The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

He was a person of sufficient prominence for Italy and Gaul to contest the honor of his birth. It would appear, however, that Gaul has the best title to whatever credit his nationality may give. The works on hymnology do not mention him, and the only notices of his life and writings are to be found in out-of-the-way corners of books on Latin literature and in the controversial pages of Church historians. Those who attack and those who defend the papal claims, are in the habit of mentioning the two embassies of Ennodius as notable points in their argument; but the man is lost from sight in the paramount importance of his mission. It cannot be so with us, to whom his personal character is the topic of interest, and who care only for his circumstances as these develop him to us upon his hymnologic side.

Ennodius has himself informed us that he regarded Arles as his native place. We also know that he was born in 473, because he died in 521 at the age of forty-eight. His family was highly respectable, if, indeed, it was not actually illustrious. Our poet always shows a familiarity with the affairs of good society; and in those times good society had only one meaning. It was a society which educated its scions in the polite learning of Greece and Rome, and which made much of the ability to speak and write the Latin tongue. It is scarcely to be questioned that this was the theory on which the early education of Ennodius proceeded. He was sent to Milan in order to become versed in what was called humane learning. If he is himself to be believed he acquired both bad and good in this school. He laments with a mock humility (for so it would appear by his later literary derelictions) that he had obtained a great deal of wicked and ungodly information; and really no one can read some of his nasty epigrams and doubt his assertion. For, whether it was permissible to a saint or not, it is a fact, that the editors of his works have not scrupled to print some exceedingly profane and improper pieces which are undoubtedly the product of his pen.

His aunt, who was bearing the cost of this admirable instruction, died in 489—that is, when he was sixteen—and he was left without means to proceed with his studies. He avows that he had come to detest the very name of liberal education, and this, under the circumstances, cannot well be regarded as anything very surprising. We soon after find him married to a lady who is described as of a “most noble” and therefore highly appropriate family. She was, moreover, “very rich”—another satisfactory point. With this wealthy and fashionable wife, Ennodius rapidly obtained a view of earth, and what earth can give, which was so far limited in that the money did not equal the desires of the married pair. It ran low and the bitterness of financial perplexities mingled with the cup of their happiness. Judging the husband by his epigrams he was pretty fairly exhausted by the speed of their career, and was quite ready to shake off the encumbrance of a family and devote himself to the lofty purpose of being supported by somebody else. An unprejudiced mind fails to see in this any particular “admonition” or “example” to his age. It is merely the selfish escape of a worldly but embarrassed man. Divorces were not available then with the ease with which a less scrupulous and more intellectual generation can now procure them. The proper, and, indeed, the meritorious way, was to slip into a cloister and become one of that vast army which was soon to be the tower of strength of the Pope. He himself ascribes this step to a serious illness in which he had been healed through the miraculous interposition of St. Victor, after the doctors had given up his case.

Ennodius now attached himself to the person and fortunes of Epiphanius, the Bishop of Pavia. He was placed under the tutelage of one Servilio, who taught him theology according to the methods and opinions then in vogue. His wife meanwhile had made the best of it after the same fashion, and had gone into a convent, where all trace of her vanishes in that monotone of gray walls, chanted services, and ceaseless devotion. At least no individuality resembling her ever henceforth emerges from that uniform procession which passes by us, in this and later centuries, as the long line of hooded figures moves athwart Dante and Virgil in the “Purgatorio.”

But the career of Ennodius now begins. He is the bishop’s chosen companion, the associate of his expedition to Briançon in Burgundy in behalf of certain prisoners; for in those days the spiritual hand was often laid with a mighty grip on the secular arm. The poet was by this time a deacon, having been ordained thereto by his kind friend the bishop. And the duties of this private secretaryship were so pleasant that it is evident no one would willingly surrender them for a cold cell and matins early in the morning. The glimpses which we get of Ennodius do not encourage us to esteem him an ascetic, or to think him lacking in zeal for personal comfort. He was the literary adjunct of a remarkably amiable prelate, with whom he was on terms of intimacy which made his own life no care at all, and his meat and drink no problem whatever! From 494, then, he continued still to occupy this post of trust and ease. We are told that the bishop persuaded him to it, but there can be no reasonable objection to our believing that the bishop had no unwilling listener.

The literary capacity of Ennodius next attracts attention. His patron (who must not be confused with the great Bishop of Salamis, the author of the famous Heresies, who belongs to the previous century) died before 510. Maximus III. had succeeded Epiphanius, and after his death our Ennodius, in 510 or 511, was selected for the vacant diocese. The name of this episcopate was Ticinum, or, as we now style it, Pavia. It is plain that the bestowal of this dignity was hastened by the fact that our scholar while still a deacon had defended Pope Symmachus before the Roman synod called “Palmare,” and so effectually that the discourse was entered on the acts of the council, where it still appears. The Pope had been charged with crimes, and a synod convoked by the heretical Theodoric was to decide the case. The date was October, 501. The place was a portico of the church of St. Peter at Rome to which this name of Palmare was usually given. And the speech is historic inasmuch as it is the earliest recorded instance of that assertion of supremacy on the part of the Roman pontiff which frees him from any responsibility to earthly rulers. Ennodius thus became the advocate of this dogma, and upon the broad wings of papal favor he soared to the high station which his patron Epiphanius had quitted.

This burst of declamatory eloquence did not come without preparatory training. Ennodius had been exercised in the art of declamation in his youthful days and, as a deacon, he was able to utilize his knowledge. In 510 or 511, not long after his elevation to the mitre, he wrote the life of his friend and predecessor. And this he followed with divers performances of a literary character which were generously applauded. He became a sort of hero in the world of letters, and whatever he was pleased to compose was heartily commended.

In 515 it was natural that such an advocate of the absolute domination of the Roman pontiff should be selected to help in the effort to reunite the Eastern Church to the Western. The ambassadors were himself, the Bishop of Pavia; Fortunatus, Bishop of Catania; Venantius, a presbyter; Vitalis, a deacon, and Hilarius, a notary and scribe. These names themselves reveal a not infrequent source of confusion to students of that distressingly barren period, when it was regarded as a very pleasant compliment to call the son of a nobody by the distinguished appellation of some great person in the Church. In this manner Hilary and Fortunatus suffered then, and modern scholars have been often vexed and perplexed since, especially when dates come near together. It hardly needs to be added that these wearers of illustrious names have only that meed of renown, such as it is.

The purpose of the embassy was to obtain from the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius, at that time a man of great age, the recognition of Hormisdas, the ruling Pope, as the supreme religious head of both empires. It was a delicate negotiation, and it demanded a perfectly incorruptible adherence to the interests of Rome. In this respect Ennodius stood pre-eminent as what Mosheim styles an “infatuated adulator of the Roman pontiff,” and as a master of the style then required in a diplomat. He had (in 503) eulogized Pope Symmachus, calling him “one who judged in the place of God” (vice Dei judicare) and again (in 507) he had published a panegyric on Theodoric, the Gothic King of Italy, which had all the absurd flattery of that species of composition. To crown these he was the obedient occupant of the see of Pavia. He was therefore just the man to do the work of the relentless and uncompromising Pope.

Caelius Hormisdas was a man who never yielded, never forgot, and never relaxed a purpose. Such men, backed by a sufficient power, wring from a reluctant world about all that they have determined to secure. But to the obstinate will of the Pope was opposed the no less obstinate will of the old Emperor—now fully eighty-five years of age—and quite as grim in his methods as any Hormisdas. It was to be a battle of giants and the intermediates might look for little favor. The opportunity for the negotiation itself happened to occur in an unusual way. Vitalianus, commander of the Imperial Byzantine cavalry, had taken arms against the Emperor; had defeated and put to death Cyril, the opposing general, and had then marched to the very gates of Constantinople. The victor was proposing to color his rebellion by a pleasant pretext of helping the orthodox; and the old Emperor, therefore, turned the edge of his own humiliation by agreeing to a correspondence with the Pope.