The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

That the Latin hymns of those earlier centuries show a steadily increasing amount of unscriptural devotion to the mother of our Lord and to His saints, and of the materializing view of our Lord’s presence with His Church in the Communion, is undeniable. But even in these matters the hymns of the primitive and mediaeval Church are a witness that these and the like misbeliefs and mispractices are a later growth upon primitive faith and usage.

The first generation of Protestants, to which Luther, Melanchthon, and Zwingli belong, had been brought up on the hymns of the Breviary and of the Missal, and they did not abandon their love for these when they ceased to regard the Latin tongue as the only fit speech for public worship. They showed their relish for the old hymns, by publishing collections of them, by translating them into the national languages, by writing Latin hymns in imitation of them, and even by continuing their use in public worship to a limited extent.

As collectors and editors of the old Latin hymns, the Protestants of the sixteenth century surpassed the Roman Catholics of that age. Over against the names of Hermann Torrentinus (1513 and 1536), Jacob Wimpheling (1519), Joste Clichtove (1515-19), Jacob van Meyer (1535), Lorenzo Massorillo (1547), and George Cassander (1556), the Roman Catholic hymnologists of the half century which followed the Reformation, we may place the anonymous collector of Basel (1538), Johann Spangenberg (1545), Lucas Lossius (1552 et seq., with Preface by Melanchthon), Paul Eber (1564), George Fabricius (1564), Christopher Corner (1568), Hermann Bonn (1569), George Major (1570), Andreas Ellinger (1573), Adam Siber (1577), Matthew Luidke (1589), and Francis Algerman (1596). All these, with the possible exception of the first, were Lutherans, trained in the humanistic school of Latin criticism and poetry; but only two of them found it needful or desirable to alter the hymns into conformity with the tastes of the age. The collections of Hermann Bonn, the first Lutheran superintendent of Lubeck, and that of George Fabricius, are especially important, as faithfully reproducing much that else might have been lost to us.

The work of translating the old Latin hymns fell especially to the Lutherans. Roman Catholic preference was no stronger for the original Latin than that of the Reformed for the Psalms. Of the great German hymn-writers from Luther to Paul Gerhardt, nearly all made translations from the storehouse of Latin hymnody, Bernard of Clairvaux being the especial favorite with Johann Heermann, John Arndt, and Paul Gerhardt. And even in hymns which are not translations, the influence of the Latin hymns is seen in the epic tone, the healthy objectivity of the German hymns of this age, in contrast to the frequently morbid subjectivity of those which belong to the age of Pietism.

More interesting to us are the early translations into English. The first are to be found in the Primer of 1545, a book of private devotions after the model of the Breviary, published in Henry VIII.’s time both in English in 1545 and again in Latin (Orarium) in 1546. In the next reign a substitute for this in English alone was prepared by the more Protestant authorities of the Anglican Church, in which, besides sundry doctrinal changes, the hymns were omitted. But the scale inclined somewhat the other way after Elizabeth’s accession. The English Primer of 1559 and the Latin Orarium of 1560 are revised editions of her father’s, not of her brother’s publications. The parts devoted to the worship of Mary are omitted, but the prayers for the dead and the hymns are retained. These old versions are clumsy enough, but not without interest as the first of their kind. Here is one with the original text from the Orarium, differing from any other authority known to us:

Rerum Creator omnium,

Te poscimus hoc vesperi

Defende nos per gratiam

Ab hostis nostri fraudibus.

Nullo ludamur, Domine,