The hymn for All Saints Day, Psallat plebis sexus omnis voce corde carmina, is notable not only for its own vigor, but as being one of the oldest in which the alliterative principle of the early Celtic and Teutonic verse is employed in Latin. It therefore comes from the North of Europe, with the chances in favor of Ireland.
Of known but less important hymn-writers of the sixth century we have only two, Columba and Flavius. The former is the great Irish missionary known to his countrymen as Columcille (the Dove, or the Dove of the Church), who lived A.D. 521 to 597. He was one of the O’Donnells of Donegal, whose chiefs, something more than seventy years before his birth, had offered especial opposition to Patrick’s preaching. He studied in the great school founded at Clonard, on the upper waters of the Boyne, by Finnian, the first of those teachers who made the Ireland of this and the following centuries “the land of schools,” to which students flocked from Great Britain and even the Continent. Finnian sent him to Clonfad to obtain ordination as a bishop; but the bishop, who was ploughing in the field when he came, made a mistake and gave him ordination as a priest. And he never rose higher than this in hierarchical dignity. Not that it mattered much in the very elastic system of Church government Patrick had established in Ireland. The tribal or sept system was copied in the Church arrangement. At the head of each church sept stood a coarb, who might be a woman, and frequently was a priest or deacon. Under this jurisdiction the bishops took the same relative place that the bards held to the chiefs in the civil tribes. Sometimes there would be a dozen of these right reverend fathers in God in one small Irish town, all under the direction of a female coarb, miscalled an abbess by later authors, as the Church sept has been miscalled a monastery.
As a penance for having been the cause of a faction fight or civil war—one hardly knows which to call it—over the ownership of a psalter, Columba banished himself from Ireland and took up his abode at Iona (or Hy), from which centre he preached the Gospel to the Scots (i.e., Irish) and Picts (i.e., Welsh) of the Highlands and the Western Islands. The former had conquered this region in the fifth century and were yet to give their name to the whole country, although up to A.D. 1198 there is no instance of Scotus meaning Scotchman rather than Irishman. But while Christianity had penetrated even the wilds of Donegal in Ireland, these Irish of Scotland and their Cymric subjects still were pagans. So as Patrick was Scotland’s gift to Ireland, Columcille was Ireland’s to Scotland. He was the type of those persuasive and successful missionaries which the Church of Patrick sent through Great Britain and to the Continent. He used the power of song very freely in his missionary labors, confounding the Druids and attracting the people by the grave, sweet melody of the Church’s chants. Like Whitefield and Summerfield, he had a wonderful, because pure voice and could sing so as to be heard a mile away. He, too, was a poet of no mean merit. The sorrows of his voluntary exile from the land of his birth—the land which exercises such a weird fascination over her children that all other lands are to her what prose is to poetry or water to wine—seem to have wakened in him the gift of song. Less beautiful than these patriotic elegies is the abecedarian hymn on the spiritual history of our world, Altus prositor, vetustus dierum, et ingenitus, which is given in the Appendix to the Lyra Sacra Hibernica (Belfast, 1879) and in the second part of Dr. J. H. Todd’s Liber Hymnorum. It is written in a very rude Latinity, and is intended for instruction and edification rather than lyric expression. But it is an interesting monument of the faith of the great missionary, as it brings us nearer him than does the wonderful biography by Abbot Adamnan, his seventh successor at Iona. It was first printed in 1657 by the Irish scholar Colgan, and with it two other and shorter hymns (In Te, Christe, credentium and Noli, Pater, indulgere), which also may be Columcille’s.
Flavius was Bishop of Chalons in the year 580, and has left one hymn, Tellus et aeth’ra jubilent, which Daniel calls an excellent poem (carmen eximium). Its theme is our Lord’s washing the feet of the Apostles, and for this reason it was commonly sung after meals in some monasteries.
Of the seventh century, the century of Heraclius and Mahomet, there is not one great hymn-writer known as such, but there are some great hymns. The greatest is the Urbs beata Hirusalem, dicta pacis visio, of which the Angulare fundamentum is a part, and which is of the seventh or eighth century. Daniel, however, with the support of Schlosser, regards this hymn as not certainly older than the tenth century, and has Neale’s support in asserting that the last two verses are a later addition to give it suitableness for singing at a dedication of a church.[24] The earliest mention of its use in the tenth century is in the church of Poitiers at the annual blessing of the font on Easter Sunday, which tends to confirm the supposition that two verses have been added. He thinks it of Spanish origin, as the metrical form is one usual in the Mozarabic Breviary. In later days it underwent three revisions. In the old Paris Breviary of 1527 it becomes the Urbs Jerusalem beata; in the new Breviary of 1736 it becomes the Urbs beata, vera pacis visio under the hands of Abbé Besnault (ob. 1726). In the Roman Breviary of 1631 it is the Coelestis Urbs Jerusalem, the form, as usual, best known to modern readers and translators, but not the best worth knowing. Along with the Urbs beata we may place the Gloriosa Jerusalem, probably of Spanish origin, and of the same century as well as similar in contents, but unequal in beauty and poetic worth.
Next in worth is the abecedarian judgment hymn, Apparabet repentina dies magna Domini, which Neale speaks of as containing the germ of the Dies Irae. It is little more than a rehearsal in a trochaic metre of our Lord’s prediction of the Day of Judgment. It follows the Scripture text much more closely than does Thomas of Celano. Bede mentions it in the next century. Mrs. Charles has translated it.
To this seventh century or the next Mone refers the Salvator mundi, Domine, which is most probably an Anglo-Saxon hymn, although of the Ambrosian school. It reappears in the Anglican Orarium of 1560 and the Preces Privatae of 1564, and is said to have been familiar to Sir Thomas Browne and Bishop Ken through its use at Wykeham’s school in Winchester. It, along with the Te lucis ante terminum, also sung at Winchester, may have suggested both Bishop Ken’s “Glory to thee, my God, this night,” and Browne’s “The night is come, like to the day,” given in his Religio Medici. To the seventh century we also may refer the Quicunque vultesse salvus, a hymn better known as the Athanasian Creed.
Besides these there are two groups of hymns whose temporal limits do not lie within the seventh century on either side, but which may be as well discussed here as anywhere. The first are the early Spanish hymn-writers. We know by name three of the seventh century. The first is Isidore, Archbishop of Seville (570-636), the scholar of encyclopaedic range, who did so much to adapt the learning of the Romans to the wants of the Gothic community in Spain. To him are ascribed, somewhat doubtfully, three ballad-hymns in honor of as many martyrs and two abecedarian poems on repentance. More certainly authentic are three or four ascribed to his contemporary Eugenius, who was Archbishop of Toledo from 646 to 657. He has left us thirty-two Latin poems in classic metres, none of which, strictly speaking, are hymns, but his Rex Deus immense has found its way into the collections. In his day he worked hard to improve the singing and other services of the Church. Lastly, there is the Spanish magistrate Cyxilla, who built a church in honor of the martyr Thyrsus of Toledo, and wrote a hymn for the dedication, though some say he got Isidore to do it for him. Daniel (I., 190) gives it in full from the Mozarabic[25] Breviary. But far more important are the anonymous hymns of that Breviary, which constituted the hymnary of the old Spanish Church at the date of the conquest of the country by the Saracens (711-14), and which through the temporary prostration of the Church’s energy was preserved from additions and alterations. The collection therefore is interesting as containing nothing of later date than the eighth century, and probably very little that is later than the seventh. Besides a large number of hymns traceable to other authors, from Hilary to Gregory—most of them from Ambrose and his school—there are forty-eight hymns peculiar to this ancient Breviary. Of these the best known are the Alleluia piis edite laudibus, the Cunctorum rex omnipotens, the Jesu defensor omnium, the O Dei perenne Verbum of Bishop Arturus Serranus of Toledo, the Sacer octavarum dies, the Sacrata Christi tempora, and the Surgentes ad Te, Domine. It is well known that the hymns of Ambrose and his school enjoyed great repute in Spain. These unnamed writers evidently have studied at his feet, their mode of dealing with the great themes of Christian praise having much in common with his. The country, however, which gave Seneca, Lucan, and Quinctilian to Latin literature was under no necessity merely to imitate an Italian model; and we find these Spanish poets departing widely from Ambrose’s school as regards the form of their verse. The four-lined stanza, with four iambic feet (u -) in each line—a line used by the tragedian Seneca before it was adopted by the Christian poets—is the form of verse employed almost exclusively by the Ambrosian school. The Mozarabic writers also use it (Convexa solis orbita), but they also employ as a substitute a trochaic verse of eleven syllables (Lucis auctor clemens, lumen immensum) and more complex choriambic forms (Alleluia piis edite laudibus, etc.). But their hymns, as a whole, lack pith and force; not one of them has earned a place by itself in the affections of Latin Christendom.
The second national group is that of the early Irish writers of Latin hymns. There are not so many of these, and still fewer names have been preserved. But they deserve notice as monuments of that aggressive Church whose missionary labors rendered such grand service in the Christianization of Western Europe. Of Caelius Sedulius there is enough said in the chapter devoted to him and his acrostic hymn. Of Columcille and the Altus Deus prositor we have spoken above. The next name which meets us is that of Ladkenus or Lathacan, an Irishman of the seventh century, to whom is ascribed a hymn of the class called in Irish Luireach (or lorica), meaning a shield. There are two hymns of this class ascribed to Patrick and to Columcille. The former, best known by James Clarence Mangan’s version,
“At Tara to-day, in this awful hour,