The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

Addere praeterea dextra laevaque columnas,

Quae Damasi teneant proprium per saecula nomen.’

“Around the apse of the inner hall there was another distich of about the same poetical value, the text of which has been discovered in a MS. at Verdun:

‘Haec Damasi tibi, Christe Deus, nova tecta levavi

Laurenti saeptus martyris auxilio.’

“Mention of Damasus’s Archives is frequently made in the documents of the fourth and fifth centuries. Jerome calls them chartarium ecclesiae Romanae.”[3]

But a still more lasting monument of his fame is the Latin Vulgate, which he incited Jerome—as the English-speaking world calls Sophronius Eusebius Hieronymus—to prepare for the Church of the West. From a very early time Latin translations of the Scriptures from the Greek version of the Old Testament and the Greek original of the New Testament had been in existence. But although there were two well recognized types of these early versions—the Italian and the African—there was so little uniformity that there were “almost as many versions as copies.” Jerome was a man of classical culture and a close student of the Scriptures, which he could read in Hebrew as well as in Greek and Latin. He came to Rome from Syria in 382, to ask the aid of Damasus in behalf of the Luciferian schism at Antioch—a matter in which the Bishop of Rome hardly could meddle. Even before his arrival he had been in correspondence with Damasus and had written for him an exposition of the vision of the Seraphim in Isaiah 6. Damasus called a synod in which the schism at Antioch was discussed, but no result reached. It is said that in this synod he exhorted Jerome to take up the work of giving the Church a good Latin version of the Bible. A ninth-century writer says he put him in charge of the Archivum, or public library, described by Professor Lanciani. Later writers speak of him, without much warrant, as Damasus’s secretary. It seems probable that Damasus regarded him as a desirable man for the bishopric when his own death should leave it vacant. But when his death came in 384, the Dalmatian scholar was passed over, perhaps because he was not a Roman, and a much smaller man than either Damasus or Jerome was chosen instead. So Jerome went back to the East and established himself at Bethlehem. Between 382 and 404 he completed his version of the Scriptures, which is of especial importance to the student of Latin hymnology, as it stands in much the same relation to the Latin hymns of the fifth and later centuries as does the English Bible to the English hymn-writers. It controls their vocabulary and explains their allusions.

As a poet Damasus does not take very high rank. We have seen Professor Lanciani’s opinion of his inscriptions. Some forty poems are attributed to him, but only a very few of these concern us here. In the Cottonian MSS. there is a copy of rhymed “Verses of Damasus to his Friend” (Versus Damasi ad Amicum suum), which would be interesting to us if we were sure that Sir Alexander Croke is right in assuming that this is our Damasus. But the name “Rainalde” in the first line would hardly occur in a Latin poem by a Roman author of the fourth century.

There is no reason, however, to call in question the two hymns—one to the Martyr Agatha and the other to the Apostle Andrew—which are ascribed to him in the collections. And the former is especially remarkable as being the oldest hymn in which rhyme is employed intentionally and throughout. Of course if it were true that Hilary wrote the Jesu refulsit omnium or the Jesu quadrigenariae, which sometimes are printed as his, we should be obliged to assign to him the honor thus claimed for Damasus. But the preponderance of evidence and of presumption is against ascribing these hymns to him. Koch assigns the latter to the fifth century and not to the fourth. Mone ascribes the former to one of the early Irish hymn-writers, whose name is lost to us. He finds in it a tendency to alliterative construction, which indicates either Celtic or Teutonic authorship; and he is decided for the former by the mixture of Greek words, which was a favorite practice with the Irish hymn writers. Also the metrical form is one affected by them. On these grounds it is fair to claim that the hymn of Damasus marks the introduction of end-rhymes into the Latin hymns.

Rhyme was by no means unknown in the poetry of the Greeks and the Romans. But in languages which occupied that stage of grammatical development in which the relations of words are expressed by terminations, the resemblances in these were so numerous and so constant that rhyme must have appeared rather a cheap form for poetry. So in this stage we find the Southern Aryans of Europe employing the quantity of syllables and those of Northern Europe the coincidences of initial sounds (stabreim or alliteration) and assonance in their verse. It was when the development of languages substituted auxiliary and connecting words for terminations that the coincidences of final sounds became so much a source of pleasure to the ear as to justify their continuous employment for that purpose.