HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

The Latin poetry of the Christian Church presents a tempting field for the exercise of scholarship and research. The relation in which it stands on the one hand to the classic poetry of Greece and Italy, and on the other to the Liturgies of the Eastern Church, the placing of accent in the room of quantity, and the rise and growth of rhyme—these and such-like matters will always prove attractive to experts and specialists. They are, however, quite beyond the scope of this brief paper. Those who wish to make an exhaustive study of a subject which has many sides and a copious literature, would do well to betake themselves to such standard works as are noted below.[1] The general reader may find something to profit and to interest him in the following general survey.

The title placed on our Saviour’s cross, setting forth His accusation—“Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews,” was written in three languages—in Hebrew and in Greek and in Latin. That collocation of languages gives the order in which the hymnody of the Church developed.

Hebrew hymnody is contained for the most part in the Hebrew Psalter; for the distinction between psalms and hymns is not one that admits of being applied to all Hebrew poetry. Our Lord and His disciples, as they went out to the Mount of Olives after the institution and first observance of the Supper Sacrament, sang a portion of the Great Hallel, which consists of Psalms cxiii. to cxviii. inclusive. Their doing so is described in the New Testament as singing “an hymn,” just as the singing of Paul and Silas in the Philippian prison is said to be singing hymns unto God.[2]

In the Eastern or Greek Church hymnody was in both private and public use from earliest times. The oft-quoted letter of the younger Pliny, written soon after his arrival as Proconsul in the provinces of Bithynia and Pontus, which took place in A.D. 110, informs the Emperor that it was the practice of the Christians to meet together on a certain day and sing antiphonally (secum invicem) a hymn to Christ as their God; while the “Apostolical Constitutions,” which take us back to the life of the Church in the second or third centuries, enjoin the use of morning and evening hymns of praise for God’s beneficence by Christ. From the ample stores of Oriental hymnology there have come into modern collections many of their gems, thanks to the scholarship and versifying skill of Dr. Neale, Keble, and Canon Bright. To the first named we are indebted for such well-known renderings of Greek sacred pieces as “Fierce was the wild billow,” and, “The day is past and over,” as also for “Art thou weary, art thou languid?” From the author of the “Christian Year” we have a beautiful English rendering of a first or second century Greek hymn, preserved by Basil, “Hail, gladdening Light, of His pure glory poured;” and from Canon Bright we have the vesper or “lamplighting hymn,” with its opening invocation, “Light of gladness, Beam Divine.”

The Western Church came under Eastern influence in the matter of hymn composition in the fourth century. The first to compose hymns in Latin verse was Hilary of Poitiers. This theologian was banished to Phrygia by the Emperor Constantius, because of his defence of the Nicene Creed from the attacks of the Arian party. During the bishop’s exile, his daughter, Abra, wrote to inform him that she had been sought in marriage, although only in her thirteenth year. This drew forth a reply in which the father left the decision to her own choice, indicating at the same time a personal preference for continued virginity. Enclosed in the communication were a hymnus matutinus and a hymnus vesperinus. The morning hymn, beginning Lucis largitor splendida, is still extant, and has been styled “the oldest authentic original Latin song of praise to Christ as God.” It is, however, more than doubtful if the one for evening use survives; for the hymn, Ad cœli clara non sum dignus sidera, given in the Benedictine edition of Hilary’s works, belongs to the sixth or seventh century, and is probably of Irish authorship.

Another name associated with the rise of sacred Latin poetry is that of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. It will ever be to the glory of this fourth-century Father that Augustine ascribed to him his conversion, and sought baptism at his hands. His illustrious convert tells, in the ninth book of his “Confessions,” how the bishop defended the churches of Milan against the intrusion of Arian modes of worship, in spite of the efforts put forth by Justina, mother of the Emperor Valentinian, to obtain one of the basilicas for the use of the party she favoured. Alarmed by a report that he might be removed by force, the devout people of the city surrounded the bishop day and night, ready to die with him rather than allow him to be apprehended.

He, on his part, to stimulate their zeal and sustain their courage, supplied them with hymns to sing in honour of the Trinity. “Then,” writes Augustine, “it was first instituted that, after the manner of the Eastern churches, hymns and psalms should be sung, lest the people should wax faint through the tediousness of sorrow; and from that day to this the custom is retained, divers (yea, almost all Thy) congregations throughout other parts of the world following herein.” Well nigh a hundred hymns have at one time or another passed under the title Ambrosian, but the number of authenticated pieces is pitiably small, not exceeding four. In that small group the Te Deum laudamus, at one time ascribed to the Bishop of Milan, does not find a place. For, as in the case of the Gloria in Excelsis Deo, the Dies Iræ, and the Veni, Sancte Spiritus, the question who wrote the Te Deum has not received a final answer, if, indeed, it ever will. Of this, however, we may be well assured, that in the time of Jerome of the fifth century, hymns were in general use throughout