The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

Not long previous to this time—for it had been about the year of Gregory’s birth—Benedict had reformed the monastic order. His work, to put it briefly, consisted in guarding the entrance to monasticism and in regulating the hours, habits, and customs of those celibates who professed such a vocation for the religious life. From his wise and systematic arrangements, which have been but little improved upon though often reinforced by “reformations,” monasticism derived that adaptation to the active and practical life of the West, which it had lacked in the preceding centuries. Indeed, he so far reacted against the contemplative idleness of the East, as to aim rather at an industrial than a learned order. But his successors corrected this defect, and gave the order the literary and educational character which has been its greatest claim to the gratitude of Christendom. Thus it came to be that the Benedictine Fathers became the order of scholars, the editors of the Fathers, of the Acta Sanctorum, and of the Histoire Litteraire de France. The permanent revenues, the fixity and quiet of these monastic lives, the slow coral-building of these unknown workers, have resulted in gathering for us all that the mediaeval historian can desire upon the religious side. And it is here that, delving amid the dust of these mountainous masses of literature, the student of Latin hymnology will find his rarest delight. For these acute scholars have literally picked up and printed, yea, and what is more to the purpose, they have indexed and classified—whatever he can wish in the way of productions in prose and verse by any known author. The old MSS. are strained through into readable type. Their contents are sorted and sifted. And he who pores over these pages will rise from them at length with a profound conviction that the scholarship of the Latin Church, and particularly the Benedictine Order, deserves well from the world of letters and merits the admiration of the Church Universal.

Into such an order as this—an order of which he was to be one of the most illustrious lights—a divine impulse was pressing Gregory. He grew more closely attached to the Benedictines of Monte Cassino. His religious relatives encouraged his evident zeal. And thus after vibrating like a bee between the odorous rose and the honey-giving clover, he settled upon the humbler and sweeter flower and let the world go by.

The Arian Lombards had encamped upon that region which we after their name now call Lombardy. The Roman bishops were already the prop of the heathen state against the semi-Christian invaders; but with Lombards, and those whose religion was only a fiction, their influence was deplorably slight. Yet as Christianity increased, according to George Herbert’s simile,

“Like to those trees whom shaking fastens more,”

the Church became doubly influential through the skill of Gregory. He felt religion to be the source of the truest strength and thus he turned his wealth and his life into its treasury.

In the year 575 he took his great revenues and endowed six new monasteries in Sicily. Then he established a seventh, devoting it to the honor of St. Andrew; and this was at Rome, in his own palace on the Coelian hill. The populace who had seen him in silk and jewels now beheld him, a poor monk of the Benedictine Order, serving the beggars at the gate. In humility of demeanor and in simplicity of food he became a model to his fellow-monks. He attended the sick in his new hospital. He ate only the dried corn, or pulse, which his mother sent to him already moistened in a silver bowl. This bowl or porringer was the only relic of his departed splendor, and we are told that he did not keep even this, but gave it at last to a shipwrecked sailor for whom he had no money, and who begged importunately from him when he was writing in his cell.

The intensity of his devotion led him into great austerities of fasting and prayer and study of the Scriptures. He outdid the others in his abstinence from food and ended by ruining his health, so that he entered the papacy with a broken constitution. When he most needed the support of a vigorous body it was therefore denied to him.

The history of his gradual elevation is suggestive. Pope Benedict I. made him one of the seven cardinal deacons, and gave him charge of one of the seven principal divisions of the city. Pelagius II. chose him to head an embassy to Constantinople in 578 to congratulate Tiberius on his accession to the throne. For six years he remained abroad on this and similar service, and returned to Rome to be elected abbot of St. Andrew’s monastery. Here he was perfectly happy. In his Dialogues he speaks of the serene life and death of several of his brethren, and his latest biographer (Rev. J. Barmby) is never tired of relating how the great Pope perpetually looked back with regretful love to those quiet and happy days of peace with God and man.

It was then that the famous incident occurred which has made historic his missionary zeal, and has handed down three Latin puns as a proof that a man can be witty as well as earnest.

The slave market at Rome had received some new captives—alas! when was it not the scene of fresh wretchedness in those awful times? But these were of remarkable beauty and fairness of skin, and John the Deacon shall tell us of them in his own words:[6]