The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

CHAPTER XXIX.
THE UNKNOWN AND THE LESS KNOWN HYMN-WRITERS.
[Fourth to Tenth Century.]

The known is but a fragment broken from the unknown. This is eminently true as regards the authorship of the Latin hymns. When we have dealt as tenderly as the historical conscience will permit with the traditions which assign hymns to this and that author, we still find ourselves unable to affix any name to the great majority. And while it is true that the most part of the very great hymns are not left in this plight of anonymity, it is true that no small number of the best are on the record like Melchizedek—“without father or mother,” and many of them also “without beginning of years,” for we can determine only approximately the century of their origin. Nor is this at all surprising. Fame was neither the object nor the expectation of the writers of the Latin hymns of the early and Middle Ages. Their utmost expectation, probably, was to be valued a little by their brethren in their own and their sister monasteries as the author of a fine sequence or an appropriate hymn for a yearly festival. It was enough for that purpose that the report of their authorship passed from mouth to mouth in the choir, without any record made of it. The love of glory as a literary motive, came in, as Mr. Symonds reminds us, with the Renaissance, which borrowed it from the old pagans. Many a devout singer of the centuries before that practised the wisdom of à Kempis’s saying, Ama nesciri, “Love to be unknown.” They wrote not for gain in renown, but for use in the edification of their brethren and of the Church. And to live for use rather than gain is to live Christianly, for, as Swedenborg says, “The kingdom of heaven is a kingdom of uses.”

This and the next chapter we shall give partly to some of these orphaned hymns, touching only on the greatest. And as we come down the centuries we shall speak also of the less notable hymn-writers, some of them not less notable as men or as Churchmen, but such as have made less of a mark in hymnology.

At the outset we are met by two of the greatest of the sacred songs of the Church, which are none the less hymns although classed technically as canticles. Who wrote the Gloria in Excelsis and the Te Deum laudamus? As everybody knows, the opening words of the former are the song of the angels who brought the good news to the shepherds—words which authenticate their heavenly origin by their simplicity, beauty, and force—“a master-song,” as Luther says, “which neither grew nor was made on earth, but came down from heaven.” But the much longer supplement, which evidently reflects the situation of the Church in the days of the Arian controversy, must either have originated in the fourth century and in the East, or must have been altered to adapt it to that time. The original still exists in Greek, but in three forms, which differ somewhat; and the Latin version is defective in that it follows a later form than that which is given in the so-called Apostolical Constitutions; and, of course, the English follows the Latin, except in the part taken from the Gospel, where “good will to men” takes the place of “to men of good will” (hominibus bonae voluntatis), the latter being the reading adopted by the English translators of 1611, but rejected by the revisers of 1883.[22]

Who made the Latin version? An untrustworthy tradition ascribes it to Telesphorus, who was Bishop of Rome in 128-38. It is possible that he prescribed the chanting of the Scripture words in the Church service; but the whole hymn is of later date in Latin. There is much more likelihood that it was, according to a tradition recorded by Alcuin in the ninth century, the work of Hilary of Poitiers, the first Latin hymn-writer.

The Te Deum laudamus has some claims to be regarded as the greatest of Christian hymns. Like the Gloria in Excelsis it belongs to that first period of Christian hymn-writing, when the Hebrew psalms still furnished the models for Christian poets, and the same free movement of rhythmical prose was all that was required or even tolerated. There is no mention of it in Church literature before the sixth century, when the monastic rules of both Caesarius of Arles (c. 527) and of Benedict of Nursia (c. 530) prescribe its use, and the Council of Toledo mentions it. As it uses the words of the Vulgate in verses 22-25 and 27 to the end, it cannot, as it now stands, be much more than a century older than this, as the date of the Vulgate is 382-404. Yet a tradition recorded by Abbot Abbo of Fleury in the ninth century, ascribes this hymn also to Hilary of Poitiers, who died fifteen years before Jerome put his hand to the work of revising the Latin Bible. Daniel thinks to reconcile the discrepancy by ascribing it to Hilary of Arles, who was born the year before Jerome had finished his work, and by regarding it as a translation from the Greek, as verses 22-26 certainly are. They are found in the Appendix to the Alexandrian manuscript of the Greek New Testament, where they follow the Gloria in Excelsis with the interruption only of an Amen. But is it not possible to regard the last eight verses as a separate hymn, made up, with the exception of the strong verse—

26. Dignare, Domine, die isto sine peccato nos custodire—

of verses from the Scriptures? These last verses have no internal connection with the first twenty-two, and they differ decidedly in style, form, and source. Those contain no Scripture quotations, except the Ter-Sanctus in verses 5 and 6, which is not taken from the Vulgate version,[23] but apparently from the Itala. If, therefore, we consider those twenty-two verses as a hymn by themselves, this may have been the work of Hilary of Poitiers, and there is no necessity for assuming that it was not an original Latin hymn. This becomes more probable if we drop out verse 13, which interrupts the flow of the Christological thought, and evidently was interpolated to make the hymn complete from a Trinitarian point of view. When the Gloria in Excelsis and the Te Deum were composed, it was the relation of the Son to the Father which occupied the mind of the Church. Both hymns are the expression of “the present truth” on that subject; the mention of the Holy Spirit in both is probably by interpolation at a later date.

As the form, and in some places the meaning of the Te Deum is misrepresented in the current version, it may be worth while to reproduce the original in a more literal version:

1. Thee as God we praise,