin classics as literary models, there arose in the sixteenth century, and even before the Reformation, a demand for a reformation of the Breviary. Besides its defects of form, such as violations of Latin grammar, the constant use of terms which grated on the ears of the humanists, and the use of hymns in which rhyme rather added to the offence of want of correct metre, the contents of the Breviary were found faulty by a critical age. The selections from the Fathers to be read by way of homily were in some cases from spurious works; and the narratives of saints’ lives for the days dedicated to them were not always edifying, and in some cases palpably untrue. It became a proverbial saying that a person lied like the second nocturn office of the Breviary, that being the service in which these legends are found. But the badness of the Latin and the metrical faults of the hymns counted for quite as much with the critics of that day. We hear of a cardinal warning a young cleric not to be too constant in reading his Breviary, if he wished to preserve his ear for correct Latinity.

As might have been expected, it was the elegant Medicean Pope Leo X. who first put his hand to the work of reform. He selected for this purpose Zacharia Ferreri, Bishop of Guarda-Alfieri, a man of fine Latin scholarship and some ability as a poet. By 1525 Ferreri had the hymns for a new Breviary ready, and published them with the promise of the Breviary itself on the title-page.[19] Clement VII., also of the house of Medici, was Pope when the book appeared, and he authorized the substitution of these new hymns for the old, but did not command this.

The book is furnished with an introduction by Marino Becichemi, a forgotten humanist, who was then professor of eloquence at Padua. It is worth quoting as exhibiting the attitude of the Renaissance to the earlier Christian literature. He praises Ferreri as a shining light in every kind of science, human and divine, prosaic and poetical. He cannot say too much of the beauty of his style, its gravity and dignity, its purity, its spontaneity and freedom from artificiality. “That his hymns and odes, beyond all doubt, will secure him immortality, I need not conceal. Certainly I have read nothing in Christian poets sweeter, purer, terser, or brighter. How brief and how copious, each in its place—how polished! Everywhere the stream flows in full channel with that antique Roman mode of speech, except where of full purpose it turns in another direction.” That means how Ciceronian Ferreri’s speech, except where he remembers that he is a Christian poet and bishop writing for Christian worshippers. “More than once have I exhorted him that it belonged to the duty and dignity of his episcopal (pontificii) office to make public these Church hymns.”