The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

The thirteenth century, the century of Francis and Dominic, of Aquinas and Bonaventura, of Thomas of Celano and Jacoponus, is the age of the giants.

Its anonymous hymns worthy of special mention are few in number. One of the most beautiful is the Easter hymn, Cedit frigus hiemale, in which the coincidence of Easter with spring furnishes the starting-point. It is probably French. The Ave quem desidero is a rosary hymn, which rehearses our Lord’s life, with a verse for each of the beads, which surely is better than the usual Ave Marias. The use of rosaries is very ancient—pre-Christian even—but it was with the rise of the Dominican Order in this century that it became a sanctioned practice. The Jesu Salvator seculi and the O Trinitas laudabilis have been traced no further back than to this age; but they preserve the tone and style of the school of Ambrose. So the Mysteriorum signifer, in honor of the Archangel Michael, recalls an earlier age, while the Jesu dulce medicamen suggests the school of Bernard. This beautiful hymn has both thoughtfulness and unction to commend it. It represents the sounder tradition of Christian teaching in the mediaeval Church, and has been neglected unduly by Protestant translators. Mr. Crippen is the only one who has rendered it, and also the Juste judex Jesu Christe, a hymn of the same age and much the same character. Notable Marian hymns are the Gaude virgo, stella Maris, Salve porta chrystallina, and the Verbum bonum et suave; with which may be named that to St. John, Verbum Dei Deo natum, often ascribed to Adam of St. Victor, and certainly of his school. Also of that school is the vigorous hymn in commemoration of St. Paul, Paulus Sion architecta. We add the terse and forceful hymn in commemoration of Augustine of Hippo, Salve pater Augustine, and the still finer in commemoration of the martyrs of the Church, O beata beatorum martyrum certamina, which has found translators in both Dr. Neale and Mr. Chambers. It is defective, as making them and not Christ the central theme.

St. Edmund, the archbishop who gave up the see of Canterbury because his heart was broken between the demands of the Pope and the exactions of the king, and died (1240) an exile in a French monastery, is credited with two Marian hymns, one of which is a “psalter,” or hymn of one hundred and fifty stanzas. They are not of great importance. Another is ascribed to Robert Grosstete, Bishop of Lincoln (died 1253), one of the great Churchmen who spoke the truth to the see of Rome. He was the friend of Simon de Montfort and of the Friars, and the foremost Churchman of England in his time, as zealous for the reformation of the clergy of his diocese and the maintenance of the Church’s rights against the King as for its relative independence of the Roman curia. The Ave Dei genetrix ascribed to him exists only in a revised and not improved shape. Its twelve verses each begin with a word from the angelic salutation. The author seems to have borrowed from a hymn of Peter Damiani.

To Hugo, a Dominican monk, who was Bishop of Strasburg toward the close of the century, and had taught theology with success, is ascribed the Ave mundi domina, in which Mary is greeted as a fiddle—Ave dulcis figella!

The fourteenth century, like the seventh, furnishes us with the name of not a single hymn-writer of real eminence, and of very few who are not eminent. Yet this century and the next exceed all others in the number of the hymns, which either certainly were written in this age, or can be traced no farther back. But the quality falls short as the quantity increases. Mary and the saints are the favorite themes; and those two great repositories of perverted praise, the second and third volumes of Mone’s collection, bear emphatic witness to the extent to which the hierarchy of saints and angels had come to eclipse the splendors of the White Throne and even of the Cross. There is not a single hymn of the highest rank which we can ascribe to these centuries of decay, when the Middle Ages were passing to their death, to make way for the New Learning and the Reformation. But the great revival, which first swept over Italy and then reached Germany about 1470, which showed its power in the revival of “strict observance” in the mendicant orders, in the multiplication of new devotions and pilgrimages, and the accumulation of relics—that revival which laid such a powerful grasp on young Martin Luther and made a monk of him—bore abundant fruit in hymns both in Latin and the vernacular languages. It is a sign of the new age that the language consecrated by Church use no longer has a monopoly of hymn-writing, but men begin to praise as well as to hear in their own tongues the wonderful works of God.

The reverence for the Virgin reaches its height in the Te Matrem laudamus and the Veni, praecelsa domina, parodies of the Te Deum and the Veni, sancte Spiritus, which have nothing but ingenuity and offensiveness to commend them to Protestant readers. Of genuine poetical merit are the Regina coeli laetare and Stella maris, O Maria. Of the deluge of hymns in commemoration of the saints, we notice only the Nardus spirat in odorem, which indicates the growing worship of our Lord’s grandmother, by which Luther was captivated; the Collaudemus Magdalena of the Sarum Breviary, which Daniel calls “a very sweet hymn” (suavissimus hymnus). From it is extracted the Unde planctus et lamentum, of which Mr. Duffield has made the following translation. Both Mr. Chambers and Mr. Morgan have translated the whole hymn.

UNDE PLANCTUS ET LAMENTUM.

Whence this sighing and lamenting?

Why not lift thy heart above?

Why art thou to signs consenting,