The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

18 (19). As our judge thou art believed to be coming.

19 (20) Thee therefore we beg,

Assist thy servants whom thou hast redeemed with precious blood.

20 (21). Cause us to be gifted, among thy saints, with eternal glory.

Amen.

There are no other unfathered hymns known to be of this century, and few less notable hymn-writers. To Jerome is ascribed a hymn, Te Bethlehem celebrat, which is not in any of the collections. His great contemporary, Augustine of Hippo, has had more than one fine hymn assigned to him, probably because his works have furnished the suggestion for so many. Notably Peter Damiani and Hildebert of Tours drew upon him. But the great theologian was not a poet, as we can see from his one essay in that form, viz., his “psalm” against the Donatists, in which he gives a popular and metrical exposition of the parable of the net (Matt. 13:47-50). It is quite enough to prove that he did not write the Ad perennis vitae fontem (Damiani), or the Quid, tyranne, quid minaris (Damiani), or the O gens beata coelitum, or even the Domine Jesu, noverim me, all of which have been given to him at times.

To the fifth century—the century of Prudentius and Ennodius—we may ascribe the earlier in the large group of hymns classed as Ambrosian, which are the work of a series of writers who may be described as constituting a school. It is one of the hardest problems in Latin hymnology to distinguish between Ambrose’s own work and that of his imitators, and to arrange the hymns composed by the latter between the fifth and the eighth century in any chronological order. What can be said positively has been shown in Chapter V. The chief authorities on the subject are the early collectors, Clichtove, Cassander, and Thomasius. Of considerable importance is the MS. given by Francis Junius in the seventeenth century to the University of Oxford, and published in 1830 by Jacob Grimm. It contains a collection of twenty-six hymns by Ambrose and the Ambrosians, with a translation into old High German, probably made at St. Gall in the ninth century. But these do not exhaust the list. Others have been pointed out by Mone and other collectors, as proving their kinship to the school by their metrical form or their contents and style. Schletterer enumerates ninety hymns of the school, and of these he assigns fifteen to Ambrose himself.

Closely related to the group, and yet not assigned to it, are several hymns to which a very early date is assigned by Mone at least. To this fifth century he gives the Unam duorum gloriam, which he also claims as of German origin, and describes as one of the oldest hymns of the German Church. It is in commemoration of two martyrs, to whose honor a church near Münster was dedicated, and is strictly classic in metre. Here also he assigns the Christi caterva clamitat, an Advent hymn of classic metre and primitive tone. He probably would agree with Wackernagel in selecting the same century for the hymn on Stephen, the protomartyr, Primatis aulae coelicae, in which he finds reminders of the style of Prudentius. Lastly, he assigns this date to the Paschal hymn, Te lucis auctor personat, which became obsolete when its special reference to Easter as the time of the baptism of adult catechumens lost its significance. It was used in France and probably other countries.

To the same fifth century belongs Paulinus, Bishop of Nola (353-431), who has many better claims to remembrance than his hymns. He was one of those men of whom their contemporaries cannot speak without enthusiasm, and as Augustine, Jerome, and Ambrose are among his eulogists we may assume that the praise was not undeserved. He came of a noble Gallic stock; he inherited wealth and acquired from the teaching of the poet Ausonius all the culture of his time; he filled high office in Italy and Spain; he spent the last twenty-two years of his life in administering with a faithful laboriousness the affairs of a Campanian bishopric. He did not receive baptism until his thirty-fifth year, so that he may have been brought up a pagan, although the inference is not necessary. In 378 he was made Roman consul to fill an unexpired term (consul suffectus), and was sent into Campania at the end of the year. There he was so deeply impressed by a festival in honor of the martyr Vincent of Nola, that his affections were drawn strongly to the city. But soon after he married a Spanish wife and went to live first at Bordeaux and then at Barcelona. At the former in 389 he was received into the membership of the Church; at the latter he and his wife, after the death of their infant son, resolved to renounce the “secular” life and to give themselves to asceticism and charity. He was ordained to the priesthood in response to a general demand of the people during the Christmas festivities. He removed to Nola, where he and his wife lived in the service of the poor, in an age when the incursions of Goths and Vandals were producing frightful wretchedness. He seems to have held right views of the responsibility of property, and instead of divesting himself of it at once, he kept it to use for his brethren. Nor did he separate from his wife after the fashion of Ennodius and others of the age. They labored together to the end. About 409 he was elected Bishop of Nola, and occupied that see until his death. Among his gifts to his people was a new aqueduct to supply their town with pure water, an evidence of his breadth of mind and genuine humanity. When he died he was added to the list of the recognized saints, and few with better right.

His literary achievement was not great, although everything he has written has its interest. His epistles and poems are reflections of both his excellence and his faults. They show at once the good heart of the man and his proneness to superstition. But his contemporaries thought his poems wonderful, and even some of the moderns have re-echoed this estimate. Erasmus calls him “the Christian Cicero,” a title more frequently assigned to Lactantius. Caspar Barth, in his Adversaria (1624), declines to rank any other Christian poet above him. His poems exhibit the decadence of Latin verse, in that quantity is often neglected and accent used to replace it. Only a few of them are hymns in any sense, and these are narrative or reflective rather than lyric. Bjorn gives two of them in his collection.