Onlayn kitobni bepul oʻqish  The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

muallif Samuel Willoughby Duffield

THE
LATIN HYMN-WRITERS
AND
THEIR HYMNS.

BY THE LATE
SAMUEL WILLOUGHBY DUFFIELD,
Author of “The Heavenly Land,” “Warp and Woof,” “The Burial of the Dead,” and “English Hymns: Their Authors and History.”

EDITED AND COMPLETED BY
PROF. R. E. THOMPSON, D.D.,
Of the University of Pennsylvania.

“Et semper in hunc studiorum quare munitissimum portum ex hujus temporis tempestatibus lubenter confugissem.”—H. A. Daniel.

“In diesem Sinne betrachte ich diese, uns von der Vorzeit überlieferten ehrwürdigen und erhabenen Kirchlichen Dichtungen als ein geistiges Gemeingut.”—G. A. Konigsfeld.

FUNK & WAGNALLS,

NEW YORK:

1889.

LONDON: 18 & 20 ASTOR PLACE. 44 FLEET STREET.

All Rights Reserved.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1889, by FUNK & WAGNALLS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editor’s Preface iii

Introduction viii

I The Praise Service of the Early Church xi

II The Study of the Latin Hymns 12

III Hilary of Poitiers and the Earliest Latin Hymns 19

IV Pope Damasus and the Beginning of Rhyme 35

V Ambrose 47

VI Prudentius, the First Christian Poet 63

VII Ennodius, Bishop of Pavia 73

VIII Caelius Sedulius and his Alphabet Hymn 83

IX Venantius Fortunatus the Troubadour 88

X Gregorius Magnus [540-604] 97

XI The Venerable Bede 109

XII Rabanus Maurus, Author of the “Veni, Creator” 114

XIII Notker of St. Gall, Called Balbulus 132

XIV Walafrid Strabo 143

XV Hermannus Contractus and the “Veni Sancte Spiritus” 149

XVI Peter Damiani, Cardinal and Flagellant 169

XVII Hildebert and his Hymn 179

XVIII Bernard of Clairvaux 186

XIX Abelard 194

XX Peter the Venerable 214

XXI Bernard of Cluny 222

XXII Adam of St. Victor 227

XXIII Thomas of Celano 240

XXIV Thomas Aquinas and John Bonaventura 255

XXV Jacoponus and the “Stabat Mater” 272

XXVI Thomas À Kempis 283

XXVII Francis Xavier, Missionary to the Indies (1506-52) 298

XXVIII The Hymn-Writers of the Breviary 316

XXIX The Unknown and the Less Known Hymn-Writers [Fourth to Tenth Century] 347

XXX The Unknown and the Less Known Hymn-Writers [Tenth to Sixteenth Century] 370

XXXI Latin Hymnology and Protestantism 401

XXXII BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES. 416

XXXIII Index to Translated Hymns 446

Appendix 485

Appendix I BERNARDI MORLANENSIS DE VANITATE MUNDI ET APPETITU AETERNAE VITAE, LIBELLUS AUREOLUS. 485

Appendix II The Carmina Burana 495

Appendix III The Four Crazed Brothers 497

General Index 499

Index to Latin Hymns Quoted or Mentioned 507

EDITOR’S PREFACE.

Some months before the death of my true hearted friend, Rev. S. W. Duffield, he wrote to express his wish that I should complete this work, if he did not live to finish it. As I was not aware how grave, and even hopeless, was his illness, I did not feel that I was undertaking a serious responsibility in assenting to his wish. But his untimely death brought to me the duty of discharging a wish which “the emphasis of death” made imperative.

In our conferences over the book and its subject, which we had had for three years past, I had come to appreciate Mr. Duffield’s ideas as to its form and content, and read with much interest his preliminary studies in the Christian Intelligencer, the Sunday-School Times, and the New Englander. On coming into possession of his manuscript and notes, I found that the greater part of the book had been carried almost to the point of readiness for the printer, although several chapters had not been written and all needed careful revision.

I have revised throughout the chapters Mr. Duffield left, but in doing so I have been embarrassed by the very vitality and personal quality in Mr. Duffield’s style. He reminds one of what Archdeacon Hare says of the freshness and living force in a page of Luther’s. This has constrained me to leave intact many a phrase or expression I should not have used, but which was natural and even inevitable in him. It is my hope that I have not sacrificed this admirable quality of his writing to any pedantry of judgment.

The chapters on Pope Damasus (Chapter IV.) I have rewritten throughout. That on Bernard of Cluny I have rearranged, but without much alteration. That on Thomas of Celano I have rewritten to the top of page 252. That on Hermann of Reichenau I should have liked to rewrite; but as I dissented from some of its arguments, I feared to more than retouch it. It stands as a monument of its author’s vehement conviction that in Hermann he had found the true author of the Veni Sancte Spiritus.

The later chapters, from Thomas Aquinas, with the exception of those on Jacoponus and Xavier, are the work of the editor alone. In preparing them I have followed the author’s own plan for the book, except (1) in treating of the less-known as well as the unknown hymn-writers in Chapters XXX. and XXXI.; (2) in inserting a chapter on the relations of Protestantism to Latin hymnology; and (3) in giving in the last chapter only a selection from Mr. Duffield’s great Index of the Latin Hymns, which I hope to see published complete in a separate book. Translations not credited to any other person are the work of Mr. Duffield.

Mr. Duffield’s own idea of his book is well expressed in the Introduction which follows this Preface. I give it as he left it, although he had noted his purpose to prepare another which would cover the ground more fully. It now remains to say something of the man personally, and in this I am indebted much to the assistance of his faithful coworker in his hymnological studies, Miss Lilian B. Day of Bloomfield, who copied his great Index of the Latin Hymns, and who prepared the indexes to both his English Hymns and the present volume.

Samuel Augustus Willoughby Duffield was born at Brooklyn, on September 24th, 1843. His family was of French Huguenot extraction (Du Field), and found a home in the North of Ireland after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Between 1725 and 1730 George Duffield, his ancestor by five removes, settled in Lancaster County, as one of the great Ulster emigration which was flowing into Pennsylvania. His son George graduated at Princeton, and after several pastorates was settled in Philadelphia in the Pine Street church. He was an ardent patriot, chaplain in Washington’s army, and Bishop White’s associate in the chaplaincy of the Continental Congress. Of two sons who survived him, one became a minister, while the other took a prominent part in public life. His grandson, Rev. George Duffield, D.D. (1796-1868) was a leader of the New School division of the Presbyterian Church, both before and after the separation of 1837, and while pastor at Carlisle was arraigned for unsound teaching in his work on Regeneration. “Barnes, Beman, and Duffield” were the three names most offensive to the Aristarchuses of orthodoxy in that time. He was married to a sister of Dr. George W. Bethune. His son, generally known in our times as Dr. George Duffield, Jr., to distinguish him from his father, was born in 1818 at Carlisle, graduated at Yale College in 1837, and at Union Theological Seminary. One of his pastorates was in Brooklyn, from 1840 to 1847, during which his son, Samuel Augustus Willoughby, was born. He is best known as a hymn-writer, two of his hymns being known and loved wherever the English language is spoken. They are, “Blessed Saviour, Thee I love,” and “Stand up, stand up for Jesus,” the latter being suggested by the dying words of Dudley Tyng in 1858.

Samuel W. Duffield was of the sixth American generation of his family. From his youth he was a young giant, with an inborn love of active sports, quick in movement, and apparently incapable of fatigue. His mind showed equal vigor and freshness, and he early developed a passion for poetry. By his tenth year he had mastered Chaucer, in spite of difficulties much more serious to beginners in those days than in our own. And he very early began to find expression for his own ideas in verse. He united with the Church at the age of thirteen, when his father was a pastor in Philadelphia, being the only one who did so at the time, so that the act was the result of personal decision and not of a revival excitement. He graduated at Yale in 1863; and after teaching for a while, he began the study of theology under the care of his grandfather and his father. Not until after he had been licensed to preach, and had had charge of a mission in Chicago, did he present himself as a student in Union Theological Seminary.

His first pastorate was from 1867 to 1870 at Tioga, one of the northern suburbs of Philadelphia. As he frequently came to the office of the American Presbyterian, on which I was assisting the late Dr. John W. Mears, I then formed an acquaintance with him, which ripened into a friendship that was to be lifelong, and I hope even longer. He was an impressive figure, of more than the ordinary height, and yet so massively built that he was seen to be tall only when beside another person. His manner was cheerful, affectionate and buoyant, giving evidence in various ways of his French descent. His character was winning and attractive by its openness, and its entire freedom from selfishness. He was a man out of whose heart the child never died, and he carried the freshness of his boyhood’s years into the mature pursuits of his manhood.

Our common love of poetry and our dawning interest in Latin hymnology—he had translated Bernard of Cluny and was trying his hand on the Dies Irae in those days—drew us closer together and gave our friendship an intellectual interest. When he left Tioga for Jersey City our intercourse became more fragmentary, but during his pastorate at Ann Arbor (1871-74) it was renewed by correspondence. He felt himself especially at home in the university city of Michigan, with a congregation composed largely of the students. Here he had the delight of welcoming Dr. George Macdonald to his pulpit, when the poet visited America in 1873. He worked hard to have me called to the Chair of English Literature in the University of Michigan, but did not succeed.

Chicago, 1874, Auburn, 1876, Altoona, 1878, and Bloomfield, 1882, were his subsequent pastorates; and in Bloomfield he remained until his death. In this New Jersey suburb of New York City he seemed to find himself especially at home. It was indeed the home of his early boyhood, for his father had been pastor of the same church from 1847 to 1852; he well remembered his playmates and schoolmates, and kept up his acquaintance by correspondence and visits, until he came among them as their pastor. He was near enough to the great city to find easy access to its libraries, especially the Astor Library and that of Union Seminary, and to enjoy the friendship of scholars of tastes similar to his own, especially that of Dr. Charles S. Robinson. He found a congenial people in his congregation. He took a lively interest in matters relating to the welfare of the town, was an active member of the Village Improvement Association, labored hard to establish a public library, and helped to set on foot a good weekly paper. He became Chaplain of the Fire Company, and preached a special sermon every year to its members. He spoke always with enthusiasm of his new environment, and seemed to look forward to many happy and useful years there. His home life, I shall only say, was especially happy and helpful to him. Among his delights was to watch the dawning powers of a daughter, who inherits all her father’s poetic gifts.

His best poetical work is still unpublished, except such parts of it as have appeared in the Sunday-School Times and other weeklies. His first venture was The Heavenly Land, from the Rhythm of Bernard of Morlaix (New York, 1867). His second and most characteristic book was Warp and Woof: A Book of Verse (1868), in which “Undergraduate Orioles” and some other pieces at once attracted attention by their felicitous beauty and genuineness. Along with his father, he prepared The Burial of the Dead (1882), a manual for use at funerals. In the long interval between these two dates he was already laboring at his book on the Latin hymn-writers. “During the years 1882-85,” writes Miss Day, “those of us who saw him most frequently on his way to and from the New York libraries came to recognize a large, square note-book and a green cloth bag as his inseparable Monday companions. Something of their contents we knew, for with his genial disposition he could not refrain from quoting snatches of the old Latin hymns with translations into musical English. But no one could appreciate the real worth of the knowledge concealed between cloth and board as did the student himself, who had spent the hours of leisure snatched from professional labors in the libraries, and among Latin quartos and folios, in search of the materials for his book. During the latter part of 1885 the Latin hymn-writers were laid aside for a while to give time for his work on English Hymns: Their Authors and History (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1886),” which was suggested by the appearance of Dr. Robinson’s Laudes Domini in 1884, and is mainly an account of the hymns included in that work, and of their authors. When this was finished he returned to his opus magnum, in the expectation of having it soon ready for the press. From our conferences and correspondence I was led to hope for its early appearance. But this was not to be. A failure of the vessels of the heart, evidently from some constitutional weakness, as he had been making no special exertion when it showed itself, was the beginning of the end. Twelve weary months of illness, spent partly in Bloomfield and partly at a watering-place, to which he had gone for change of air, were followed by his death on May 12th, 1887. He died as he had lived, in the full assurance of the Gospel, and looking for life everlasting in Jesus Christ.

The news of his death was received with grief by the whole community, especially by the young people, with whom he had so lively a sympathy. The Bloomfield Fire Company displayed their flag at half-mast, placed a guard of honor over his remains during the forty hours they lay at the church, and attended his funeral in a body. Signs of the general mourning were seen everywhere, and the town felt it had lost a public-spirited citizen, while his church had lost a faithful and devoted pastor. Mingled with memoranda for his book, I find in his note-books other indications of the breadth and energy of his work for the spiritual and intellectual improvement of his people, especially through his lectures before the Young People’s Society of the Westminster Church.

In the city of the dead at Detroit, where his kindred lie buried, there stands a memorial stone, which bears the inscription:

DILECTISSIMUS
EHEU PRAEMISSUS EST
QUANQUAM E VITAE INTEGRAE MEDIO
RAPTUS
AEVUM LONGISSIMUM PEREGIT
BEATO ILLI
PATER UXOR
MULTIS CUM LACRIMIS
HOC MARMOR
DEDICAVERE

Beside him lies now the mortal part of the much-loved father who wrote these words. Dr. George Duffield the younger died July 6, 1888.

INTRODUCTION.

The study of the Latin hymns is so much a thing of its own kind that one owes it to himself as well as to his readers to begin at the beginning. This beginning in the present instance happened to be on the North River, on a bright, fresh April morning in the year of grace 1882. It was at that time, with the clear sky overhead and the hearty breeze coming full in our faces from the Narrows, that my friend, the Rev. F. N. Zabriskie, D.D., broached the following proposition:

It was, he said, a matter of great surprise to him that no one had done for the Latin hymn-writers what had been done for those of later date. We had their hymns, but for his part he confessed to a love for the personality of the poets themselves, and for the circumstances which conspired to produce their poems. Now, if it seemed good to myself, who had already given time and study to the hymns, he would gladly open the columns of the Christian Intelligencer (the organ of the Reformed Church in America) to a series of articles bearing such a character. And there and then the book began.

But my original ideas modified greatly as I went on. In place of my mastering the subject, the subject mastered me. My previous studies went for but very little, and my confidence in my ability to prepare the articles without taking much time from regular and important duties diminished with every number. I found myself on new ground and was perpetually referred back to the original authorities. French and German and Latin—I had to investigate them all in order to satisfy that insatiate creature, a scholar’s conscience. I discovered that, except for rare and slight notices, this sort of work had neither been done nor was likely to be done, and conferences with our best hymnologists only made me more interested in doing it, and doing it as well as I could. Doubtless those whose specialities lie in mediaeval days will find much to criticise, but no one can be a severer critic than myself according to my means of information.

These chapters, like this Introduction, will be found to be written in the American language. Their purpose is to reach the popular desire for better knowledge, and it would be absurd to offer these facts in any dry or pedantic style. Yet the scholar and the hymnologist will both find that a positive value and a careful accuracy attach to the work that has been done. I found I could take nothing for granted, and I took nothing for granted. Even the Archbishop of Dublin and the principal of Sackville College have their idiosyncrasies and predilections, and a quite easy way of writing on these topics is to copy what has been said already. A very notable case to the contrary is Lord Selborne’s splendid article on “Hymns” in the new Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Therefore life and song and color are not absent, I trust, from these pages. I should not like to give all the authorities consulted or rummaged through; for, indeed, I have kept no record of them. Like the famous sun-dial I have registered none but the serene hours, and many a time the scarce and long-sought volume before me has been jejune enough. While, on the other hand, a book like Morison’s Life of St. Bernard has turned out to be precisely the help I was seeking, bright in its style and careful and original in its researches. I have verified its quotations too often not to pay it at least this faint tribute of approval.

It would be also beyond measure ungrateful in me if I did not here acknowledge the kindnesses I have received in this quest after the Sangreal of a true psalmody. Let me name, then, the Astor Library. Its superintendent, Mr. Little, and its librarians, Mr. Frederick Saunders (author of Evenings with the Sacred Poets), and his assistant, Mr. Bierstadt, have been uniformly courteous and obliging. So has been the Rev. Professor Charles A. Briggs, D.D., in whose care is the fine theological library of Union Seminary. So have been the authorities of the Society Library (New York), and of the Philadelphia Library, and of the Boston Athenaeum and Public libraries.

Personally, I am deeply indebted to the culture and friendship of Miss Marion L. Pelton, Assistant Professor of Literature in Wellesley College, who has made for me many valuable notes; and to the assistance and counsel of Professor F. A. March, LL.D., Professor F. M. Bird, Professor Philip Schaff, D.D., and Judge W. H. Arnoux.

It will be readily seen that I have not concerned myself with the matter of the host of English translations, or with that of the comparison and criticism of the text of the hymns. These branches of hymnology are in a scientific sense the most valuable, but in a popular sense they are the least interesting. And I could not hope to rival, far less to equal, such illustrious scholarship as that of Daniel or Mone. I have therefore been content to pipe to a lesser reed, and in a more familiar and gossiping way to attempt the history of the hymns. And for the rest I can only add what Master Robert Burton saith in his Anatomy of Melancholy: “If through weakness, folly, passion, ignorance, I have said amiss, let it be forgotten and forgiven.... I earnestly request every private man, as Scaliger did Cardan, not to take offence.... If thou knewest my modesty and simplicity, thou wouldest easily pardon and forgive what is here amiss, or by thee misconceived.”

Samuel Willoughby Duffield.

Bloomfield, N. J., U. S. A.

LATIN HYMNS.

CHAPTER I.
THE PRAISE SERVICE OF THE EARLY CHURCH.

When our Lord and His disciples “had sung an hymn” they left the place where they had observed the passover, and went out to the Mount of Olives. This hymn was the “Great Hallel,” consisting of Psalms 113 to 118 inclusive. The 113th and 114th were sung previous to the feast; the others, after it. We thus know, with singular accuracy, what was the first hymn of praise in the Christian Church. The essence of this “Hallel” is the essence of all true psalmody—trust and thanksgiving and praise.

It may be said, and with truth, that the Magnificat of Mary, the Nunc Dimittis of old Simeon, and, above all, that the Gloria in Excelsis Deo of the angels at Bethlehem, antedate this hymn of our Lord and His apostles. It may also be said, and with the same truth, that these furnished to the early Christians their earliest expressions of praise. But it appears that the Last Supper, with its pathetic union of Jewish and Christian ideas, was also the place at which the Psalms of David and the spiritual songs of primitive Christianity were united. The thought that this reveals is larger than these limits will permit us to discuss. It is in brief that as Jesus Christ came, “not to destroy, but to fulfil,” He designed to show to His Church that gratitude, love, trust, and adoration were to be combined in all future psalmody. The t’hillim of the Jew were to become the hymni of the Christian.

The noticeable fact remains that the early Church only caught the simplest and most fervent forms of this worship. Their pure veneration of the Lord led Pliny to write (Ep. 10:97) that they “sung alternately among themselves a hymn to Christ as God”—carmen Christo quasi Deo, dicere secum invicem. It is this loving devotion which charms us as we read those verses which have been preserved. For the most part the subjects are limited. We could naturally expect that, being largely drawn from Jewish sources, they would express gratitude and adoration—and this is correct. Chrysostom declared that the early Christians sung at prayers in the morning, at their work, and very usually at their meals. Jerome, writing to Marcellus, says—and we quote Cave’s translation for its quaintness—“You could not go into the field but you might hear the Ploughman at his Hallelujahs, the Mower at his Hymns, and the Vine-dresser singing David’s Psalms.” In fact, Christian song was a notable feature of primitive Christianity.

The language of these hymns was either Syriac or Greek. By degrees the Greek obtained the precedence; and as the Latin hymns did not arise until Hilary of Poitiers (fourth century), the period between the Ascension and that era belongs to the Greek language rather more than to any other. We also know from the New Testament writers some very important facts, which may properly be classified at this point.

1. There were three terms for the sacred song. It might be a psalm, or a hymn, or a spiritual song, as we discover from Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16.

2. From 1 Corinthians 14:23-33, it seems plain that the composition, as well as the singing of these hymns and songs, might be the result of sudden emotion or inspiration. In any case, there is no doubt (for Tertullian decisively states it) that the “extempore,” or, more strictly, “private” authorship of such psalmody was not uncommon. The council of Laodicea (circa A.D. 360) interdicted private persons from this privilege. Even in Paul’s time it would appear to have produced an effect akin to the “spirituals” of our own freedmen—much of it being exquisite in its simple devotion, while a certain share offended good taste, and hindered the propriety and solemnity of worship.

3. The alternation of prayer with praise was never better illustrated than when Paul and Silas (Acts 16:25) sent up their midnight anthems from that “inner prison,” while their feet were “made fast in the stocks.” This alternation was—as the Fathers assure us—the order in public worship also.

4. We have received in the very pages of the New Testament some of these earliest hymns. To say nothing, at present, of those great leading chants which bear the names of the angels, and of Mary, and of Zacharias, and of Simeon—and to pass over all those of Jewish origin—we have still left us such a strain as that in Acts 4:24-30. Here we have an impulse which expresses itself in reply to Peter and John by sacred song.

Ephesians 5:14 has also been considered to be such a fragment:

“Awake, O thou that sleepest!

Arouse thee from the dead!

And Christ shall give to thee

Enlightenment!”

So too 1 Timothy 3:16 has been arranged by some scholars as though it were a well-known strophe the Apostle quoted:

“Who—for the mystery is great—

Was manifest in body,

Was justified in spirit,

Was visible to angels,

Was heralded to heathen,

Was trusted on the earth,

Was taken up to glory.”

Nor is this the only instance in this very Epistle, for 1 Timothy 6:15, 16, reads:

“The king of all the kingly ones,

The lord of all the lordly ones,

Who only hath the power of life immortal;

Inhabiting the unapproachable light;

Whom never any one of men hath seen,

Nor ever can behold;

Let glory and eternal strength be his!

Amen!”

5. When, now, we complete our New Testament mention of this praise—which clings like incense to the temple-curtains and sweetly perfumes the place—we have only to add the earliest received anthems. These are the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55); the Benedictus (Luke 1:68-79); the Gloria in Excelsis Deo (Luke 2:18); and the Nunc Dimittis (Luke 2:29-32). It will be observed that all these are derived from a single gospel, wherein, more than in any other, the “sweet, sad music of humanity” can most readily be found. It is natural, too, that the painter and physician, Luke, should have a poetic ear which could catch—as in the Acts of the Apostles—this faintest and earliest praise. There were, indeed, in the primitive church, eight of these classic expressions of worship. These are:

(1) The Lesser Doxology (Gloria Patri),

“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.”

(2) The Greater Doxology (Gloria in Excelsis),

“Glory be to God on high, and on earth peace,” etc.

[This was also called the Angelical Hymn.]

(3) The Ter Sanctus (the cherubical hymn),

“Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty.”

(4) The Hallelujah.

[This “Alleluia, Amen!” was the response of the church.]

(5) The Evening Hymn (containing the Nunc Dimittis).

(6) The Benedicite.

[The “Song of the Three Children,” which is taken from the Apocrypha, and which appears in the service of the Episcopal Church (Order for Morning Prayer) as, “O all ye works of the Lord,” etc.]

(7) The Magnificat.

[Named—as these are all named—from the first word of the Latin Vulgate version.]

(8) The Te Deum,

“We praise Thee, O God, we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord,” etc.

We can feel quite sure that the Latin Church merely borrowed these hymns from the earliest forms of the Greek. The Te Deum was probably translated from that language, either by Hilary of Poitiers or by an unknown author of that date. It is, undoubtedly, a close rendering of many phrases and expressions which are common to the Greek hymns, and, if the learned hymnologist H. A. Daniel is to be credited (Thesaurus Hymnologicus II. 289), it is a real and literal translation of an actual chant of praise of great antiquity. His words are these: “To give you my opinion briefly, the Te Deum, equally with the Angelic Hymn (to which it is very similar in form and expression), was born in the Eastern Church, whence it has been translated into the Latin tongue.” He then proceeds to cite an ancient Greek hymn, five lines of which are exact with the Latin.

In 2 Timothy 2:11-13 the “faithful saying” has been interpreted to be a similar quotation from one of these ancient hymns:

“For if we are dead together,

We shall live together;

If we serve together,

We shall reign together;

If we should deny Him,

He will deny us too;

If we should be faithless,

He is faithful still.”

It does not, of course, absolutely follow that these are really such fragments of hymns as scholars have supposed. The late Dr. Lyman Coleman—a man of great practical good judgment—comments upon these citations thus:

“The argument is not conclusive; and all the learned criticism, the talent, and the taste, that have been employed on this point, leave us little else than uncertain conjecture on which to build an hypothesis.” (Primitive Church, p. 366.) Yet the latest scholarship tends so strongly in this direction, and the internal evidence is so good and fair, that it may be regarded as pretty well affirmed and accepted. No one, for example, would think of comparing such passages as these with the antithetic prose of Romans 3:21-23; or with the magnificent unrhythmic utterance in Romans 8:38, 39; or with the careful particularity of 2 Corinthians 6:4-10. They are seen and felt to be different both in tone and in form.

In the Apocalypse, where the language is naturally exalted and poetic, several such instances have been noted. They are: Revelation 1:4-8; 5:9, 10, 12-14; 11:15, 17, 18; 15:3, 4; 21:10-14, and 22:17. Of one of these—the “Song of Moses and of the Lamb”—we may be reasonably certain:

“Great are Thy works and strange,

Lord God, Thou Ruler of all!

And just are Thy ways, and true,

Thou King of the nations of earth.

For who shall not fear Thee, Lord,

And give to Thy name the praise,

For holy art Thou alone!—

To Thee shall the nations come

And worship before Thy face;

For all of Thy righteous acts

Shall then be openly known!”

In the same manner may be written the stanza from Revelation 22:17:

“And the Spirit and the Bride—

Are saying, ‘Come!’

And he that heareth—

Let him say, ‘Come!’

And he that thirsteth—

Let him come!

And he that willeth—

Let him receive,

Freely, the water of life!”

We have also a positive acquaintance with the order of religious worship in the early Church, dating back one hardly knows how far, but definitely leading us into the custom of the first three centuries. Public services began, and were continued, as follows:

First, Prayer—or, possibly, a Salutation or Invocation, such as is in common use to-day.

Then the Reading of Scripture. The Old Testament and New Testament were both employed: the one being expounded to apply to the case of the Christian Church; and the other for her comfort, encouragement, and edification.

Then followed the Hymns and Psalms. The distinction appears to have been that the psalms were those of David; the hymns, such as the song of Mary, or of the angels; and the spiritual songs, such as were composed by private persons, or which sprang up spontaneously in a kind of chant. That this was liable to abuse, and might cause confusion, is made evident by Paul’s advice to the Corinthians. Between these acts of praise was interpolated some brief Scripture lesson. And, very likely, a considerable portion of time was taken up by this part of the service.

Then came the Sermon, which was succeeded by a Prayer.

Another question now meets us, and one of some importance: Did the early Christians employ any musical instruments? In reply, it can be noted that ψάλλειν, “to make melody” (Eph.5:19), is usually taken to refer to a musical accompaniment. In Romans 15:9 it is a quotation from Psalm 18:50, where it means, “I will sing psalms.” In 1 Corinthians 15:15 (“I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also”) and in James 5:13 (“Is any merry? let him sing psalms”) we have nothing decisive except that we know that the Jewish method of “singing psalms” was to the accompaniment of musical instruments. Thus, with all these texts before us, we are not able either to affirm or deny the fact. The reference of Paul (1 Cor. 14:7) to the pipe (αυλός, flute) and harp (κιθάρα, lute) gives us no assistance. The “harp” of Revelation 5:8, 14:2, and 15:2, is the cithara or lute again; but neither does this tell us what the early Christians did or did not do. The inference is pretty strong that they avoided some things that were Jewish—and instrumental music was a marked feature in the Jew’s worship—but it is plain that (as with the Sabbath question) there was a great deal of blending at the edges between the two dispensations. We are told, moreover, that the Syriac Church has always been rich in tunes, having fully two hundred and seventy-five, while the Greek was confined to about eight.

There is another fact which comes in just here, however, to explain what we would otherwise find it hard to unriddle. It is the matter of the very language of the hymns themselves.

When we observe the places where these fragments occur, or where singing in the church is mentioned, we find that the language naturally is Greek. No one doubts that Luke and the other New Testament writers employed the tongue which was the educated and flexible medium of conveying the loftiest truth; nor that Ephesians or Corinthians chanted in Greek. “The Greek tongue,” say Conybeare and Howson (St. Paul, 1:10), “became to the Christian more than it had been to the Roman or the Jew.” It lends itself most readily to that dithyrambic shape in which highly emotional natures could best express their praise. So the irregularity of the verse; its utter lack of metrical form (as Dr. Neale found when he examined eighteen quarto volumes of it), and its simplicity of diction, all combined to put the instrumental accompaniment aside. Perhaps there was a prejudice—as Archbishop Trench affirms—against a distinctively Jewish method. Perhaps there was a disposition in this, as in other matters where art had perverted the morals of men, to oppose whatever looked toward a possible laxity. Music and banqueting, music and luxury, music and profligacy, went together so much that the early Church reacted to the extreme of Puritanism—forgetting that her Lord and Master had often worshipped in the full-choired temple itself. In the catacombs, where every manner of ordinary symbol may be found, there is neither pipe nor harp, nor any sort of musical instrument—the lyre alone excepted. But neither is there any condescension to beauty in form or color. Everything betokens a rude, uncultivated simplicity—a piety which contented itself with the barest and meagerest representations. It rose high enough to portray the face of Christ, in the ancient cemetery of Domitilla, and in one carving on a sarcophagus of the fourth century. And, remembering how repugnant anything heathenish was to the souls of those who associated pipe and tabret and harp with the bloody arena and the wild revelry of Rome, can we doubt why they mingled only their unassisted voices in these chants of praise? It can be positively added that Ambrose, Basil, and Chrysostom do not include instrumental music in their eulogies of the Church’s practice upon this theme.

We are justified, however, in going one step beyond this bald statement, that the early Christians sang together. They sang secum invicem, alternately. The quotations already given show the adaptation of their hymns to this use. In this, at least, they were following the Jewish habit of responses and part-singing, whatever other changes their poverty or prejudices or principles or persecutions might have produced.

It remains for us to speak of the ancient hymns which have come down to our day. We have some information as to Harmonius and Bardesanes, who wrote Syriac hymns in the first century, but the hymns themselves are either lost or unidentified. Ephrem Syrus (died 378) furnishes the earliest authentic hymns in that language. One of these (Daniel, Thesaurus Hymnologicus, III. 145) is on the Nativity of our Lord, and may be thus rendered, following Zingerle’s German version:

“Into his arms with tender love

Did Joseph take his holy son,

And worshipped him as God, and saw

The babe like any little one.

His heart rejoiced above him there,

For now the only Good had birth;

And pious fear upon him came

Before this Judge of all the earth.

Oh, what a lofty wonder!

“Who gave me then this precious Son

Of highest God, to be my child?

For I against thy mother here

Had almost been by zeal beguiled;

And I had thought to cast her off—

Alas, I saw not truly then

How in her bosom she should bear

The costliest treasure known to men,

To make my poverty, so soon,

The richest lot in mortal ken!

“David, that king of ancient days,

My ancestor, had placed the crown

On his own head, and there it lay;

But I sank deep and further down:

I was no king, but in its stead

A carpenter, and that alone.

But now may crown my brow again

That which befits a kingly throne,

For here upon my bosom lies

The Lord of lords, my very own!”

There is a trifle of doubt as to which is the very oldest Greek hymn. One cited by Basil (died 379),

“Φῶς ἱλαρὸν ἁγίας δοξής”—κ. τ. λ.

has been by some considered the most ancient, and is known to us as, “Hail, gladdening Light.” It is wrongly credited to Athenagenes (died 169), for Basil explicitly denies that authorship. That which it is safest for us to receive is one found in the works of Clement of Alexandria, and by him ascribed to an earlier author. It was probably composed about 200 A.D.; and while it is too long to quote, it may be characterized as dithyrambic, and almost Anacreontic, in rhythm. It begins:

“Στρομίον πώλων ἀδαῶν.”—κ. τ. λ.

and is known as “Shepherd of Tender Youth,” from its best English version, by the Rev. Dr. H. M. Dexter, of Boston. The Φῶς ἱλαρὸν is also accessible in Longfellow’s beautiful translation in the Golden Legend, commencing, “O gladsome light.”

As we turn the pages on which Daniel and Mone have recorded these hymns of the earliest age of the Church, we observe that they are either in praise of Christ or of God, or are songs of worship for the morning or the evening. Their simplicity is admirable. Here is one called ἦχος—an “Echo”—literally rendered:

“We who have risen from our sleep

Worship before thee, O Good One.

And, of the angels the hymn

We cry aloud to thee, thou Mighty One;

Holy, holy art thou, O God,

And of thy mercy have pity on us!

“From my couch and from my sleep

Thou hast raised me, O Lord;

Enlighten my mind and my heart,

And open thou my lips

To praise thee, Holy Trinity,

Holy, holy, holy art thou!

“Suddenly shall come the Judge,

And the deeds of each shall be laid bare;

But guard us from fear in the midst of the night,

Holy, holy, holy art thou!”

Another of these unplaced, anonymous, and possibly very ancient hymns, may be given in full for comparison:

“Ψυχή μου, ψυχή μου,

Ἀνάστα, τί καθεύδεις;

Τὸ τέλος ἐγγίζει,

Καὶ μήλλεις θορυβεῖσθαι;

“Ἀνάνηψον ὀυν, ἵνα

Φείσηται σου Χριστὸς

Ὁ Θεὸς, ὁ πανταχοῦ παρὼν

Καὶ τὰ πάντα πληρῶν.”

“O soul of mine, O soul of mine,

Arise, why sleepest thou?

The end of earth is drawing near

And art thou fearful now?

Be sober therefore, O my soul,

That He who filleth space

And filleth time, our Saviour, God,

May spare thee by His grace.”

And this beautiful little doxology:

“My hope is God,

My refuge is the Lord,

My shelter is the Holy Ghost;

Be thou, O Holy Three, adored!”

In such sweet and simple language did the early Christians sing their “praise to Christ, as God.” They understood the true meaning of a hymn as Ambrose and St. Bernard also understood it—and as Gregory Nazianzen and Adam of St. Victor never knew it at all. In 1866 Professor Coppée could truly declare that there was no collection of sacred verse in which this thought of adoration and of worship was “the leading feature.” It is better now; but even to-day there is an honored place for any book of praise in which the formal and didactic shall be done away, and where nothing shall be found but the pure reverence of a loving and trusting soul.

Of old, in the temple, there was kept—said the rabbins—a flute of reed, plain and straight and simple, but of marvellous sweetness. It came down from Moses’ day. But the king commanded his goldsmiths to cover and adorn it with gold and gems. And, lo, the sweetness of the reed flute was forever gone! Thus, perchance, in our later art and our foolish wisdom, it may be we have often spoiled the ancient hymns!

CHAPTER II.
THE STUDY OF THE LATIN HYMNS.

The genealogy of the song of praise in the mediaeval and modern Christian Church is both simple and beautiful. It begins far back, as we have seen, in the chants and psalms of the Hebrew. Then it changes to the Syriac and the Greek. Then it emerges into the Latin. Next it is caught up in the old High-German poetry, and at length it becomes the modern English hymn. The line of direct descent is like that of some high and puissant family whose inheritance is transferred now to one branch and now to another, but whose noble lineage is never lost.

When the reader or the worshipper is attracted to-day by some ancient hymn-writer’s name, he naturally asks for information. He is aware that hymnology is called a branch of study, like any other scholastic pursuit. He is also aware that the more usual English and German hymns have their historians, and, to a limited degree, that they have been analyzed, classified, compared, and their text settled. Even their impelling causes and surroundings are known, as in the case of the touching lyrics of George Neumark and Paul Gerhardt, or the pathetic strains of Cowper, or the stirring notes of Charles Wesley.

But occasionally a bird of strange plumage flies across this peaceful sky or perches and sings in these religious groves. The name of some Greek father—an Anatolius or a John of Damascus—appears as the original author. The hymn-horizon widens out to an earlier age. When one sings the Te Deum Laudamus, he discovers that it has its antecedent in the Greek liturgy. And when he employs that fine version of Bishop Patrick,

“O God, we praise Thee and confess,”

he is put upon a track of inquiry by which he discerns an even earlier rendering in the oldest prayer-books, beginning—

“We praise Thee, God, we knowledge Thee

The only Lord to be.”

These little hints and stray gleams of outlook through the mists of uninformation are intensely alluring. And when by some happy chance it is learned that this old Latin sequence is traditionally ascribed to Ambrose, Bishop of Milan; when it is accredited to the spontaneous utterance of Augustine and his great preceptor at the time of Augustine’s baptism; when it is noted as a derivative from that Greek psalmody whence the holy Ambrose obtained so many of his hymns; and when it opens thus a door into the heaven of the earlier worship of the Church, then indeed the reader is proportionately stimulated to further question.

For the most part it will be found that the Latin language contains the best of the Greek, and the inspiration of the majority of the first German hymns. In the dead ark of the Middle Ages was kept this rod that budded and this golden pot with its sacred heavenly food. It is amazing that this treasure has been so well preserved, but it is none the less certain that we now have it safely, never to be lost again.

There are no Latin hymns—let us here say—earlier than Hilary of Poitiers (died 366). His Hymnarium has perished, and all but one of the compositions attributed to himself are doubtful. The “evening-song” which he sent to his daughter Abra, while he was in exile among the followers of the Eastern Church, forms the connecting link between Greek and Latin hymnody. The true hymn—a different thing from the rhythmic but unmetrical sequence—here takes its rise. In this small, pure fountain-head reappear the percolating praises of the two previous centuries. The short lines drop with a gentle tinkling melody upon the ear. As yet there is no rhyme, although there is an occasional lightening of the lyric by some such verbal art.

But with Ambrose the full stream begins to sweep along. There can be no doubt that many ungathered and traditional stanzas were in his time discoverable in the Church—much as it can be observed that phrases in prayer or in exhortation are the inheritance of our own generation from days of struggle and of trial among our Christian ancestors. And what better could a beleaguered bishop do, when he was shut up in a church “for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ,” than to collate these old hymns? Twelve possibly—eight, or less, with moderate certainty—can be regarded as of his own composition. The rest of the ninety or a hundred are commonly received as “Ambrosian,” since they share his spirit and partake in some degree of his method. The rules of the Venerable Bede are not infallible, and modern criticism frequently rejects what the early collectors are disposed to assign to this single illustrious source.

Augustine wrote no actual hymns, but he was the cause of hymns in others—as, notably, in the case of Cardinal Peter Damiani. The Ambrosian music and the Augustinian theology served for inspiration to many later men. Yet the assignment of these Latin hymns to their proper authors is, at the best, a most precarious undertaking. A few, quoted or mentioned by competent witnesses—as when Augustine quotes Ambrose—seem duly authentic. This is, however, a rare occurrence. Generally we proceed upon the mere dictum of the first compilers—especially of Thomasius, George Fabricius, and Clichtove.

These early compilations are sufficiently scarce. Professor Dr. H. Ad. Daniel gives a list of some which, except for the books of “the venerable Thilo” in the Yale Library, are beyond the reach of American students. Dating from 1492 and running into the first decade of the sixteenth century there were many “Expositions” of hymns, of which the work of Clichtove (Basle, 1517) remains to us in the greatest number of editions. Up to the middle of the present century this book was practically indispensable to any correct knowledge of the original texts. Since that time it, as well as every similar work, has received attention, and its contents have been often reproduced.

Other and later laborers are such as Cardinal Thomasius (Rome, 1741), who follows upon the traces of George Cassander, the Liberal Catholic (Paris, 1616). We are possibly more indebted to Cassander than to Thomasius for the correct designation of a good deal of the authorship. Both of these editors collate the text with other versions, and thus prepare the way for later and more accurate work. Both depend to a notable degree upon the book of George Fabricius (Basle, 1564), which is quite rare; although Thomasius’ works are said by Daniel to be sufficiently uncommon in Germany, as they certainly are in America. The recent republication of the Mozarabic Breviary in J. P. Migne’s Patrologia brings this volume, however, within easy reach.

Thus we are naturally led to speak of the sources of the hymns themselves—sources from which these editors have secured them. As a part of religious worship they were incorporated into the various breviaries, of which hundreds must have been in use before the unification begun by the Church of Rome in the sixteenth century. Besides these church books, there were collections of hymns alone made by mediaeval schools, whose manuscripts still exist in European libraries.

The only method by which to ascertain the number and extent of these treasures was to gather and classify them. And strangely enough this labor has been performed by Protestants rather than by Catholics. Cassander’s book was forbidden at Rome, as he was what now would be called an Old Catholic; Luther, George Fabricius, and Hermann Bonn were in no better odor of sanctity; and for our own times the standard work is that of Herman Adelbert Daniel, who was a Lutheran professor at Halle, while close behind him come several others of the same religious belief.

The necessary and highly difficult task of getting the materials together has been exhaustively performed. Professor Daniel’s investigations extended to the original copies in monasteries and abbeys almost without number. But F. J. Mone enlarged even upon this. Daniel’s Thesaurus in five volumes was completed in 1856—having been several years in course of publication—and it stands as yet unrivalled. Mone’s Lateinische Hymnen des Mittelalters appeared in 1853-55, and was therefore available for the conclusion of Daniel’s great work. Its value consists in the fact that it is derived exclusively from manuscripts and from material hitherto untouched. The Germans, indeed, have made Latin hymnology a special branch of study, considering that it is profitable to them for its value religiously and historically. From old Flacius Illyricus’ appendix to the Catalogus Testium Veritatis has been recovered the original of Bernard of Cluny’s “Jerusalem the Golden”—a poem which would never have been known by us if this same Matthias Flacius had not preserved it as a testimony against the corrupt state of the Church.

We must then add the German names of Schlosser, and Simrock, and Fortlage, and Stadelmann, and Jacob Grimm, and Königsfeld, and Bässler, and Kayser, and Kehrein, and Morel. Wackernagel and Koch, the great historians of German hymnology, have also done admirable service in prefixing the Latin hymns to the earlier part of their collections and histories of German praise. There is a host of lesser names, and there have been some separate discoveries worthy of note. Thus the English ritualists, under the lead of Newman and Neale, unearthed some capital lyrics. The Hymni Ecclesiae of Cardinal J. H. Newman, being half derived from the Paris Breviary, contain hymns which are scarcely to be found elsewhere—many of them, as our Index will show, being accessible only in those pages. The Sequentiae Medii Aevii of Dr. John Mason Neale also bring to us texts which are extremely scarce. Archbishop Trench, in his collection of eighty hymns, has avoided anything like Romanism even to the occasional expurgation of a phrase; but he has given us a few hymns which are difficult to procure. Königsfeld’s selection of one hundred is admirable; and Bässler’s and Simrock’s little books have made a very good choice. More recently still Professor F. A. March, of Lafayette College, has prepared a selection of one hundred and fifty of these hymns for the use of institutions of learning; and this, for every purpose, is the finest and most satisfactory series of texts at our command. The ordinary student can learn much from this before he needs to attempt the larger and more expensive works.

In making an exhaustive index of all the originals before us, these collections soon dwindle into a very diminutive form. There are about three thousand five hundred hymns in the various books. And they are of all sorts—good, bad, and indifferent. The good are the pure and true utterance of pious spirits—such lyrics as the Veni, Redemptor, and the Veni, Sancte Spiritus, and the Vexilla Regis. The positively bad are those which are either poor in execution—a common fault—or decidedly defective in religious tone. Many so-called “hymns” are nothing but plagiaries or parodies upon older compositions. Some are debased into mere patchwork. There are a few which are macaronic, and a great many in which poverty of phrase is helped out by wholesale pilfering. Moreover, it is easy to find those which are highly objectionable in point of taste and theology, to say nothing of prosody or Protestantism. And if Protestants are principally energetic in restoring and editing these hymns, to the frank and generous extent of overlooking what is unpleasant in them, it ought to follow that they should not be blamed for preferring only those lyrics in which the broad and Christian fervor of devout souls can be observed.

Of those hymns which are upon the border line, the pathetic Stabat Mater may stand as an example. It would be bigotry to reject it from the list—as one compiler has done—while it would certainly not be fair to Protestants to utilize it, in any close translation, for the worship of the Church universal.

Perhaps there are not less than from four to five hundred of these hymns, then, to which no cause of blame can attach—which are as dear to the Church of the Roman Catholics as to that of the Catholic Protestants. On such common ground the heartiest sympathy and co-operation can develop the riches which yet remain. Already it is Caswall, the priest, and Newman, the cardinal, and Neale, the ritualist, who have given to our daily praise the happiest versions. It is Ozanam who has discovered several unknown hymns; and Gautier and Digby S. Wrangham who have brought out Adam of St. Victor; and the ninety-seven pieces of Abaelard are reprinted from Cousin’s text in Migne’s Patrologia. The study of these sacred verses has been comparatively limited in range and nationality, but it has had the incomparable advantage of being thorough.

Thus we are to-day possessed of the text of every really fine sacred Latin lyric. Somewhere or other it has bloomed and has been gathered by some acute hymnologist. The text, too, is tolerably clarified. Translations into our own tongue have been made by such men as Caswall and Newman and Neale (who have rendered all the hymns of the Roman Breviary), and by Mant, Chandler, Pearson, Kynaston, and many others. In America the Rev. Dr. Washburn, Dr. Coles, and Chancellor Benedict have been as prolific as any. Scattered renderings have obtained place in various hymnals. And we are now prepared at last for the general and popular interest which should be taken in this vast treasure of the Latin tongue.

Nothing is more surprising than the utter misinformation which prevails. A few scholars, like Dr. Schaff and Dr. William R. Williams, have endeavored to illuminate our American darkness. But, speaking only now of the Latin hymns, the story of their authors remains obscure and the romantic history of their origin remains for the most part untouched.

Yet Prudentius, the Spaniard, was a classic survival in Spain. And Damasus, the pope, was associated with certain dramatic scenes. And Venantius Fortunatus, troubadour and bishop, furnishes us with a most striking portrait of the times in his attachment to the abbess-queen, Radegunda. The list presumably includes Elpis, the wife of Boethius, the “last of the Romans;” and Coelius Sedulius, the Briton; and Gregory the Great and the great archbishop, Rabanus Maurus, and perhaps Robert II. of France. It calls into fresh life the histories of the Venerable Bede and of Alcuin; of the two Bernards, the one of Clairvaux and the other of Cluny; of Peter the Venerable and of Abaelard and Heloise; of Adam of St. Victor, and Thomas of Celano; of Bonaventura and Aquinas and à Kempis and Xavier. It shows us that mad Solomon, poor Jacoponus; and it leaves us with verses from John Huss, the martyr, to be read by the light of the Reformation’s dawn.

Thus largely does the subject of the Latin hymns traverse the ages. From the fourth to the sixteenth centuries of the Christian era it is the one stream which was fed from Alpine or from Pyrenean snows—a “river of God that is full of water,” which expands into the stately movement of the Notkerian and Gottschalkian sequence, or gently murmurs its song of trust with the missionary Xavier as he writes the exquisite melody of that hymn, O Deus, ego amo te! To understand and to love these lyrics is to be better fitted for this nineteenth century of praise. Not the persecutors and the injurious, not the cruel and the cold-hearted will then remain to us; but the Dies Irae will utter its trumpet-voice above the dead phrases of a formal service, and the Salve caput cruentatum will call us afresh to the foot of the cross.

CHAPTER III.
HILARY OF POITIERS AND THE EARLIEST LATIN HYMNS.

When Master Peter Abaelard was preparing his own hymns for use in the Abbey of the Paraclete, he prefaced them with a brief treatise. There were ninety-three of them, arranged for all the services of Heloise and her nuns, and he answers the request of his abbess-wife by sending them, somewhere in the neighborhood of the year 1135. “At the instance of thy requests, my sister Heloise,” he writes, “formerly dear in the world and now most dear in Christ, I have composed what are called in Greek, ‘hymns,’ and in Hebrew, ‘tillim.’” For it is plain that she has a vivid recollection of his “wild, unhallowed rhymes, writ in his unbaptized times,” and she would now have him tune his lyre, as Robert Herrick did, to a loftier strain.

Hence he made for these gentle sisters a hymn-book of their own, and so became the Watts or Wesley of their matins and vespers. With characteristic self-confidence he only included what he had himself prepared; but this introduction casts a great deal of light upon the knowledge and piety of the time respecting hymns.

“I remember,” continues Abaelard, “that you asked me for an explanation. ‘We know,’ you said, ‘that the Latin, and especially the French Church, have in psalms, and also in hymns, followed more a custom than an authority.’” This was quite true; and the remark is eminently characteristic of Heloise, whose scholarship was admirable, and whose disposition was of a sort to crave for and cling to a stronger nature. He then quotes for her the decree of the fourth Council of Toledo (A.D. 633), by which Hilary of Poitiers and Ambrose of Milan are established as the great fathers of Christian song in the Western Church, and by which the praise of God in hymns is sanctioned and commended.

To much the same effect are the words of Augustine of Hippo, centuries earlier. His beloved mother, Monica, had died, and nothing appeared to comfort him so much as one of these same holy songs. “Then I slept, and woke up again and found my grief not a little softened; and as I was alone in my bed, I remembered those true verses of thy Ambrose. For thou art the

“‘Maker of all, the Lord

And Ruler of the height,

Who, robing day in light, hast poured

Soft slumbers o’er the night,

That to our limbs the power

Of toil may be renewed,

And hearts be raised that sink and cower,

And sorrows be subdued.’”

This is the Deus creator omnium of the great bishop of Milan; and this, in consequence of Augustine’s quotation, is among the best authenticated and earliest hymns of the Latin Church.

But there were more ancient hymns than the Ambrosian or Augustinian. They bear the name of Hilary, and with them Latin hymnology really begins. It is true that in the previous century—the third—Cyprian of Carthage had written religious poetry, but he composed nothing which could be sung. There is, indeed, nothing previous to Hilary.

And now let us go back to the creation of this first and noblest light. For Hilary had been a heathen—a heathen of the heathen—in Roman Gaul. He was born in Poitiers (Pictavium) about the beginning of the fourth century. His father’s name was Francarius, whose tomb—although he must at first have lived as an idolater—is said by Bouchet to have been “for upward of fifteen hundred years” in the parish church of Clissonium (Clisson, near Nantes). We are indebted to Jerome for the main facts of Hilary’s life, and to Fortunatus for a large share in the filling up of the outlines. Hilary was so celebrated a man that contemporary references are more abundant and helpful in his career even than in that of Shakespeare. In those days he was at the summit of renown, a notable exception to the case of the prophet, “not being without honor save in his own country.” “For who,” says Augustine, “does not know Hilary the Gallic bishop?” And Jerome wrote to St. Eustacia that Hilary and Cyprian were the “two great cedars of the age.”

He was doubtless well educated. His Latin was good and copious, without possessing very great polish. His Greek was sufficient to fit him to translate the creeds of the Eastern Church, and to become familiar with their hymns. We have his own testimony that he lived in comfort, if not in luxury; and the inference is plain that his family were of consequence in the place. It was in his leisure that he took up Moses and the prophets; and there, in that famous old town of his birth, the mists of his idolatry thinned away. We do not know that any external pressure was brought to bear upon his mind, or that he was led by anything except a natural curiosity into this new learning.

Poitiers itself is a noble situation for such an intellect. It is perched on a promontory, and surrounded on all sides by gorges and narrow valleys. The isthmus, which joins it back to the ridge, was once walled and ditched across. The Pictavi, and afterward the Romans, understood the military advantages of the spot. It has always been the abode of scholars and of warriors. Here Francis Bacon once studied. Here Clovis, founder of the Merovingian dynasty, beat Alaric II., in 507, in fair battle. Here Radegunda the Holy lies buried. Here Fortunatus, the poet-bishop, dwelled. Here Charles Martel hammered the Saracens in 732. Here, in the Cathedral of St. Pierre, rest the ashes of Richard Coeur de Lion. Here, beneath these walls, fought Edward the Black Prince against King John of France, in 1356, when the English had the best of the day. For they had learned—as Bishop Hugh Latimer says that he himself was taught—how to draw the cloth-yard shaft to a head, and let it fly with a deadly aim. “In my tyme,” said Latimer, “my poore father was as diligent to teach me to shote as to learne anye other thynge, and so I thynke other menne dyd theyr children. Hee taughte me how to drawe, how to laye my bodye in my bowe, and not to drawe with strength of armes as other nacions do, but with strength of the bodye. I had my bowes boughte me accordyng to my age and strength; as I encreased in them, so my bowes were made bigger and bigger; for men shall never shoot well excepte they be broughte up in it.” (Sixth sermon before Edward VI.) It was such archery as this that laid the flower of France in the dust, and put John, their king, into prison.

Poitiers is thus a noble and appropriate birthplace for one who before the time of Charles the Hammerer was called the “Hammer of the Arians” (Malleus Arianorum), and who combined fighting with praying all through his life. Places and circumstances and the untamable blood of heroes have more to do with the making of men than we suppose; and Hilary was so distinctly a son of Caesar’s Gaul that he became its large, true, and free expression, appropriate to its landscape and harmonized to its atmosphere.

And as to his emergence from heathenism, there can be nothing more satisfactory to us than his own story. He has recorded that when he found, in Exodus, how God was called “I am that I am,” and when he read in Isaiah (40:12) of a deity who “held the wind in His fists,” and again (66:1) of Him who said, “Heaven is My throne and earth is My footstool,” then this Deus immensus surpassed all his heathen conceptions of grandeur and power. And when he read (in Ps. 138:7) how this great God loved and cared for His children, so that one could say, “Though I walk in the midst of trouble, Thou wilt revive me; Thou shalt stretch forth Thine hand against the wrath of mine enemies, and Thy right hand shall save me”—then he was drawn toward this mighty being by a sentiment of confidence and trust. He also—turning the pages of the Wisdom of Solomon (13:5) in the Apocrypha—found it written that “by the greatness and beauty of the creatures proportionately the Maker of them is seen.” And then, encountering the Gospel of John, its opening sentences clarified his mind. All became plain. He accepted with calmness, firmness, and dignity the great doctrines of the Christian faith. He was imbued with John’s conception of that Word, “which was in the beginning” and “which was God.” From that moment he had a theology which was as pure as crystal and as indestructible as adamant. There is no muddiness about his ideas from this time onward, though Arians buzz and sting, and calamities rain upon him, and the path of duty is deep with mire and the future is dark. Every one of these things passes away. His own language as to this great change in his belief is as characteristic as it is beautiful: “I extended my desires further, and longed that the good thoughts I had about God, and the good life which I built on them, might have an eternal reward.” Like one of his own favorite saints in the Gospel and the Apocalypse of John, he was thus “led by the Spirit of God” to become one of the chanting choir before the throne.

It matters very little, therefore, to us of to-day, that, in 1851, Pius IX., himself a man of sweet and gentle temper, made Hilary a “Doctor of the Church”—a distinction reserved for those greatest ones, like Augustine and Chrysostom, whose learning and eloquence are world-renowned. The dead bishop did not need this posthumous distinction. He has long been recognized—to quote Professor Dorner—as “one of the most original and profound,” albeit not the easiest to understand at all times, of the great teachers of the Christian Church. We may hereafter attach more value to his work even than we do at present.

This then was the man who had determined to enter upon a Christian life. He was already married and had one daughter—Abra by name—and possessed a certain repute as a man of reading and of affairs. His origin protected him from a contempt of pagan learning; and his marriage protected him from that one-sided development which has Romanized the once Catholic Church. The period in which he lived was one of transition—from classic literature to Christian literature, and from the Latin of far-off Virgil and Cicero to the Latin which was to become the uniting tongue of all scholars in that Babel of the Middle Ages. This language was now shaping itself to its new work and becoming, like English under the genius of Chaucer, a living speech. In the moulding hands of these first Christian writers it became flexible, not always fluent or graceful or even strictly grammatical, but capable at least to carry what would otherwise have been lost. Greek was gone, and French and German and English had not yet appeared. As a Gallo-Roman, then—a post-classic Latinist—Hilary gives in his allegiance to Christianity, and his wife and daughter are baptized with him into the true faith.

So far much is conjectural; and more is vague and to be derived from the shadows cast upon the screen of history by the “spirit of the years to come yearning to mix itself with life.” We emerge, however, into historical certainty about the year 351. Then, on the death of their bishop—who is thought to have been Maxentius, the brother of St. Maximin of Trier—his townspeople clamored for Hilary. The Histoire Litteraire de la France sets this election down for the year 350; but that authority, in this and a great many other instances, is profuse and multitudinous and not absolutely safe. We are certainly not far out from the correct date in saying 351.

It illustrates a condition of things which are suggestive of the simplicity of the early Church, when we find that in spite of his being a married man and a father—and in spite of Cyprian’s and of Tertullian’s praises of celibacy—Hilary was heartily chosen and almost forced into the episcopate. In this position he exhibited “all the excellent qualities of the great bishops.” We are told that he was “gentle and peaceable, given particularly to an ability to persuade and to influence.” With these he joined “a holy vigor which held him firm against rising heresies.” And Cassian says that Hilary “had all the virtues of an incomparable man.” The fact, after all, speaks for itself more loudly than these commendations. He was so much one of themselves that the people of Poitiers would not have selected him, if they had not known him to be the best man for the mitre.

From this time began that career of stainless honor which has outlasted the very walls which echoed his voice. He was known from Great Britain to the Indies. He ranks second only to Athanasius as a defender of the faith; and—as we already noted—he is classed by Jerome with the great bishop of Hippo whose portrait is given to us so vividly in Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia. And to us of our century and of our convictions in favor of charity and culture, it is particularly praiseworthy that he never gave up his secular scholarship, and that he never flagged or faltered in defending opinions which were as large and liberal as they were undeniably orthodox. He was an oak which stood against the blast unshaken, and which yet held, in the heart of its great branches, sweet nests of singing birds and leafy coverts of shade and peace.

Hilary was not suffered to be inactive. It was the period at which the Arian heresy was in full incandescence. No one holding the opinions of the Bishop of Poitiers could well remain neutral. He had—in conformity with a custom soon to become a law—separated his life from that of his home; but he appears always to have cherished a warm love for his wife and child. This placed him, however, in perfect freedom from other cares, and at liberty to devote himself to the eradication of false doctrine. Constantius, the Emperor, was an Arian, and this made the perplexity of the position very great. An honest man might ruin all by his blunt independence—but an honest man dare not be silent. And, besides, Hilary had neither attended the Synod of Arles (353) nor that of Milan (355), and was somewhat out of the ecclesiastical tide.

That he was no coward was soon shown to everybody’s satisfaction. He prepared a letter to the Emperor as brave as it was keen, and which touched up with a vigorous lash the cringing sycophants and shuffling hypocrites about the court. Hilary is notably strong when he denounces the substitution of force for reason—and perhaps his doctorate came to him only in 1851 (when he could not well care much for it) because this doctrine of his was not altogether what Mother Church has been in the habit of teaching and practising! I may refer to the recent work of the Rev. R. T. Smith upon The Church in Roman Gaul as fully confirming this statement. St. Martin of Tours is there called to bear testimony that the Bishop of Poitiers held such opinions just as sturdily in his days of power as in these times of trial and persecution. He was, in short, a thoroughly sincere man, and it took him only a few years—until 355—to get into the hottest bubbling spot of all the caldron. At that date, in company with other leaders of the church in Gaul, he drove out a very pestilent fellow—Saturninus, the Bishop of Arles—as a seditious and irreconcilable element in their midst. With him was cast out Valens, and with Valens was cast out Ursacius. But of all these, Bishop Saturninus was the angriest and the most revengeful.

A year of something like good order followed, when lo, the Arians came to the front with a synod of their own complexion at Beziers. Here Hilary found himself in the vocative case altogether. The tables were turned upon him, and it was he who must now go forth a banished man. The power was against him, and he set out with bowed head and sad heart upon one of those pride-humbling journeys which have not seldom brought the greatest results to religion, and which not a few of the best men have taken in their day. In this manner Bernard went to meet Abaelard; Martin Luther went to the diet at Worms; and John Bunyan took his way to Bedford jail.

Principal among the causes of his sadness was that he was snatched away from his constant and congenial duty of explaining the Scriptures to the people of his diocese. Still he had nothing for it but to go; and so, somewhere about 356, we find him in Phrygia. He is accompanied by Rodanius, Bishop of Toulouse, who had plucked up considerable courage by seeing how well Hilary took his defeat.

In 357 the Church in Roman Gaul sent him their greeting, from which that of his own Poitiers people was not absent. And the Gallic bishops, having perceived him to be capable of much good service in his enforced residence abroad, bade him inform himself and them upon the creeds and customs of the Eastern Church. This he had already, to a degree, undertaken. And in 359, whom do we find entering a convocation of bishops at Seleucia but our very Hilary, opposing with a strong and unflinching philosophic power all those—and there were many there—who denied the consubstantiality of the Word.

There were one hundred and sixty of these bishops at Seleucia, of whom one hundred and five—a very handsome majority—were “semi-Arians.” Of the remaining fifty-five there were nineteen classed as Anomoeans—those who held that the Son was unlike the Father in essence, or ἀνόμοιος—and the rest were heretics of different grades of badness. It was the natural outcome of the difficulties with Athanasius, where the royal authority was on the side of the Arians. The Roman Catholic historians are therefore not complimentary to this synod—or rather “double council” of Seleucia and Rimini—and this was assuredly no very comfortable body of Christians for a banished bishop to exhort. But he did it with effect, and proceeded to the council at Constantinople (360) and did it again; and presently (361) Constantius died and the Nicene Creed was victorious.

So was Hilary, who—in 360-61—returned to Poitiers, where, as soon as his crozier was once more well in hand, he levelled Saturninus and compelled him to abandon his diocese. He then turned upon Auxentius of Milan, who only escaped the same or a worse fate by clinging to Valentinian, the reigning Emperor, and was denounced by Hilary as a hypocrite for his pains. Our bishop appears in these days to have been decidedly a member of the Church Militant; and perhaps it was natural enough when one had survived the reigns of Constantius, Julian the Apostate, and Jovian, for him to be as he was. I am not commenting upon these exciting scenes; I desire rather to go back and show how they produced the hymns of which we are to speak.

It was in 357—at the same date with the letters from the bishops and from the churches—that Abra, his daughter, wrote to him herself. From this epistle we learn that her mother still lived, and we observe the dutiful and loving daughter apparent in every line. In reply Hilary sends a well-composed and even imaginative letter. Under the figures of a pearl and a garment he charges her to keep her soul and her conduct pure. He rather recommends a single life, but not in any such extravagant eulogy of celibacy as some would have us suppose. It is more after the style of what Grynaeus affirmed of him—that he was so moderate in these opinions as to suffer his canons to marry—since it would be hard for an unbiassed mind to draw any harsh conclusions from the language; yet all this is of small consequence compared with the enclosure—two Latin hymns, one for the morning and one for the evening, which she may use in the worship of God. The first of these is the Lucis largitor splendide; but the second is probably lost. It is said that it was the hymn, Ad coeli clara non sum dignus sidera—“To the clear stars of heaven I am not worthy,” etc. This is very doubtful indeed, so much so that we may decline to receive it on several grounds. It is to be found in the superb folio edition of Hilary’s works (Paris, 1693) prepared by the Benedictines of St. Maur. Yet if internal evidence is to weigh at all we must reject it without scruple. It is not a hymn in any true sense, and certainly has no reference to the evening hour of worship. It contains a gross phrase or two, which are not suggestive of Hilary, who would scarcely have said that he would “despise Arius” by “modulating a hymn” against him, nor would he have spoken of the “barking Sabellius” or the “grunting Simon.” The verses are unpleasantly flavored with earthliness, and to think that a young girl would be inclined to sing ninety-six lines of an abecedary—or “alphabet-hymn”—is absurd. Moreover, the editors of the edition of 1693 only print four stanzas, and express their own disbelief that Hilary wrote it, based upon these facts and upon their no less important criticism of the style, which is masculine throughout, and refers to ideas highly inappropriate to the use intended. Mone is nearer to the correct doctrine when he assigns it to a period between the sixth and eighth centuries. Daniel (4:130) prints it in full and quotes Mone’s remark that an Irish monk is likely to have been its author. It is in the metre familiar to modern eyes in the Integer vitae of Horace, but it displays neither taste nor poetry nor any religious fervor. That it begins each stanza with a consecutive letter of the alphabet is no proof of anything except wasted ingenuity. So that, I repeat, we do well to reject it and to leave it rejected.

All, then, that is left us is the Lucis largitor splendide—“Thou splendid giver of the light.” The letter went back from Seleucia to Poitiers and carried this hymn, at least, with it. Hilary had sent this and its companion, ut memor mei semper sis—“that you may always remember me.” And we may fancy the lovely high-born daughter of that earnest and scholarly man as, daily and nightly, she sits at her window—perchance with her gaze wistfully turned to the eastward. There she sang these simple, beautiful hymns—she the first singer of the new hymns of the Latin Church. Among the themes for Christian art yet left to us there is hardly one more suggestive than this—for Abra doubtless sang her father’s hymns to her father’s loyal people. It may even be supposed that he gave her the tunes as well as the words, and that, by morning and by night, the battle-scarred Poitiers re-echoed this voice of the exiled bishop.

Of the hymn itself as much can be said in favor as we have just said against its pretended and ill-matched companion. It breathes the Johannean sentiments throughout. It celebrates the Light, the Son of God, the glory of the Father, “clearer than the full sun, the perfect light and day itself.” To one who is acquainted with the Greek hymns it is instantly suggestive of those pellucid songs—its atmosphere is all peace and its trust is as restful to the tired spirit as the quiet coming of the rising day. It may easily have been a translation from the Greek, or, even more easily, the natural up-gush of melody which was touched into life by the frequent hearing of the Eastern hymns. Hilary never learned it in an Arian church, nor did he find it among controversialists. Its nest, where it was first reared, was in some corner of a catacomb or in some nook of the Holy Land. This hymn, then, we may safely accept as the oldest authentic original Latin “song of praise to Christ as God.”

Whether the Bishop of Poitiers had much or little learning, he wrote a valuable book on Synods, and translated for us many useful and otherwise inaccessible confessions of faith and statements of doctrine. Erasmus—himself no brave man, nor one likely to estimate moral courage properly—calls this letter to Abra “nugamentum hominis otiose indocti”—the trifling production of a man lazily uneducated! Well, perhaps it would have been as well if some of that same “luxurious ignorance” of Hilary could have secured the “laborious learning” of Erasmus from exhibiting, at the end of life, its own inefficiency. Jerome said that whoever found fault with Hilary’s knowledge was compelled to concede his philosophic skill; and it reminds one of the remark of Dante Rossetti, who said that nothing in our age could stand comparison with a sonnet of Shakespeare, for, rough as it might seem, Shakespeare wrote it. It was this manhood behind the Latin which went for more than all Rotterdam!

Hilary is credited with a great deal, doubtless, that he never wrote. So he is, by Fortunatus, with miracles which he never performed. Alcuin and others assign to him the Gloria in Excelsis, but this was certainly more ancient than Hilary, being quoted by Athanasius in his treatise on Virginity. He could at best merely have translated it. This he might also have done for the Te Deum laudamus. And since we know that he prepared a Liber Hymnorum—the first actual hymn-book of the Western Church—we have some reason to think that he would not have altogether forgotten the greatest chants of the early Christians. This hymn-book is utterly lost to us. This is not the same as the Liber Mysteriorum—the book of the mysteries—and its existence, like that of its companion work, rests upon the testimony of Jerome. Doubtless in it there were other poems and songs from which the Hilarian authorship has been broken or lost. It was not the ancient custom either to preserve the author’s name, or even to retain the precise form of his hymn. He threw his little lyric—as the Israelites did their jewelry—into the common treasury of the Church; and in the Breviaries, where so many of these hymns are to be discovered, a later and more critical scholarship may identify some of them hereafter. As delicate insects are preserved in amber, we there find much that we should otherwise have lost; but, like that very amber, when its electricity is excited, his was that sort of reputation which attracted many anonymous trifles—as, for example, the Ad coeli clara—to itself.

Of Hilary’s other writings, with exception of his work on the Councils of Ariminum and Seleucia, we have the full text. His commentaries on the Psalms and on Matthew; his controversial pamphlets against Constantius; his book of Synods; his twelve books De Trinitate—these are accessible in the Patrologia of Migne.

It was undoubtedly believed at the time of the fourth Council of Toledo that he had written many pieces “in favor of God, and of the triumphs of apostles and martyrs;” and both Jerome and Isidore of Seville declare him to have been the first among the Latins to write Christian verse. But to show how uncertain is the conjecture that is thus started, I may mention that the Ut queant laxis of Paul Winfrid, the “Deacon,” is credited to Hilary by the Histoire Litteraire. The same authority also claims for him the first Pange lingua (Pange lingua gloriosi, praelium certaminis), which is sometimes assigned to Claudianus Mamertus, but is the well-authenticated composition of Venantius Fortunatus, the troubadour and friend of Radegunda, the wife of Clotaire. We may as well admit that a great man did not necessarily do all the great things of his day.

Besides, the search after truth in this matter is complicated marvellously by the trade of the hymn-tinkers, who put new bottoms and tops and sides to a great many religious lyrics. Here is a case in point in Mone (vol. iii., p. 633). The hymn begins Christum rogemus et patrem—“We call on Christ and on the Father.” It has seven stanzas. The first stanza is from a morning hymn, supposed to be by Hilary. The second is from an Ambrosian hymn. The third and fourth are from another Ambrosian hymn to the Archangel Michael. The fifth is from a very noble Ambrosian hymn—the Aeterna Christi munera—of which Daniel says that it itself has been “wretchedly torn to pieces by the Church” (ab ecclesia miser e dilaceratum). The sixth and seventh stanzas are also Ambrosian—from the Jesu corona virginum. Thus this single hymn of seven stanzas is mere patchwork, gathered from that Ambrosian hymnody which the Breviaries supply. And finding all the rest of it credited to Ambrose and to his century, we are inclined to doubt that Hilary should be considered as the author of any portion at all.

Indeed the identification of Hilary’s hymns—except the Lucis largitor—is purely conjectural. It rests mainly on the hymnological acumen of Cardinal Thomasius, which may or may not be liable to error. Kayser refuses, on one ground or another, to positively endorse any, except the one which all now concede. Next to this in probability stands the Beata nobis gaudia (though it is doubted by Professor March), and then the Deus pater ingenite, which is taken from the Mozarabic Breviary. The Jam meta noctis transiit, the In matutinis surgimus, and the Jesu refulsit omnium, have only the authority of Thomasius. The Jesu quadragenariae, Daniel says, is an old hymn, but very certainly composed later than the time of Hilary. The Ad coeli clara we have already rejected. Thus we have one authentic and five conjectural Hilarian hymns. There is, however, great doubt resting on the Jesu refulsit omnium; and if I consulted merely my own judgment, I should declare against it, if only in view of the rhymes—a characteristic which it would scarcely possess if it were genuinely of the fourth century. And while we are upon this somewhat ungrateful duty of trying to set matters right, shall we pass over the slip which Mrs. Charles makes in her capital little book? (Christian Life in Song. Am. ed., p. 74.) For she says that “The Hilary who wrote the hymns was the canonized Bishop of Arles.” There was, much later, a Hilary of Arles; and there was another Hilary of Rome, and there were also others of the same name; but none of them wrote hymns. He of Arles assuredly did not.

Of our own Hilary it may be added that the rest of his life was earnest, but comparatively quiet. We shall find Gregory of Tours and Fortunatus asserting that he raised the dead and healed the sick, and cast out devils (some of them in the shape of snakes) from a boy’s stomach; but these stories belong naturally to a credulous and superstitious age. More to the purpose is it to find that the bishop had entered upon the composition of tunes for his hymns, and had taken up calligraphy and the ornamentation of manuscripts. There was a book of the Gospels found, on which was indorsed, “Quem scripsit Hilarius Pictavensis quondam sacerdos”—“which Hilary of Poitiers, formerly a priest, wrote.” A similar book was left by St. Perpetuus, Bishop of Tours, to Bishop Euphronius, Fortunatus’s friend. This is attested by his will, executed in 474. “I saw,” says Christian Druthmar (ninth century), “a book of the Gospels, written in Greek, which was said to have been St. Hilary’s, in which were Matthew and John,” etc. But whether Hilary wrote this is naturally an open question.

The good bishop died at Poitiers—as Jerome and Gregory of Tours declare—but the date is still a matter of some uncertainty. Valentinian and Valens were upon the throne, and it is safe to say that 367-68 was the year. January 14th has also been assigned by some authorities, but with no better reason than a generally received tradition to this effect, and the fact that this is his day in the Roman calendar. His body was, however, scattered rather widely. It was removed from its tomb in the time of Clovis—a bone of his arm was in Belgium, and some other portions of his anatomy were in Limoges. About the year 638, Dagobert is stated to have placed his remains in the Church of St. Dionysius, and so confident of this fact were the people of Poitiers, in 1394, that they vehemently asserted that they had his relics there in perfect safety. “Calvinistic heretics” were said to have burned the mortal remnants of the great “hammer of the Arians,” and the Pictavians took this method to meet the calumny. For aught we know to the contrary they were perfectly right, and the dust of their bishop is still resting peacefully in their midst.

For his works, the Paris edition of 1693 is the best; but the Patrologia of J. P. Migne contains all that any one can need or care to see. It is the full reprint of the Paris volumes, together with biographical and critical notes, in Latin, prepared with great diligence and research; but, of course, from the Roman Catholic point of view.

THE HYMNS OF HILARY.

I.
HYMNUS MATUTINUS.

1. Lucis largitor splendide,

Cujus sereno lumine

Post lapsa noctis tempora

Dies refusus panditur;

2. Tu verus mundi Lucifer,

Non is, qui parvi sideris

Venturae lucis nuntius

Angusto fulget lumine,

3. Sed toto sole clarior,

Lux ipse totus et dies,

Interna nostri pectoris

Illuminans praecordia:

4. Adesto, rerum conditor,

Paternae lucis gloria,

Cujus admota gratia

Nostra patescunt corpora;

5. Tuoque plena spiritu,

Secum Deum gestantia,

Ne rapientis perfidi

Diris patescant fraudibus,

6. Ut inter actus seculi

Vitae quos usus exigit,

Omni carentes crimine

Tuis vivamus legibus.

7. Probrosas mentis castitas

Carnis vincat libidines,

Sanctumque puri corporis

Delubrum servet Spiritus.

8. Haec spes precantis animae,

Haec sunt votiva munera,

Ut matutina nobis sit

Lux in noctis custodiam.

I.
A MORNING HYMN.

1. Thou splendid giver of the light,

By whose serene and lovely ray

Beyond the gloomy shades of night

Is opened wide another day!

2. Thou true Light-bearer of the earth,

Far more than he whose slender star,

Son of the morning, in its dearth

Of radiance sheds its beams afar!

3. But clearer than the sun may shine,

All light and day in Thee I find,

To fill my night with glory fine

And purify my inner mind.

4. Come near, Thou maker of the world,

Illustrious in thy Father’s light,

From whose free grace if we were hurled,

Body and soul were ruined quite.

5. Fill with Thy Spirit every sense,

That God’s divine and gracious love

May drive Satanic temptings hence,

And blight their falsehoods from above.

6. That in the acts of common toil

Which life demands from us each day,

We may, without a stain or soil,

Live in Thy holy laws alway.

7. Let chastity of mind prevail

To conquer every fleshly lust;

And keep Thy temple without fail,

O Holy Ghost, from filth and dust.

8. This hope is in my praying heart—

These are my vows which now I pay;

That this sweet light may not depart,

But guide me purely through the day.

II.
HYMNUS MATUTINUS.

1. Deus, Pater ingenite,

Et Fili unigenite,

Quos Trinitatis unitas

Sancto connectit Spiritu.

2. Te frustra nullus invocat,

Nec cassis unquam vocibus

Amator tui luminis

Ad coelum vultus erigit.

3. Et tu suspirantem, Deus,

Vel vota supplicantium,

Vel corda confitentium

Semper benignus aspice.

4. Nos lucis ortus admonet

Grates deferre debitas,

Tibique laudes dicere,

Quod nox obscura praeterit.

5. [Et] diem precamur bonum,

Ut nostros, Salvator, actus

Sinceritate perpeti

Pius benigne instruas.

II.
A MORNING HYMN.

1. Eternal Father, God,

And sole-begotten Son,

Who with the Holy Ghost

Art ever Three in One.

2. None calleth Thee in vain,

Nor yet with empty cry

Doth he who seeks Thy light

Lift up his gaze on high.

3. Do Thou, O God, behold

With mercy them that pray;

Receive their earnest vows

And take their guilt away.

4. The kindling sky forewarns

Our souls what praise we owe

To Him at whose command

The night has ceased below.

5. We ask a happy day,

That Thou shouldst guide our ways

In constant faithfulness,

O Saviour, to Thy praise!

III.
HYMNUS PENTECOSTALIS.

1. Beata nobis gaudia

Anni reduxit orbita,

Cum Spiritus paraclitus

Illapsus est discipulis.

2. Ignis vibrante lumine

Linguae figuram detulit,

Verbis ut essent proflui,

Et charitate fervidi.

3. Linguis loquuntur omnium;

Turbae pavent gentilium:

Musto madere deputant,

Quos Spiritus repleverat.

4. Patrata sunt haec mystice,

Paschae peracto tempore,

Sacro dierum circulo,

Quo lege fit remissio.

5. Te nunc, Deus piissime,

Vultu precamur cernuo:

Illapsa nobis coelitus

Largire dona Spiritus!

6. Dudum sacrata pectora

Tua replesti gratia,

Dimitte nostra crimina,

Et da quieta tempora!

III.
WHITSUNDAY HYMN.

1. What blessed joys are ours,

When time renews our thought

Of that true Comforter

On the disciples brought.

2. With light of quivering flame

In fiery tongues He fell,

And hearts were warm with love

And lips were quick to tell.

3. All tongues were loosened then,

And fear, in men, awoke

Before that mighty power

By which the Spirit spoke.

4. Achieved in mystic sign

Has been that paschal feast,

Whose sacred list of days

The soul from sin released.

5. Thee then, O holiest Lord,

We pray in humble guise

To give such heavenly gifts

Before our later eyes.

6. Fill consecrated breasts

With grace to keep Thy ways;

Show us forgiveness now,

And grant us quiet days.

IV.
HYMNUS MATUTINUS.

1. Jam meta noctis transiit,

Somni quies jam praeterit

Aurora surgit fulgida

Et spargit coelum lux nova.

2. Sed cum diei spiculum

Cernamus, hinc nos omnium

Ad te, superne Lucifer,

Preces necesse est fundere.

3. Te lucis sancte Spiritus

Et caritatis actibus

Ad instar illud gloriae

Nos innovatos effice.

4. Praesta Pater piissime

Patrique compar unice,

Cum Spiritu paraclito

Nunc et per omne saeculum.

IV.
A MORNING HYMN.

1. The limit of the night is passed,

The quiet hour of sleep has fled;

Far up the lance of dawn is cast;

New light upon the heaven is spread.

2. But when this sparkle of the day

Our eyes discern, then, Lord of light,

To Thee our souls make haste to pray

And offer all their wants aright.

3. O Holy Spirit, by the deeds

Of Thine own light and charity,

Renew us through our earthly needs

And cause us to be like to Thee.

4. Grant this, O Father ever blessed;

And Holy Son, our heavenly friend;

And Holy Ghost, Thou comfort best!

Now and until all time shall end.

CHAPTER IV.
POPE DAMASUS AND THE BEGINNING OF RHYME.

Contemporary with Hilary of Poitiers, but probably a younger man, as he survived him by seventeen years, was Damasus of Rome. Like many other Romans of the imperial period, he was a Spaniard by birth; or, at least, he was the son of a Spaniard who had removed to Rome and had become a deacon or presbyter of the church dedicated to the memory of the Roman martyr, St. Lawrence. Of his own earlier life we know very little. An extant epitaph records the fact that he had a sister who became a nun and died in her twentieth year. He himself served in the Church of St. Lawrence until his sixtieth year, when he was chosen Bishop of Rome; and in the accepted catalogue, which begins with the Apostle Peter, he ranks as the thirty-sixth bishop of the see.

He was chosen bishop in A.D. 366, because of the position he had taken with reference to the controversy which then agitated the diocese, and because of the firmness and weight of character he had displayed in the troubles of the years before his election. The great Christological controversy was agitating the Church of both East and West. The West was substantially in agreement with Athanasius, against both the Arians and the semi-Arians, and would have been entirely so but for the influence exerted by semi-Arian or Arian emperors and the courtly bishops of their party. Constantius, the last surviving son of Constantine the Great, was exceedingly zealous for the semi-Arian doctrine, which rejected the statement of our Lord’s substantial identity with His Father, but was willing to assert His substantial likeness. It was only the difference of an iota in a Greek word—ὁμοουσιος or ὁμοιουσιος—but if there ever was a case in which neither jot nor tittle must be allowed to pass away, it was this.

Liberius, who was elected Bishop of Rome in 352, was the victim of Constantius’s policy. In 353 the East and West were united under his rule, and that year at Arles, as in 355 at Milan, councils were called, in which the condemnation of Athanasius was procured by imperial blandishments. In the former the presbyter sent by Liberius to represent the Roman see subscribed with the majority. But in the second his three representatives obeyed their instructions, and accepted disfavor and exile rather than subscribe. Then Liberius himself was summoned to Milan, and the weight of imperial threats and persuasions was brought to bear upon him. He withstood both manfully, and demanded as a preliminary to any discussion of the charges against Athanasius, that the Nicene Creed should be subscribed by all parties, and the banished bishops returned to their sees. When given his choice between submission and exile, he chose the latter.

The Emperor now sought among the Roman clergy for a man to put into Liberius’s place. In Rome, as in most of the cities of the West, Arians were not to be found. But in the Deacon Felix the court party obtained a candidate who, while himself a Trinitarian, was willing to hold communion with the Arians, and presumably to condemn Athanasius. Of the details of his election and ordination little is known, but we find him installed in the Roman see with the vigorous support of the civil authority, although not with the assent of the Roman people. The great body of the Christians in Rome are said to have refused communion with him because he was tainted by communion with heretics; and when Constantius came to visit the city, he was besieged by the Christian ladies of the city with appeals for the restoration of Liberius.

In the mean time three years of exile to Thrace, where he was thrown of set purpose into constant association with bishops of the semi-Arian party, and isolated from his friends, had broken the spirit of Liberius. He was not a man of strong character, and, unfortunately for the theory of papal infallibility, he yielded. He signed a creed compiled for the occasion, which described Christ as of like substance with the Father, and condemned Athanasius.[1] He then was allowed to return to Rome, although Felix II. was still the recognized bishop. Constantius seems to have foreseen the difficulties which would attend the presence of the two bishops in the city, and he consented to the return of Liberius unwillingly. The body of the people and of the clergy at once rallied around Liberius, and rejected Felix altogether; and of this party was Damasus. But while they were willing to condone his weakness in the matter of condemning Athanasius, there was a party of more determined Athanasians who refused to do so, and the diocese now was divided between the three factions. That of Felix disappeared with his own death in 360 and the death of Constantius in 361. But the extreme Athanasians, although they did not attempt to set up a rival bishop while Liberius lived, perpetuated their party, and they probably received aid and comfort from a similar party which had arisen in the East, in opposition to the wiser and more charitable policy of Athanasius himself. This party was called the Luciferians, from Lucifer, Bishop of Cagliari, in Sardinia, who was in exile in the East at the time when this question was raised there after the death of Constantius.

In 367 Liberius died, and the schism at once showed itself in Rome. Damasus was chosen and ordained bishop in the regular form by the friends of Liberius, who were the great majority. But the Deacon Ursicinus was chosen by the Luciferian party, and ordained by bishops of that party in the basilica of St. Sicinus. Unfortunately the prefect of the city was a weak and ineffective man, who was quite unable to preserve peace between the two factions. It soon came to blows between them, and the pagan historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, tells us with what result:

“Damasus and Ursinus being eager beyond measure to secure possession of the bishop’s seat, carried on the conflict most bitterly and with divisive partisanship, their supporters carrying their quarrels to the point of inflicting death and wounds. As Juventius was unable either to suppress or abate these evils, he yielded to the violence and withdrew to the suburbs. And in the struggle Damasus overcame, as his party was the more determined of the two. It is admitted that in the basilica of Sicinus, which is a place of assemblage for Christian worship, there were found in one day one hundred and thirty-seven corpses of those who had been done to death; and also that the excitement of the populace abated slowly and with difficulty after the affair was over.”

“See how these Christians love one another!” was a comment made by pagans on the spirit which had prevailed in the earlier Church. They now might have said it ironically. It is impossible to acquit Damasus of all responsibility in the matter, as he was a man of eminent ability and influence, and might have put an end to these scenes of violence if he had exerted his authority. It is equally impossible to believe that he took any part in them. Then, as in the Reformation times, what John Knox calls “the raskill multitude” greatly enjoyed an opportunity to show how great their zeal for religion, in any other shape but that of obeying its precepts. “Set Jehu to pulling down idols,” said an old Puritan, “and see how zealous he can be.”

The schism did not end with the bloody struggle around the basilica of St. Sicinus. It is true that the civil authority now interposed and banished the bishop of the Luciferian party. But he afterward was allowed to return, and again the troubles revived and ceased only with his second banishment. Even when the Emperor Gratian gave Damasus the entire jurisdiction over the bishops and priests involved in the schism, with a view to the final suppression of these disputes, the extremists lingered on. After Ursicinus there was yet another Luciferian bishop of Rome; and by a curious freak of controversial zeal the memory of Felix was consecrated as that of an opponent of Liberius, and a mythical account of their relations was given currency, which has resulted in the elevation of Felix to the rank of “pope and martyr,” on the ground that Constantius had him beheaded for his loyalty to the Nicene faith![2]

Damasus made an excellent record in his see, after the abating of the troubles which attended his accession to it. He left no room for doubt as to his orthodoxy. For the first time since the great controversy broke out in Alexandria, the whole weight and influence of the great Roman see was thrown unreservedly and effectively on the Athanasian side. The accession of Valentinian (364-75) to the imperial authority in the West once more threw the weight of court influence on the other side; but intolerance was not carried to the same extent as by Constantius. At every stage of the discussion we find Damasus outspoken on behalf of the Nicene faith, and in support of Athanasius. In 368 he held a synod at Rome, in which the Illyrian bishops Ursacius and Valens, who were trying to Arianize the West, were condemned as heretics; and in 370 another in which the same condemnation was meted out to Auxentius, the Bishop of Milan. Before he died he saw the second General Council meet at Constantinople and lay the ban of the Church on all the compromises with Arianism.

The see of Rome already had become a place of great splendor and influence. “Make me Bishop of Rome,” the pagan senator Praetextatus said to him, “and I will be a Christian to-morrow.” Damasus seems to have enjoyed the pomp and show and opportunities for outlay and for influence which his position secured him. But there was much in his administration of his diocese which commends him to our sympathies and even our admiration. He seems to have been the first to have taken a genuine interest in the Catacombs—the great underground burial-places which are so rich in memorials of the Church’s primitive and martyr ages. He fostered their use as places of pilgrimage and reunion for the people of his own diocese and pilgrims from others. He constructed the staircases which made them accessible, the well-lights for their illumination and ventilation, and the chapels for collective worship. Here Christendom, in the day of its triumph, gathered to commemorate those who had been faithful when the Church was under the cross, and Prudentius in his Peristephanon has left us a lively picture of the eager multitudes who resorted thither on the festival days, some from Rome itself, others from the Etrurian and Sabine villages, thronging even the great roads to the city to their utmost capacity: “From early morn they press thither to greet the saints. The multitude comes and goes until evening. They kiss the polished plates of silver which cover the grave of the martyr. They offer incense, and tears of emotion stream from the eyes of all.”

When, after long centuries of forgetfulness, the Catacombs were reopened in 1578 by Antonio Bosio, traces of these pilgrimages were found in the graffiti or rude chalk-inscriptions left on the walls of the passages by the Italian peasants of the fourth and fifth centuries. There also were found the inscriptions in verse, composed by Damasus, and cut in stone by his friend, Furius Filocalus, who devised an ornamental alphabet for the purpose. In one of these Filocalus describes himself as one who “reverenced and loved Pope Damasus” (Damasi papae cultor atque amator).

Another side of his activity has been brought into light by more recent researches in Rome. Professor Lanciani says that to Damasus belongs also the honor of having founded the first public library of Christendom: “The finest libraries of the first centuries of Christendom were, of course, in Rome.... Such was the importance attributed to books in those early days of our faith that, in Christian basilicas, or places of worship, they were kept in the place of honor—next to the episcopal chair. Many of the basilicas which we discover from time to time, especially in the Campagna, have the apse trichora—that is, divided into three small hemicycles. The reason of this peculiar form was long sought in vain; but a recent discovery made at Hispalis proves that of the three hemicycles the central one contained the tribunal or episcopal chair, the one on the right the sacred implements, the one on the left the sacred books.

“The first building erected in Rome, under the Christian rule, for the study and preservation of books and documents, was the Archivum (Archives) of Pope Damasus. This just and enterprising pope, the last representative of good old Roman traditions as regards the magnificence and usefulness of his public structures, modelled his establishment on the pattern of the typical library at Pergamos; of which the Palatine Library in Rome had been the worthy rival. He began by raising in the centre a hall of basilical type, which he dedicated to St. Lawrence,” and which “was surrounded by a square portico, into which opened the rooms or cells containing the various departments of the archives and of the library.” A commemorative inscription, composed by Damasus himself, in hexameters, seven in number, was set in front of the building above the main entrance. The text has been discovered in a MS. formerly at Heidelberg, now in the Vatican. The first four hexameters do not bring out in a good light the poetical faculties of the worthy pontiff—in fact their real meaning has not yet been ascertained; but the last three verses are more intelligible:

‘Archibis, fateor, volui nova condere tecta;

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.

But besides the occasional occurrence of rhyme in classic poetry—as in Virgil’s famous jeu d’ esprit,

“Sic vos non vobis edificatis aves,” etc.—

there seems to have existed forms of popular Latin verse in which rhyme and accent held the place which quantity held in classic poetry. It is this popular form of verse which the Church’s hymns began to reproduce, just as they also in many cases are written in that lingua rustica, or countrified speech of the peasantry of Italy and France, which was to become the basis of the Romance languages. It is a matter of dispute whether the Saturnian verse-form, to whose early prevalence and prolonged existence among the classes not pervaded by Greek culture Horace alludes, was based on an accentual scansion or merely on a numbering of syllables and a rude approach to quantity. The general consensus of scholars is that the Saturnian metres were based on accent, and that rhyme, which is the natural and invariable product of the accentual scansion, was also in use.[4]

So this hidden current of rhymed and accented poetry of the common people rose to light again after many ages in the hymns of the Western Church. Thus Damasus brings us to the parting of the ways. In Hilary, Ambrose and his school, Prudentius, Ennodius, Fortunatus, Elpis, Gregory, and Bede we have the perpetuation of the classic tradition of quantitative verse in the service of Christendom and for the ear of the cultivated classes. And while that tradition expires in the Middle Ages, we see it revive again in the sacred poets of the Renaissance—in Zacharius Ferrari, George Fabricius, Marcus Antonius Muretus, Famiano Strada and the other revisers of the Roman Breviary, the two Santeuls in the Breviary of Clugny, and Charles Coffin in the Paris Breviary. But Damasus stands at the head of a still more illustrious line. Catching, perhaps, from the Etruscan and Sabine peasants, who thronged the Catacombs on the day when the Martyr Agatha was commemorated, the accents of the popular poetry, he became the founder of the tradition which lives in the broader current of Latin sacred song. In this line of succession we find already a few of the Ambrosian hymns, and then a long series in which the two Bernards, Adam of St. Victor, Thomas of Celano, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventura are the most illustrious names. And as indeed the tradition of accent and rhyme seems to have made its way into the literature of the modern world through the Latin hymns, Dante and all the great poets who have illustrated its power to give pleasure might be said to belong here.

The hymn in commemoration of the Martyr Agatha—whose story of suffering and triumph had seized on the imagination of the people as did those of the martyrs Cecilia and Sebastian—we give with the English version of the Rev. J. Anketell, which he has kindly permitted us to use.

Martyris ecce dies Agathae

Virginis emicat eximiae,

Christus eam Sibi qua sociat,

Et diadema duplex decorat.

Stirpe decens, elegans specie,

Sed magis actibus atque fide:

Terrea prospera nil reputans

Jussa Dei sibi corde ligans.

Fortior haec trucibusque viris

Exposuit sua membra flagris,

Pectore quam fuerit valido

Torta mamilla docet patulo.

Deliciae cui carcer erat,

Pastor ovem Petrus hanc recreat,

Laetior inde magisque flagrans

Cuncta flagella cucurrit ovans.

Ethnica turba rogum fugiens,

Hujus et ipsa meretur opem:

Quos fidei titulus decorat,

His Venerem magis ipsa premat.

Jam renitens quasi sponsa polo,

Pro misero rogitet Damaso,

Sic sua festa coli faciat,

Se celebrantibus ut faveat.

Gloria cum Patre sit Genito,

Spirituique proinde sacro,

Qui Deus unus et omnipotens

Hanc nostri faciat memorem.

Fair as the morn in the deep blushing East,

Dawns the bright day of Saint Agatha’s feast;

Christ who has borne her from labor to rest,

Crowns her as Virgin and Martyr most blest.

Noble by birth and of beautiful face,

Richer by far in her deeds and her grace,

Earth’s fleeting honors and gains she despised,

God’s holy will and commandments she prized.

Braver and nobler than merciless foes,

Willing her limbs to the scourge to expose;

Weakly she sank not by anguish oppressed,

When cruel torture destroyed her fair breast.

Then her dark dungeon was filled with delight,

Peter the shepherd refreshed her by night;

Forth to her tortures rejoicing she went,

Thanking her God for the trials he sent.

Barbarous pagans, escaping their doom,

Honor her virtues that brighten their gloom;

They whom the title of faith hath adorned,

Like her, earth’s possessions and pleasures have scorned.

Radiant and glorious, a heavenly bride,

She to the Lord for the wretched hath cried;

So in her honor your praises employ,

That ye too may share in her triumph and joy.

Praise to the Father and praise to the Son,

Praise to the Spirit, the blest Three in One;

God of all might in Heaven’s glory arrayed,

Praise for thy grace in thy servant displayed.

It will be observed that Mr. Anketell, in the second line of the sixth verse, follows the reading preferred by Daniel: Pro miseris supplica Domino, which omits the Pope’s name. But it seems much more unlikely that this line should be altered to the line as given above, than that the contrary change should have been made. Emendators generally pass from the concrete to the vague, from the specific to the general.

CHAPTER V.
AMBROSE.

It would appear that the Ambrosian hymns obtained much of their earliest recognition in Spain. At least so runs the statement of Cardinal Thomasius, who edited the Mozarabic (Spanish) Breviary. He says: “It is not doubtful that in the seventh century of the Church, when the Spanish Church especially flourished, the Ambrosian hymns were everywhere in vogue.” The Concilium Agathense (Council of Agde in Southern France, A.D. 506), which concerned itself chiefly with matters of discipline, ordained that hymns should be sung morning and evening, and at the conclusion of matins, vespers, and masses. These and similar enactments had reference to the body of hymns which had received the name of the Bishop of Milan. Then, as now, they formed the true fragrant cedar-heart of the old psalmody, and it is from their structure that the Council of Toledo (633) drew its famous definition. The Council said: “Proprie autem hymni sunt continentes laudem Dei. Si ergo sit laus, et non sit Dei, non est hymnus. Si sit et laus Dei laus [sic] et non cantatur non est hymnus. Si ergo laudem Dei dicitur et cantatur, tunc est hymnus.” That is to say: “Hymns properly contain the praise of God. If therefore there be praise, but not of God, this is no hymn. If there be praise, praise of God, but not capable of being sung, this is no hymn. If therefore the praise of God be both composed and sung, it is then a hymn.”

The author who is thus honored as the first great leader of the Church’s praise was born at Treves, in Gaul, about the year 340 (or, as some say, 334). His father was a Roman noble who became praetorian prefect of the province of Gallia Narbonensis; and as Hither Gaul was an important region, it can be easily seen that the young Ambrose was reared in the midst of wealth and power. His mother was a learned woman and he naturally imbibed letters as he grew up. A tradition, which is probably based on fact, assures us that even in his cradle he was marked for fame. A swarm of bees came down upon him, and the amazed nurse saw them clustered about his very mouth without harming him. This was the same prodigy which had been related of Plato, and hence his parents imagined a high destiny for the lad. It was indeed a singular and suggestive commentary on his future life. He preserved his equanimity amid a great deal of buzzing; and the sweetness of his speech won to him no less a convert than the great Augustine. His entire career was worthy of the sainted Sotheria, his ancestress, who was martyred for the faith under Diocletian.

He appears to us a man of both character and conscience. His education was given him at Rome, and his brother Satyrus and himself went to Milan to practice at the bar. His success as a pleader was great. He became first assessor to the prefect with the rank of Consularis, whose headquarters were now at Milan; and subsequently he took charge of Liguria and Emilia. For in 369 we find him, by appointment of the Emperor Valentinian, prefect of Upper Italy and Milan. His position is sometimes styled that of “consular,” sometimes that of “governor,” and sometimes that of “praetor” or imperial president, which last perhaps the easiest designation for modern ears and carries the plainest meaning with it.

Now Milan was the capital of Liguria and it was the business of the praetor to preside in the stead of the Emperor over the choice of a bishop. Auxentius, an Arian, who had held this office, died in 374 and a new election was necessary. This was not an easy matter, for the feud between the Catholics and the Arians was at fever-heat, and rioting and bloodshed were very certain to occur.

The praetor called to mind the advice of Probus, prefect of Italy, who had once charged him to administer the affairs of his region “like a bishop.” He therefore tried to cast oil upon the waters. His genial gravity and calm serenity of spirit aided the impression he meant to produce. Both factions gazed upon him with delight. His attitude was so unpartisan as to charm everybody, and it was very natural that this eloquent representative of the Emperor should carry the suffrages of the throng. And just when the interest was most intense and the confidence greatest, a child cried out, “Let Ambrose be bishop,” and the crowd caught the contagion at once.

In later days it was maliciously said that Ambrose had himself contrived this scene with an eye to the stage effect—that for all his apparent humility the coming bishop set store by the office and wanted to obtain it—that, in short, his reluctance to receive it and even his precipitate flight from the city were prearranged! More than this, it has been asserted that the various schemes and subterfuges to avoid becoming bishop were known to and abetted by his friends, who were of the orthodox party and desired to have their candidate elected. The best reply that can be given is the character of the man himself. Such a person must have entertained the highest reverence for such an office. In his administration of its cares and duties he showed a conscious supremacy over every worldly consideration. In his final acceptance of it he evinced no less of self-denial than of sincerity. And it is incredible that so mighty a mind as that of Augustine could have been caught by the glittering emptiness of a hypocritical or self-seeking nature. We may well charge these calumnies to their proper sources—those, namely, of disappointed ambition or of envious malignity.

The record of this endeavor to escape office reads singularly enough. He first put some criminals to the torture, hoping by this means to shock the people through his hard-hearted justice. When this would not do he avowed philosophic rather than Christian sentiments. Having again failed, he welcomed some very profligate persons—men and women—to his palace in a way to invite scandal. This expedient being also detected he actually escaped from the city by night, but lost his way and found himself in front of the gates when morning dawned. This being his fourth unavailing effort, he fled to a friend’s house in the country, begging that he might lie hidden there until the first rush of feeling had been stemmed and he could hope for calmer consideration of his refusal. But the friend immediately betrayed him for his own good, and this well-meant treachery fastened the mitre firmly on his brow. Basil the Great gloried in this new coadjutor; and at the age of thirty-four or thereabouts, he himself became convinced that he could struggle no longer against his fate.

It was thus that Ambrose finally assumed the episcopate, and it was soon evident that this catechumen—for he had not even been previously baptized—respected its dignities and meant that others should be of the same mind as himself. He gave up his private fortune, selling his large estates and personal property, and reserving from them only a proper allowance to his sister Marcellina, who had early taken the vow of virginity. He associated with this proceeding the most strict method of living. “He accepted no invitations to banquets; took dinner only on Sunday, Saturday, and the festivals of celebrated martyrs; devoted the greater part of the night to prayer, to the hitherto necessarily neglected study of the Scriptures and the Greek fathers and to theological writing; preached every Sunday and often in the week; was accessible to all, most accessible to the poor and needy; and administered his spiritual oversight, particularly his instruction of catechumens, with the greatest fidelity.”

This is the character, admirably condensed, of a model bishop. To its fulfilment it requires the fervent piety of a true Christian and the constant zeal of an acute student together with the large prudence of a man of affairs. All these are abundantly found in Ambrose. And if it happened that in other and worse times his assertion of the spiritual independence of a bishop gave a foundation for what became the authority of the pope, it may be properly retorted that for him not to have done so then would have prevented many another better thing in later ages.

He was a more polished scholar than Hilary, and a more devout Christian than Damasus. Hence it was that his energy and skill contributed largely to the success of the Nicene orthodoxy in the West. Those times were troublous, and a cheerful and sunshiny temper like that of Ambrose was a vast auxiliary to the cause. He had been consecrated in 374, eight days after his election; and in 382 he presided at the synod in Aquileia which deposed Palladius and Secundianus, the Arian bishops. By so doing, and by his general attitude, he incurred the anger of Justina, whose son, the younger Valentinian, he always upheld and shielded. The Empress, however, determined to deal with him a good deal as Ahab’s wife dealt with Elijah. This comparison takes additional point from the use which Ambrose himself made of the story of Naboth in his defence of the Portian Church.

He had already encountered the smouldering idolatry of old Rome, headed by the rhetorician, Symmachus; but the eloquence of Ambrose had borne down all opposition and that conflict was now at an end. A vindictive woman was, however, a greater danger than a clever orator, and he found this true when Justina, the Empress-mother, allied herself with the heretical Arians. His pious zeal was kindled in a moment. Give up churches to such a schismatic set as these? Never!

It was at Easter in the year 386 that the Portian Church and its holy vessels were demanded for the use of the other party. Then stood up both the old Roman and the new Christian in the single person of the Bishop of Milan. He compared the demand to that of Ahab for Naboth’s vineyard; and it may well be supposed that with the rush of such a torrent of speech a current of inference was also borne along which involved Justina herself. The sermon, which has survived to us, was preached on Palm Sunday, and in it he said that he would hold every religious edifice against heresy to the very death. Let them take his property; let them depose or destroy himself; let them do their worst—but for his part he would stand there unshaken for the truth. He would not incite riot and confusion, but he would not yield. It was the anticipation of Luther’s “Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders! Gott helfe mir!” For Ambrose proclaimed, almost in these actual words, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. God help me!”

He made one magnificent point in this discourse—the focal centre it was of the entire outburst of eloquent declamation. It was when he quoted what our Lord Himself had said. “Yes,” cries Ambrose, “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but give to God what is God’s. Is the Church the property of Caesar? Never! It belongs unalterably to God. For God, then, it shall be kept. It shall never be surrendered to Caesar.”

The fight was really a siege. The sacred character of the churches protected their defenders. Ambrose invigorated the multitude who flocked to help him, and who organized relief parties to keep possession by day and by night. To relieve the monotony of their watches, he frequently addressed them words of encouragement. His fine equanimity triumphed over the impending disaster. He taught the people there and then the hymns of the early Church. He composed tunes and instructed them in singing. And when at last he was able to discover the bodies of Gervasius and Protasius, the ancient martyrs, he kindled in the spirits of his hearers such a fire that the popular voice was heeded even by the throne itself, and Justina was defeated and gave up the struggle. The court actually retreated before the authority of the Church. And from that moment, and that other memorable moment when he arraigned Theodosius, Ambrose delivered the power of the bishop’s crozier from any interference coming from the Emperor’s sceptre. Those were the days when the pastoral staff might be of wood, but the man who wielded it was of pure gold.

This account needs the story of Theodosius to be immediately attached to it in order to make it stand out in its true relation to the character of Ambrose. The bishop met three great enemies during his career. First appeared Idolatry, championed by Symmachus; then followed Heresy, championed by Justina; and now came Despotism, behind which stood the beloved Theodosius, the Emperor-pupil, with his hands red from the massacre of Thessalonica. The facts were these: a tumult had arisen in the circus at that place; Botheric, an imperial officer, had been killed; and the Emperor had in revenge put very many people to death. Some have even run the figures up to the incredible altitude of thirty thousand, and the massacre has been always regarded as involving seven thousand victims at the lowest estimate. It was a brutal and a horrible act, and Ambrose came out as Nathan did before David and denounced it with the most withering reproaches. The Emperor cowered and bent before this sirocco of the truth. The speaker was poised so high above him in the assured calm of a steady rectitude that Theodosius could do nothing except yield. And yield he did; and for eight months he paid penance before he was restored. It was the penance of the German Henry which hastened the Reformation; it was the humiliation of Theodosius which preserved both rights and dignities to the Church.

There is another side of Ambrose, and one on which Protestants will love to dwell. While his great disciple Augustine lent the weight of his authority to the doctrine that civil constraint might be used to bring men to orthodox beliefs, Ambrose always denounced that. When Valentinian II. sent him to Trier to negotiate with the rebel Maximus, in the winter of 383-84, Ambrose—like his contemporary, Martin of Tours—refused to have any communion with the bishops who recognized Maximus as Emperor, not on political grounds, but because they had obtained the execution of certain Spanish Priscillianists for heresy. This was the first blood-stain on the white garments of the Church—the first in the long line of such sins against the Word and Spirit of Christ. Yet Adrian VI. appealed to it as a precedent against Luther, and described the usurper as one of “the ancient and pious emperors.” In this he followed the example of his infallible predecessor, Leo I., who, in 447, declared there would be an end of all law, human and divine, if such heretics were allowed to live!

As an orator and writer, Ambrose’s strength lay in the simple direct plunge of his sentences, wide and grand and forceful as the launching of a great bowlder down a mountain path. And Mr. Simcox has noticed that the words which are used to describe his rhetorical power are almost all derived from eloqui. The other assemblage of expressions, drawn from disertus and the like, refer to the logical or learned weight of an argument. But what struck every one in the case of Ambrose was that he let the truth come mightily, just as he felt and believed it, with a swing and a vigor which was the outburst of his own majestic soul. It was this which won his victories. It was this power of sincerity which made him the counsellor of Theodosius and the instructor of Gratian as well as the guardian of Valentinian II. It was this unshrinking forwardness of movement which led him to oppose the rebuilding of the Jews’ synagogue; they had denied the Lord Jesus—let their house burn! But a victory more Christian was gained when thirty days of respite were fixed by his intercession between the sentence and execution of criminals. And although the defence of “Virginity,” as Ambrose conducted it, was the mainspring of the conventual idea, and was afterward vigorously used for that purpose, it is again plain that he advocated what he believed and what he himself devoutly practised. He shines upon us, from every angle of vision, as a character most pure, serene, and brave.

The siege in the basilica at Milan had an important bearing on the whole future of the Christian Church. Augustine tells us how his mother Monica had followed him to Milan, and how when there “she hastened the more eagerly to the church and hung upon the lips of Ambrose.” (Aug. Conf., B. vi.) “That man,” he continues, “she loved as an angel of God because she knew that by him I had been brought to that doubtful state of faith I now was in.” She evidently anticipated that so eloquent a preacher would complete the work that he had been permitted to begin. As for Augustine himself, he felt “shut out both from his ear and speech by multitudes of busy people whose weaknesses he served.”

How finely, by the way, this very expression illustrates the greatness of Ambrose’s character and the unselfishness of his life! We get also a picture of the man as a student—one whose voice would become worn by any extended public speaking, and who therefore read to himself in his private studies in a manner unusual apparently in that age—namely, as we do now, without opening his lips or articulating the words. The effect of Justina’s persecution is also given most graphically. (Aug. Conf., B. ix.) For Augustine, having first told us how these heavenly voices fell upon his ear, says that his mother “bore a chief part of those anxieties and watchings” and “lived for prayer.” At this date, he emphatically declares, “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) congregations throughout other parts of the world following herein.” It is he, moreover, who tells us that the two martyrs’ bodies were transferred to that Ambrosian church erected in 387, and where afterward were placed the bones of its great founder; which was spared by Barbarossa in 1162, and which, as the church of San Ambrogio, still occupies its old site in Milan. Thus we have the most important of contemporary testimony to some of these troublous scenes.

Of the Ambrosian hymns themselves a great deal may be said. It is better to confine one’s self rather, therefore, to results than to the long processes which have led thither. But it is impossible to agree with Dr. Neale and Archbishop Trench, who say of them that “there is a certain coldness in them—an aloofness of the author from his subject.” This is one of those bits of critical misapprehension which lead us to doubt the infallibility of even so admirable a judgment as that of the warden of Sackville College. The truth is that Dr. Neale admired gorgeousness and the splendor of ritual. He praises the Pange lingua of Aquinas altogether too much and he praises Ambrose altogether too little. A simple and reverent spirit cannot be said to experience, as he does, a “feeling of disappointment” before this which he calls “an altar of unhewn stone.” This single phrase exposes the delusion. “Unhewn stone” is not to Dr. Neale’s nor to Archbishop Trench’s churchly taste, while it is precisely upon such an altar as that (Ex. 20:25) that God was ready to let His flame descend. The latest judgment—that of Mr. Simcox—(Latin Literature, vol. ii., 405) is decidedly preferable: “They all have the character of deep, spontaneous feeling, flowing in a clear, rhythmical current, and show a more genuine literary feeling than the prose works.” To any one who is at all familiar with the Ambrosian hymns this will at once commend itself as the better criticism.

We may pause a moment to inquire about the chants which bear his name, but we shall have slight enough information. Four tunes are traditional: the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixed Lydian. What these were and how they were sung, we do not accurately know. We do know, however, that Ambrose employed but four notes (the tetrachord) where we have subdivided the various tones into the octave. The Germans do not profess to tell us anything more definite than this.

The actual hymns are to be reckoned up in several ways. First comes the mass of Ambrosiani, including hymns of Gregory the Great and of other and much later authors. Many have been foisted into this category because they were found in old breviaries and manuscripts. Then from these we may separate the presumed originals—of which a large proportion are now known to belong to other writers. These misapprehensions are due to such compilers as Fabricius, Cassander, Clichtove, and Thomasius, who were not invariably correct and who perpetuated their designations through later works. Still a third class are the possible originals, selected by the judicious but not always accurate zeal of the Benedictines of St. Maur when they edited the collected works of the great bishop. And last of all can be placed the probable originals—those hymns which are authenticated by Augustine and by St. Caelestin (A.D. 430), together with those in structure closely resembling them.

For our own purposes a fifth class can even yet be formed from the last named group—the undoubted originals, which will comprise only those attested by contemporary authority.

The list would stand then in the order of authenticity, about as follows:

I.

Attested by St Augustine.

Deus Creator omnium,

Aeterne rerum conditor,

Jam surgit hora tertia, Qua

Referred to directly by St. Caelestin.

Veni Redemptor gentium.

These are the undoubted hymns and the only hymns to be safely assigned to Ambrose.

II.

Aeterna Christi numera, et martyrum,

Illuminans altissimus,

Orabo mente dominum,

(from Bis ternas horas,)

Splendor paternae gloriae.

These are the probable hymns.

III.

Apostolorum passio,

Conditor alme siderum,

Consors paterni luminis,

Hic est dies verus Dei,

Jam lucis orto sidere,

Nunc sancte nobis Spiritus,

O lux beata Trinitas,

Obduxere polum nubila coeli,

O rex aeterne domine,

Rector potens, verax Deus,

Rerum Deus tenax vigor,

Somno refectis artubus,

Squalent arva soli pulvere multo,

Summae Deus clementiae,

Tristes erant apostoli.

These have, for one reason or another, been assigned to Ambrose. It is to be remembered that the Tristes erant is a part of the Aurora lucis rutilat, and that in many cases the hymns are very much intermingled. A rigid designation is therefore impossible. The fourth class comprehends what may be called Ambrosiani—the Sedulian and Gregorian and other hymns being simply excluded from the list.

IV.

Aeternae lucis conditor,

Agnis beatae virginis,

Apostolorum supparem,

A solis ortus cardine Et usque,

Aurora lucis rutilat,

Bis ternas horas explicans,

Certum tenentes ordinem,

Christe coelorum conditor,

Christe cunctorum dominator alme,

Christe qui lux es et dies,

Christe rex coeli domine,

Christe redemptor gentium,

Cibis resumptis congruis,

Coeli Deus sanctissime,

Convexa solis orbita,

Dei fide, qua vivimus,

Deus aeterni luminis,

Deus qui certis legibus,

Deus qui claro lumine,

Deus qui coeli lumen es,

Dicamus laudes Domino,

Diei luce reddita,

Fulgentis auctor aetheris,

Gesta sanctorum martyrum,

Grates tibi Jesu novas,

Hymnum dicamus Domino,

Immense coeli conditor,

Jam cursus horae sextae,

Jam lucis splendor rutilat,

Jam sexta sensim volvitur,

Jam surgit hora tertia, Et nos,

Jam ter quaternis trahitur,

Jesu corona celsior,

Jesu corona virginum,

Jesu nostra redemptio,

Magnae Deus potentiae,

Magni palmam certaminis,

Mediae noctis tempus est,

Meridie orandum est,

Miraculum laudabile,

Mysteriorum signifer,

Mysterium ecclesiae,

Nox atra rerum contegit,

Optatus votis omnium,

Perfectum trinum numerum,

Plasmator hominis Deus,

Post matutinas laudes,

Rerum creator optime,

Sacratum hoc templum Dei,

Saevus bella serit barbarus horrens,

Stephano primo martyri,

Telluris ingens conditor,

Te lucis ante termium,

Tempus noctis surgentibus,

Ter hora trina volvitur,

Ternis ter horis numerus,

Tristes nunc populi, Christe redemptor,

Tu Trinitatis unitas,

Verbum supernum prodiens, a Patre,

Victor, Nabor, Felix pii,

Vox clara ecce intonat.

While these are often known to be mere paraphrases of Ambrose’s own homilies, or imitations of his hymns, they are as frequently found to possess his spirit and almost the very forms of his verse. Thus Daniel says of the Ter hora trina that it is “not unworthy of Ambrose himself.” We also find many cases where the Roman Breviary has altered the first line as well as changed the arrangement of the stanzas.

The last class are those hymns, formerly called Ambrosian, but now known to be the work of other hands. They are given with their authors’ names appended.

V.

Ad coenam Agni providi.

(Ad regias Agni.)

An ancient hymn, older possibly than Ambrose or Hilary.

Aeterna Christi unmera nos

.

A mediaeval patchwork.

Aeterna coeli gloria

.

An Abcedary of later date.

Agathae sanctae virginis

.

Found at Milan among Ambrosian hymns.

Almi prophetae progenies

.

Time of Ennodius, sixth century.

Amore Christi nobilis

.

Versification of Ambrose on the Incarnation, cap. 3.

A solis ortus cardine, Ad usque

.

“An Abcedary arranged by Sedulius.”—

Neale. Aurora jam spargit polum

.

“Incognitus auctor.”—

Cassander. Bellator armis inclytus

.

“Ein altes Lied.”—

Mone. Ex more docti mystico

.—

Gregory. Fit porta Christi pervia

.

Part of

A solis ortus

.—

Sedulius. Jam Christus astra ascenderat

.

—

Gregory. Lucis creator optime

.

—

Gregory.

Here, then, we have what may be called substantially the earliest hymn-book of the Latin Church. Of course there were other hymns which were very soon separated and properly assigned, but not until the fifteenth century was any intelligent analysis attempted, and it is even now—as can be easily seen—a matter not of dogmatic certainty, but of scholarly authority and inherent probability. It may not be improper to add, however, that in these hymns we find some of the purest and most pious of praises. The honor of the Virgin Mother and of the saints has not yet been attempted. The martyrs, Stephen and Agnes and Agatha, are alone mentioned, if we except an occasional and somewhat doubtful tribute to others. These are hymns of worship and of prayer—of adoration and of fellowship.

As a handful of grain from a great granary, here are four versions of hymns counted as among Ambrose’s best:

DEUS CREATOR OMNIUM.

Maker of all, the Lord,

And ruler in the height,

Thy care doth robe the day in peace,

Thou givest sleep by night.

Let rest refresh our limbs

For toil, though wearied now,

And let our troubled minds be calm,

And smooth the anxious brow.

We sing our thanks, for day

Is gone and night appears;

Our vows and prayers in contrite hope

Are lifted to thine ears.

To thee the deepest soul,

To thee the tuneful voice,

To thee the chaste affections turn,

In thee our minds rejoice.

That when black depths of gloom

Have hid the day from sight,

Our faith may tread no darkening path,

And night by faith be bright.

And let no slumber seize

That mind which must not sleep,

Whose faith must keep its virtue fresh,

Whose dreams may not be deep.

When sensual things are done

Our loftiest thought is thine,

Nor fear of unseen enemies

Can break such peace divine.

To Christ and to the Father now,

And to the Spirit equally,

We pray for every favoring gift,

One God supreme, a Trinity.

SPLENDOR PATERNAE GLORIAE.

O splendor of the Father’s face,

Affording light from light,

Thou Light of light, thou fount of grace,

Thou day of day most bright.

O shine upon us, perfect Sun,

With lasting brightness shine;

Let radiance from the Spirit run,

Our senses to refine.

To thee, our Father, do we pray,

Whose glory endeth not,

That thine almighty favor may

Remove each sinful spot.

He fills our deeds with heavenly strength,

He blunts the look of hate,

He ends our weary lot at length,

Or gives us grace to wait.

HIC EST DIES VERUS DEI.

This is the very day of God,

Serene with holy light,

On which the pure atoning blood

Has cleansed the world aright.

Restoring hope to lost mankind,

Enlightening darkened eyes,

Relieving fear in us who find

The thief in Paradise.

Who, changing swiftly cross for crown,

By one brief glance of trust,

Beheld God’s Kingdom shining down,

And followed Christ the Just.

The very angels stand amazed,

Beholding such a sight,

And such a trusting sinner raised

To blessed life and light.

O mystery beyond our thought,

To take earth’s stain away,

And lift the burden sin hath brought,

And cleanse this coarser clay.

What deed can more sublime appear?

For sorrow seeks for grace,

And love releases mortal fear,

And death renews the race.

Death seizes on the bitter barb,

And binds herself thereto,

And life is clad in deathly garb,

And life shall rise anew.

When death through earth has made her path,

Then all the dead shall rise,

And death, consumed by heavenly wrath,

In groans, and lonely, dies.

O LUX BEATA TRINITAS.

O blessed light, the Trinity,

In Unity of primal love—

Now that the burning sun has gone,

Our hearts illumine from above.

Thee, in the morn with songs of praise,

Thee, at the evening time, we seek;

Thee, through all ages we adore,

And, suppliant of thy love, we speak.

To God the Father be the praise,

And to his sole-begotten Son,

And to the Blessed Comforter,

Both now and while all time shall run.

The closing scenes in the life of the great bishop were such as became his past. His funeral address over his brother Satyrus is like that of Bernard over his brother Gerard, or like that of Melanchthon above the dead Luther. His eulogy of Theodosius, whom he survived but two years, is conceived in a strain of lofty poetry, several paragraphs opening with the repeated phrase Dilexi virum illum. I loved that man!

Ambrose died on the night after Good Friday, A.D. 397. Paulinus, his biographer, was taking notes of the commentary pronounced by his dying master on the 43d psalm. It was a scene like that at the deathbed of the Venerable Bede. The failing bishop said that he heard angelic voices and saw the smiling face of Christ; and the reverent scribe avows that the face which looked on his own was bright, and that around that aged head shone until the very last an aureole of glory.

Let us allow much charity to the miracles and to the superstition of that time, but let us also remember the gravity and sweetness of the poet-bishop. For it is no wonder that when he lay in state in the great cathedral with quiet, upturned face, little children were moved by his gentle dignity of countenance and men and women, affected by this holy presence, put away their sins, and were baptized as followers of the dead man’s faith.

CHAPTER VI.
PRUDENTIUS THE FIRST CHRISTIAN POET.

Aurelius Prudentius Clemens has received rather more than his due share of renown. His works have been edited by the most careful scholars. There is a beautiful little “Elzevir” upon which Heinsius expended his labor and which was printed at Amsterdam in 1667. There is an “Aldine,” 4to, Venice, 1501. But the most elegant is that of Parma (1788, 2 vols., 4to), edited by Teoli; and the best is regarded as that of Faustinus Arevalus, the Spaniard, Rome 1788-89, also in 2 vols. 4to. If to these we add the most accessible collection of his writings, we shall find it in the fifty-ninth and sixtieth volumes of Migne’s Patrologia. The text of these various editions is derived from what is called the Codex Puteanus, now in the Paris Library—a manuscript dating into the fifth or sixth century. In all, there have been nearly a dozen of them, of which that of R. Langius (1490, 4to) is the true princeps—the very earliest. And in the matter of editorship, it is worthy of note that Erasmus did not disdain to expend his fine classical skill upon the hymns for Christmas and the Epiphany.

If we ask Bentley his opinion of Prudentius he tells us that he is “the Horace and Virgil of the Christians.” Milman declares that he was “the great popular author of the Middle Ages,” and that “no work but the Bible appears with so many glosses [commentaries] in High German.” “T. D.,” away back in 1821, when dear old Kit North was editing Blackwood, furnished that periodical with some poetical translations and remarked that Prudentius was “the Latin Dr. Watts.” In La Rousse he obtains the credit of being “the first Christian poet.” Among the earlier contemporaneous, or slightly subsequent references his name is preceded by the magic letters, “V. C.,” standing not, as some have thought, for Vir Consularis, a man who had enjoyed the consulship, but for Vir Clarissimus, a person of high distinction. It is reserved for the “worthy and impartial” Du Pin to formulate a judgment more in accord with the true facts of the case. “Prudentius,” saith Du Pin, “is no very good poet, he often useth expressions not reconcilable to the purity of Augustus’s Age.”

The value of his poetry turns largely upon its theological and historical merits—both of which are considerable. It is not structurally perfect by any means, and yet it has furnished several very lovely hymns to the Church—graceful and delicate, rather than strong or inspiring.

In giving him his name it is safe to take that which is usually adopted: Aurelius Prudentius, surnamed Clemens or the Merciful. To this has occasionally been prefixed Quintus or Marcus, but neither has sufficient authority in its favor. He was a Spaniard, and the main facts concerning his life are learned from his own metrical preface to his poems. Probably few questions have been more closely discussed by the learned than this of his birthplace. The internal evidence is heaped up on either side until it is seen that Calahorra [Calagurris] is probably where he was born, while Saragossa [Caesarea-Augusta] was “his city” and the place with which he was most identified.

He was doubtless of good family. Those industrious and microscopic editors who have devoted themselves to his fame have laid great stress upon the names Aurelius and Clemens. The Aurelii, they say, were distinguished and well-born people. The Clementes were also of notable memory. And there were two Prudentii beside himself who obtained rather more than ordinary distinction. Indeed, there were some five Prudentii, early and late, and one of them, Prudentius Amoenus, tried, indifferently badly, to climb to fame by an abridgment of his predecessor’s history of the Old and New Testaments. In this he was so successful that the original is now lost, the condensation alone remains, and our Prudentius is often known as Prudentius Major, to differentiate him from this troublesome Minor, who was a preceptor of Walafrid Strabo. In regard to two other hymns—the Corde natus and the Vidit anguis—an element of doubt has been introduced by this same person. Faustinus Arevalus was nothing if not a hymn-tinker (see Christian Remembrancer, vol. xlvi., p. 125 ff.), and it is possible that these by such careless editorship have been incorporated into the text of the true Prudentius from the pages of his namesake and imitator. The hymn Virgo Dei genitrix (of the fifteenth century) is ascribed to another of the five Prudentii.

This sort of blunder is by no means unusual. We have an instance in point with reference to the very Consul Salia in whose consulship our poet tells us that he was born. A similarity between Coss. Salia and Massalia misled the learned. They saw in this a proof that Massilia (Marseilles) was his birthplace, and Prudentius was at once claimed for France. But we have now unravelled and disentangled the greater part of this obscure coil. Flavius Philippus and Flavius Salia are known to have served conjointly in the year 348, and hence the industry of Aldus Manutius and Labbeus (Labbèe) has been thrown away and their false conjecture has been abandoned.

Prudentius himself tells us nothing about his family, beyond what we derive by inference. The deeper that we plunge into this labyrinth of guesses the further we are from being settled in opinion. The exhaustive—and, let us add, the exhausting—editor of the latest edition finally calls a halt in the middle of his complicated Latin sentences and avows himself utterly at a loss about the truth. There is then some comfort left to us in cutting and untying these knots; for whatever view we may advance has found distinguished and earnest championship already! On the whole, Teoli appears a reliable leader, and him we have mostly followed, as later authors, such as Professors Fiske and Teuffel, seem to have done before us.

Let us say, then, that he was born in 348, Philippus and Salia being consuls, at Calahorra, which lies up the Ebro and to the northwest of Saragossa. To-day Calahorra is a small place of a few thousand inhabitants, but it furnishes two other notable facts to history in addition to its claim to be the birthplace of Prudentius. It was this little fighting town which resisted Afranius, whom Pompey sent to take it in 78 B.C., and it was then that the citizens ate their wives and children sooner than surrender. Besides this somewhat doubtful glory it produced Quinctilian; while Tudela, which is between it and Saragossa, gave a name to the learned Jew, Benjamin of Tudela, whose ideas about the Tower of Babel have become as classic as Prudentius’s hymns or as the Maid of Saragossa herself. It may be added that paganism was very early abandoned in all this region.

The parents of Prudentius gave him a good education. He possessed, says Teoli, ingenium acre, disertum, ferax—talent that was keen, eloquent, and fruitful. But at the rhetoricians’ schools, which he attended about the age of seventeen, he found little that was commendable in manners or morals. It would appear that he gave the rein to his vices and that his life was not very rapidly turned into the ways of Christianity.

He was at first called to the bar and made judge in two towns of considerable size, which may perhaps have been Toledo and Cordova. About the year 400 he is supposed to have gone to Rome and to have been favorably received by Honorius the Emperor, who then promoted him to some sort of honorable office in his native country. At fifty-seven years of age, as he himself tells us, he began to cultivate literature. He had retired from active life, much as Chaucer did in later days. From this period onward he lived in quiet; he “fled fro’ the presse and dwelt in soothfastnesse,” like the father of English verse. He gave himself to sacred things—to hymns in honor of God and of the saints, and to poems against paganism and in favor of Christian duty.

His poems have Greek titles. First comes the Psychomachia (the Battles of the Soul)—in hexameter—treating of the conflict in a Christian soul between virtue and vice. The contrasts are arranged somewhat like those of Plutarch between the Greek and Roman leaders, only, of course, the antithesis is decidedly against the vices. Here stand Faith opposed to Idolatry, and Chastity facing Impurity, and Patience resisting Anger, and Humility contrasted with Pride, and Sobriety pre-eminent over Excess, and Liberality vanquishing Covetousness, and Concord healing the wounds caused by Dissension. There are nine hundred and fifteen lines in the poem.

The Peristephanon (Concerning Crowns) has twelve hymns in honor of various martyrs. Mr. Simcox notes that these are almost idyllic in form, and that there is much made of the white dove which flies from the burning pile about St. Eulalia and of the violets which the girls should bring to the tombs of the virgin martyrs. It may be interesting to name the martyrs thus celebrated. There were two from Calahorra; then Laurentius and Eulalia; eighteen who suffered at Saragossa; Vincentius, and finally Fructuosus and Quirinus, bishops both.

Then comes a poem on the Baptistery at Calahorra (translated in Blackwood, vol. ix., p. 192), with a description of the deaths of Cassian, Romanus, Hippolytus, Peter and Paul the apostles, Cyprian and Agnes. These poems, it should be said, are various in metre and some are quite long.

The Cathemerinon (a Book of Hours) is the real mine whence the most of the hymns which were composed by Prudentius are taken. In this we have hymns for cock-crowing and morning; before and after food; at the lighting of the lamp; and before retiring to rest. With these are joined others for the use of those who are fasting, and at the conclusion of the fast; for all hours and at the burial of the dead; the work ending with hymns for Christmas and Epiphany.

The Apotheosis consists of poems relating to the errors of all the heretics that can be named—Patripassians, Arians, Sabellians, Manichaeans, Docetae, etc. The value of this to ecclesiastical history is easily perceived. It has more than a thousand hexameters and it treats additionally of the nature of the soul and of sin and of the resurrection.

The Hamartigenia (the Origin of Evil) takes up original sin as against Marcion; and the Dittochaeon (which possibly means Double Food) is the abridgment of Old and New Testaments. This last is a sort of religious picture gallery ranging from Adam to the Apocalypse in hexametrical epigrams. There is reason to doubt whether it be what Prudentius originally composed. If he followed his usual vein of abundant verse, there is no question but that these half a hundred epigrams would be more popular than his very extensive poetical treatment of such subjects.

It is left us to mention the two books against Symmachus, the Roman senator, whom Ambrose so earnestly and successfully opposed. Symmachus had purposed to restore the idols, revive the revenues of the pagan temples, and generally to cast out Christianity from Rome. The poetry of Prudentius is again valuable here, for it plunges into the origin and baseness of idolatry, describing the conversion of Rome, and presenting a picture of the times which is invaluable to the historian. It is from the pages of Prudentius that we learn the cruelty of the purest of the Roman women, when

“The modest vestal, with her down-turned thumb

Urges the gladiator to his stroke

Lest life may lurk in any vital place!”

One line in our author’s hymn in honor of St. Lawrence preserves an historical fact which was not appreciated in its full significance until our own times. He says, Aedemque Laurenti tuam Vestalis intrat Claudia—“Claudia, the Vestal Virgin, enters Thy House.” In 1883 there was discovered in the Atrium of the Vestals a pedestal of a statue dedicated to one of the heads of the order, from which her name had been effaced purposely. Nothing of it was left except the initial C., while there still remained the praise of “her chastity and her profound knowledge in religious matters” (Ob meritvm Castitatis Pvdicitiae adq. in Sacris Religionibusqve Doctrinae Mirabilis). The statue was erected in the year 364, and the order was abolished by the younger Theodosius in 394, so that her conversion must have taken place between those two dates. The conversion of a person filling a place of such high honor in pagan eyes, of a Vestalis maxima, must have been a severe blow to the pagan party, which in Rome was making a fierce but hopeless fight for the old worship. Yet we find no other reference to it in literature, unless the letter of Symmachus to a Vestal, of whom he had heard that she meant to withdraw from her order, was addressed to Claudia. See Professor Lanciani’s Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries, pp. 170-72 (Boston, 1888).

It is uncertain in what year or in what part of Spain Prudentius died. Conjecture varies between 410 and 424 A.D. This infinitude of filmy particulars causes one to feel as if he were walking through spider-webs of a morning in the country. This hard, practical nineteenth century only experiences a sense of annoyance as it encounters the elaborate nothings of that strangely laborious, all-gathering scholarship which prevailed in the sixteenth and seventeenth. To create any intensity of interest to-day requires an imagination which would sacrifice truth to attractiveness.

But certainly, from what we can see of the man in his works, we can have no hesitation in pronouncing a verdict highly favorable both to his poetry and his piety. As governor of important towns he merited—or he would scarcely have received—his title of “the Merciful.” As a close observer of his time and a student of its thought, he has preserved for us what we cannot spare. It is he who in the Jam moesta quiesce querela struck the first notes which were to vibrate in the Dies irae. It is he again who in the Ales die nuntius anticipated Henry Vaughan and his

“Father of lights, what sunny seed,

What glance of day hast thou confined

Into this bird!”

The hymn is as follows:

“The bird, the messenger of day,

Cries the approaching light;

And thus doth Christ, who calleth us

Our minds to life excite.

“Bear off, he cries, these beds of ease

Where lie the sick and dumb;

And let the chaste and pure and true

Watch, for I quickly come.

“We haste to Jesus at his word,

Earnest to pray and weep,

Such fervent supplication still

Forbids pure hearts to sleep.

“Disturb our dream, thou holy Christ,

Break off the night’s dark chain;

Forgive us all our sin of old,

And grant us light again.”

And so it is still he who casts the ray of his fancy upon Bethlehem and upon the Transfigured Christ. Here is the Quicumque Christum quaeritis in proof of his real genius:

“O ye who seek your Lord to-day,

Lift up your eyes on high,

And view him there, as now ye may,

Whose brightness cannot die.

“How gloriously it shineth on

As though it knew no dearth:

Sublime and lofty, never done,

Older than heaven and earth.

“Thou art the very King of men,

Thy people Israel’s King,

Promised unto our fathers when

From Abraham all should spring.

“To thee the prophets testified,

In thee their hearts rejoice—

Our Father bids us seek thy side

To hear and heed thy voice.”

I have changed the two last stanzas into the second person instead of the third. Otherwise the rendering is a faithful and literal version of the hymn. This, then, is a good proof of the genuine ring of true metal to be found in Prudentius.

The variety and flexibility of his measures, in spite of archaic or post-classical words and phrases, deserves our highest praise. He is a writer of the “Brazen Age,” but he has not sunk far from the “Silver,” nor exactly into the falchion sweep of the more brutal “Iron” time.

Here is another of his hymns, the Nox et tenebrae et nubila, which has obtained a place in the Roman Breviary:

“Night, clouds and darkness, get you gone!

Depart, confusions of the earth!

Light comes; the sky so dark and wan

Brightens—it is the Saviour’s birth!

“The gloom of earth is cleft in twain

Struck by that sudden, solar ray;

Color and life return again

Before the shining face of day.

“Thee, Christ, alone we seek to know,

Thee, pure in mind, and plain in speech;

We seek thee in our worship, so

That thou canst through our senses teach.

“How many are the dreams of dread

Which by thy light are swept apart!

Thou, Saviour of the sainted dead,

Shine with calm lustre in the heart!”

The same leading idea of the analogy of the natural light with the spiritual runs through the following:

“Lo the golden light appears,

Lo the darkness pales away

Which has plunged us long in fears,

Wandering in a devious way.

“Now the light brings peace at last,

Holds us purely as its own;

All our doubts aside are cast,

And we speak with holy tone.

“So may all the day run on

Free from sin of hand or tongue,

And our very glances shun

Every form and shape of wrong.

“High above us One is set

All our days to know and mark,

And our acts he watches yet

From the dawning to the dark.”

Prudentius undoubtedly exhibits the early traces of observances which are peculiar to the Roman Catholic Church. In one of his hymns (the Cultor Dei memento) he advises that the sign of the cross be made upon the forehead and above the heart:

“Frontem locumque cordis

Crucis figura signet.”

But we have not the space, nor is this the proper occasion, to follow him through those matters which belong to the church historian more than to the hymnologist. We must leave him to end his days in undisturbed quiet, a good deal after the manner of Chaucer, as indeed we have already hinted. He is said to have died in the neighborhood of the year 405 in Spain. Our information is largely conjectural and affords us no certainty about his closing years.

That a poet who still dwelt amid the sculptured coldness of the pagan past should have written such hymns, is a proof of what Christianity was then achieving. She had banished from the chilly apartments of literature the ancient focus with its feeble charcoal and its mephitic smoke. Instead of this she had created the cheerful hearth, on which a pure fire of devotion was kindled and whose ascending flame swept off the immoral vapors of the time. Prudentius, in a word, made scholarship and religion companions instead of enemies; and brightened classic prosody by the presence of a living faith.

To Prudentius also more hymns have been ascribed than he ever wrote, but after these have been weeded out, there are left:

Ales diei nuntius,

Nox et tenebrae et nubila,

Sol ecce surgit igneus,

Intende nostris sensibus,

O crucifer bone, lucisator,

Pastis visceribus, ciboque sumpto,

Inventor rutili dux bone luminis,

Ades pater supreme,

Cultor Dei memento,

O Nazarene lux Bethlem verbum Patris,

In Ninivitas se coactus percito,

Christe servorum regimen tuorum,

Da puer plectrum,

Corde natus ex parentis,

Deus ignee fons animarum,

Jam moesta quiesce querela,

Quid est quod arctum circulum,

Quicumque Christum quaeritis,

O sola magnarum urbium,

Audit tyrannus anxius,

Salvete flores martyrum,

Qui ter quaternus denique,

Felix terra quae Fructuoso vestiris,

Lux ecce surgit aurea,

En martyris Laurentii,

Beate martyr prospera,

Noctis terrae primordia,

Obsidionis obvias,

Hymnum Mariae Virginis,

Germine nobilis Eulalia,

Scripta sunt coelo duorum,

Innumeros cineres sanctorum.

CHAPTER VII.
ENNODIUS, BISHOP OF PAVIA.

Rambach says, in his Anthology, that none of the hymns of Ennodius have been adopted by the Church. “Nor have I,” adds Daniel, “found in any breviary a verse of Ennodius. Yet,” he continues, “since there are many of them in the collection of Thomasius, which have been taken from the Mozarabic Breviary, it seems to me certain that in some countries they were formerly employed by the Church.” Some corruption has also taken place in the text. And, in short, these hymns have never appeared either devout or original enough to secure the suffrages of the faithful.

The reason for their emptiness is not far to seek. Their author was a man of great celebrity but of little piety. His reputation, too, is that of an ardent ecclesiast, who managed to climb the heights of saintship by working in the interest of the Roman pontiff. He labored to maintain the supremacy of the Pope—upon whom, it is said, on good authority, that he was the first to bestow the world-wide appellation of Papa (Pope)—and to effect the union under this one religious head of both Greek and Roman churches. To this single cause, with its double aspect, Ennodius gave his talents and his zeal. He was so far successful that he gained honor and position for himself, however he was prospered in his other plans.

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.

Anastasius began to carry out his share of this unpleasant business by appointing a council to meet at Heraclea, in Thrace, on July 15th, 515, and asking for commissioners to be sent from Rome. The venerable fox knew perfectly well that he had not allowed time enough for the proper instruction of these delegates, nor for them to make the long journey. But Pope Hormisdas appointed them, and they proceeded to the imperial court, utterly indifferent as to the time of the council, and without any apologies for their delay which history deigns to record. They went, indeed, in a very haughty spirit, and did not even commence their expedition before August 12th.

When they reached the Emperor they asked, or rather demanded, that he should assent to the letter of Pope Leo, who was the first to claim this submission from the East. They insisted, furthermore, that this heterodox monarch should accept the definitions of the famous Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451, which relate to the nature and personality of Christ. The schism between East and West had now lasted for thirty-one years, and a certain Acacius, Bishop of Constantinople, who had been a most persistent opponent of the demands of Leo the Great, was still a thorn in the Roman pontiff’s side.

But Anastasius received the ambassadors with just as proud a spirit as they had shown to him. He would neither yield to Leo nor to Chalcedon, nor would he anathematize Acacius. Ennodius and his companions returned to Rome without accomplishing their mission, and the Emperor sent letters after them by Theopompus and Severianus, principal men of his court. When these reached Rome they were badly received by Hormisdas, and found that nothing would answer except the excommunication of Acacius. With this ultimatum they got back, somewhat crestfallen; and poor Acacius (who was not half so bad as his papal foe) was once more threatened with banishment to eternal fires.

Anastasius, however, was not at all inclined to hand over his bishop to the mercies of Hormisdas. He stoutly refused and continued to refuse throughout the ensuing correspondence. About two hundred monks and archimandrites (heads of monasteries) sent from Syria a letter to the Pope which was directed against the patriarch of Antioch, Severus by name, and which gave in their own allegiance to the Western Church. Nevertheless, the Emperor still maintained the cause of Acacius, although he must have seen that the Pope was as determined as ever to carry his point and that there was now a great deal which was working in favor of the papal plans. When the Syrians addressed their letter to the “Most holy and blessed Hormisdas, Patriarch of the whole earth, holding the see of Peter the prince of the apostles,” it spoke volumes for what the Pope had been able to effect by his agents and representations in the East. But the Emperor would not yield the point and act upon the conciliatory policy of the heretical Theodoric of Italy, which was that they might settle religious matters in their own fashion, provided they honored absolutely his temporal sway.

A second embassy was set on foot consisting of Ennodius and Peregrinus, Bishop of Misenum. By these ambassadors letters were sent renewing the old conditions and avowing that nothing would be satisfactory short of the complete banishment of that pestilent wretch Acacius. This was too much for the Emperor to bear. He angrily dismissed the legates, shipping them off in an old and leaky vessel, and giving a special order to Demetrius and Heliodorus to see that they did not set foot in his dominions after they had once sailed for home. Behind the flying ambassadors followed a document which expressed the royal mind with force and vigor. After comparing the conduct of the Pope very unfavorably with that of Jesus Christ, the Emperor proceeds to say: “We shall give you no further trouble, it being in vain for us to pray or entreat you, since you are obstinately determined not to hearken to our prayers and entreaties. We can bear to be despised and affronted, but we will not be commanded.”

This was dated July 11th, 517, and reveals an unexpected dignity in the old Emperor, and it makes us glad to record that, while he lived, the Bishop of Constantinople was at least preserved in a salvable state.

But when Anastasius died, then Hormisdas began again upon Justin, his successor, and never stopped until Acacius was struck from the roll of bishops and until the East acknowledged the spiritual supremacy of the West. That the victory was of no long continuance or of any enormous value, does not prevent us from noticing that it gave to Magnus Felix Ennodius his permanent place in the Roman calendar, and did everything for his literary and ecclesiastical comfort. He was well rewarded for his devotion to the cause.

Anastasius reigned 491-518, and Hormisdas, who had once been married and had a son, who also became Pope, ruled in his sphere from 514 to 523. Thus he had nearly five years wherein to rejoice over his obstinate dead enemy. And Ennodius possessed his soul in peace and turned his attention once more to polite literature.

Of the writings which he has left to us, the principal are the life of Epiphanius; another of Antonius of Pannonia, a hermit at Lake Como and then a monk at Lerins; together with a Eucharisticum de Vita sua and the apology and panegyric mentioned above. Add to these nine books of letters, “weighed down with emptiness,” and various itineraries, declamations, and poetical pieces, and you have all he did. The letters are most unsatisfactory when we remember that he was the friend, and perhaps the relative, of men like Boethius, Faustus, Avienus, Caesar of Arles, Aurelian, and of bishops and other prelates without number, and lived in Italy under the great Theodoric. He is utterly lacking in contemporary portraits, and his accounts of his three journeys give us nothing valuable. All is stilted, unnatural, and dull. He was not much of a traveller at best. A trip into Burgundy, another across the Po to see his sister, and one from Rome by sea, make up the list of which he kept any trace in his writings. He is in no haste to detail the sayings and doings at Constantinople! But it should be said that these performances with the pen were previous to his elevation to the mitre. Afterward he doubtless composed only hymns and epigrams—the hymns being decent and the epigrams very much the reverse. The German scholar Teuffel looks upon his productions as an “important source of history” for some enigmatic reason of his own, but Simcox very justly scouts them; and the Romanist Berington asserts that he rises “with weariness” from their perusal. I must personally declare that they exhibit neither skill, taste, nor information. They are jejune and empty to a marvellous degree; and for complication of sentences and unclassical phraseology, they are equal to the stupidest books of a later day. And nothing worse than this can be said by any critic.

The Eucharisticum is an insincere sort of thanksgiving for his restoration to health, and very far behind the style of Augustine which it copies. It gives us a few particulars of his personal history, but it is prosaic and Pharisaic, and full of a mock humble glorification of the blessed Victor the Martyr, by whose intercession he is now convalescent.

The hymns are a trifle more hopeful, and really merit our notice. They are by no means the “dozen tame hymns” of which Simcox speaks so contemptuously. There are sixteen of them and three are quite good. Here, for instance, is the Christe lumen perpetuum:

“O Christ, the eternal light

Of every sun and sphere,

Illumine thou our mortal night

And keep our spirits clear.

“Let nothing evil smite,

Nor enemy invade;

And let us stainless be, and white,

By nothing base betrayed.

“Guard thou the hearts of all,

But chiefly of thine own;

And hold us, that we may not fall,

Through thy great might alone.

“That so our souls may sing,

When favoring light they see;

And every vow and tribute bring

To God in Trinity.”

The Christe precamur is quite as good:

“To thee O Christ we ever pray

And blend our prayer with tears;

Thou pure and holy One, alway

Protect our night of years!

“Our hearts shall be at rest in thee;

In sleep they dream thy praise,

And to thy glory, faithfully,

They hail the coming days.

“Give us a life that shall not fail;

Refresh our spirits then;

Let blackest night before thee pale,

And bring thy light to men!

“Our vows in song we pay thee still,

And, at the evening hour,

May all that we have purposed ill

Be right through sovereign power!”

There is yet one more hymn which seems worthy of a place in our regard. It is the Christe salvator omnium:

“O Christ, the Saviour of all,

Thou Lord of the heavens above;

We ask thy glorious aid

Before the day shall remove.

“The sun is hastening down;

His light is sunk in the west;

He hideth the world in gloom,

According to God’s behest.

“Do thou, most excellent Lord,

As we thy followers pray,

To us, all weary with toil,

Grant quiet night on our way.

“That day, from our darkening hearts,

May never withdraw her light;

But, safe in thy guardian grace,

Thy love illumine our night.”

The poetical and spiritual range of these lyrics is not extensive, of course, but it is a vast improvement on those “uncleanly imitations of Martial,” or such involved and heartless tricks of verse as he sometimes essays. But he became a saint, and that must suffice! His life has been written by Sirmond; and his times and life together have occupied the attention of Fertig (Passau, 1855). He died at Padua, as we are credibly informed, on July 17th (XVI. Kal. Aug.), 521, and this date is assigned to him in the Roman Catholic calendar of saints. His epitaph, according to Despont, who wrote in 1677, was still to be found in the church of St. Michael, and testimonies to his services are among the acts of the Fifth Synod of Rome, and are included in the public papers of Hormisdas.

When you break open the important historical facts with which he was identified, then like the toad from the stone, comes forth Ennodius. And like that toad, though “ugly and venomous,” he yet “wears a precious jewel in his head.”

CHAPTER VIII.
CAELIUS SEDULIUS AND HIS ALPHABET HYMN.

Latin hymnology gives a distinguished place to a hymn of twenty-three stanzas, each stanza containing four lines and beginning with a letter of the alphabet in regular order. Thus from A to Z all the letters appear except J, U, and W. Caterva is spelled Katerva, to answer for K. Y is represented by Ymnis, which is another form of Hymnis. And at last Zelum concludes the list. The author struggles with a difficulty when he takes Xeromyrrham to answer for X, but otherwise the ideas and versification are so excellent as to have made the hymn classic. The Roman Breviary uses two selections from it. One commences A solis ortus cardine, ad usque, and the other, Hostis Herodes impie. The general subject is the Nativity, but the poem soon proceeds to the Miracles of our Lord, and closes with an ascription of praise for His Resurrection.

There can be no doubt about the authorship. Old manuscript codices, and the tradition of the Church, assign it definitely to Caelius Sedulius—sometimes called Caius Caelius Sedulius—who flourished near the middle of the fifth century. But his personal history is much harder to come at, and the few facts which we possess only stimulate our curiosity to know more. And besides, he is so entangled with another Sedulius—also a poet, also a celebrated author, also a Scot, and also involved in much obscurity—that nearly every notice of his name contains more or less of error. This second Sedulius, however, wrote no hymn which has survived, and therefore needs no further mention. He is always named Sedulius Scotus, to distinguish him from our Sedulius, who is invariably called Caelius Sedulius. He flourished somewhere between 721 and 818, while the best ascertained date of his predecessor’s life appears to be 434.

Our sources of information regarding Sedulius are Isidore of Seville and Fortunatus of Poitiers. Jerome (Hieronymus) left a catalogue of authors from the time of St. Peter to his own day. This was continued by Gennadius, as Notker of St. Gall tells us, and then it was still further extended by Isidore. Neither Jerome nor Gennadius mention our poet; the first because he died in 420, before Sedulius had achieved distinction, and the second possibly for the same reason, as his death occurred about 496 at Marseilles. Isidore (who died 636) then undertook to supply the deficiencies of the catalogue and inserted a brief note respecting Sedulius.

Earlier than Isidore, however, is Fortunatus (530-609), who names our author as one of the five first Christian poets. Juvencus he dates at 330 A.D.; Sedulius flourished in the first half of the fifth century; Prudentius was converted in 405; Paulinus died in 458, and Arator was at his zenith in 560. This would seem to fix pretty closely the period to which Sedulius belongs.

References in the manuscripts are of no additional value. They tell us that he was a “Gentile layman,” or, in other words, a person not of Italian birth; that he learned philosophy in Italy; was converted and baptized by Macedonius, a presbyter; and that he wrote his theological works in Arcadia, or, as some say, Achaia. The Vatican “Codex of the Queen of Sweden” calls him a “verse-maker” and “teacher of the art of heroic metre.” Another codex adds that he also taught other varieties of metrical composition, and that all this happened in the days of the younger Theodosius, son of Arcadius, and of Valentinian, son of Constantine. Of his specific writings still another codex states that he “put forth in Achaia this book against error and composed in verse a commendation of the Christian faith.”

Some Sedulius, “notable for his writings,” appears to have found his way into Spain where, in the year 428, Isicius, a Palestine monk, who had become Bishop of Toledo, detained him for his good fellowship at Toledo. With him is said to have tarried a certain Bishop Oretanus, and the inference is that these three worthies held numerous symposia upon theology and literature. But the story is denied by Nicolaus Antonius, the historian of old Spanish scholarship.

Those minute and laborious investigators, the Benedictines, have, with ant-like patience, threaded every corner of the labyrinth in which these stray facts are gathered. They assert that Macedonius probably received him after he had been baptized by some one else. And while we do not know under what master he studied theology, nor even where the school was located, we know that Sedulius became presbyter in a church whose bishop’s name was Ursinus, and where Ursicinus, Laurentius, and Gallicanus were his co-presbyters.

Ussher relates that the epithet Scotigena—the Scot—was frequently applied to him. Trithemius gives us to understand that he was led by love of learning to visit France, then Italy, then Asia, and then Achaia, and that his reputation was gained in the city of Rome. Sixtus Senensis compares him to Apollonius of Tyana in his zealous pursuit of wisdom; and enlarges the list of countries which he traversed by adding Britain and Spain. Under Theodosius and at Rome, he too declares Sedulius to have been famous in prose and verse. But Ussher first claimed him for Britain; and Ussher it was who maintained that he was a pupil of that Hildebert who ranks among the earliest of the Irish bishops. It must not be forgotten that somewhere in Britain in those days there was the light of Christianity, for in 432 St. Patrick set out from Scotland “to convert Ireland.” Nor can we omit to notice that Ussher styles Sedulius “Scotus Hybernensis,” thus originating the expression “Scotch-Irishman,” but using it in exactly the reverse of its modern sense.

So far as these partial facts and conjectures go we are safe in affirming that Sedulius was a learned and studious person, probably an Irishman—for at that time Scot and Irishman were synonymous—and that he gained renown about the year 434, having studied in Italy, travelled extensively, and been a resident in Achaia. The temptation is, however, irresistible to make him Irish rather than Scotch, upon the strength of the most ancient “bull” on record. It is found in the Alphabet Hymn and reads thus:

“Quarta die jam foetidus

Vitam recepit Lazarus,

Cunctisque liber vinculis

Factus superstes est sibi.”

“Upon the fourth day Lazarus

Revived, though all malodorous;

And freed from the enchaining ground

Himself his own survivor found!”

The writings of Sedulius are more numerous than might be supposed. Those which have been preserved are nine, two in verse and the rest in prose. The most elaborate is a commentary on the four Gospels, dedicated to the abbot Macedonius and to which he prefixed his Carmen Paschale. He also wrote on the Pauline Epistles, as did his namesake of the ninth century. To Theodosius he addressed a book. He wrote treatises on the books of Priscian and Donatus, the grammarians. He also treated of the miracles of Christ in prose and sent out many “epistles of Sedulius Scotigena.” His poetry is comprised in the Alphabet Hymn; in the Carmen Paschale whence we get nothing for hymnology except the hexameter Salve Sancta Parens enixa (puerpera regem); and in the Elegy, from which comes the Cantemus socii.

The Carmen Paschale is an epic in the Virgilian style. The Elegy is an exhortation to the faithful. But the Alphabet Hymn has enriched the Church with two lyrics, one on the Nativity and one on the Slaughter of the Innocents. By placing the first stanza side by side with the first stanza of the famous Ambrosian hymn, it is easily seen that they are the same.

Ambrosian.

“A solis ortus cardine

Et usque terrae limitem

Christum canamus principem

Natum Mariae virginis.”

Sedulian.

“A solis ortus cardine

Ad usque terrae limitem

Christum canamus principem

Natum Maria virgine.”

But this is no unusual occurrence in days when the language of the Psalms was employed in the Ambrosian hymns, and when the Ambrosian hymns themselves furnished a convenient foundation for the later praises of the Church. Not only did Sedulius imitate them closely, but Ennodius, Fortunatus, Gregory, Bede, Rabanus, and Damiani—with many other unknown writers—studied and copied their metre and expression. A curious instance of this same copying and following can be found in our own hymn. In it the stanza, Ibant magi quam viderant, contains two lines which have been inserted bodily in a production of the fourteenth or fifteenth century. It is true that they are very suggestive and beautiful, but when Sedulius wrote

“Stellam sequentes praeviam

Lumen requirunt lumine,”

he wrote what was original with him, but which was sheer theft in the hands of the author of Hymnis laudum preconiis, who nevertheless takes the couplet to grace the feast of the Three Kings.

Latin hymns are by no means all beautiful or all graceful. The earlier pieces appear and reappear—fragments from the better workmanship of the past—throughout the Dark Ages. And here we must leave Sedulius. If he was indeed the companion of Hildebert, his story belongs to that fabulous age of the British Church when bishops were but simple pastors and when great purity and truth prevailed. In the Alphabet Hymn there are references to the direct Scripture narrative; to the “enclosed John” who greets the Saviour; to Him fed with a little milk, who Himself feeds the birds; to the great Shepherd revealed to shepherds; to Herod who seems to fear a King who does not covet earthly dignities; to the Magi who seek their Light from the light; to the healing of the sick and the raising of the dead; to the water that blushes into wine, as perhaps Crashaw had read; to Peter who fears by nature and walks the wave by faith; to Lazarus “his own survivor;” to Judas the carnifex who professed peace by his kiss which was not in his soul; to Him who triumphing over Tartarus returned of Himself to heaven. Such is the hymn, and upon reading it one is not surprised that Fortunatus called its author Sedulius dulcis—the sweet Sedulius. Nay, Rudolph of Dunstable goes so far as to perpetrate a pun, and declares that Sedulius sedulously sings of things that are old and new. And the dear man of God, Dr. Martin Luther of blessed memory, who had no relish for Ambrose’s hymns, called our Irishman a poeta Christianissimus, and translated into his massive German both the hymns the Breviary had extracted from his chief poem.

CHAPTER IX.
VENANTIUS FORTUNATUS THE TROUBADOUR.

Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus was a man not satisfied with four names. In jest or earnest he assumed another, Theodosius. In point of time he had an interesting position; in regard to residence his story becomes really valuable; and when we add that he gave to the Church several of her best-known hymns, he appears before us as a person unfamiliar, but highly attractive.

If, as we have reason to think, he came into France in 566 or 567, at the age of thirty-five or thirty-six, we must suppose him to have been born about 531. He was an Italian of Treviso, which is not far northwest of Venice and northeast of Padua. Of his parentage and early education (except the fact that he was trained at Ravenna) we are ignorant; but he is said to have been acquainted with Boethius, a thing hard to believe, for the philosopher perished in 524. We are left in some doubt whether he had set forth from Italy because the Lombards were about to invade his part of it, or whether religious motives were at the bottom of this “exile,” as he is very ready to call it.

Judging his unknown past by his better-known later history, he was a man of affable and genial character, who could pay for all favors in the small coin of panegyric, and whose pen filled his pocket and procured him the hospitality of the rich and the great of the earth. We know he could sing, for he says so himself; and he could also turn verses so sweet and mellow that even the poorest of them were learned by his admirers and recited again with much delight. Now it happened that his eyes were affected, and his friend Gregory of Tours sent him some of the blessed St. Martin’s holy lamp-oil. When this was rubbed upon them—and it was doubtless good oil, and therefore not an objectionable ointment—he was greatly helped. He consequently showed his gratitude in two ways: by making a pilgrimage to the blessed St. Martin’s own town, and by writing the blessed St. Martin’s biography. This last he accomplished to the extent of four books of verse, employing, without any apparent scruple, the much more classic and elaborate treatise of Sulpicius Severus as the groundwork of his own. It was this journey which raises the question whether he was avoiding the Lombards or performing a pious vow when he entered France. Perhaps in this, as in other events of his life, the religious garment covered the secular desire.

From his native country, then, he made his way into another and less cultivated region. There was a Gallo-Roman society at the time, very much as there now are groups of educated persons in Siberia, or in the seaboard cities of China. A certain freemasonry of intelligence passed a literary man along from castle to cloister and from cloister to court. It was a period when classic learning was at its lowest ebb, and when the Romance tongues, like the second growth of a forest, were thickly clustering in upon the few survivors of the ancient groves of literature. The sixth century was removed from the past, but had not attained to much on its own account.

Yet we must not think that this century was barren of beginnings. The Merving kings—Clovis, and Childebert, and Clotaire the First, and Charibert—had now given place to Chilperic on the throne of France. Indeed, some writers are inclined to make this sixth century the true commencement of the Middle Ages, and it is very certain that we can see a great deal in the story of Fortunatus which is mediaeval. Moreover, Mohammed was born in 570, at Mecca, while our future bishop was traversing Gaul. And nearly contemporary with our author’s birth—that is, in 533—comes the announcement of the supremacy of the Roman bishop, which culminated in 590 in the strong administration of Gregory the Great. Fortunatus lived, therefore, in days when Latin Christianity was taking shape, and when the most aggressive of false religions was springing up. We have indeed said, in effect, that the Western Empire was at an end, and that the Monarchy of France had begun in 476.

Thus, as he looked backward, the Italian refugee could recall the successive blows of barbarian swords—the swords of Alaric, and Genseric, and Attila, and Odoacer—under which Rome had fallen. When Alboin started his raid from Pannonia in 568, with Lombards (Longobardi) and Gepidae and twenty thousand Saxons, it was surely enough to make a troubadour take refuge at Tours.

Our materials for the biography of Fortunatus from this point in the story become more available. He kept an itinerary, which was lost; but he wrote often to Gregory of Tours, and this seems to be the only correspondence which he conducted in a natural and ordinary manner. From it we learn that he crossed the mountains in a “snowy July,” and had written either “on horseback or half asleep.” He passed some time at Metz and Rheims. His days and nights were spent in travelling and feasting and in preparing songs and odes, to the consternation of his modern biographer, Luchi, who does not find much evidence of piety in these proceedings.

Fortunatus is his own exponent, and his language, literally translated, gives us a vivid picture of the way in which he made friends with everybody. “Travelling among the barbarians” (he writes to Gregory), “on a long journey, either weary of the way or drunk beneath the icy chill, at the exhortation of the muse (I know not whether more cold or sober), a new Orpheus I gave voices to the wood, and the wood replied.” The sentence illustrates not merely his experience but also his style of composition, which is turgid and frequently obscure. His panegyrics, for example, abound in the most fulsome flattery, arrayed bombastically in a string of nouns, verbs, and adjectives half a page long. The real idea walks within much of his Latin, like a pigmy in a great court train, ridiculously small and ridiculously pretentious.

Sometimes these same expressions of our poet betoken a convivial familiarity with his friend Gregory of Tours, which is not precisely canonical. Many post-classical words appear, and phrases which no grammarian would easily justify. The man is full of sly hints of good eating and drinking, and has a high-flown style of compliment, as when he writes to Lupus, “As often as I put together the parts of your discourse, I thought that I reclined upon ambrosial roses.” To Sigismund and Aregesles, two brothers, he declares that, “This sweet letter reveals to me the names of friends. Here is the brilliant Sigismund, and here is the modest Aregesles. After Italy, O Rhine, thou givest me parents, and by the coming of these brothers I shall be no longer a stranger.” In fact, he picked up “brothers” and “parents” with charming facility, and had a dexterity in drawing a corner of the mantle of royal favor over him which any courtier might covet.

Thus he went—we cannot well detect in what order or by what method, but pretty conclusively as a troubadour might have done—all through France. Like Chamisso, he proposed to

“Take his harp in his hand

And wander the wide world over,

Singing from land to land.”

With Sigebert, King of Austrasia, he contracted quite a friendship, and being at Poitiers when Gelesuintha was put to death, he lamented her in verses which pleased Sigebert, her brother-in-law and avenger, greatly. He also became well acquainted with Euphronius of Tours, nephew of St. Gregory, the bishop, and thus laid a good foundation for ecclesiastical preferment. But it was to Poitiers that he gradually drifted, and there circumstances fixed him for the most of his life.

We may safely conclude that Tours, which is not a great distance off, first attracted his wandering feet. He had a duty to the blessed St. Martin’s holy lamp and to the blessed St. Martin’s holy memory, and these devout proceedings were more than sufficient to commend him to a hospitable bishop. Contemporary accounts of him are lacking, if we except the brief notice of Paul the Deacon, which cannot properly be called contemporary, as it is in his history of the Lombards, which was prepared in the first half of the eighth century. But Fortunatus again comes to our rescue with quite a goodly supply of verses and with some epistles which show that the life of that period was a curious resultant between the Roman and barbarian ideas. It ought in honesty to be added that Brunehilda was no saint, and that the court of the Merovingians was so barbaric that it stood by and saw her torn to death, at eighty, at the heels of a wild horse; and this was later even than Fortunatus’s day.

By this time Treviso (Trevisium) had been regularly attacked by the Lombards, and the pilgrimage, which had changed to a pleasure-trip, changed again to a residence. He speaks of himself later as having been “for nine years an exile from Italy,” and his only reference to his family that is discoverable is when he tells the Abbess Agnes that she is as dear to him as his own sister Titiana. He is a poet driven like a leaf before the storm, and he is whirled first into Tours and then into the safe eddy of Poitiers, which he celebrates reverently in song as the home of the great Hilary.

His royal friendships are made apparent by epithalamia—especially that on the marriage of Sigebert and Brunehilda—and by various odes. But now comes the real romance of our poet’s life. Clotaire the First had married a fair woman named Radegunda, whose piety gave him not a little trouble. She was determined to keep all her vigils and fasts and to exert herself in works of charity, even to the scrubbing of the base of the altar with her own hands. It was one of her greatest pleasures to take leprous women in her arms and kiss them, and when one of the lepers said to her, “Who will kiss you after you embrace us?” she “answered benevolently, that if others will not kiss me, it is truly no affair of mine.”

It would be beneath the dignity of this narrative, if it were not a portion of her own life in the Latin, for us to record the incident which helped to cause her separation from her husband. She had arisen at night and came back thoroughly chilled, and with her feet properly cold. Clotaire growled out that he would sooner have a nun for a wife (jugalem monacham) than such a queen. So she took him at his word, founded a convent at Poitiers, and distinguished herself to later generations by many noble works.

Over this convent she placed her maid Agnes, and served her former servant with profound humility and obedience, albeit she must always have been herself the ruling spirit of the place. With Fortunatus she formed a close friendship. And as this is the beginning of the conventual and ecclesiastical side of his career, we may as well bring the story up to its parallel point in current history.

Gregory, Archbishop of Tours and historian of France, always addresses his friend Fortunatus as presbyter Italicus. That Fortunatus embraced the monastic life at Aquileia (about 558-59) has been maintained, and the opinion is also fairly defended that he was enrolled as a “cleric” at Poitiers, although he was novus, or a “new-comer,” there. He had evidently some quasi ecclesiastical connection, and those were days when the celibacy of the clergy was much mooted, but when the wandering monks had not yet been held to the stringencies of the monastic orders. If we ask Fortunatus why he remained in Gaul, he replies that Radegunda retained him there “by her prayers and vows.” It is conjectural that he was first chaplain to the convent, and it is certain that then he was elevated to the rank of Bishop of Poitiers.

To this daughter of Berthar, King of the Thuringi, our troubadour now paid his devoirs. Often at “the convivial banquets of the barbarians” he had “poured forth his verses.” He was now to become the devoted cavalier of a queen and an abbess, and to furnish literature with some very unique specimens of religio-amatory verse.

The life of Radegunda, written by Fortunatus and amplified by the nun Bandonivia, furnishes many interesting facts about this holy woman. She took her final resolution to separate from her husband after he had unjustly put her brother to death. On this she went to St. Medard and declared her intention of celibacy, and thence to the church of St. Martin, at Tours, where she made her formal vows. From this she retired to her villa called Suedas, near Poitiers, which she turned into a convent. Thither in 569 the Emperor Justinus (Justin II.) sent rich presents, one being a portion of the true cross. This inspired Fortunatus with a new song, and he broke out in the Vexilla Regis, which is surely one of the most stirring strains in our hymnology.

The following version expresses literally and without modification the ideas set forth in the Latin:

“VEXILLA REGIS PRODEUNT.”

The royal banners forward fly;

The cross upon them cheers the sky;

That cross whereon our Maker hung,

In human form, by anguish wrung.

For he was wounded bitterly

By that dread spear-thrust on the tree,

And there, to set us free from guilt,

His very life in blood he spilt.

Accomplished now is what was told

By David in his psalm of old,

Who saith,[5] “The heathen world shall see

God as their King upon the tree.”

O tree, renowned and shining high,

Thy crimson is a royal dye!

Elect from such a worthy root

To bear those holy limbs, thy fruit.

Blessèd upon whose branches then

Hung the great gift of God to men;

Whose price, of human life and breath,

Redeemed us from the thrall of death.

Thy bark exhales a perfume sweet

With which no nectar may compete;

And, joyful in thine ample fruit,

A noble triumph crowns thy root.

Hail, altar! and thou, Victim, hail!

Thy glorious passion shall not fail;

Whereby our life no death might lack,

And life from death be rendered back.

O Cross, our only hope, all hail!

In this the time when woes assail,

To all the pious grant thy grace,

And all the sinners’ sins efface!

At this time Fortunatus also composed a long poem of thanks to Justin and Sophia for gifts sent to himself, by which it would appear that he was tolerably well identified with the interests of Radegunda and her convent.

From this date onward his friendship with Agnes and Radegunda exposed both him and them to very considerable comment. He even refers to it in one of his poems, addressed to the abbess, in which he protests the purity of his conduct. But it is not hard to see how his expressions might be misunderstood. They are frequently fervid beyond the courtesies of compliment, and they remind us all the while of those singers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries who begin with William, Count of this very city of Poitiers (1071-1127), and who have made the name of “troubadour” synonymous with the praise of love and beauty. Fortunatus calls on Christ, and Peter, and Paul, and Mary to witness the entire propriety of his love for Agnes and Radegunda, but he follows it with lines which Bertrand de Born or Alain Chartier might have composed.

Really there is a great deal of this exuberant poetry in the worthy chaplain. He wrote every sort of odd acrostic on the holy cross, reminding us in more ways than one of Damasus, or of the later cavalier poets of England. He tells Radegunda, who seems his principal star, that everything is alike when he does not see her; that although the sky is cloudless, yet, if she is absent, “the day stands without a sun.” He excuses himself in other verses for sending her violets instead of lilies and roses. Any incident in which Radegunda plays a part is enough to turn the poetic stream upon the mill-wheel of his verse. If there are flowers on the altar; if there are flowers sent by her to himself; if she has retired from the world to perform her vows; if she has returned again to the public gaze, and especially if he has been at a little dinner or has received some agreeable little dishes—then the bard strings his harp!

It is quite amusing to read some of these effusions. He advises Radegunda, as Paul did Timothy, to drink wine on occasion. And when the queen and the abbess conspire to make his life pleasant he has plenty of metrical gratitude to offer. They send him butter (butyr) in a lordly dish; they furnish chestnuts in baskets woven by their own hands; they provide milk, and prunelles, and olives, and eggs. For all these he renders thanks in kind. Never were eggs and butter sung in a loftier strain! But sometimes the poet descends a trifle from his elevated phrases. He says pathetically in one of these effusions that they sent him “various delicacies for his full stomach” (tumido ventre), and that he got asleep after it and failed to furnish the appropriate verses. He laments this in proper metre, declaring that he had opened his mouth and shut his eyes (the old gormandizer!) and had eaten on, regardless of his duty. And for this he craves forgiveness from his beata domnia [it ought to be domina] filia—his blessed queen-daughter. But be good enough to observe that his own gifts in return are very small, and that he is always apologizing and hoping that they may not be rejected. Truly this was such a man as Sir Walter Scott has sung, for

“The best of good cheer and the seat by the fire

Was the undenied right of the barefooted friar.”

Only it may be safely questioned whether our Fortunatus was any more of an ascetic than Damasus himself. One almost wishes for an historical picture—and it should be a good theme, by the way—in which Fortunatus and his two friends appear. It should be that celebrated feast which he describes [J. P. Migne: Patrologia; Opera Fortunati, Lib. xi., cap. ii.], where Agnes had adorned the tables and the apartment with “every species of blossoming plant;” where the rich wines, and the generous fare, and the crystal, and the gold, and the flowers should brighten the fine hall of the chateau; and where, perhaps, the ecclesiastic should take his small harp and strike its strings with a delicate hand, while the fair face of Agnes and the darker beauty of Radegunda should inspire his song.

One traces to this mellow undercurrent of human life the swing of his best lyrics—the Pange lingua gloriosi praelium certaminis and those hymns to the Virgin of which he was the earliest promoter. No ene can doubt the influence of these women upon the Ave maris stella or the Quem terra pontus aethera. Say what we please about his piety, he has written what will live with the best. And to compare him to the melancholy Cowper, as Mrs. Charles has done, can only be characterized as a most amusing misconception.

We know nothing of him as bishop further than the fact that the office became vacant in 599, and he was an available as well as distinguished candidate. Surviving Radegunda, who passed away in 587, he died about 609, full of years and honors—the last of the classics and the first of the troubadours; the connecting link between Prudentius and the Middle Ages; the biographer of some of the saints and the interested collector of many legends of their miracles; and, finally, the first of Christian poets to begin that worship of the Virgin Mary which rose to a passion and sank to an idolatry. Venantius Fortunatus was neither a bad man nor, in the highest sense, a holy man. But he was a poet in spite of his barbaric Latin, and a writer of hymns which live to-day, long after the particulars of his career are forgotten.

CHAPTER X.
GREGORIUS MAGNUS [540-604].

The materials which are at hand for the life of Gregory the Great are, if anything, too numerous. In their original form they include all that Paul the Deacon (quoted by the Venerable Bede) and John the Deacon (quoted by everybody) have chosen to relate. And these have been so anxious to do entire justice to the great Pope that they fill their pages with miracles, wonders, and signs, as well as with the authentic facts of history. But Gregory carved for himself such a niche in the temple of fame that we are not likely to go very far astray in searching for the proper estimate of his work.

It may be safely assumed that from this pontificate dates the supremacy of the Roman see. It was Gregory whose missionary spirit opened the doors of Britain to the truth. It was he who, without asserting any superior claim, opposed successfully the encroachments of the Greek patriarchs. And it was again he who gave to the Church her sacred melodies.

He was born, says Paul the Deacon, in the city of Rome, of a father named Gordianus and a mother named Sylvia. These people were of the Anician family and were also of distinguished religious descent. Felix—fourth of the name and Pope under the title of Felix III.—was his atavus, or great-great-great-grandfather. The very name Gregorius our worthy deacon declares to be the Greek equivalent of the word “Watchful.”

The child of such a house would be well nurtured in all the learning of the time. Hence, he was trained in grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics—the ancient trivium or complete course of liberal education. Naturally, too, he became an excellent scholar. And when he grew up he was called to an important post in Roman civil affairs. He became praetor of the city—a city which was subject to Byzantium and exposed to incursions of various barbarian invaders. The Lombards, indeed, attacked it during his praetorship.

At this period of his life his love for display was as remarkable as his subsequent simplicity. He delighted in rich attire and surrounded himself with the pomp and circumstance of his position. A rich man and a rich man’s son, he was thoroughly in sympathy with passing affairs, and as Rome bloomed the more vigorously above her own decay, he was himself one of those “flowers of evil” whose gaudy hues brightened the scene. But at the same time he became accustomed to the management of large affairs, and his administration secured to him the good will of his associates and subordinates. It can often be noticed that these early Fathers came to their power in the Church after having been strictly and carefully trained in the world. Hilary and Ambrose were as conspicuous examples of this foreordination as was Gregory the Great.

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]

“Perceiving among the rest certain boys for sale, white of body, fair in form, and handsome in face, distinguished moreover by the brightness (nitore) of their hair, he asked the merchant from what country he had brought them. He answered, ‘From the island of Britain, whose inhabitants all display a similar beauty (candore) of face.’ Gregory said, ‘Are those islanders Christians or do they yet hold to their pagan errors?’ The merchant replied, ‘They are not Christians, but are entangled in their pagan delusions’ (laqueis). Then Gregory, groaning deeply, said, ‘Alas! for shame! that the prince of darkness should own those splendid faces; and that such glorious foreheads (tantaque frontis species) should express a mind vacant of the inward grace of God!’ Then he asked the name of their tribe. The merchant responded, ‘They are called Angli.’ Then he said, ‘They are well called Angli, as though they were angels (angeli) for they have angelic faces; and such as these should be fellow-citizens of the angels in heaven.’ Again, therefore, he inquired what was the name of their province. The merchant told him ‘Those provincials are called Deiri.’ Then Gregory said, ‘They are well called Deiri, for they must be snatched from wrath (de ira) and gathered to the grace of Christ. The king of that province,’ he continued, ‘how is he named?’ The merchant replied, ‘He is called Aelle.’ And Gregory, alluding to the name, said, ‘It is well that the king is called Aelle. For Alleluia in praise of the Creator must be sung in those parts.’”

Such was the commencement of that Christianizing process which eventually brought Anglo-Saxon monks to Rome for education—not that Rome was the chief source and centre from which the work of Christianizing the English was effected. That strangely organized Church, which Patrick had established in Ireland and Columcille (Columba) had propagated to Celtic Scotland, was the missionary Church of that age. Its zeal carried the faith to Scandinavia in the person of its royal converts, the two Olafs, besides Christianizing the Norsemen of Ireland and the lesser islands. Its missionaries poured southward across the lines that sundered Saxon from Celt, and co-operated mightily with the more languid efforts of the Kentish Church established by Augustine. And up to the Synod of Whitby in 664, Patrick rather than Peter was the saint who stood the highest in the esteem of English Christians.

Yet it would be unfair to rob Gregory and Augustine of the honor of having begun the work, and begun it on a higher and more permanent level than was possible to the Irish Church. After all, Rome stood for a wider conception of Church and social order and a broader Christian culture. It is to her victory that we owe Bede and the great Churchmen, who adapted the learning and lore of the Latin world to the needs of English Christendom. And so in Augustine’s mission we may see the apostolic succession, in a broader sense of the word than the technical, carried to England, to be transmitted in turn to America. England acknowledged the gift in the establishment of the tax called “Peter’s Pence” for the care and support of pilgrims to Rome, and the support of clerics, who went to study in the Saxon school established in Rome. To this we may trace, perhaps, the spread of hymn-writing from Rome to England, whose results are gathered into the Missals and Breviaries of Sarum, York, and Hereford, and that elaborate compilation, “The Hymns of the Anglo-Saxon Church,” which Rev. J. Stevenson edited for the Surtees Society.

The mission of Augustine led to far-reaching consequences. One was that the higher classes of Great Britain turned toward Rome as the centre of the world, and one of the remoter consequences of this missionary expedition was the recognition of the papal supremacy. But in his highest flight of authority Gregory the First never assumed nor felt the consciousness of power which caused Gregory the Second to write to Leo, the Isaurian: “All the lands of the West have their eyes directed upon our humility; by them we are considered as a God upon earth.” No, nor did he press his claims as did his other successor, Gregory VII., some times known as Hildebrand.

Indeed, Gregory I. in his desire to save these beautiful captives offered himself to Pope Pelagius as a missionary, and even obtained his consent to the expedition. But we are informed that the people surrounded the pontiff on his way to St. Peter’s and begged him to recall their favorite. So that Gregory had gone but three days’ journey before he was overtaken and brought back, almost forcibly, to his monastic home. The scheme of saving Britain was thus deferred but not given up; and when the cardinal-deacon became Pope it was again revived, and with success.

In the year 590 Pelagius II. died of the plague. His chair was no sooner empty than Gregory was seen to be the choice of everyone—senate and people and clergy. He was accordingly elected, and then—for such was the feeling in those days—he resisted the honor with all his might. Like Ambrose he fled from the city; he disguised himself; he even wandered in the woods. But it was one of the old principles that the more the elect refused the more their calling and election were to be made sure to them. And therefore, he was found at last, after a thorough search, and was led, literally in tears, back to Rome. He had begged the Emperor Maurice not to confirm this appointment, but it was to no effect that he pleaded for release. His quiet, peaceful days were over, and he was placed at the helm of the ship of the Church to steer her, and the commonwealth which was her freight, through floods of barbarians and into safer seas. I am using his own figure: “I am so beaten by the waves of this world,” he wrote, to his friend Leander, “that I despair of being able to guide to port this rotten old vessel with which God has charged me. I weep when I recall the peaceful shore which I have left and sigh in perceiving afar what I cannot now attain.”

He took his seat in the midst of the plague. Eighty persons in the processions which he organized at seven points in the city to pray at the church of Santa Maria-Maggiore for its cessation, died of the disease during their very progress. Each procession met the others at this church of St. Mary. One consisted of secular clergy; another of abbots and monks; a third of abbesses and nuns; a fourth of children; a fifth of laymen; a sixth of widows, and a seventh of matrons. And thus arose the story about the angel whom Gregory believed that he saw above the summit of the Mole of Hadrian, and who there stood and sheathed his sword. This legend gave to that structure the name of the Castello di San Angelo, the Castle of the Holy Angel.

The Lombards were Gregory’s first care. He corresponded with Theodolinda, their queen, and she became his constant friend and his advocate with the king. He finally obtained from King Agilulf (her second husband) a special truce for Rome and its neighboring territory—a most delightful relief from the terrors of the last thirty years.

Moreover, he directed his attention—as Hormisdas had done before him—to the struggle which was never at rest between the Greek and Roman churches. The Patriarch of Constantinople was determined to assert his own superior claims to the veneration of the faithful. Hormisdas had avowed—but never vindicated—the supremacy of the Pope. But his title of Papa was the result of mere adulation and never of general consent. And the patriarch happened to be at this time the strong-willed John the Faster—an austere and pugnacious man. It was natural therefore that he should claim the title of Universal Bishop, and it was equally natural that Gregory, without demanding anything especial for himself, should resist John.

In this controversy—and in those others where his works bear testimony to his literary and political skill—we see Gregory at his best. He is not deficient in satire; occasionally he indulges in playful humor; but he never forgets principle nor flinches from the prosecution of his cause. It cannot be said of him that he proposes to overrule the civil authorities, but he unquestionably tells them some exceedingly plain truths. To the Emperor Maurice he wrote remonstrating against his refusal to allow a soldier to become a monk: “To this by me, the last of His servants and yours, will Christ reply, ‘From a notary I made thee a count of the body-guard; from a count of the body-guard I made thee a Caesar; from a Caesar I made thee an emperor; nay, more, I have made thee also a father of emperors; I have committed My priests into thy hand; and dost thou withdraw thy soldiers from My service?’ Answer thy servant, most pious lord, I pray thee, and say how thou wilt reply to thy Lord in the judgment, when He comes and thus speaks.” In this style he alternately appealed and remonstrated in his dealing with the powers that be.

To John the Faster, however, he administered gall and honey—sometimes separately and sometimes mixed together. “Your holy Fraternity,” he says, on one occasion, “has replied to me, as appears from the signature of the letter, that you were ignorant of what I had written about. At which reply I was mightily astonished, pondering with myself in silence, if what you say is true, what can be worse than that such things should be done against God’s servants and he who is over them should be ignorant?” Two monks had in fact been beaten with cudgels for heresy and finally resorted to Rome in defiance of John, where Gregory pardoned and restored them. The Pope continues: “But, if your holiness did know both what subject I wrote about and what had been done, either against John, the Presbyter, or against Athanasius, monk of Isauria and a presbyter, and have written to me, ‘I know not,’ what can I reply to this, since Scripture says, ‘The mouth that lies slays the soul?’ I ask, most holy brother, has all that great abstinence of yours come to this, that you would, by denial, conceal from your brother what you know to have been done?”

If we are, in spite of this plainness, disposed to be severe upon Gregory’s subservience to the civil power of the Byzantine Court, we shall find an instance in his behavior toward Phocas. This man had murdered the Emperor Maurice, gouty and helpless as he was; and had previously put his six sons to death before his eyes. The good old emperor died like a hero, repeating the words of the psalm, “Thou, O Lord, art just, and all Thy judgments are right.” And we need only to turn to Gregory’s writings to prove that the dead man was his friend and had done him many a kindness.

Notwithstanding these gracious and excellent memories of the late emperor, the Senate and people had hailed the advent of Phocas with rapturous delight. His image and that of his wife had been sent to Rome, and now, with the uproar rising to his windows, Gregory descended to the common level of detestable approbation, and caused these images to be carried into the oratory of the Lateran palace. “This,” says one of his biographers, “is the only stain upon the life of Gregory. We do not attempt either to conceal it or to excuse it.” True, Maurice had been a vexatious old man, and his piety, while it was undeniable, was nevertheless somewhat acrid. But the Bishop of Rome should have had sufficient strength at least to repress any tumultuous joy over an act of murderous ambition and hateful selfishness. This, however, is the weakness of many a prelate. In the hour of trial he bends like a reed to the blast, when we should expect him to be an oak, and trust to his roots to grapple him safely down to the firm earth of principle. This great blot, conceded by all candid historians, remains upon his memory.

It is a better picture for us to view when, forsaking his trust in the mercy of barbarians or the senility of despotic power, Gregory looked outward to the new nations and sought to furnish the Roman Church with fresh vigor and vital help from this unwasted source of strength. He corresponded with Childebert II., the unfortunate young King of Austrasia, the son of the notorious but intellectual Brunehilda. With him and with the French bishops he labored to secure the destruction of “simony,” by which was meant the bargain and sale of ecclesiastical positions. He also strove to prevent laymen from being elevated to the episcopate, though he should have remembered that Hilary of Poitiers was a notable argument against his fears.

He also attended to the religious matters of Spain. This province had ceased to be Arian in 587 with the accession of Recared; and with it and with Istria he was entirely successful in his methods of unity and peace. He also overcame the Donatist party in Africa, who had for years been ordaining their own bishops side by side with the regular succession, and sometimes in actual alternation with them.

To crown all, he organized a mission to the distant island of the fair-faced Angli in 596, the very date at which the young Childebert perished by poison in the twenty-sixth year of his age. Then it was that Augustine, after one recoil which showed that he was not quite up to the mark of Gregory’s zeal, finally set out in earnest with forty companions. The month was July. The mission was almost an embassy. It went through the intervening kingdoms endorsed to and by their kings. And it went to cheer the little feeble remnant of the Celtic Christians who had escaped the Saxon sword, and to draw from the Venerable Bede his grateful tribute to the man who had already well deserved the title of great. “For,” says Bede, “if Gregory be not to others an apostle, he is one to us, for the seal of his apostleship are we in the Lord.”

When we remember, also, his secular services in saving Rome from sack and pillage, we cannot but perceive that he was laying, broad and deep, the foundations of that temporal authority which the Pope of Rome was soon to claim. The revenues of the Roman bishop were growing enormously. He had in Sicily and elsewhere his agents and stewards (defensores). He was rapidly arising to a position of almost independent dignity. His deference to kings was only that of Christian courtesy and love. In another man some of this might have been disfigured by self-seeking and moral obliquity of purpose. In Gregory we find, throughout his career, a noble integrity which was certainly austere enough, but which was in the main pure and free from spot. His weakness was that of overconciliation, of which the case of Phocas is a flagrant example. But his strength was in his just judgment and in his masterful manipulation of the materials before him.

In his way, too, he saved Christian art as well as Christian music. He condemns the Bishop of Marseilles (Massilia) for having broken some statues of the saints. And while his remonstrance may perhaps be quoted in favor of image-worship, it certainly cannot be quoted for that blind iconoclasm which would destroy pagan beauty before the shrine of Christian ugliness. In the association of his name with the Gregorian chant he did almost as great a kindness to the Church as did Ambrose when he brought to her services the Greek hymns of the East.

He was a sick man while he labored at these matters of devotion and duty. Rheumatic gout attacked him and crippled his joints. We must add to this that he was not without enemies, and not without many a little sting and thrust of vicious tongues and pens. But he endured to the end, and he probably was sincere when he wrote himself down as Servus servorum—though there have been other popes since his day to follow the custom, and who were the “servants of servants” only according to the “devil’s darling sin, the pride that apes humility.”

Thirteen years he held the keys of St. Peter. Busy until the last moment, he wrote or dictated the correspondence which was required. But the disease which was upon him steadily increased until, on March 12th, 604, he was released from suffering and from care. His portrait shows him as a man with high and wrinkled forehead; a thin beard around the cheeks and chin; large, deep-set eyes; straight and manly nose, and a singular lock—almost like that in the conventional portrait of Father Time—upon his brow. There are a great many doctors of divinity who do not a little resemble him to-day. It is a good face, but a somewhat stern and severe one—of the sort to make credible the story that he had a special whip for his choristers, and used it when it was needed.

His works fill several volumes in the Patrologia. His Morals, a commentary upon Job, is the very best of his books; but he was probably ignorant of both Hebrew and Greek, and hence his comments on Scripture are rather more homiletical and practical than scholarly. The Pastoral Rule was translated into Saxon by King Alfred, who admired its practical wisdom, and sent a copy to every bishop in his kingdom; under Charles the Great also it was much esteemed in France. His Letters are the great mine of information upon his personal opinions and methods. The Dialogues were addressed to Theodolinda, and in these we find some superstition; and indeed a fondness for saints’ miracles and a weakness for relics were characteristic of his otherwise sensible conduct. He wrote but nine hymns which are authentically traceable to his pen. They are the Primo dierum omnium; the Nocte surgentes vigilemus; the Ecce jam noctis; the Lucis Creator optime; the Clarum decus jejunii; the Audi benigne Conditor; the Magno salutis gaudio, the Jam Christus astra ascenderat, and the Rex Christe, factor omnium. With a lesser degree of probability he has been named as the author of the Aeterne Rex altissime; the En more docti mystico; the Lignum crucis mirabile; the Noctis tempus jam praeterit; the Nunc tempus acceptabile; and the Summi largitor praemii.

Of these the Rex Christe, factor omnium delighted Luther so much that he declared it in his impetuous way “the best hymn ever written”—an opinion which he would find few nowadays to endorse. Gregory disliked pagan literature and cultivated the style and prosody of Ambrose. It is possible, therefore, that among the Ambrosian hymns there may be those which he has written and which are credited to an earlier date. But the cause of hymnology suffers little by the loss. He was not a poet; but as the man who made the papacy a thing and not a name—as the man who evangelized Britain—and as the man who gave the Gregorian tones to the praises of the Church, he will be held in kindly and lasting remembrance. There was in him a vein of peculiar sarcasm as well as of deep earnestness and of great sagacity, yet his literary merits are not to be weighed against those words and actions written viewlessly on the air, but which still effectually vibrate through the polity of the Roman Catholic Church.

CHAPTER XI.
THE VENERABLE BEDE.

It happened with Bede as with some other Latin hymn-writers—there were several persons who had the same name as himself. Hilary and Fortunatus and Notker are not the only cases of confusion, for there were certainly three Bedes, and they were not long removed from each other in point of time. Beda Major—the elder or greater Bede—was a presbyter and monk of Lindisfarne, commemorated by his more celebrated namesake. Another was a holy man of the time of Charles the Great. But our own Beda or Bedan was a presbyter and monk of Jarrow, and is distinguished from the rest by the title of “Venerable,” which he shares with Peter the Venerable of Cluny.

There are few finer figures in early English history. Sprung from pagan and utterly illiterate ancestry, he has taken his place as an historian, a scholar, a natural philosopher, and a poet; and in every department of this varied knowledge he has shown his ability and industry. English literature recalls him; English history praises him; English scholarship has elaborately edited his writings, and English patriotism has affectionately honored his memory.

Cuthbert, his disciple, who wrote his life, begins his narration in the following words:

“The presbyter Beda, venerable and beloved of God, was born in the province of Northumbria, in the territory of the monasteries of the Apostles Peter and Paul, which is in Wearmouth and at Jarrow, in the year of our Lord’s incarnation the six hundred and seventy-seventh, which is the second year of the solitary life of St. Cuthbert.” It also was the ninth year after the reduction of Saxon England to the Roman obedience at the Synod of Whitby.

Bede himself relates that when he was seven years of age the care of his education was committed by his relatives to the Abbot Benedict and afterward to the Abbot Ceolfrid. He adds that from that date to the time at which he prepared the accompanying list of his works he had spent his days in the same place. His existence was passed in meditating upon the Holy Scriptures; and he “found it sweet,” in the midst of his observance of the conventual discipline and daily chanting in the church, “either to learn, or to teach, or to write.” The choice of this word “sweet” (dulce) is significant, for no man could more carefully have mingled the sweet with the useful. A gentle spirit breathes across his studious pages, as over the rough beards of the yellow grain a breeze moves and sways them, harsh though they are, in graceful waves. For he loved learning with a perfect avidity. His works reveal his desire to accumulate it—to teach it again in plain and simple fashions—and this benevolent desire redeems many a tedious discourse.

This life of his was devoid of personal incident. He includes nothing of his individual history in the little notices which he makes of contemporary events, and he is singularly silent even about the affairs of which we should think he would naturally speak. The light which we get upon his surroundings and circumstances we must, therefore, derive from other sources, but fortunately these are at hand. We know, for example, that Benedict Biscop, who founded those twin monasteries in which Bede dwelled all his life, was himself a remarkable person. He was of noble birth, and gave up place and ambition in the court of the king to proceed to Rome, there to be trained as a monk, and then to return and found Wearmouth in 674 and Jarrow in 682. To the second of these religious establishments, situated upon the Tyne, Bede was transferred under Ceolfrid, its first abbot, and there thenceforth he remained. We are even able to determine his usual food as a school-boy, for, says his latest biographer, Rev. G. F. Browne, “we have a colloquy in which a boy is made to describe his daily food in his monastery. He had worts (i.e., kitchen herbs), fish, cheese, butter, beans, and flesh meats. He drank ale when he could get it, and water when he could not; wine was too dear.” There is, indeed, in these Saxon monasteries the honest and hearty food which belonged to their age and people. Cedric the Saxon, in Sir Walter Scott’s novel of Ivanhoe, represents very fairly the popular feeling on the subject. Chaucer, too, can be quoted upon this same profusion and the generosity of the time. Of the Franklin he says:

“It snowed in his house of meat and drink.”

With such a patron as Biscop the monasteries never lacked any good thing. He brought back from the Continent the best matters of the period—books, pictures, relics, skilled mechanics, makers of stained glass, and choir-masters. He saw before him a land in which the monk was to be the conservator and promoter of learning. And in carrying out this purpose he did more than plant a monastery, for he planted and reared a man. We have the word of that historian whose life and death so nearly approach those of his favorite author, when we declare that “prose took its first shape in the Latin history of Baeda.” For John Henry Greene closed his history of the English people much as Bede ended his own career, weary with his labor and yet completing what he had begun.

That which lies before us is what Greene finely styles “the quiet grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge.” It was no hoarding, avaricious, trilobite life to be fossilized for future ages in the dead strata of ecclesiastical records. Instead, it concerned itself with all learning; and though it perished in the blackness of a general ignorance, it is a source of light and force to-day.

But let us return to Bede’s brief points of change. While he was still a boy, the monastery was desolated by one of the great plagues which followed the Synod of Whitby, and every monk who knew how to sing in the choir, except the Abbot and Bede, were among the victims. Unaided these two struggled with the double task of teaching the others to sing and keeping up the monastic services in the mean time. The antiphons they had to abandon, but they struggled through the Psalms, often weeping and sobbing as they sang. At nineteen—six years before the usual age—he became a deacon; at thirty he was a priest; at fifty-nine he died. He acquired his Greek through the agency of Archbishop Theodore, who had come from Paul’s city of Tarsus in Cilicia. There were many in England who actually spoke in that tongue, owing to his encouragement of it. And Bede was no mean nor small factor in its diffusion, for he taught at Jarrow a school of six hundred monks, besides an uncounted number of strangers who sought his instruction. The genealogy of school masters is truly suggestive. From Bede to Alcuin, from Alcuin to Rabanus Maurus, from Rabanus and his liberal methods on to the times of Abelard and the free inquiry; so the torch of learning passes down the generations. And when we remember Alcuin’s commendation of Bede and Rabanus Maurus’s instruction by Alcuin, we cannot doubt the close connection of these three earliest names. Abelard really revived the bolder and broader style which had been opposed at first in the Abbey of Fulda.

How the monk ever found time for his accomplishment of study and writing among his constant labors—his chanting and his teaching and his frequent preparation of homilies—it is indeed hard to discover. But he wore away the thin scabbard of the body by the keen edge of his sheathed and unsheathed mind, until he died before his days were truly done. How often must we lament the incredible monotony and weary routine of these noble lives! How much more, we say to ourselves, they could have achieved under better and freer conditions! But perhaps not. Perhaps this very constriction was a source of strength; and perhaps the severe stress which finally broke this noble student was, after all, the creator of his best powers and the director of his finest energy.

Did he ever visit Rome? Monks from the Anglo-Saxon monasteries went on pilgrimage back and forth, but if he went with them neither he nor they have mentioned it. Yet there is a letter of Pope Sergius to Ceolfrid which hints at such a journey, and might easily furnish a ground for the opinion. On the whole, we must consider Bede as an unflickering light, burning itself away at Jarrow, but illuminating all England with its rays. It is not because of deficiency in acquirement that we deny these traditions. He knew all that was then current. His writings are an encyclopaedia of universal learning. Honorius of Autun says of him, scripsit infinita—he wrote incalculably much. Lanfranc cites his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Alcuin compares him to the Younger Pliny, and quotes him with great delight as “Magister Beda.”

The hymns ascribed to the Venerable Bede, on what appears to be good authority, are the following:

Adesto, Christe, vocibus,

Apostolorum gloriam,

Emitte, Christe, Spiritum,

Hymnum canamus gloriae,

Hymnum canentes martyrum,

Illuxit alma seculis,

Nunc Andreae sollemnia,

Praecessor almus gratiae,

Praecursor altus luminis,

Primo Deus coeli globum,

Salve tropaeum gloriae.

Also, but more doubtfully:

Apostolorum passio,

Inter florigeras.

His Ascension hymn,

Hymnum canamus gloriae,

in its abbreviated form, spread beyond the bounds of English use, and found favor with the Churches of the Continent. It has simplicity and directness, if not much poetic force and is too prolix for Church use in its original form. Mrs. Charles’s version, “A hymn of glory let us sing,” is well known. Next to it stands his

Hymnum canentes martyrum,

known to English readers by the admirable version in Hymns Ancient and Modern, which begins, “A hymn for martyrs sweetly sing.” A third notable hymn is that to the Cross:

Salve tropaeum gloriae,

in which he embodies the beautiful legend of St. Andrew’s death.

The notable thing about all Bede’s hymns is the influence which the old forms of Teutonic poetry—the alliterative staff-rhyme—have exerted on their construction. We can even trace an approximation to alliteration in his verses, while rhyme is rather an accident than an object. The verses of Beowulf and of Caedmon were in his mind when he wrote. That he could use the classic metres also, we see from his poem in hexameters on the life of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, the great Scoto-Irish saint, whose deeds still filled the North with their echoes.

CHAPTER XII.
RABANUS MAURUS, AUTHOR OF THE “VENI, CREATOR.”

None of the great Latin hymns is more regarded than the Veni, Creator Spiritus. The Dies Irae may be grander; the Veni, Sancte Spiritus may be sweeter; the Ad perennis vitae fontem may be lovelier; the Stabat mater may be more pathetic, but, after all, the Veni, Creator holds a place of equal honor in the estimation of the Church. The Church of England, while rejecting every other Latin hymn from her services, nevertheless retained this in the offices for the ordering of priests and consecration of bishops. This is only the carrying out, indeed, of the account given by the famous but unknown monk of Salzburg who rendered so many of the Latin hymns into the old High-German tongue. He says, “Whoever repeats this hymn by day or by night, him shall no enemy visible or invisible assail.” This has always been the repute of the hymn, and there is no doubt that this attended it on its journey down the ages in the worship of the Church.

Its authorship, however, has been less carefully preserved than its text, which is notably free from mutilation and obscurity. It is really singular to find a hymn which has been so universally employed, and which has escaped in such a marvellous manner from the profane meddling of prosaic or bigoted revisers. Its doxologic final stanza is one which is not often to be found elsewhere—as though the hymn had taken and maintained a place apart. If it were the product of the Ambrosian age this would not be likely to have occurred, for all those doxologies are formal and interchangeable to a marked degree. But this is the appropriate conclusion of a unique ascription of praise to the third person of the Trinity.

Its date is thus, to some extent, fixed for us. We cannot refer it to the days of Ambrose, and, since it is found in nearly all the twelfth to fourteenth-century breviaries, we are unable to attribute it to the period of the Renaissance. Its very verse would prevent this, if nothing else did. The word spiritalis is a barbarism—an altogether post-classical expression. The true usage is that in which the genitive case is employed, thus “spiritual delight” would be animi felicitas, not spiritalis (or spiritualis) felicitas. Perpetim is also a word which purists of the new classic revival would avoid if they could. So, too, there is a certain amount of stress to be put upon the scanning of Paraclitus—where the i is long, though Prudentius in the fifth century and Adam of St. Victor in the twelfth both make it short. It has therefore been said that the hymn was composed by a person who was skilled in the Greek language. This altogether depends on the question whether he pronounced the word by accent or by quantity. But still it is not to be denied that the prosody of the poet gives us reason to think that he did pronounce the word with the accent on the η. If this be so, it would follow that he was a man of rare and fine scholarship in comparison with the contemporaneous learning.

Another criticism is purely theological and aids in fixing the date by the history of doctrine itself. At the Council of Toledo A.D. 589, the word filioque was added to the Creed to indicate the faith of the Church in the procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son. This hymn preserves this point of the orthodox belief with such care that there can be no doubt of its being subsequent in time to the date of that council.

In coming more particularly to the various authors who have been credited with its composition, it may be well to attend to each claim as it is put forward in some sort of chronologic order.

George Fabricius of Chemnitz (1564) was ready enough to ascribe it to Ambrose himself. The only ground for this conjecture is the structure of the verse. And this is no more a proof of authorship than that a hymn written in what we call “long metre” must be, because of that fact alone, the production of Isaac Watts. On the other hand, it is plain that the theological allusion and the doxology, when taken together, remove the hymn far enough away from the days of the great Bishop of Milan.

In later times of more critical scholarship the learned and accurate Professor Hermann Adalbert Daniel has devoted much study to the hymn, and has reached the conclusion that it belongs to that king whom the Germans are never tired of praising—Charles the Great (Karl der Grosse), by the French called Charlemagne. Led by his illustrious opinion the compilers and translators have, without another question, set it down for Charles’s work. So it has gone; the minor German collators, like Königsfeld and others, following peacefully in the rear of an original investigator. This was not true, however, of men who hunted for proof on their own account, as, for instance, Mone and Wackernagel. But it is distinctly true of the English scholars, among whom Archbishop Trench appears to carry the most prevalent influence. They usually assent without a murmur to this conjecture of Daniel indorsing Thomasius, who was, so far as can be discovered, the parent of the opinion. The only real exception is the Scotch hymnologist, Dr. H. M. MacGill, who doubts, but conforms to the opinion which is in vogue.

The grounds of this general confidence in Charles’s authorship it may be proper to mention here in brief. We know it is said that he was a patron of learning, a friend of scholars, and a devout believer in the orthodox theology. In the year 809 he took an active part in a synod at Aquisgranum which affirmed the doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son. There is, furthermore, a statement, quoted by Cardinal Thomasius from the Acta Sanctorum, which goes in the direction of a positive assertion. In the life of the Blessed Notker it is said that this hymn was composed by Carolus Magnus.

Now it has never been established that Charles was even a ready writer of prose, to say nothing of verse. Berington, following Einhard, Charles’s secretary, says in his History of the Literature of the Middle Ages (1814), that Charles was not a literary man. “He seems never to have acquired the easy practice of writing,” is his strong language (p. 102). The hymn, on the contrary, bears the evident marks of accustomed skill and practice in the art of verse as well as the accuracy of a mind trained in theologic discriminations. Moreover, if Maitland (he of the Dark Ages) is to be credited, then this life of the Blessed Notker, by Ekkehard Junior, is full of errors, of ignorance, and wilful design. It naturally celebrates whatever is likely to add to the credit of St. Gall. Hence we need not be astonished when it tells us that Notker composed the sequence, Spiritus Sancti adsit nobis gratia, and sent it to Charles the Great, receiving in return his composition the Veni, Creator Spiritus. Nor should we be surprised when this turns out (as it is now conceded to be) a mere legend without any historic basis. When Thomasius follows this story, and Daniel follows Thomasius, and Trench follows Daniel, and the compilers follow Trench, it really appears that but little independent judgment has been exercised on the subject.

Notker died in 912, and as Charles the Great was dead in 814, the absurd anachronism of the Ekkehard legend is clear to a glance. It should perhaps be added that Trench, although allowing Charles as author, believes the hymn to be possibly of earlier date.

Mone takes a new departure when he gives up the common opinion and announces that the hymn ought to be assigned to Gregory the Great (540-606). In his first volume he taxes Daniel with having been altogether too prompt to agree to the cardinal’s dictum. He finds no reason to give the hymn to Charles, but he regards the classical style of its composition to be very fitting to the culture and well-known powers of Gregory. He rejects the doxology Sit laus, etc., and considers, very justly, that the stanza Per te sciamus, etc., is the true conclusion of the hymn.

Wackernagel agrees with Mone. He thinks that the only way in which Charles could have secured the authorship would have been by getting the composition effected by the intervention of Alcuin. He therefore believes that Gregory was the poet of the Veni, Creator, and so publishes it in his exhaustive work upon the German church hymns. Professor March, always careful and scholarly in his assignments, adopts this opinion also.

Against the Gregorian authorship, supported as it is by such eminent and independent scholars, one must be slow to contend. But in fact there is no great similarity between the hymn before us and those of Gregory. The great Pope is not a great poet. He has not written one hymn which has really endured. The Audi benigne Conditor is quoted freely, and the Rex Christe, factor omnium received Luther’s highest approbation. But these and other hymns from his pen are imitations of Ambrose—almost slavish imitations. The lofty and grand largeness of the Veni, Creator is wanting to them all. The argument, good as it may seem, is only negative. The inference is that the hymn was written by him—nothing more. On the same grounds we might as well go back to old George Fabricius and give it into the hands of Ambrose as he did. The truth is that Gregory’s writings do not contain it, and why they should not, if he were its actual author, it is hard for any one to understand.

But we are not at the end of the inquiry yet. We positively know certain facts. These are: That the earliest mention of the hymn is in the Delatio S. Marculfi, A.D. 898; that it is found in the breviaries of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries; that its author was a skilled theologian and probably a master of the Greek language; that he was a poet in the true sense and therefore quite certain to have written other hymns and poems; that it was so soon and so generally adopted as to prevent any corruption of its text; that all these ascriptions of it to this or that person are nothing but tradition; and, finally, that the hymn has such spiritual worth and power as to mark it for the production of a devout as well as scholarly mind. All these requirements are met in Rabanus Maurus, Bishop of Mainz, pupil of Alcuin, and laureate after Alcuin and Theodulphus.

There was a certain Christopher Brower, a Jesuit and a profoundly learned scholar, who was born in 1559 at Arnhem in Gelderland. In the year 1580 he went to Cologne in pursuit of his studies. Then he studied philosophy at Trier, and eventually became rector of the college at Fulda. Here he wrote four books upon antiquarian topics. His diligent, exhaustive style can be judged by the fact that he spent thirty years upon a history of Trier. His Antiquitates were printed in 1612, but in 1603 he had edited the writings of Fortunatus, and this book was reissued in 1617, the year of his death, by Joannes Volmar at Cologne. This edition has an appendix of 150 pp. 4to., in which is contained the entire series of hymns and other poetical compositions which were due to the aforesaid Bishop of Mainz, Rabanus Maurus. It was edited from a very old MS. of undoubted veracity, and it contains the Veni, Creator in the precise text which we now employ. It is to be noticed that it does not recognize the doxology Sit laus, etc., and this Mone assures us was composed at a later period by Hincmar of Rheims, and is, as we have said, unique. But it accents Paraclitus upon the second a and not upon the i.

The stanza Da gaudiorum, etc., was rejected some time ago by the best scholars. It is from a hymn of later date. And we therefore find the version which appears in Brewer’s editions of the poems of Rabanus Maurus to be consonant with the most intelligent criticism of the text of the Veni, Creator.

The hymn itself we can assign with very considerable certainty to the author in whose pages it again is apparent, and we may believe in the accuracy and scholarly acuteness of the Jesuit antiquarian.

It will not be amiss if we set our reasons in order, for a long-established delusion is as hard to overthrow sometimes as the stubbornest fact. They are such as the following:

1. The hymn is found in the writings of Rabanus Maurus, in a codex which Brower calls “very ancient and well approved.”

2. It is the precise paraphrase of the learned bishop’s chapter on the Holy Spirit. Thus he begins the chapter with an assertion of the procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son. He then calls this Spirit donum Dei, and several times repeats the phrase. He argues that the Spirit is coequal and coeternal God. He then discusses the term Paraclete, and proceeds to speak of the septiformis nature of His power. Next follows a most significant and unusual expression—namely, that the Holy Spirit is digitus Dei—the finger of God. And the consecution and coincidence of thought is still further increased by an allusion to the grace which bestowed the gift of tongues. He then speaks of the Spirit as fire—which accords with the word accende—and then he explains the simile of water, which corresponds with the word infunde and with the previous phrase fons vivus. He also quotes from the Gospel of John to show that this “living water” means no more nor less than the Holy Spirit. These coincidences are doubly remarkable, for they not only exhibit the same ideas—some of which, by the way, are quite uncommon—but they also set them forth in the precise order in which the good bishop employs them in his hymn. It is as if, being aroused and animated by his great and noble theme, he had turned to verse as an appropriate medium of lofty praise and had sung from his heart this immortal hymn.

3. To these reasons we may add a third—that the internal structure of the hymn shows its author to have been a person of theological soundness, spiritual insight, scriptural knowledge, genuine scholarship, and a natural poetical capacity. These facts again agree with what we know to have been the talents and learning of Rabanus Maurus.

4. If Gregory had written this hymn it would have appeared at an earlier date and would have been undoubtedly attributed to its illustrious author; whereas it is not in his carefully compiled writings nor is it accredited to him by Thomasius or any hymnologist before the time of Mone and Wackernagel.

5. Charles the Great had not the learning, and both he and his grandson, Charles “the Bald,” are named on the strength of a long-exploded and always anachronistic tradition.

6. Ambrose is out of the question by the theological limitation of the stanza Per te sciamus, etc.

7. Finally, we have the right to believe that a man whose other hymns have been so extensively, though anonymously, introduced into the worship of the Church, was entirely competent to frame this present hymn.

This last point is worthy of more than this terse remark. Rabanus composed the hymns, Adest dies sanctus Dei, Festum nunc celebre, Fit porta Christi pervia, Tibi Christe splendor Patris, Christe Redemptor omnium, and Jesu Salvator saeculi, all of which display great powers of sacred poetry and two of which are beyond any possible doubt his authentic productions. Of the twenty-nine hymns found in Brewer’s codex there are two which have been credited to Ambrose beside the Veni, Creator, and there are seven which are classed by Daniel and Fabricius as belonging between the tenth and fourteenth centuries and to unknown authorship. The codex adds to our previous list eight entirely new poems, and two others which raise a question on which we may pause for a moment before conceding the current opinion.

The first of these hymns is the Altus prosator, of which the codex gives us a much fuller and longer version. It is called ordinarily the “Hymn of St. Columba,” and was reprinted by Dr. Todd from the Liber Hymnorum of old Irish hymns in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. Our present line of inquiry would lead us to assign it to Rabanus, and thus do away with the mere conjecture which makes Columba its author.

The second hymn is that usually credited to Elpis, the wife of Boethius. But the designation of this hymn is as fanciful as the other. Brower in his loyalty to the Church will not impugn the authorship which is commonly received, but he is constrained to admit that a stanza is appended which the popular version entirely omits. It seems far more reasonable to think that Rabanus composed the whole hymn than that he only added a few verses at the end. What Rabanus Maurus really did was to construct an hymnodia which had an appropriate sacred song for every season. He was a poet and he lauded the verses of Hilary and of Ambrose. Had he intended to make selections he would not have omitted them. But he has certainly put his own compositions into this list. Therefore it follows that he may well have included more than was at first supposed. And when it is plain—for the index of hymns makes it plain—that not one single hymn of the twenty-nine is the undoubted and absolute property of any other poet, we are safe in assuming that they all are what the codex declares them to be—the actual productions of the Bishop Rabanus.

The hymn Fit porta Christi pervia occurs in the midst of the Ambrosian A solis ortus cardine, et usque, and was there inserted by the Benedictines of St. Maur. Daniel says it is an entire hymn as it stands. And so say we who find it standing alone in the codex of Brower.

At once, then, Rabanus Maurus ascends from comparative obscurity to a front rank among hymn-writers. And we are ready for all the light upon his personal history which we can obtain.

VENI, CREATOR SPIRITUS.

Veni, Creator Spiritus,

Mentes tuorum visita,

Imple superna gratia

Quae tu creasti pectora.

Qui Paraclitus diceris,

Donum Dei altissimi,

Fons vivus, ignis, charitas,

Et spiritalis unctio.

Tu septiformis munere,

Dextrae Dei tu digitus,

Tu rite promissum Patris,

Sermone ditans guttura.

Accende lumen sensibus,

Infunde amorem cordibus,

Infirma nostri corporis,

Virtute firmans perpetim.

Hostem repellas longius,

Pacemque dones protinus,

Ductore sic te praevio

Vitemus omne noxium.

Per te sciamus da Patrem

Noscamus atque Filium,

Te utriusque Spiritum,

Credamus omni tempore.

O Holy Ghost, Creator, come!

Thy people’s minds pervade;

And fill with thy supernal grace

The souls which thou hast made.

Thou who art called the Paraclete,

The gift of God most high;

Thou living fount, and fire, and love,

Our spirit’s pure ally;

Thou sevenfold Giver of all good;

Finger of God’s right hand;

Thou promise of the Father, rich

In words for every land;

Kindle our senses to a flame,

And fill our hearts with love,

And through our bodies’ weakness, still

Pour valor from above!

Drive farther off our enemy,

And straightway give us peace;

That, with thyself as such a guide,

We may from evil cease.

Through thee may we the Father know,

And thus confess the Son;

For thee (from both the Holy Ghost),

We praise while time shall run.

Rabanus Maurus, teacher and Abbot of Fulda and Archbishop of Mayence (Mainz), was commonly called the “foremost German of his time.” Though the centuries have somewhat obscured the lustre of his renown, they have not deprived him of his place in history, nor have they dissociated his name from that of his instructor, prototype, and model, the great pedagogue Alcuin.

Of the birthplace of Rabanus we have no certain knowledge. Some have said that he was Scotch or English, others that he was French; but the more reliable authorities are convinced that he was a German, born either at Fulda or Mainz. The epitaph written by himself affords probably the solution of the question. It was composed at Mainz while its author was archbishop, and contains these words:

“Urbe quidem hac genitus sum, ac sacro fonte renatus,

In Fulda post haec dogma sacrum didici.”

That is, he was born at the place where he was writing these verses—most likely Mainz—and there he was baptized. Afterward he was educated in Fulda. An additional reason for this belief is that his father was of a family known in the records of Mainz.

Trithemius says that Rabanus was born in 788 quarto nonas Februarii, the second of February. Mabillon adds, “I do not know whence he got the day; the year is probably pretty close.” But the year itself, on the strength of internal evidence found in the man’s writings and in the monastic rules regarding the holding of office before the attainment of a fixed age, Mabillon places at 776. This extension of twelve years is a very important affair since it makes Rabanus a monk of thirty-three at the date of the Council of Aquisgranum (Aix-la-Chapelle or Aachen), called by Charlemagne to reannunciate the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit.

The name of Rabanus’s father was Ruthard and his mother was christened Aldegunde. “She was a woman of the most honest conversation,” as Trithemius declares, the fit helpmeet of a man “rich and powerful, who for a long time served in the wars under the Frank princes.” There was a brother, doubtless an elder brother, called Tutin, a person “noble among the first,” and perhaps the father of a nephew, Gundram, whom Rabanus mentions as the royal chaplain of Lewis of Germany.

The lad Raban—“the raven”—took on his dark garments at nine years of age and went to be a little shaveling monk at Fulda. There he continued, patiently toiling on at his studies according to the methods of a benighted time, and it is plain that he progressed so well as to get the favor of his abbot, Ratgar. Since Ratgar took office in 801 or 802, and Alcuin died in May, 804, it must have been at or about the twenty-fifth year of his age that Rabanus was directed to put himself under the care of Alcuin. A record which has been preserved shows that in 801 our poet had been made a deacon at Fulda, and it is natural for us to look upon this journey to the monastic school of St. Martin at Tours as an honor given to one who had already earned some distinction in scholarship.

Be this as it may it is certain that nearly the latest work of Alcuin’s life was the preparation of the successor to his own ideas who should hold high the torch of knowledge to his land and generation. To him—though the old eyes at Tours should not see it—was to succeed Walafrid Strabo, and to Walafrid Strabo were to be added the scholars of St. Gall, and notably the marvellous cripple Herman of Reichenau. Ratgar now was busy building a great church, and architectural notions befogged his brain. But he had built better than he was aware when he sent off Rabanus and Hatto to sit at the feet of the man who had brought the system of Bede the Venerable into Gaul, and who was to commit his own enthusiasm for learning to a greater scholar than Paul Winfrid, the Deacon.

This Hatto was not the infamous bishop of the Rat Tower whom Southey has immortalized in blood-curdling verses. That notorious prelate was indeed Abbot of Fulda and Bishop of Mainz, but he died in 969 or 970, and the swarming rats which devoured him for his avarice in keeping the corn from the poor owe their original celebrity to those curious volumes, the Centuries of Magdeburg. So far as we can discover, the Hatto who accompanied Rabanus became neither famous nor infamous, unless it be something to have obtained the abbacy of Fulda when his friend laid it down.

In 804 Rabanus returned to Fulda. He had profited by the instruction he had received, and was now the fittest person to be put at the head of the school in the cloisters. To his original name the old teacher had affixed the honorable title Maurus, and to this again Rabanus himself added the descriptive adjective Magnentius. So that Rabanus Maurus Magnentius is the full appellation of the man henceforth to be styled with the largest truth, Primus Germaniae preceptor. This giving of names was one of the features of those times. Alcuin was called Albinus Flaccus, Paul Winfrid was known as Bonifacius, and Ratbert, the advocate of transubstantiation, became Paschasius. Besides this, the spelling of proper names was very much at sea. Thus, to the R of Rabanus there was prefixed or suffixed a Greek “rough breathing,” making it HRabanus or Rhabanus, precisely as we some times find HLudovicus or HLotharius.

It is at this time that the true skill and ability of Rabanus appear before us. He was the first person to establish a school in Germany which had in it the promise of modern education. He allowed pupils to attend and be trained in the cloisters who had no vocation for a monastic life. In point of fact he was the real founder of the school system of Germany, and his fellow-countrymen have not been slow to accredit him with the achievement. His life and accomplishments have employed the pens of Buddeus, Schwarz, Dahl, Bach, Kunstmann, Spengler, Köhler, Richter, and other writers on the history of paedagogik.[7] It is beyond debate that the school at Fulda was a most remarkable place.

Rabanus was not the only teacher in the school. He was assisted by his faithful friend Samuel of Worms, a fellow pupil under Alcuin. Together these men developed and enlarged the minds of many of the future nobles of Germany, and laid in Bible study and in the advanced opinions which they announced, the foundations for a nation the most scholarly of any on the earth. In these classes were to be seen such disciples of the new learning as Walafrid Strabo, Servatus Lupus, Einhard (who subsequently sent thither his son Wussin), and Rudolf who wrote the life of his preceptor.

Leaving the manner of that ancient school life for the present, we are struck with astonishment at the broad and liberal tone of the instruction. Rabanus followed Bede in providing an encyclopaedia of human knowledge for his pupils. He entitled it De Universis and based it on the previous work of Isidore of Seville. Additionally he abridged the grammar of Priscian, a treatise which furnished, even as late as the days of Richard Braythwaite and his Drunken Barnabee, the suggestive line,

“Fregi frontem Prisciani.”

“I’ve broke Priscian’s forehead mainly.”

He also furnished a text-book in arithmetic, drawn mostly from Boethius, and an etymology in which he depends to some extent on Isidore. He utilized Bede for chronology, and Gregory for ecclesiastical forms, and Augustine for doctrine, and Cassiodorus for commentary and exegesis.

Moreover, he was free from much of the superstition of his age. He objected to giving the liver of a mad dog to one who had been bitten by it—that being then held a perfect cure. His letters show an independent and almost an audacious mind. In all religious discussion his motto was, “When the cause is Christ’s, the opposition of the bad counts for naught.” In statecraft—for ecclesiastics were chief movers in these affairs—he held with Ludwig the Pious. He wrote a great deal in the way of Scripture commentary, and his intellect was of a mystical order. He delighted in allegories, in enshrining the bones of saints and confessors, and in making the most marvellous and intricate anagrams and arrangements of verses and letters upon the subject of the Holy Cross, whose praise he has elaborately set forth. Wimpfeling may well style this production a “wonderful and highly elaborate work.” It dates from the year 815, and no modern reader can view it without dismay at its enormous expenditure of labor.

A man like this in the teacher’s seat of Fulda would not be long in obscuring by his manifest talents the feebler light of his abbot. So Ratgar found, and devoted himself and his monks with mistimed zeal to the erection of a great addition to the cloister church. He grudged the time given to the studies of the school. He would much prefer to have had the full control of all that was passing in the cloisters, but this was plainly impossible. So he devised a very satisfactory way of interrupting the success of Rabanus. He took the books from the scholars and he even forbade them to the teacher. This was the cause of some pathetic verses in which Rabanus sets forth his petition for their return. “Let thy clemency,” he exclaims, “concede me books, for the poverty of knowledge suffocates me.” One grates his teeth in reading farther on the words, “Whether you do this or not, yet let the divine power of the Omnipotent always afford you all good things and complete a good fight with an honest course, that you may ever be with Christ in the height of heaven.”

Ratgar was a tyrant; there was no doubt of that. The only question was how long this tyranny would survive the loss of students and the defection of the monks, who had already begun to complain and resist. There was not any hope, however, that this line of conduct would be materially altered, and here again we have verses of Rabanus, lamenting in moving terms the loss of scholars and the demoralization of the school. It is not at all unlikely that the praises of the Holy Cross were the solace of the poor pedagogue who had lost his favorite volumes. He could scarcely otherwise have found the leisure for this elegant trifling.

The poem just mentioned is imperfect. It breaks off abruptly and the conclusion is missing. What it may have had to do with the outcome of Ratgar’s tyranny we therefore cannot say, but the times upon which the monastery had fallen were very grievous; and in 807 there was a pestilence which depleted the list of monks from four hundred down to one hundred and fifty, and these must, of course, have been more pressed by the manual labor than ever. They toiled as did Israel in bondage, and yet the end had not come. It was a period of the worst sort of misrule, paralleled later at Cluny and not unknown in other conventual establishments. In 814 Rabanus was ordained priest on December 23d, and, as is supposed, after his withdrawal for a time from the monastery to the refuge offered by a friend’s house. From a passage in one of his commentaries it has been inferred that he used this suspense of his labors to make a journey to Palestine.

In 811 there was, says Dahl, a great confusion (Verwirrung) in the cloister. A libel was sent to Charles the Great criticising the conduct of Ratgar—“libel” being used in its old sense of “little treatise.” Nothing, as it would seem, was done about this, although the ordination of Rabanus may have been a link in the chain.

But when Ludwig the Pious (Ludwig der Fromme) came to the kingdom Ratgar was summarily deposed, and Egil, a kindly, book-loving man, created abbot in his stead. This occurred in 817, three years after Ludwig began to reign. All difficulties were now over. The school was reopened with greater prosperity than before. The library was increased. The secular scholars were taught outside the walls, for the number of students surpassed the accommodation. And, in a word, Ratgar had merely held back a constantly augmenting torrent which now poured itself in in an intrepid tide. When Martin Luther, centuries later, cries out for intelligent instruction and for the extension of the school system of Germany, he is but repeating the cry which swelled in the ears of Ratgar and drove him before it with execration from his abbacy.

In 822, when Egil died, by common consent Rabanus was invested with the dignity of abbot. For a time things went smoothly enough, and such scholars as Walafrid Strabo, Servatus Lupus, and Otfried of Weissenberg were the glory of the Fulda schools. But the pendulum swung too far in the rebound from Ratgar’s illiterate policy. The monks were kept at writing and teaching with too little discrimination as to their tastes and capacities. They began to grumble that the material interests of the monastery were neglected, and that Fulda might be growing rich in books and in bookworms, but was in danger of becoming poor in everything else. The disaffection found a support in Archbishop Otgar of Mainz, a busy political prelate, who seems to have become jealous of the prominence of Rabanus. As a supporter of Lothar and of the policy of imperial unity, he was in politics on the other side from Rabanus. Our abbot was a Nationalist and a Home Ruler. He wished to foster the cultivation of the German tongue and to maintain the distinctness of the German nation. He had stood by poor, weak Ludwig the Pious, whose sorrow it was to have succeeded to the work of Charles the Great. He addressed to him a letter of consolation in his troubles, and wrote a treatise: De Reverentia Filiorum erga Patres et Subditorum erga Reges, to recall his unfilial children to a sense of their duty. In Ludwig the German he recognized the most dutiful of the three. So when the Emperor Ludwig died in 840, he supported the younger Ludwig in the demand for virtual German independence against the high-handed imperialism of his elder brother Lothar. He thus shared in the triumph of the victory at Fontanetum, followed by the Compact of Verdun (843), which practically put an end to Karling imperialism, and secured the national independence of France and Germany. But in the mean time Otgar enabled the illiterate party at Fulda to drive Rabanus into exile, and when he came back he found the brethren had chosen another abbot, Hatto, in his stead. Waiving his own rights, and laying aside all grudges, he betook himself to his books in a priory or something of the sort on Mount St. Peter, not far off, and resumed the work of teaching. Here he is thought to have composed his great philosophical treatise on the All, which marks a distinct advance in the development of mediaeval metaphysics and logic. Indeed, there was but one thinker of the ninth century who surpassed him in penetration and learning—the wonderful Irish monk, John Scotus Erigena, who wrote Latin but thought in Greek and was filled with all the wisdom of the Hellenes, from Plato to Dionysius the Areopagite.

In 847 Archbishop Otgar died, and Ludwig the German elevated his friend Rabanus to the see of Mainz, the metropolitan see of Germany. Since Boniface, the Anglo-Saxon “Apostle of Germany,” who had succeeded to this dignity a century earlier, there had been no man of such eminence at the head of the German Church, nor have any of his successors surpassed him. His first care was the restoration of the discipline, which had decayed under the confusions of those dark days of civil war. A great synod met at Mainz in October, Rabanus having been consecrated in June. Besides the prelates, abbots and monks of all orders attended, and the canons adopted had reference to stricter life as the obligation of the clergy.

The year was not over before news of fresh trouble reached him. One of his own pupils at Fulda, the monk Gottschalk, a man of restless intellect, was reported as spreading an exaggerated version of Augustine’s doctrine of absolute predestination, and one which threatened to overturn the very idea of human responsibility. Gottschalk evidently was one of the people who love to walk on the fence rather than in the road—to carry every principle with ruthless logic to its remotest conclusion. The first news of his extravagances reached Rabanus in a letter from Italy setting forth the doctrines his former pupil was teaching. He at once responded in a letter (or rather a treatise) taking the same ground as the semi-Pelagians had done in the controversy with the school of Augustine, ground sanctioned by Gregory the Great, Beda, and Alcuin, although thought unsafe when first defended by Gennadius and John Cassian. Gottschalk seems to have accepted the reply as a sort of challenge. The next year, 848, he made his way to Mainz, and when Rabanus called together an assembly of churchmen and laymen—not a regular synod—he appeared before it with a confession of his faith in which he replied to the arguments of Rabanus. The assembly failed to convince him of his being in error, and at the king’s suggestion a pledge was exacted of him that he would never return to Germany. Hincmar of Rheims, the metropolitan of the Church of France, made sure of his keeping this pledge. As Gottschalk was handed over to him by King Ludwig, with a letter of explanation from Rabanus, he had him condemned by the Synod of Quiercy (853) to deposition from the priesthood, corporal chastisement until he should burn his confession with his own hands, and lifelong imprisonment. So ended, in 867, this Calvinist of the ninth century, without much credit to anybody who had a hand in his fate, but with least of discredit to Rabanus.

In 852, by order of King Ludwig, another synod convened at Mainz, to discuss, it is supposed, the doctrine of transubstantiation, which Paschasius Radbertus of Corbie had been setting forth in his treatise, De Corpore et Sanguine Christi. Our Rabanus resisted the new dogma, declaring that the participation of the Lord’s body and blood in the sacrament is “not carnal but spiritual.” Nor is this the only point of his agreement with Protestant teaching. Especially in his assertion that the Bible is a book for every Christian, and clear and intelligible as a rule of faith, he anticipates Luther.

In 850 a great famine desolated Germany, in whose course people were driven to the terrible deeds which sometimes characterize such times. Rabanus did his possible to relieve the terrible needs of his flock. Three hundred of these poor people were fed daily from his resources as archbishop, and his heart went out in pity to the multitudes he could not aid. Pitiful scenes he must have witnessed. One poor woman fell dead as she staggered to his threshold, with a babe at her breast. His charity was too late to save her, but her child was rescued.

He lived six years more, seeing his diocese recover from the desolation of that terrible winter, cherishing the literary and educational work of the monasteries on the lines laid down in his De Institutione Clericorum, keeping his clergy up to the ideal of the priestly life as defined in his De Disciplina Ecclesiastica, and civilizing the rude people of his great diocese. He died in 856, in his eightieth year, and was buried in St. Alban’s church in Mainz. In the era of the Reformation his bones were transferred to St. Maurice’s church in Halle. As Rome has not inscribed the opponent of transubstantiation in the list of her saints, they are allowed to rest together in peace, instead of being distributed through a long series of churches as relics.

He had composed for himself an epitaph, as was the fashion of those days, but it is pleasanter to read than some of those exaggeratedly humble and prosaic treatises concerning which we hardly know whether most to stand amazed at the badness of the Latin or the meanness of the piety. Rabanus avoids these objectionable features. His language is that of a poet and his sentiments those of a sincere Christian. Particularly there are two lines which are notable because they give us a glimpse of his personality:

“Promptus erat animus, sed tardans debile corpus;

Feci quod poteram, quodque Deus dederat.”

“Quick was my mind, but slow was my body through weakness;

That which I could I have done, and what the Lord gave me.”

One of his latest bequests was that of his books, which he devised, like a true scholar, partly to his old abbey of Fulda and partly to the monastery of St. Alban at Mainz.

John Trithemius eulogizes him in words which may, perhaps, be transferred into our pages from their original Latin as a specimen of the praise which Rabanus has always received—praise that is indeed worthy of the man who wrote the Veni, Creator.

“Rabanus was first among the Germans; a scholar universally erudite; profound in science; eloquent and strong in discourse; in life and conversation he shone as most learned, religious, and holy; he was always a prelate dignified, affable, and acceptable before God.”

This same Trithemius gives us a little notion of the bishop’s appearance. In body, he says that he was tolerably robust; of a sanguine, bilious temperament; rather fleshly in person than inclined to meagreness (macilentus); with a “courageous and great” head; and of a well-proportioned figure.

Of the other writings of Rabanus it is sufficient for us to name his compendium of the grammar of Priscian; his great work upon The Universe; his treatise upon the Praises of the Holy Cross, and his elaborate commentaries upon the various books of the Bible. He also prepared homilies and sundry compositions relative to ecclesiastical matters. In the Patrologia of Migne it requires six closely-printed volumes to cover his contributions to sacred literature. Especially we have occasion to note his theological writings, as it is in these that his spiritual character is most apparent.

His works mostly are dead enough to modern interest, but not all. German philology honors in him a great churchman who shared Charles the Great’s respect for German speech and culture, and at whose feet Otto of Weissenburg, the poet of the Krist, sat. German pedagogics recognizes in him the first Praeceptor Germaniae, who transplanted to Fulda the generous plans of education which Charles conceived, and which Alcuin executed at Tours. German philosophy recognizes in him the first forerunner of the great series of her metaphysicians. But to us he is Rabanus the poet, who acquired the art of verse under Alcuin, who used it at times to little purpose as in his De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis, but who in a happy hour wrote the Veni, Creator Spiritus.

CHAPTER XIII.
NOTKER OF ST. GALL, CALLED BALBULUS.

In the life of Notker, written by Ekkehard (Eckhardt) the Younger, who was Dean of St. Gall in 1220, we have a perfect mine of garrulous gossip and of chattering, pleasant romance. It has been called “one of the most delightful of mediaeval memoirs;” though we are very little disposed to accept a large share of it as solid fact. There is in it much confusion, both of dates and names. From one of its stories came the designation of Charles the Great (“the Emperor Charles”) as the author of the Veni Creator, a point which we have treated more fully in the chapter upon Rabanus Maurus. The copyist is mainly accountable for these blunders, some of which are so grossly anachronistic as to be at once corrected by their reader; and others are so puerile that no one can easily be deceived.

Since it is to Notker that we owe the “sequence” in its full development, it may be as well for us to let Ekkehard sketch his character at full length. The biography is in one of the April volumes of the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandist Fathers—a great white-covered folio which displays the immense research of its editors. For those who are less inclined to the Latin language in its monkish form, there is the admirable abridgment by Baring-Gould, known as the Lives of the Saints—a compilation which must be always distinguished from the work of the same title by Alban Butler. From these sources a great deal of truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, real record and unreal romance, have flowed forth upon the world. We cannot but speak reverently and kindly of such noble endeavors as those of Dr. Neale, but here, at the very outset, it must be understood that he has been altogether too much swayed by peculiar opinions for his ideas upon sequences—and upon Notker also—to have the weight of absolute authority.

Notker himself is to be discriminated from another Notker of the same religious house of St. Gall, who is generally known as “the Physician.” This one is Balbulus, or “the Stammerer,” who is sometimes called “Vetustior,” the Elder, to distinguish him from his nephew, Notkerus Junior. He came, Ekkehard asserts, of noble and even royal parentage, being probably born about the year 850. At an early age he entered the monastery of St. Gall, in Switzerland, which had been founded by Gallus, the Irish saint, a disciple of Columbanus, in the seventh century. This celebrated man died, A.D. 640, at the age of ninety-five, and his life was written by Walafrid Strabo in two books; the martyrology recording his death upon October 16th. St. Gall itself is now a town of some fifteen thousand inhabitants, and the capital of the canton to which it has given its own name. But the abbey was suppressed in 1805, though the library, filled with valuable manuscripts, still remains. From these ancient parchments P. Gall Morel, Librarian at Einsiedeln, has resuscitated many sequences and hymns formerly employed in their services.

The Sangallensian poets are not, however, very numerous. Hartmann was probably the earliest composer of a “sequence”—a style of sacred poem which we shall consider presently. Then came Notker Balbulus, who has the greater renown. Tutilo and Ratpert and Walafrid Strabo complete the list. St. Gall was for years a noted centre of learning. It is well situated, and from its towers the waters of the Boden-See (from which it is distant but a few miles) can be readily discerned.

Here, then, Notker began his religious life. He had probably seen the light in the green and fertile Thurgau not far away from St. Gall. And his talents were soon so noticeable that he rapidly advanced in the esteem of his associates. Meanwhile—for the Irish and Scottish monks made this a thoroughfare on their pilgrimages to Rome—there came along an Irish bishop named Mark, whose nephew, Maengal, strongly aroused the admiration of Notker. Maengal’s music especially affected him, and he devoutly prayed God to let the Irishman tarry with them at St. Gall. This indeed happened, and Maengal, rechristened Marcellus, remained in Switzerland.

This good tutor now undertook the musical training of Notker, Ratpert, and Tutilo. And from this beginning arose the choral school of St. Gall. Ekkehard’s history of it is most suggestive. It was originally begun, he says, for the study of the Gregorian tones, but these Swiss people had by degrees lost the sweetness of the old Pope’s music. And he borrows the language of John the Deacon, in his life of Gregory, to satirize the “thundering voices” with which such “Alpine bodies” failed to secure the proper modulation. I borrow Baring-Gould’s idiomatic rendering of this significant passage. It runs as follows:

“The barbarous hugeness of those tippling throats, when endeavoring to utter a soft song full of inflections and diphthongs, makes a great roar, as though carts were tumbling down steps headlong; and so, instead of soothing the minds of those who listen, it agitates and exasperates them beyond endurance.”

Such was the character of church music when the song school of St. Gall was started. The monks had already been so fortunate as to secure one of the two Gregorian antiphonaries sent by Pope Adrian to the Emperor Charles the Great. The occurrence was curious enough to be chronicled, and the story merits our own repetition. Metz had been the German music centre, but when the French music clashed with that which was considered the correct and Gregorian method, Charles again solicited from the Pope two priests who were thorough musicians, and should put Metz and her school above criticism. These two men, by name Peter and Romanus, set out thereupon, but took a heavy cold between them at Lago Maggiore (aere Romanis contrario quaterentur). Peter soon recovered, but Romanus advanced from a mere cold into an actual fever, and remained at St. Gall with one of the antiphonaries, while the disgusted Peter, who claimed both copies, was forced to proceed alone and with a single manuscript to Metz.

St. Gall was sufficiently attractive to Romanus for him to make no effort to leave it when he grew convalescent. And these compositions and melodies of his were the foundation upon which, in later years, Notker and Hartmann and the others built their sequences. That which Maengal now effected was the real beginning of that system of music which is so elaborately treated by Dr. Neale in his preface to the second volume of Daniel’s Thesaurus. Perhaps more has been made of it there than it really deserves. It is certainly too far out of the line of this inquiry of ours for us to discuss the point technically. One of the best definitions of the sequence is, however, that of Mabillon, who calls such compositions “rhythmical prayers” (rythmicae preces).

Notker became easily—so Ekkehard asserts—the finest musician about the abbey. He was also a bright and rather witty man. When Augustine was asked what God was doing before He created the world, he replied that He “was building hell for such vain and frivolous spirits” as that of his questioner. The chaplain of Charles the Fat put a similar inquiry to Notker, and got quite as brief a retort. He asked, “What is God doing now?” And Notker stammered out, “Just what He has always done and always will do; He is putting down the proud and exalting the humble!”

There is another of these queer anecdotes which will serve to show that the old monks were by no means destitute of a sense of humor. A certain young Salomon, son of the Count of Ramsweg, was a student of the abbey school, and something of a snob among his fellow-scholars. Notker, Ratpert, Tutilo and Hartmann were of as good family as he, and they did not enjoy his behavior. Finally, through favoritism, Salomon came to be abbot of six monasteries and Bishop of Constance in addition. But in spite of these dignities he had a singular predilection for the Abbey of St Gall, and was accustomed to put on a surplice and go about the place attending the offices like a regular monk—which, by the way, he had no right to do. His old friends found this out, and raised so much of a stir about it that he ceased from the practice. But at night he still persisted in entering the abbey and aiding in the services.

Rudiger, one of the confederates, was therefore set to watch for the coming of the intruding bishop, and when Salomon slipped along toward the church in the darkness the watcher suddenly thrust a light in his face and saw who it was. Then this valiant Rudiger swore the largest oath permitted in those sacred precincts, for he asseverated “by St. Gall” that no stranger in their conventual habit should be around the cloisters at night. Salomon offered endless apologies, and promised to secure permission from the abbot before he wore the surplice again. And he even turned his discomfiture into a partial victory by begging Rudiger to present this request in his behalf. The petition, so voiced, came duly before the “senate” of that monkish republic, which happened, unfortunately for the avaricious and rapacious Salomon, to include his four opposers—“Hartmann, who composed the melody to the Sanctus humili prece; Notker the Stammerer, who made Sequences; Ratpert, who wrote Ardua spes mundi, and Tutilo, who was the author of Hodie cantandus.” These men finally allowed him to come in as usual, provided he would entirely demit his canon’s raiment, and be nothing but a Benedictine monk while within the walls.

Somehow Salomon conceded even this, and one day brought a splendid gift—a gold box encrusted with jewels and containing relics—which he offered to the abbey. All this looked in the direction that the monks feared; and they therefore rejected his present with some scorn. But it did not take long to lift Salomon the Simonist to the Abbacy of Reichenau, and then Archbishop Sfortto contrived at length to secure the wealthy St. Gall for his favorite. Thus Salomon, the detested, became, in spite of all opposition, the abbot of that celebrated cloister.

But St. Gall itself had always prospered, apparently as the sun does according to the theories of some astronomers, for it had been continually receiving cometary accessions that dropped into it unexpectedly. One such was an antiphonary, which, on the principle that “to him that hath shall be given,” fell into the hands of these musical monks through the burning of the Abbey of Jumieges in 851. This was the true origin of the “sequence.” It solved the problem of Notker in a novel manner when he finally examined it, for he had been puzzled at the immense prolongation of the final syllable ia in the Alleluia, which was sung to cover the retreat of the deacon as he ascended to the rood-loft to chant the Gospel. This Alleluia came between the Epistle and the Gospel, and as the deacon had some space to traverse, the ia was nearly interminable; for even a very few seconds became on such an occasion a most perceptible and wearisome interval of time.

This Jumieges antiphonary, in which words were fitted to the Gregorian tones, suggested another treatment of the difficulty. Notker consequently composed the Laudes Deo concinat, and afterward the Coluber Adae male suasor. Iso, his master, approved of them, and Maengal afterward gave him considerable help. The “sequence” in its standard form had a “note to each syllable,” as in modern church music. And this was the beginning of that Book of Sequences perfected by him in 887, and which has gained a merited prominence for the name of Notker Balbulus.

Ekkehard tells certain legends (which may or may not be trustworthy) regarding the suggestion whence some of these sprung. The droning rotation of a slow mill-wheel gave rise, he says, to the sequence Sancti Spiritus adsit nobis gratia; and this is far more credible than the additional information that Notker sent it to “the Emperor” Charles and got back the famous Veni Creator Spiritus—a story which Mabillon utterly confutes. This Emperor was certainly not Charles the Great—who was long ago dead—and it might have been Charles “the Bald” or Charles “the Fat” (the usurper), or Charles “the Simple,” but there seems an antecedent improbability that any such nickname could belong to the grave and great poet of that splendid hymn. And, indeed, we are now positive that it is the composition of Rabanus Maurus, Bishop of Mayence (Mainz), who died in 856.

There is probably some show of reason in the idea that the groaning machinery of a mill should have helped to originate the extended notes of the sequence. The picturesqueness of the story is really its best claim to our notice. I well remember a mill by which I used often to pause in the stillness of night, listening to the wailing protracted cadences of the huge wheel which slowly turned in its bed as the buckets successively filled from the shut, but leaky gates. Hearing this, and comparing it with the “sequence” of the Catholic service, or with the long-drawn tones of a German choral, it is impossible not to be struck by the resemblance.

Then there is another story—indeed, there are several in the Latin which could scarcely be inserted here—but there is certainly one other which both Baring-Gould and Maitland have had sufficient geniality to extract. It refers to the manner in which Notker, Ratpert, and Tutilo—“the three inseparables”—attended to the eavesdropping of one of Abbot Salomon’s spies. This spy was Sindolf, the refectorarius, or steward, a sour-visaged, crab-appleish kind of man, who was never so happy as when he had an evil speech to retail. He particularly delighted in fretting the temper of the abbot with reference to these poets and musicians, but they suspected his design and “set a watch because of him.”

One evening after “lauds” the three were in the “writing-room” (scriptorium) where the manuscripts were prepared and kept, busy with their conversation and having thereto the permission of the prior. Sindolf sniffed scandal in the air, and flattened his ear against the opaque glass, where a convenient crack suffered him to listen to their words. It was night, and Tutilo, a shrewd, lively fellow (homo pervicax), was glad enough to get this occasion against the slinking traitor. In the Acta Sanctorum, and again in Mabillon, copied into the one hundred and thirty-first volume of Migne, we have old Ekkehard’s grim report of this monkish fun.

“There he is with his ear to the glass,” cried Tutilo. “Do you, Notker, because you are a timid little chap (timidulus), go away into the church. But Ratpert, my friend, take down the whip that hangs in the chimney corner and run out-doors. And then comfort my heart (cor meum confortare) by laying on to him with all your might (esto robustus). For I, when you get close enough, will throw open the window in a hurry, catch him by the hair and hang on with a will” (ad me pertractum violenter tenebo). Off went the timorous Notker; out slipped the cheerful Ratpert; open went the window, and the vigorous Tutilo clutched Sindolf by ears and hair together! Then Ratpert rained on the lashes (a dorso ingrandinat), and Sindolf twisted and howled and kicked, and lights began to fly around, and the brethren came running. But Tutilo held on and called for a light and shouted that he had caught the devil; while Ratpert vanished into the night and Notker had entirely disappeared in the church. “Where are Notker and Ratpert?” was the first question. “Oh, they smelled the devil and ran away to ask succor from heaven,” said Tutilo. “And here was I, left to do the best I could with this thing that walks in darkness. And I believe an angel has been sent to chastise him in the rear!”

The sneaky Sindolf was completely abashed, but his temper did not improve under the chastisement. Even Salomon, his patron, laughed at him along with the others, which made the matter worse. So one day, finding a beautiful copy of the Canonical Epistles in Greek which Liutward, Bishop of Vercelli, had sent as a present to Notker, what does the malicious wretch do but cut it to pieces with his knife! Ekkehard adds that the mutilated copy could still be seen in the library of St. Gall.

These two worthies, Ratpert and Tutilo, heartily deserve the place which Ekkehard accords them in his life of Notker. Ratpert walked usually between Notker and Tutilo; a very punctual, studious man who “wore out two pairs of shoes in the year;” a man who seldom left the abbey walls, and who regarded “expeditions” as being to the full “as dangerous as kisses;” a negligent fellow about the offices and masses, claiming that he taught them often enough to his pupils; and finally, a composer of good litanies; dying October 25th, A.D. 900.

Tutilo was a capital companion; genial and ingenious; capable of music on all sorts of pipes and fiddles; who told a good story and made many a good joke; active and agile in his figure, and withal a fine carver, painter, and goldsmith. Some of his ivory carving still exists in the town library of St. Gall—so one historian records in a foot-note—and he was evidently a most skilful musician, whose hymn tunes, composed on the rota, or small harp (the minstrel’s instrument in those days), were always acceptable. He wrote Hodie cantandus, Omnium virtutum gemmis, and Viri Galilaei. This last he sent to “King Charles,” who himself composed a tune to which Tutilo set words called Quoniam Dominus. His royal patron liked him well. “Curse the man,” he said one day, “he is altogether too good a fellow to be a monk!” Ekkehard adds to this list of compositions the sequence Gaudete et cantate as a specimen of Tutilo’s ability in a slightly different direction of music, declaring that “any one who understands music” will notice and appreciate the distinction.

Hartmann was abbot after Salomon; a most learned man, and one who perhaps contributed more to the development of the “sequence” than we are now able to prove.

Of Notker it is only fair to say that he gave to himself the name Balbus, or Stammerer, which was changed, owing apparently to his small stature, into the diminutive, Balbulus. When Innocent III. asked Uadalric, then Abbot of St. Gall, what rank Notker had held in the convent, the abbot replied that he was only “a simple monk,” but was born of noble parents and was thoroughly holy and well educated. On which the Pope declared that they were wretched and wicked people (nequissimi), and would suffer for it (infelices eritis) if they did not celebrate the festival of this man who had been “so full of the Holy Spirit.” Julius II. commanded Hugo, Bishop of Constance, to inquire into the matter. The result established him as a beatified confessor, and so distinguished him by the prefix “Blessed” from Notker “the Abbot,” who was his nephew, and died 973; Notker “the Physician,” who died 1033; Notker “of Liege,” who died 1007, and Notker “Labeo,” who died 1022. B. Notker Balbulus himself died in 912. Salomon, who was then his abbot, died in 919, and in 921 Hartmann succeeded to the dignity.

It would not be difficult to add to this account several superstitious stories; how Notker broke his staff over a dog-devil which went howling through the church; how he had some difficulty with another demon who intermeddled with pen and ink; how he severely handled a flagitious monk; and, generally, how he proved to be a moderate worker of miracles and a pleasant colleague to the other cenobites.

But we turn with a peculiar interest to that little sequence which has made his name immortal. This Media vita in morte sumus is the one which meets us in the Burial Service of the Protestant Episcopal Church:

“In the midst of life we are in death:

Of whom may we seek for succor

But of thee, O Lord,

Who for our sins art justly displeased?”

It is there found in connection with a passage from the Book of Job, and is followed by the Sancte Deus; Sancte fortis; Sancte et misericors Salvator, Amarae morti ne tradas nos; which is in our translation, “Yet, O Lord most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.” All that Notker originally composed is that which is first mentioned above. The rest came about as we shall presently see.

The Rev. F. Proctor, in his History of the Book of Common Prayer, states that this brief sequence—of which he does not appear to know the origin—“was formed from an antiphon which was sung at Compline during a part of Lent.” There is also a singular misapprehension by which the “samphire gatherers” hanging over the cliffs of England at their “dreadful trade” were credited with the suggestion. It was formerly supposed that Notker watched them during their dangerous toil, and so, by another equally strange inadvertence, the fact was taken as a proof that he must have been himself a native or resident of Britain. This, like the other legend of the twenty-year debate upon sequences, proves on inquiry to have no foundation in fact. The story itself is a sufficient explanation without any coloring whatever. It reveals to us the poetic spirit of the devout man who beheld his fellow-creatures poised between life and death, and wrote this short and exquisite meditation thereon.

“The holy Notker,” says Canisius, “made the ‘prose’ of the following lament when the bridge [over the chasm] at Martinstobel was being constructed in a precipitous and most dangerous place. But who added the ‘verses’ I do not know. I have quoted it from a most ancient codex, where it is set to modern notes.” He then proceeds to give it in the ordinary form. It is, as he says, a prose, and must be distinguished from verses of regular metre:

“Media vita in morte sumus, quem quaerimus adjutorem, nisi te, Domine, qui pro peccatis nostris juste irasceris.”

Thus far Notker. Then occur the “verses” in three stanzas:

“Ah homo, perpende fragilis,

Mortalis, et instabilis,

Quod vitare non poteris

Mortem, quocunque ieris.

Aufert te, saepissime,

Dum vivis libentissime.

Sancte deus.

“Vae calamitas inediae,

Vermis fremit invidiae,

Dum audit flentem animam

Mortalis esse utinam!

Nec Christi fati gladius,

Transiret, et non alius,

Sancte fortis.

“Heu nil valet nobilitas

Neque sedis sublimitas,

Nil generis potentia,

Nil rerum affluentia,

Plus pura conscientia

Valet mundi scientia.

Sancte et misericors Salvator,

Amarae morti ne tradas nos.”

It is perfectly plain, then, that this “third sequence”—the Media vita being the second—is derived from the “verses” whose authorship Canisius cannot discover, and the date of which cannot be far from the fourteenth century.

But when we imagine the good monk watching the workmen from the brink of the Goldach, which hurries down through St. Gall toward the Boden-See, we can bring to mind the whole picture. The present bridge is one hundred and sixteen feet long and fully one hundred in height from the swift little stream. It is of wood, and was constructed in 1468. Here, dizzily balancing in mid-air, tradition says that a man, even as Notker gazed, lost his footing and plunged into the abyss. The eternities came together! A spark from the infinite kindled within the poet’s soul. Heaven from on high beheld this single life suddenly hurled to ruin. Earth from beneath reached up and seized upon the thing of earth. And thus it was with us every moment! In the midst of life we were in death, and from none could we seek for help save from God alone—that God, displeased at sinners, who is the sinner’s only hope!

Standing once before the graves at Gettysburg, the tall gaunt figure of Abraham Lincoln paused upon such an eternal edge. His soul took in at one sweep the heroic past and the historic future. And those words which came, so men assure us, almost without premeditation from his lips are the noblest utterance of our time. That compact, terse, brief expression is the essence of national strength. The phrases are vivid with a supernatural brightness: “Government of the people, for the people, by the people must not perish from the earth.” It was so with Notker; and now, wherever that beautiful service is uttered above the dead, the forgotten monk of St. Gall speaks with a voice which touches unaltering humanity, and utters that grave, great thought, preciously protected in its small casket of language, that death is beneath and God is above, and that all our hope must come from Him!

CHAPTER XIV.
WALAFRID STRABO.

Among the pupils of Rabanus Maurus was a boy afflicted with strabismus. He was cross-eyed, or crooked-eyed in some manner, and this fixed upon him the name of Strabo the “squinter.” Like many another monk in that age, he has so sunk himself into his service as to have become a man without a country and almost without parentage. Some therefore contend that he was an Anglo-Saxon, once a monk in London and afterward educated at St. Gall, Reichenau, and Fulda. An obscure tradition even makes him a relative of the Venerable Bede. Another story assigns him to Haymo’s family. Now, Haymo was a monk of Fulda about 850, a man of very liberal opinions, learned, and truly catholic, especially in his denial of the universal authority of the Pope and the doctrine of transubstantiation. It is something of an honor to have been this man’s brother, and it is no discredit to have been related to Bede. At any rate these guesses—for they are little else—serve to show us the repute in which Walafrid Strabo was held.

More accurate investigation reveals a sentence in the preface to the life of St. Gall which seems conclusive. In it Walafrid speaks of “us Germans or Suabians.” Suabia is thus designated as his birthplace, and we find his name among the list of those scholars who did credit to their teacher Rabanus.

His period is the middle of the ninth century, for in 842 he became Abbot of Reichenau in the diocese of Constance, and he died in 849. Dates like these are not hard to verify, for we have many chronicles and records in which the Dark Ages laid the foundations of authentic history. Here lie away in their narrow niches of brief reference many illustrious people. And the work of the hymnologist consists often enough in the same sort of research as secular history demands. Now and then on the dead breast there is a little withered flower ready to crumble into dust.

That curious, peering Trithemius—to whom we are indebted for such laborious inquiries concerning the men of this time—maintains that Walafrid was “rector” of the school in the monastery of Hirschfeld. If this be so it only confirms what we note again and again, that Alcuin and Rabanus were the real instigators of German scholarship. And the work from which we shall presently quote becomes more interesting to us for this reason.

Walafrid left a long catalogue of works behind him. He wrote a valuable antiquarian treatise on the divine offices and usages of the Church. Besides, he is accredited as the author of the lives of St. Gall, St. Othmar, St. Blaithmac, St. Mamma, and St. Leudegaris. He also composed various poems; a preface to the Life of Ludwig the Pious, and a condensation of Rabanus Maurus’s Commentary on Leviticus. He compiled the famous Glossa Ordinaria, which remained the standard commentary on the Bible throughout the Middle Ages. He began the annals of Fulda, which have since been continued by competent hands, notably those of Christopher Brower. He has been called a “pretty good poet for his age”—by which is meant that there was a scanty supply of poetry in the ninth century—a fact which no one is competent to dispute.

It goes without saying that his life was the life of an ecclesiast, restricted to a Chinese minuteness of ritual, and permitting only such visits and journeys as religious business justified. His death occurred on one of these infrequent expeditions. It was in France, whither he had gone—as we are expressly told—in order to hasten some ecclesiastical affair.

These are the meagre and unentertaining facts connected with the name of Walafrid Strabo. He would not have deserved, nor would he have received our notice if two of his hymns (the Laudem beatae martyris and the Gloriam nato cecinere) had not been preserved. These entitle him to mention, and he promptly rises to genuine importance if we can agree with Kellner (see Bibliotheca Sacra, January, 1883, p. 154), that a recently discovered “diary” is from his pen. It is probable that, whether it be authentic or not, it is strictly accurate in its relation of the studies pursued in those schools. And if we assume it to be credible we can revise our dates to correspond.

Thus his school life began in 816, and after its close he went to Fulda, thence to return to his old monastery in 842 as its abbot. These dates are afforded by the document itself, which was originally published in 1857, as a part of the educational report of the Benedictine school of St. Maria of Einsiedeln in Switzerland. It appears to me that its tone and composition are not such as to justify the value which Kellner sets upon it. Walafrid’s name was a convenient one, and this is doubtless no more nor less than a clever historical romance. But it has been composed in the very neighborhood of the scenes it depicts, and the advantages of all the ancient MSS. and traditions have been incalculably great.

The narrative is introduced by a modern preface which speaks of St. Meinrad, the founder of Einsiedeln, as a contemporary of Walafrid. Then we have a statement which tersely exhibits the plan and purpose of the story:

“In the dark hour when the Roman imperial throne collapsed on which Theodoric the Goth had just seated his teacher Avitus, Manlius Boethius committed his spiritual wealth to the Goth Cassiodorus, who transmitted it to the sons of St. Benedict,” etc.

“The seed of Christian instruction had been inherited by the sons of St. Benedict from the age of martyrs and holy fathers. Great seminaries were opened at Fulda, Weissenberg in the bishopric of Speyer, St. Alban in Mainz, St. Gall, Reichenau in the bishopric of Constance, St. Maximin, and St. Matthias in Trier, etc. To these establishments the sons of the nobility resorted, while the Benedictines were their teachers and fathers. Whoever saw one of these schools saw them all as to everything essential. Accordingly, it is our purpose to describe one of them—namely, the school of Reichenau, from which came the founder of Einsiedeln, St. Meinrad, and Walafrid Strabo, who was his schoolmate in Reichenau, and who, four years after him, assumed the Benedictine dress.”

Then follows an assurance to the “intelligent reader” that this account “is not mere poetry,” but is “sustained by authoritative documents,” among which are named the writings of Walafrid himself, of Bede, Alcuin, Rabanus, and the collections of Pez, Metzler, and others. It is plain, then, that Kellner has been misled, and that Professor J. D. Butler, of Madison, Wis., who has made this clever translation from the German, has been likewise deceived. Yet the historical importance of the “diary” remains, and the writings of Alcuin, Bede, and Rabanus, with those of Walafrid, give the original particulars and can be cited in proof. Professor Butler adds a few pleasant details about Reichenau. It was founded in 724, earlier than any neighboring convent except St. Gall. It is on an island in the Lake of Constance, whose lake-girt limits are about two miles by three. It became so rich that it acquired many other properties, and its abbot could journey to Rome and never sleep a night outside of his own domain. The old tower, built by Henry the Black, is still standing, and among the cherished relics of the abbey is a piece of green glass weighing twenty-eight pounds given by Charlemagne, who thought it to be an emerald. There is also a supposititious water-pot from Cana of Galilee, which evidently came from Palestine and shows the mediaeval intercourse with the Holy Land. The revenues of the abbey were not sequestrated until the year 1799. Such is a brief sketch of this religious house which we shall again encounter in the story of Hermannus Contractus.

Walafrid’s narrative begins with the year 815. He saw the vast buildings with surprise and was greeted by a throng of future schoolmates. His teacher had several boys under his care to teach them to read. This he did by the help of a wax tablet—the old Roman method. The letters were scratched on the wax and erased by the blunt end of the pointed “style.” Along with this elementary work came Latin, together with a German primer—in both of which the boys were expected to read.

At harvest time there was a short vacation. The boys rambled through the fields and picked fruit and enjoyed themselves generally.

The second year’s work was the learning of conversational Latin. This was the language of daily intercourse and was employed to express all wants. The grammar of Donatus was studied under a pupil-teacher, and the cases and tenses were rigidly committed to memory. The rod was the penalty for misbehavior. German phrases were translated into Latin and some portion of biblical history was repeated to the scholars at night, which they were obliged to tell again in the morning.

Then follows a description of the dedication of the minster and of the solemn effect of the great High Mass, at which time Walafrid resolves to become a monk.

The year 817 was occupied with grammar and orthography, and the use of Latin was compulsory. Hitherto there had been a trifle of laxity and a few lapses into German were forgiven. Now there was no exception to scholars of this advancement. They wrote from dictation upon their tablets, and the Psalter was in this manner transcribed and memorized.

The fourth year (818) was signalized by the planting of the first grape-vine on the island. Doubtless the fact itself is authentic, and is here introduced owing to its date. And in this year the scholars attack prosody. They study Alcuin (who wrote many verses), and the distichs of Cato, and Bede’s De Arte Metrica. The earlier Christian poets—Prosper and Juvencus and Sedulius—are mentioned. It is strange that the author does not name Prudentius, who was far more of a classic than any or all of these three. But it is quite correct to mention Virgil as a permitted book, and the exercises in poetry in which all were engaged.

In 819, the fifth year, the boys became pupil-teachers themselves. They were further instructed in rhetoric, with illustrations from the Bible to be paralleled from Statius and Lucan, whose works they were studying. Other scholars again were set to work as scribes and copyists. The amusements were the running of foot-races, quarter-staff playing, and “dice,” by which we are probably to understand the very ancient game of backgammon. And again, it is strange that no mention is made of the games of ball, which were decidedly common in those days.

The year 820 is consumed with rhetoric—with Cicero, Quintilian, and the histories of Bede, Eusebius, Jerome, and others. The classic authors were Sallust and Livy, with Virgil and (at last) Prudentius and Fortunatus.

In 821 comes Boethius, attended by more of Cassiodorus, and the pleasant pastime of “dialectics,” or debating. In these debates the enthusiasm was kindled for future controversies. And in other lines—as, for example, in studies of the current legal codes, of the Salic and Ripuarian Franks and Lombards—those who were to be rulers were diligently trained. Here (for this is the exact account of that ancient instruction) we see how the Church held sway over her former pupils, and how the pupils became by and by the exponents of religious opinions and subservient to ecclesiastical decrees.

With 822 we have mention of rhetoric and logic, with oral and written exercises, and in 823 the scholars took up and pursued the studies of geometry and geography according to the light of that period. Then came music with the various instruments, as organ, harp, flute, or trombone. Finally, Walafrid is supposed to record his initiation into the reading of Greek. From the MS. of Homer the boys were instructed, and the account closes abruptly with a reference to the study of astronomy.

Subsequent to this year, 825, Walafrid is believed to have passed considerable time at Fulda with Rabanus Maurus.

These were the ideas and educational methods of that period. Outside of the monasteries and abbeys there was nothing that went on in the way of learning. It needed special establishments, with great wealth, the protection of kings and nobles, and the indefinable terrors of religious authority to perpetuate scholarship. We may despise, as some writers freely do despise, the bigotry and intolerance which obliterated fine manuscripts of the classics to make room for monkish trifles. But we cannot fail to discover the germs of the new poetry of the Church in these unpromising times. Fortunatus and Prudentius were no bad preceptors after all. And even if Walafrid Strabo was not much of a poet, he has served our occasion as a pupil when he might not have gained notice as a writer of hymns.

CHAPTER XV.
HERMANNUS CONTRACTUS AND THE “VENI SANCTE SPIRITUS.”

One of the surprises of history is the long-delayed honor which comes to the modest and the meek. The notable and prominent attract to themselves much of the repute of any age. They even gain the credit of achievements to which they never put a finger. But by and by the “whirligig of time brings in his revenges,” and they that were last become first.

Thoughts like these are sure to come to us when we encounter such a name as this of the poor cripple of Reichenau. Whatever fame he had in his own day gradually disappeared and he has been only a shadowy figure for many years. It is true that Ersch and Gruber, in their great encyclopaedia, say of him that he is “one of the most meritorious men of the eleventh century.” It is also true that Ussermann—himself an almost forgotten authority—has labored to give Hermann his proper meed of praise; and that the Benedictines have patiently collated many little particulars concerning him. Yet he still remains locked up in Latin or in German or in French; and English readers can be pardoned for being utterly ignorant of him and of his works.

This man merits no small share of our notice. He came of good blood, for his father was the Count of Vöhringen in Suabia. He traced his kinship to the famous St. Udalric, whose sister, named Leutgarde, is mentioned (971) in the saintly bishop’s pages. Her son was Reginbald, slain in battle against the Hungarians in 955. This Reginbald had a daughter Bertha, who married Wolfrad, Count of Vöhringen, and died in 1032. Wolfrad, dying in 1010, had a son Wolfrad, who married a lady named Hiltrude and became the father of fifteen children—one of whom was Hermann. This is the simplest form of a genealogy, which the learned chronicler protracts in a marvellous manner, to the great confusion of the modern mind. I have not cared to follow him into the remoter affinities and alliances which add distinction to the poor little paralytic child, who at seven years of age was carried to the great school at St. Gall.

I have said that Hermann was a cripple. He was so completely helpless, indeed, that he could not move without assistance; and his days and nights were full of pain. He was “hump-backed and bow-breasted, crippled and lame.” (Gibosus ante et retro, et contractus, claudus. Pertz: Monumenta: Scriptores: V., 268.) But his mind triumphed over these infirmities. A pathetic legend concerning him assures us that in the visions of the night the Virgin stood before him, radiant and beautiful. As in the old story about the choice of Hercules—which was probably the origin of this—she offers him strength of body combined with ignorance and weakness of mind; or wisdom and ability in a body which should be deficient and sickly to the day of his death. This “second Hercules”—as the chronicler admiringly calls him—promptly chose the last.

He had been born (for his ancestral records and his own Chronicon help us to exactness) on July 18th, 1013. He was admitted to school, probably, though not certainly, at St. Gall, on September 15th, 1020. Hitherto his education had been absolutely neglected. He could not go about alone nor even speak intelligibly (Annales Augustani [1042-55]. In Pertz: Mon. Ger., VII., 126) owing to his paralysis. But he had a devouring desire for knowledge, and rapidly mastered Latin, Greek, Arabic, and (probably) Hebrew, so that he possessed them equally well with his vernacular speech. The convent was the only place for such a poor little waif as he, and thus, within the learned cloisters of St. Gall, he followed reverently upon the shining path of Notker and Tutilo and Ratpert and Hartmann, and added his name to theirs in the development of the sequences and antiphons of the Church.

Nor was this all. He became an excellent historian, a distinguished musician, and a renowned philosopher and theologian. In mathematics he was equally skilled and ingenious. He is considered by some to have invented the astrolabe, the first instrument by which the height and distances of stars were calculated. Assuredly he wrote an exhaustive treatise upon its use, whether he originated it or not; and it is said that he added to his scientific studies the making of clocks and watches. He has left us essays upon the monochord, on the squaring of the circle, on computation and physiognomy and metrical rules and astronomy. These are marked by the inferior attainments of the age, as we might expect, but they display an amount of original research for which we are unprepared.

He was also an excellent scribe, and the library of St. Gall still contains a copy of a work ascribed to Anselm of Canterbury written by him in the fulfilment of a vow. He resembled the Venerable Bede in the universality of his knowledge, and, like Alcuin and Rabanus Maurus, he is one of the great teachers of his time. Always, during these darkening years, there appears to have been some ministering priest in the temple of education—some self-devoted, God-fearing man, who patiently kept the altar-fire burning, and spent his life, to the utmost verge, in climbing those altar-steps with fresh fuel for the flame.

We do not know how much of this work was begun or completed during his life at St. Gall. We are able to say that he translated Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric from the Arabic language, and this of itself should award to him the very highest renown. It is impossible in a single sentence to do justice to this achievement and we must take it more at large.

The dictator Sylla brought the works of the great Greek philosopher, together with his library, to Rome, in the year B.C. 147. This was on the capture of Athens, and these writings were still comparatively unknown in Greece. The philosophy of the Peripatetic school was, of course, familiar to their countrymen; but it was by and through the Latin race and not the Greek, that the “Master of Syllogisms” was to become most potent. Aristotle’s was the controlling system of the Middle Ages. His rules of logic were imperative. They governed theology, and indeed every other form of metaphysics. They restrained with an iron grip the expanding ideas of men. It was against Aristotle, in the person of William of Champeaux, future Bishop of Chalons and founder of the school of St. Victor, that Peter Abelard laid his lance in rest. Even to the days of Dean Swift these ideas bore sway, and when that brilliant man sought his degree from Trinity College, Dublin, he was met by the question whether he reasoned according to Aristotle. And his reply, that he did well enough in his own fashion, was held to be little less than atheism. Nor is this the only comparison which might be aptly instituted between Swift and Abelard.

So Aristotle had his authority and held his sceptre down almost to our own time. But at the commencement his writings were either used in the Greek language or in the Arabic. In the twelfth century the schools of the Moors in Spain were the true centre of philosophy. They first applied his teachings to theology, and to these schools resorted many scholars from other parts of the continent. But such translations as these travelling students brought home were probably of a sort to make intricacy and subtlety more intricate and subtle. A fog had gathered over Europe, and the Dark Ages are indeed no myth. There were few points of light anywhere, and among these few were the bright spots called St. Gall and Reichenau.

Charles Jourdain asserts that only a part of Aristotle was known before 1200 A.D., and that this was through the translation of Boethius. (See Ueberweg: Hist. Philos., I., 367.) So that if Hermannus Contractus translated Aristotle at so early a date, it shows that his rendering was in advance of most, if not of nearly all those which were used in the Western schools. He had a brother, or uncle, Manegold, who died in Palestine. He had another brother Werner, who afterward became a legate to Gregory VII. (Hildebrand) in the fierce struggle between Pope and Emperor in 1077. And he was further well placed both by his family connections and his situation at a centre of learning, to secure the best manuscripts and the best Arabic instruction. (See an elaborate dissertation in Wegelin: Thes. Rerum Suevicarum, II., p. 120.) It evinces decided wisdom and toil on his part to have undertaken and completed this translation; and there is no doubt that the humble paralytic from his bed of suffering influenced materially the scholastic movements of the coming centuries. Could he have seen the swarming thousands who built the abbey of the Paraclete; could he have witnessed in vision the uprising of such schools as St. Victor in France and Oxford in England; could he have heard Roger Bacon confess his indebtedness to those pages; could he have foreseen the infinite consequences both to the preservation and the hindrance of human thought, with what strange zeal he would have traced each painful line!

But he could not know it. He had removed at thirty years of age to his perpetual celibacy at Reichenau—Augia the Rich, as it is called in the Latin tongue. It is built on an island in the western arm of the Lake of Constance. And there, with great mountains to gaze upon and fair waters to catch for him the rosy light of evening; with the brethren of the convent laboring cheerfully in their fields or toiling in their cells, Hermann of Vöhringen, Hermann of Reichenau, Hermannus Contractus, Hermann der Gebrechliche, Hermann the Cripple, spent his uneventful life.

Here he wrote the legends of some of the saints, and here he prepared his valuable compendium of universal history. He calls it a Chronicon, and condensed into its records the story of the world from A.D. 1 to the year 1054, the date of his own death. It is very brief through the first portion of its account of “the Six Ages.” Then its statements are fuller. When it reaches contemporaneous events it becomes exceedingly important to the historical student, for it is in the nature of a chronicle. Here also the man’s own personality occasionally appears. He speaks of Reichenau as Augia nostra and mentions the basilica which Henry III. (“the Black”) has erected to “our patron, St. Mark the Evangelist.” This establishes the fact that Reichenau was his true residence, and gives us the standpoint of the little isle in Lake from which to look out across the dark-green and sometimes stormy waters upon the confusions of the time. These were the days when the Truce of God (1041 A.D.) was necessary in order to prevent the bloody feuds of the barons during Advent, Lent, and from Wednesday evening of each week until the following Monday morning. Yet amid all these conflicts Hermann the Paralytic remained secure, guarded by religion and surrounded by the peaceful lake. And like that lake the Rhine stream of secular affairs flowed always through his life clear and undisturbed.

It is during these closing scenes that a touching entry is made in the pages of the Chronicon. Under the year 1052 the crippled hand slowly traces these words: “At the same time, on January 9th, my mother Hiltrude, the wife of the Count Wolfrad, a pious, meek, generous, and religious woman, and one who was as devoted to and happy in her husband and her seven surviving children as any person could be, closed the last day of her life in about the sixty-first year of her age and the forty-fourth of her marriage, and was buried at the Villa of Altshausen, in a sepulchre under the chapel of St. Udalric which she had herself constructed.” And then follows a brief poem in which the merits and the love of this dear mother are affectionately told.

Hermann, on the best of testimony, was a person of just this amiable and beautiful spirit. He is called hilarissimus, as if to show his great cheerfulness. He was always a strict vegetarian in his diet. He hated injustice; scorned every sort of vice—and Heaven alone knows how much there then was of nameless wickedness!—and finally, he was thoroughly free from all envy and malice. It is a curious testimony to his breadth of mind that one of his biographers says of him (quoting the old adage), that he regarded nothing human as alien to his search.

He preserved this calmness and sweetness of temper to the farthest limit of his days. Not long before he died he said to his faithful friend, Berthold of Constance, “Do not, I say, do not ask me about this; but rather attend to what I will tell you, for in you I do not a little confide. I shall die doubtless in a very short time. I shall not live. I shall not get well.” He added that he was so “seized with an ineffable desire and delight toward that intransitory world and that eternal and immortal life,” that all things of this passing existence seemed empty and vain and dropped like motes (flocci) from him, in the breath of that heavenly air.

And then he proceeded to detail a vision in which he fancied himself reading and rereading the Hortensius of Cicero. His mind was clear; his hopes for religion and for education were high; but all was now over and he must depart. Therefore he quietly and pathetically ends by saying, “Taedet quidem me vivere”—indeed it is wearisome to me to live. And thus, on September 24th, 1054, he ceased from earth—in his forty-second year, and having carried the story of the world down to the end of his own career.

But his works follow him. I do most firmly believe him—and not Robert the Second—to have been the author of the Veni Sancte Spiritus.

The first person to attribute this hymn to the King of France is Durand, (Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, Lib. IV.) His book treats of ceremonial observances and is among the rarest of printed volumes. The splendid copy upon vellum in the Astor Library is not only beautiful in itself, but it is extremely valuable as the third specimen of typography in existence. Only two works—one of them the Bible and another the Psalter of Mainz—had been previously printed from movable types. I have personally verified the reference and its English rendering is as follows:

“Notker, Abbot of St. Gall, in Germany, first composed sequences with notes of his own in the Alleluia. And Nicholaus the Pope [Nicholas II., 1059-1061] granted that they should be sung at masses. But Hermannus Contractus, a German, inventor of the astrolabe, composed these sequences: Rex omnipotens and Sancti Spiritus and Ave Maria and the antiphons Alma redemptoris mater and Simon Barjona. Peter, Bishop of Compostella, made the Salve regina. And the King of France, Robert by name, composed the sequence, Veni Sancte Spiritus and the hymn Chorus novae Hierusalem.”

It is hard to crowd into a paragraph more errors than are in this. Notker was not Abbot of St. Gall. Innocent III. was very severe upon Udalric of St. Gall, because such a spiritual and able man had lived and died unhonored among them; a simple monk whose labors and death received no special attention in their religious year.

Nor did Hermann write the Sancti Spiritus adsit; for this, on the best of testimony, was Notker’s. It was so sung at Rome under Innocent III.; and Ekkehard the Younger, in his history of Notker, pointedly claims it for him.

It is very doubtful whether Hermann invented the astrolabe for measuring the distances of stars. His two treatises are upon its use, and he is evidently very familiar with it. But it was first made serviceable in navigation by the Portuguese—if we are to believe Evelyn (in his Navigation)—and the study of astronomy was greatly cultivated by the Arabic schools in Spain and elsewhere about this period. J. A. Fabricius indeed mentions that the astrolabe was “commonly employed in the days of Ptolemy.”

The Ave Maria is supposed by Koch to belong to the thirteenth century and some have ascribed it to Adam of St. Victor. It is, perhaps, by Heribert of Eichstettin (died 1042). Hermann wrote the Ave praeclara maris stella, which might have been mistaken for this other.

The Salve regina is assigned by Durand to Peter of Compostella. Gerbert names several possible authors, but evidently follows the leadership of Durand. (De Cantu, etc., II., 27.) And yet Trithemius, with every really critical scholar, credits it to Hermann. It is exhaustively considered by Wegelin and definitely conceded to him. (Thes. Rerum Suevicarum, II., p. 120 ff.)

Robert the Second cannot claim the Chorus novae Hierusalem. It is the production of Fulbert of Chartres (died 1029), and is included without question in every complete edition of his works.

Thus the absolute authority of Durand is much shaken. He was a lawyer in the thirteenth century, who studied at Bologna and taught at Modena; a legate of Pope Martin IV.; dean of the church at Chartres, and Bishop of Mende. The fact that he was dean of Chartres, and yet ascribes the Chorus Novae, not to Fulbert but to Hermannus, is suggestive, but not convincing.

So Durand was the first person to affix the name of Robert II. to the Veni Sancte. Trithemius comes next in order; the Abbot of Spanheim; historian and scholar; indefatigable in researches, but erratic and prejudiced; born 1462 and dying 1516. His true name is Johann von Trittenheim and we derive this, and other information about authors and their works, from his Liber de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis—a biographical dictionary like those of Jerome, Gennadius, and Isidore, to whose works he really furnishes an Appendix. Egon (sometimes known as Ego) in his account of Reichenau’s distinguished men (De Viris illustribus Augiae divitis, quoted by Pez: Thesaurus Anecdotorum, I., 3; 68. Cf. Migne, 143) declares that Trithemius was “unjustly hostile to the monks of Reichenau” in asserting that “our Hermannus” was from St. Gall, when even Metzler conceded, on behalf of his own convent, that Hermann had changed his residence from St. Gall to Reichenau. Be this as it may, the positive statement of Trithemius, which gives the Veni Sancte to Robert II. instead of to Hermann, has been generally accepted. Cardinal Bona (1677), Louis Archon (1704-11), and others agree with him.

But there is a break in the continuity of faith. Clichtove—an authority much esteemed—expresses no opinion about the author of the Veni Sancte further than to say quisquis is fuerit—whoever he was.

Rambach, in his Anthology, comes now to the rescue. (Anthologie, I., 227.) He says it is “ganz unstreitig von Robert;” and all the German critics, with the single exception of Daniel, have followed this authority blindly. Whatever the Germans said has usually been enough for the English. Therefore the Veni Sancte is in every collection attributed, without a shadow of doubt, to Robert the King.

There should have been less positiveness about this if the accurate Daniel had been noticed more carefully. He praises the language of Clichtove, who says that the author, “whoever he was,” must have been “inwardly filled with light,” and he italicizes the quisquis is fuerit. But as Robert, with only three others, appears to have escaped the wreck of the sequences in the sixteenth century, even Daniel allows the Veni Sancte to him; and Archbishop Trench finds that “there exists no good reason why we should question” that Robert wrote it.

We may dismiss any conjectures about Innocent III. having been its author, although great efforts have been made to credit this hymn to his pen. Dom Remy Cellier and Migne seem the most strongly partisan, but their remarks and references are weak. (Scriptores Ecclesiastici, vol. xiii., p. 109, note. Also Patrologia, 141; 901.)

A sample of the general looseness of citation can be found in Kehrein (No. 125), who announces that Gerbert “holds Hermannus Contractus to be the author” of the Veni Sancte. Gerbert does nothing of the kind. He names Hermann with others. It is quite true, though, that he does not name Robert.

Setting aside Innocent III. for cause—although Brander of St. Gall, in his Index Sequentiarum, grants this to him—the authorship of the hymn rests between the king and the monk. I say “for cause,” since Innocent was at the summit of temporal power, and his position was a very tempting one to posthumous flattery. He is credited with the Ave mundi spes Mariae. He did not write the Stabat Mater, nor did he compose the Veni Sancte. Let any one examine the Ave mundi and he will renounce all hope that the man who prepared this could ever have written the others, or either of them. Besides, Wrangham is likely to be correct when he assigns this latter sequence to Adam of St. Victor. It is precisely in Adam’s style of metrical composition; it is not found before the fourteenth century, and its tone is modern. It can therefore be said that Innocent deserves no place among the Latin hymn-writers.

Now, Robert II. is much in the same condition as Innocent III. His is a shining name to which to affix popular hymns. He has been credited with the Ave maris stella—the parent of all hymns to the Virgin. The sequence Sancti Spiritus adsit is not his, on the testimony already adduced; but in the year 1110 the “ancient customs of Cluny,” collected by St. Udalric (Hermann’s ancestor) gives us this “at Pentecost” (D’Achery: Spicilegium, I., 641), with the “response,” Spiritus sanctus. This would serve to show that such praise to the Holy Spirit was usual. With the Chorus Novae we have already dealt. And the Rex omnipotens belongs to Hermann though it is ascribed to Robert—another instance of inaccuracy, which casts a ray of light upon the present problem.

Those sequences of which Robert was the possible author are printed in Migne’s Patrologia (141, 959 ff.). Only one of them merits a word of notice. It is the Te lucis auctor personent. Daniel assigns this to the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but Mone and Koch to the fifth. These last are probably right. It is early found in the Anglo-Saxon Church and is among the old Vatican MSS. and the hymns collected by G. Cassander. It is scarcely possible that it comes down as late as the eleventh century.

Robert’s other sequences are six in number and of no importance. His personal history is pathetic enough. He was the son of Hugh Capet; born at Orleans in 970 and died at Melun, July 20th, 1031, having been sole king since 996, though he had been crowned in 988. His first wife was Susanne, an Italian princess; and we learn from his contemporary, Richer of Rheims, that one of his first public acts was to repudiate her on the plea that she was too old for him, and that he refused to restore her dowry. His next marriage was with his distant cousin Bertha—a cousin four times removed—the widow of the Count of Blois. This marriage was inconvenient to the Emperor Otho, as it would have brought the House of Capet into the line of succession to certain lordships in the old Kingdom of Burgundy. So Pope Gregory V., the kinsman of Otho, required Robert to give up Bertha, not because Susanne was still alive, but because the Church forbade the marriage of cousins in even the fourth degree. At first Robert refused, but when his kingdom was laid under an interdict, he showed as little manhood in standing by his second wife as he had shown humanity and justice to his first. Such a ban was too severe to be borne and the king yielded, though Baronius says he tried to take back his wife Bertha in spite of it all. His life and kingship belong to French history, and can be found there. His disposition was that of a monk and not of a monarch. He founded four monasteries and built seven churches. He supported three hundred paupers entirely and a thousand in part. His reign lasted—thanks to ecclesiastical influence—for thirty-four years. It was troubled and not especially pleasant; and for his third wife the king had married the handsome shrew Constance, the daughter of William Count of Arles. Pious and excellent man that he is reputed to have been, he had a natural son, Amauri, who was great-great-grandfather to Simon de Montfort. Truly, when all is said and done, Robert II. is hardly the author in whom we would like to believe with all our hearts when we sing—

“Holy Spirit, come and shine

Sweetly in this heart of mine.”

Per contra, Hermann of Reichenau grows more interesting the more he is studied. He has been so unfortunate as to be confused with other persons in two or three cases. By Brander he is identified with Hartmann of St. Gall, and the sequence Rex omnipotens is taken from him.[8] The pretty little sequence, Veni Sancte Spiritus et reple, which Königsfeld thinks to be his, is doubtless no earlier than the fourteenth century and by some anonymous composer who has merely imitated the great masters.

Beside the Rex omnipotens he composed the Ave praeclara maris stella, where his name gains another misprint and becomes “Heinricus, monachus San Gallensis.” This poem was thought worthy of the authorship of Albertus Magnus (Albert von Regensburg), and to him accordingly Wackernagel and Koch credit it. Mone has vindicated the claim of Hermann which is set forth in Migne. (Patrologia, 143; 20 ff.) So that we are again sure of a piece which has been meritorious enough to be coveted.

Then comes the antiphon Simon Barjona, which Du Meril calls Simon Baronia and of which no trace remains. Two other sequences are, however, extant, and are beyond any question or debate. They are the Salve regina, which Daniel calls a “most celebrated antiphon,” and the Alma redemptoris mater, the refrain of which Chaucer used in that “Prioress’s Tale,” which Wordsworth has modernized.

In addition we must observe that the Veni Sancte is attributed to Hermann simultaneously and by the same authority as that which credits him with the other sequences. Two pieces—Vox haec melos pangat and Gratus honos hierarchia—are lost. But the Salve regina was worth contending for; and Gerbert names Gregory II., Peter of Compostella, St. Bernard, and “Adhemar, Episcopus Podiensis” (Bishop of Puy and his own candidate) together with Hermannus Contractus. Nevertheless, Trithemius, Gerbert, and, indeed, everybody are heard to declare that Hermann was “the marvel of the age,” the best man of his time in music and the author of a work on metrical rules. He is known as Doctor Egregius, and it is beyond any peradventure that he was capable of writing the Veni Sancte.

The only arguments that are employed to prove that Robert was the author are very weak. The first is that there was no sufficient competitor. But surely Hermannus Contractus is now a competitor of real merit and importance. Then, too, the king was a kind of religious pet, and such persons receive more than their due. But the second argument is weaker still. It amounts in brief to the harmony displayed in the poem between the king’s life and his lovely verses. It strikes one, however, that an invalid like Hermann might have had fully as deep a religious experience as any such king. Moreover—and this is a vital fact—the Veni Sancte is found in the German hymnaries almost exclusively. This point was insisted upon in the controversy about the Veni, Creator; and Charles the Great in this respect had the advantage over Gregory the Great, until the claim of Rabanus Maurus, another German, was thoroughly examined. But among all the sources carefully edited by Kehrein from Daniel, Mone, and elsewhere, the French collections do not present themselves. On the contrary, in this elaborate list we find St. Gall, Kreuzlingen, Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Mainz, Ebersberg, Rome (1481), Venice (1497), with later examples printed at Cologne, Prague, Eichstettin, Lubeck, and Basel. Brander also found the hymn in the earliest codices of the three great neighboring cloisters of St. Gall, Einsiedeln, and Reichenau. Meanwhile the only notice of it in France comes from the Paris Breviary, which is of recent date.

There is but one consideration further. I trust that I have established the perfect possibility that Hermannus Contractus might have been the author equally as well as Robert. The men lived in the same period to which, on the testimony of the best critics, the hymn is considered to belong. They were alike in possibilities of Christian experience and of musical and poetical temperament. But here they begin to diverge; and the preference is decidedly in favor of Hermann, whose hymn is found in the three oldest codices of his own neighborhood; of St. Gall, where he studied; of Einsiedeln, where it is possible that he was a resident; and of Reichenau, where he certainly lived from the age of thirty until his death. He could scarcely have gone about very much in his helpless and crippled condition; and these three conventual establishments are within a moderate distance of each other. From his seventh year he was to be discovered always somewhere in that vicinity, and the historians of St. Gall and of Reichenau positively claim the Veni Sancte as his.

It is only left for us to lay the Salve regina side by side with the Veni Sancte. A man who wrote upon metre ought to possess some excellence in the art of which he wrote, and these pieces placed together display a graceful and ingenious versification which is not at all usual in that century. It is not claimed that either Robert or Hermann wrote other hymns in the identical stanza form of the Veni Sancte. Therefore nothing is available for direct comparison. But as to the spirit of each there can be no debate. Robert never composed anything else like the Veni Sancte, and it certainly seems as if Hermann did compose a sequence which bears a passing resemblance; and which I have endeavored to translate with its occasional rhymes and assonances:

Salve regina, mater misericordiae

Vita, dulcedo et spes nostra, salve.

Ad te clamamus exules filii Hevae.

Ad te suspiramus gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle.

Eia ergo advocata nostra, illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte

Et Jesum benedictum fructum ventris tui nobis post hoc exilium ostende,

O clemens, O pia, O dulcis virgo Maria.

Hail O queen, mother of pitifulness!

Life and delight and our confidence, hail!

To thee we exiles, children of Eve, are crying.

To thee we aspire, groaning and moaning in this the vale of our sorrow.

Lo, thou therefore, our advocate, turn upon us those pitiful eyes of thine,

And after this exile show us Jesus, the blessed fruit of thy womb,

O merciful, O pious, O sweet Virgin Maria.

This is another of his sequences, the Rex regum Dei agne, found by Brander among the antiquities of St. Gall:

King of kings, Lamb of God, mighty Lion of Judah,

The death of sin by the merit of the cross and the life of justice; giving the fruit of the tree of life for the taste of wisdom; the medicine of grace for the loss of glory,

Since thy blood restrained the might of the sword of flame, opening the garden of paradise, the seed of obedience, the medicine of grace.

This day is illustrious to the Lord; peace is on the earth, lightning to the shades below and light to the saints above; the day of the double baptism of law and gospel.

Christ is the passover to man; while the old passes the new arises; rejoice my heart, freed from ferment, full of the bread unleavened.

Since the enemy are overwhelmed, with stained door-posts eat the sacrifice on the paschal night, at home, with the bitter herb of the field,

Let your loins be girt and your shoes bound on, have the staff in the hand, and eat the head with the legs and the purtenance thereof.

Wash us this day, O Christ, cleansing us with hyssop; and make us worthy of this mystery, drying the sea, boring the jaw of Leviathan with a mighty hook.

Rejoice us with the cup and fill us; arouse us, drinking from the brook in the way, thou our propitiation, thou priest and sacrifice, thou wine-press and stone of offence and grape!

O fragrant flower of the virgin rod,

O light full of sevenfold dew,

Fairer in beauty than the juice of the grape,

The blush of the rose, the candor of the lily.

How camest thou with such pity to bend to the help of this little world; that thou mightest share our sorrows and be our Redeemer from the birthmark of sin, bearing the curse of sin?

O Lord, Kinsman of thy servants,

The hope of the first and of the last resurrection,

Confirm thy covenant to the seed of Abraham, and us, O Leader immortal, reviving with thyself, who are dead with thee to our old father Adam, strengthen, joining us to thy mightier members.

Give us the paschal feast of the life eternal, thou Paschal Lamb!

The question before us is not one of theology but of literature. Did the man who wrote those verses write these also?

Veni, Sancte Spiritus,

Et emitte coelitus

Lucis tuae radium.

Veni, pater pauperum,

Veni, dator munerum,

Veni, lumen cordium;

Consolator optime,

Dulcis hospes animae,

Dulce refrigerium:

In labore requies,

In aestu temperies,

In fletu solatium.

O lux beatissima,

Reple cordis intima

Tuorum fidelium!

Sine tuo numine

Nihil est in homine,

Nihil est innoxium.

Lava quod est sordidum,

Riga quod est aridum,

Sana quod est saucium;

Flecte quod est rigidum,

Fove quod est frigidum,

Rege quod est devium!

Da tuis fidelibus

In te confidentibus

Sacrum septenarium;

Da virtutis meritum,

Da salutis exitum,

Da perenne gaudium!

Come Holy Spirit,

And send forth the heavenly

Ray of thy light.

Come, Father of the poor;

Come, giver of gifts;

Come, light of hearts.

Thou best consoler,

Sweet guest of the soul,

Sweet coolness;

In labor, rest;

In heat, refreshment;

In tears, solace.

O blessedest light,

Fill the inmost parts

Of the heart of thy faithful!

Without thy divinity

Nothing is in man,

Nothing is harmless.

Wash what is base;

Bedew what is dry;

Heal what is hurt;

Bend what is harsh;

Warm what is chilled;

Rule what is astray.

Give to thy faithful,

In thee confiding,

Thy sevenfold gift.

Give the reward of virtue;

Give the death of safety;

Give eternal joy.

This very singular construction of clauses is apparent to the eye at once. Let it be remembered that Robert uses it nowhere else, and that the most of Hermann’s writings are gone. This chance for the “higher criticism” is therefore taken from us. If it could be shown, however, that this was a method employed by the monk of Reichenau in his prose works, the case might be regarded as absolutely proven, in so far as it demonstrates that the bulk of the presumptive evidence is in his favor.

But here we are at fault. We can only add probability to probability and leave all absolute demonstration alone. Pez has preserved not merely Egon’s account of Hermann’s life, but he has edited Hermann’s treatises on the astrolabe (Thes. Anecdot. Tom., III., pt. 2, p. 94) from a MS. codex in the monastery of St. Peter at Salzburg. His musical treatise is reprinted by Gerbert. (Scriptores Eccl. de Musica, vol. ii., p. 124.) The didactic poem reciting the combat of the Sheep and the Flax—always recognized as the production of Hermann—is in Migne’s Patrologia and also in Du Meril’s Poesies Populaires. Unfortunately none of these writings are of a sort to help us. We cannot by their assistance make any headway in critical analysis.

It is noticeable that J. A. Fabricius in his great work on the Middle Age and later Latin writers, allows Hermann to be the author of the Veni Sancte, following the testimony of Egon and Metzler. And it is more than noticeable that Du Meril—himself a Frenchman—should also apparently concede the hymn to this German.[9]

I have made an exhaustive search for everything bearing upon the life and writings of Hermannus Contractus. I have pursued him and Robert through the Quellen of German history; through the writings and compilations of Canisius and Despont and Urstitius and Martene and Mabillon and D’Achery and Pertz and the Monumenta Germaniae Historica of the “Society for Opening the Sources of German History.” In these and in the encyclopaedias of La Rousse and Ersch-Gruber and the great Patrologia of Migne, I have investigated every by-path and blind alley. It is abundantly clear that he was the most distinguished man of his region, and, likely, of his period. Usserman and Possevin have devoted attention to him. (Prodromus Germ. Sacr. Tom. I., p. 145 sqq., De Apparatu.) His didactic poem on the “Eight Principal Vices” is in Haupt’s Zeitschrift, vol. xiii. His lives of Conrad and of Henry III. have not been preserved. That he was a very voluminous writer is also evident. After giving the names of some of his sequences Metzler adds that there were cetera mille alia—a thousand more. So also speaks Trithemius; and indeed this testimony is universal.

A single line of inquiry has been left to the American student. We have lists of the MSS. in the various libraries of Europe. If it were only possible to examine these with reference to the Veni Sancte the matter could be definitely settled. The Rheinau (Reichenau) library is rich in hymnaries. Haenel’s “No. 53”—whose library number is 91—is, for instance, a Liber hymnorum of the tenth to the twelfth centuries. There are several others—breviaries and collections of hymns—dating to the twelfth century; and one book, “No. 124” (Lib. No. 75), which is marked Sequentiae propriae, etc., and which is likely to have the Veni Sancte. In the eleventh century at St. Gall they have “No. 381” (St. Gall No. 486) which is a codex insignis—a very beautiful MS.—containing the “earliest collection of hymns and poems of writers dwelling at St. Gall.” In this same century appears the Anselm, which is noted as a codex nobiliter scriptus ab Herimanno, qui se hoc libri decus ex voto perfecisse testatur (pag. 6), a manuscript elegantly written by Hermann [“Herimann” is his own spelling of his name in the Chronicon, by the way], who says on page 6 that he has accomplished this excellent volume in pursuance of a vow. Among these St. Gall MSS. can be found the Salve regina, bearing the date 1437. If it were made a point of investigation it might be discovered that in both Reichenau and St. Gall the Veni, Sancte Spiritus is in codices which utterly remove it from the perplexity of its authorship, and positively join it to the name of Hermann.

One can sum up the whole discussion in a few sentences. Robert wrote no other valuable hymns; Hermann did write several. Robert was not specially skilled in metrical science; Hermann was the author of a treatise on the subject. Robert was a poet and a musician; Hermann was his superior in both departments. Robert had trouble and sorrow and Christian experience; Hermann must certainly have had as much as he, and more. Robert has had poems attributed to him which have failed of proof, and none of his own verses seem ever to have been misappropriated or missing; Hermann has had more taken from him than given to him.

In the matter of authority we are to note:

1. That the historians of St. Gall and of Reichenau claim for Hermann the Veni Sancte.

2. That the hymn is found in the earliest codices of both places; and of Einsiedeln, which is in the neighborhood.

3. That Clichtove is in doubt and Daniel is in doubt; that J. A. Fabricius and Du Meril incline toward Egon’s statement; that Trithemius is not entirely unprejudiced; and that Migne, gathering nearly everything (as I have verified from the originals), leaves a strong presumption in Hermann’s favor.

I may appear to make a good deal too much of this matter of mediaeval jealousy. But no student of those times needs to be told that the jealousy between the various cloisters was excessive. There is a letter of the Reichenau monk Gunzo, written in 960. (Martene, I., 296.) It is addressed to the “holy congregation at Reichenau” and describes his journey to St. Gall. The distance was great enough to exhaust the learned brother; he was lifted off of his beast and carried in by hospitable hands. Notwithstanding which he vents his indignation upon their methods and their lack of scholarship. They are self indulgent; they are a fraud on the face of the earth. Nihil inde sed fraudis molamina parabantur—they do nothing there except contrive a great mass of deception, says the angry Gunzo. They attacked him on his grammar; and he attacked them in turn on their loquacity. The epistle is grimly humorous at this distance of time; but the bitterness was altogether too genuine to be pleasant.

Far away from the most of these noises—separated by the waters of the lake from the trampling pilgrim-bands who went to and fro between the East and West—Hermann of Reichenau passed his quiet hours. His convent was rich. Its abbot was said to be able to journey to Rome and not sleep anywhere on the way except upon his own soil. It had been founded in 724 under the auspices of Charles Martel. Such was the admirable situation of this religious house—sufficient to itself in the midst of all changes.

They buried Hermann in his ancestral tomb at Altshausen. In 1631 “three bones” of him were exhumed and carried “by force” to the monastery of Ochsenhausen, but who took them and who resisted the taking of them, we are not told. These are the meagre particulars of a life gentle, patient, and unassuming—the life of a scholar and of a poet—who mastered great obstacles by the genius of faith.

Three hundred years before Christ there came into Ceylon the Buddhist missionary Mahinda. The king received him kindly and built for him and his monks a convent on the hill Mihintale, to the east of the royal city. On the western face of this hill Mahinda had his own retreat cut out from the living rock. Still can be seen—though after two thousand years—this study in which the great teacher of Ceylon “sat and thought and worked through the long years of his peaceful and useful life.” Under the cool shadow of his rock, with his stone couch on which to repose, and with the busy plain, so far removed from him, sending its faint noises up from below, there wrought the sage. And there he died at last and was buried in the neighboring Dagāba. Modern times have nearly forgotten him, but no story of that valley or that island is complete without his name.

And so, in this later manner, lived and died Hermann Count of Vöhringen, who laid down earthly honors to take up the pursuit of heavenly glory; who overcame peevishness of mind and weakness of body by faith and hope and love; who looked out upon his times from this serene distance, and who went to his last sleep beneath the shadow of the rock.

Note.—I am not ignorant that Jourdain (Recherches critiques sur l’Age et l’Origine des Traductions latines d’Aristote. Paris, 1819 and 1843) has attacked the ascription of translations of Aristotle from the Arabic to our Hermann, denying that the cripple of Reichenau possessed any knowledge of that tongue. Briefly stated his arguments are these: 1. That Trithemius followed Jacobus of Bergamo in ascribing to H. Contractus a knowledge of Arabic. 2. That Metzler (whom he calls Mezler) has added the statement about the Poetics and Rhetoric. 3. That every one else has followed these two authorities. 4. That “H. Alemannus” wrote in Toledo, to which the other Hermann could not have journeyed. 5. That the translations were by this “H. Alemannus” (Hermann the German) who flourished in the first half of the thirteenth century.

It is enough of a reply to say: 1. That the concluding words of a manuscript relate, not to its author, but to its transcriber. The MS. mentioned by Jourdain and the other MS. in the Bibliotheque Royale of the fifteenth century (viz., Doctrina Matumeti, quae apud Saracenos magnae auctoritatis est, ab Hermanno latine translata. Cod. MS., No. 6225) are both later than their original date. This second MS. may be by Hermann de Schildis, a monk of the thirteenth century. 2. Every one has not “followed” the authority of Metzler and Trithemius. The “Anonymus Mellicensis” (twelfth century) enumerates treatises by Hermannus Contractus upon Computation, Astronomy, Physiognomy and Poetry, which at least imply that Aristotle had largely affected his studies. 3. It is notable also to find H. Alemannus quoting Cicero in his two introductions, when we know H. Contractus to have been very fond of Cicero. 4. H. Alemannus says that he has met great “impediments” and “difficulties” in accomplishing this translation, and that the difference between Latin and Arabic poetry forbade a poetical rendering. Which would coincide with H. Contractus’s personal obstacles and with his natural desire as a poet to attempt a rendering in verse. 5. H. Alemannus refers to “Johannes Burgensis” (John of Burgau, in Suabia) as a bishop and the king’s chancellor and his personal friend and the promoter of this work. I cannot find “John of Burgau;” but H. Contractus was a Suabian, and Suabia is very near to Reichenau. H. Contractus was also closely associated with Conrad and Henry III., whose lives he wrote.

It is a curious question this. It is only another proof of the neglect into which a great man has fallen. For Hermann is called “nostri miraculum seculi” by the next generation who came after him. And there is no absolute proof that, “without lexicon or grammar” (for so Jourdain puts it), he could not have mastered Arabic. Observing the topics of his other writings cognate to those of Aristotle, I am therefore not in the least inclined to yield to even M. Charles Jourdain.

CHAPTER XVI.
PETER DAMIANI, CARDINAL AND FLAGELLANT.

It is not every poet who begins by keeping the swine and ends by wearing the red hat and purple robe of a cardinal-bishop. Nor is it every poet who commences as a forlorn and deserted foundling, to whom it is a great mercy to have even swine to keep by way of getting his daily bread. But all this and more befell Damiani.

We are not informed about his parentage, except that he had a mother who abandoned him, and a brother (or, more probably, an uncle) who took pity on him. He was born in Ravenna. Some authorities say it was in 988; others that it was in 1007. A modern hymnologist, anxious to be right (though he is frequently wrong), sets it at 1002. But 1007 has the greatest weight of evidence.

This brother, or uncle, had compassion on the lad, and poor little outcast Peter was sent by him “into his fields to feed swine,” a much more honorable employment of course in Italy than in Palestine, and one which he shared with Nicholas Brakespeare, the English pope, Hadrian IV. What was his previous history we cannot discover, though the Acta Sanctorum for February 23d is full of legendary accounts. We only know that his natural abilities attracted the notice of another relative (brother, some say), who was an archdeacon at Ravenna. He it was who advanced Peter to the opportunities of education, and who proved so fast a friend that the boy took his patron’s name for his own. As Eusebius called himself Eusebius Pamphili (Pamphilus’s Eusebius), so Peter became Peter Damiani, “Damian’s Peter,” and this designation has adhered to him ever since. It is amusing to read now and then of Peter Damianus, as if Damiani were an Italian nominative case instead of a Latin genitive.

His birth was too obscure to lead any person to interfere with him. He therefore quietly studied and improved, to the edification of his fellow-pupils and the admiration of his teachers. His school-training was, first of all, in Faenza. Thence he was sent to Parma, and eventually he returned to Ravenna, where he taught with distinction and popular approval, until he was nearly or quite thirty years old.

The age was barbarous and good professors were scarce. It seems to have been expected that brilliant minds would go on shining like those exhaustless lamps which are fabled to have been found in the tombs of the old magicians. If such was the case, with the intense intellect of Damiani he must have tapped some source of real spiritual power early in his course, for he burns brightly even now as we read his vivid truthfulness and peruse some of his lovely verses, out from which leap, nevertheless, tongues of flaming scorn for hypocrites and simonists.

Yes, the age was barbarous, and therefore Peter Damiani was soon a professor, with many students and an abundance of fees. Knowledge in those days not only meant power but wealth, and he was fast growing rich in Ravenna. It was a delightful life, but it did not suit him. He was, in fact, the “spiritual kinsman, and in many respects the pioneer” of Gregory VII. Hildebrand came to be, after awhile, his personal friend, his sanctus Sathanas, his Mephistopheles, his instigator and stimulant. Of a sudden, then, he departed from Ravenna to take up his abode with the hermits of Fonte Avellana, near Gubbio. Here he was known by the name of Frater Honestus, and surely he deserved the title, for he was a swift witness against every sort of sin. Guy, the abbot, persuaded him to undertake the instruction of the brethren, and thus he found himself back at his old work of teaching once more.

It was not long before the new monk became prior of the convent. Then, in 1041, he rose to be abbot. And then, in 1047, he indited to Pope Leo IX. his famous Liber Gomorrhianus. This Gomorrah Book is just what its name implies. It is one of the earliest protests uttered within the Church against the awful wickedness which was everywhere prevalent.

The subject is far too unpleasant for me to deal with it at any length. And yet this disagreeable topic forces itself upon the notice of the student of that period wherever he may turn. Most ingenious and sophistical distinctions were made in those days relative to sin. This thing, for instance, was wrong; but that other was not half so wrong as this was. Such an offence was to be condoned by a trifling penance, and such another was to be only met by years of contrition. Against all this hypocritical nastiness Damiani set his pen. No more scathing book was ever written. And the only wonder is that it has evaded the vigilance of the men who suffered by it, and has made its escape into type, never again to be in peril of its existence. Bayle—who may be safely accounted unapproachable in such abstruse inquiries—has given us the whole story of this book. It was a terrible scourge to the vices of the clergy, and even Baronius allows that it was not written one moment too soon.

The pope to whom this remarkable document was addressed was a man of appropriate spirit. He was the third in the series of five able German popes, who labored so hard in the cause of disciplinary reform. At Hildebrand’s advice, he had laid aside the papal insignia, which he donned at his election, and came to Rome as a barefooted pilgrim in 1048. He aimed to put down simony, to stop the barter and sale of benefices, and to secure the celibacy of the clergy. To this end he used the synods with vigor, and was ready for almost any proposed reform which fell in with his line of operations. He was of the German, not the ultramontane party, and therefore was quite liberal in his construction of the great text, “Thou art Peter,” and went so far as to say that the Church should first of all be built upon the true rock, which was Christ. To him, then, the Gomorrah Book went, and it made a stir.

The next four popes occupied among them no longer period of ecclesiastical rule than from the year 1054 to the year 1061. Matters were unsettled. No one continued in office. But the finger of Hildebrand the cardinal was mightier than the hand of any pope. Nicholas II. was guided by him, and Alexander II., who came forward in 1061, was unquestionably under his control. And when Alexander appeared, it seemed that the Gomorrah Book was still an element of unrest and disturbance, at a time when the claims of an Antipope (Honorius II.) had been set up by the Imperialist party, and it was necessary for even Hildebrand’s friends to give as little offence as possible to the clergy. For the election of Alexander was clearly irregular, because it was in defiance of the rules laid down by Nicholas II. at a Lateran Synod in 1059. With a genial and suave manner the new pontiff now borrowed the work for the ostensible purpose of having it copied by the help of the Abbot of St. Saviour. That was the last that Damiani saw of it for some little while.

If Alexander thought that the hermit abbot of Fonte Avellana would submit to this method of suppression he flattered his soul in vain. Damiani, after a reasonable delay, appealed to his friend Hildebrand. The book was like a part of himself, and he had no desire to have it treated with neglect. One cannot here follow the windings of the story further than to say that Damiani got his book again, and now we have it too.

I am surprised at the blindness which prevents some writers from seeing in this Peter de Honestis a most noble and consistent character. Morheim only pays him a merited compliment when he says that his “genius, candor, integrity, and writings of various kinds, entitle him to rank among the first men of the age, although he was not free from the faults of the times.” But how could one easily avoid the extreme of severity who was confronted by the grossest sins that ever carried a hissing sibilant in front of their names! Flagellation was a natural reaction from those fleshly lusts that warred against the soul.

Somehow Hildebrand took a great fancy to this genuine reformer. His own great schemes were ripening, and Damiani was just the man to be made of value in the office of cardinal. In 1057, then, the abbot had been created cardinal-bishop of Ostia by Pope Nicholas II., and in the year following deacon of the holy college. At first he strenuously resisted the honor, but was forced to assume it by the Pope’s command. In 1059 he had acted as papal legate to the semi-independent Ambrosian Church of Milan. Here he obtained pledges from them that they would conduct their affairs with purity and agree to receive the authority of the Roman pontiff.

He did not remain among the cardinals very long. His convent allured him, and the display requisite to his proper duties was both irksome and repugnant to him. Therefore he went home again, ardently devoted to Hildebrand, but devoid of all ambition, and ready to denounce the Pope or anybody else when it appeared that the rights of the Church were infringed.

In 1062 Alexander II. found use for him as legate to France, and he influenced Cluny in favor of Alexander II. In 1068-69 we find him again a legate in Germany, impressing on young Henry IV. the importance of submission to Rome. This, too, he effected; and in 1072—the last year of his life—he appears in the same capacity at the age of sixty six, busy with the reform of the Church in his native Ravenna.

This is the outline of his story, and it bears no great marks of difference from others which have been commemorated in ecclesiastical history. Upon these services, and upon his relations to Hildebrand, a claim to considerable repute might be established for him. These facts, however, would not keep him in mind to-day so well as his doctrine of flagellation and the melody of his two grand hymns.

This matter of flagellation was older than Damiani’s time. It was permitted in the convents to give five “disciplinary strokes.” Starting at this point Peter the Honest asks, “Why may we not give the sixth, for the same reason?” If these five have been inflicted on the unwilling victim, why should he not secure some credit to himself by taking a sixth, a seventh, an eighth? The ice once broken, it is easy to see how the new custom would be seized upon by the ascetic hermits of Fonte Avellana. The argument is curious, as a specimen of that specious reasoning to which the ecclesiastic mind was tending, and which, later on, comes into full bloom among the Jesuit fathers.

Damiani inquires “if our Saviour was not beaten; if Paul did not receive, on several occasions, forty stripes save one; if all the apostles were not scourged; and whether the martyrs had not received the same punishment. Did not St. Jerome say that these were scourged by order of God? And who dares deny that they were scourged for others and not for themselves? Hence, if one undertakes this discipline, willingly, for himself, he must be doing a good thing.” (See Fleury: Hist. Ecclesiastique, XII., p. 107, Anno 1062.) He then adds the example of Guy, his predecessor, who died 1046, and of Poppo, a contemporary, who had died in 1048. The date of his own advocacy of this doctrine is about 1056.

Monte Cassino took up the practice with vigor; but in Peter’s own convent the most consummate example of flagellation was speedily developed, and his disciple, Dominic of the Cuirass (Dominicus Loricatus), carries off the palm from all posterity. The method proposed by Damiani was that the psalter should be recited to the accompaniment of the blows of the scourge. Every psalm called for one hundred strokes; the whole psalter for fifteen thousand. By this spiritual arithmetic three thousand equalled one year of purgatory, and therefore the complete psalter answered for five years of purgation removed from either one’s self or one’s neighbor. But Dominic was an inebriate in his flogging and set himself tasks of stupendous size. He also improved the art in several respects. He used both hands with dreadful facility, and frequently lashed his face until it was covered with blood, singing his psalms the while in a harsh, cracked, and terrible voice. In the forty days of one Lent he recited the psalter two hundred times, and inflicted what one reckless calculator calls “sixty million stripes” upon himself. The true number is three million, which is clearly sufficient.

At another occasion he literally flogged himself “against time,” apparently just to see what could be done by a determined man in twenty-four hours. At the end of that period he had gone through the psalter twelve times and a fraction over, and had given himself one hundred and eighty-three thousand stripes, working away with both hands (as a caustic writer suggests) “in the interest of the great sinking fund of the Catholic Church.”

Flagellation, like the dancing mania and the strange parades of the Turlepins and Anabaptists in the Middle Ages, has its root in nervous excitement and morbid devotion. Under Anthony of Padua, about 1210, all Perugia lashed themselves through the streets. Justin of Padua relates that great disorders and indecency attended the processions. The madness spread like wildfire through Rome and Italy. In 1260 and in 1261 the custom was again revived after some decadence, in the same town of Perugia and under one Rainer. And at this date thousands went out into Germany led by priests with banners and crosses. Again fading from public notice, the flagellants reappeared during the progress of the plague in 1349. Hecker and Cooper supplement the account given by Boileau. The affair was itself an epidemic. The company marched and sang hymns—among which was the Stabat Mater—and bore tapers and magnificent banners. They finally became a regular nomadic tribe, separating into two portions, one of which went to the south and the other to the north. The Church was powerless, and those pro and anti flagellationists, who happened to be in ecclesiastical authority, solemnly excommunicated each other!

The wild license of these scenes was far from aiding either morality or religion. Clement VI. (1332-52) issued his bull against them. And, inasmuch as these fanatics had failed to restore a dead child to life in Strasburg, the malediction of Rome had some effect, and once more the harsh custom died out.

Then there was another upheaval under Venturinus, a Dominican of Bergamo, and ten thousand persons joined the order. Like a perennial plant it again perished and again sprang up in 1414, when these awful orgies were renewed under the leadership of a person named Conrad. But now the Inquisition interfered, and among the testimony taken to show the lengths to which the fanaticism went is the sworn evidence of a citizen of Nordhausen who, in 1446, asserted that his wife wanted to have the children scourged just as soon as they had been baptized!

Once more, in the sixteenth century the Black and Gray Penitents appeared in France. In 1574 the Queen-mother put herself at the head of the black band in Avignon, and the disorders, indecency, and general depravity of manners which followed would scarcely be believed even if it was proper to mention them.

From that date to the present time more or less of this old insanity occasionally reappears. It affords a singular commentary on our boasted advance beyond those dark ages, for us to know that the Penitentes of our own Californian coast do precisely every year what Dominic of the Cuirass and Anthony of Padua and Conrad and Rainer all did centuries ago.

And this frightful enginery of fanaticism was set in motion by the man who wrote one of the loveliest hymns in the Latin language!

I make no attempt to analyze the feelings that have prompted this strange austerity. Isaac Taylor has already done this in a most masterly fashion in his Fanaticism. But the essence of it is that wild delusion which leads men (and even women) to fancy that they can vicariously atone for others’ sins and “make merit,” as the heathen do, for those who are less bold than themselves. They have fastened themselves down like the poor wretched geese doomed to furnish pattes-de-fois-gras. They are before the hot fire of zeal and gorged upon indigestible dogmas. Hence their charity becomes as abnormal as the livers of the geese, and the moral epicure, alas, finds in them dainties suitable for his depraved taste!

It would be a grievous injustice to a good man if Damiani should only bear with us the character of an ardent zealot and not of a Christian poet. In this last guise he is at his best. Doubtless he often offends by his Mariolatry, but he will as often charm by the music of his verse. He may serve also as a convenient example of this worship of Mary, for in one of his prayers he has given us the pith and core of that peculiar devotion. It runs thus:

“O queen of the world, stairs of heaven, throne of God, gate of paradise, hear the prayers of the poor and despise not the groans of the wretched. By thee our vows and sighs are borne to the presence of the Redeemer, that whatsoever things are forbidden to our merits may obtain, through thee, place in the ears of divine piety. Erase sins, relieve crimes, raise the fallen, and release the entangled. Through thee the thorns and shoots of vice are cut down, and the flowers and ornaments of virtue appear. Appease with prayers the Judge, the Saviour, whom thou didst produce in unique childbirth, that He who through thee has become partaker of our humanity, through thee may also make us partakers of His divinity. Who with God the Father and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, world without end. Amen.”

I have given this as an example of his prose. Here is a petition “against a stormy time,” composed in that “leonine and tailed rhyme” in which Bernard of Cluny, a century later, wrote the De Contemptu mundi. It commences,

“O miseratrix, O dominatrix, praecipe dictu!

O thou that pitiest, O thou the mightiest, hark to our crying;

Lest we be beaten down, lest we be smitten down when hail is flying.

Thine is a priestly breast, O thou that succorest, mother eternal

Therefore we pray to thee, lest we be stayed from thee, by storm infernal.

Quiet the tempest-wrack! Give us the sunshine back for our fair weather!

Lend us clear light again, make the stars bright again where the clouds feather!

Virgin, oh cherish thy friends lest we perish by sickness or anger;

Drive all these ills away, thou whose love stills away thunder’s mad clangor!”

By far the greater part of his hymns are addressed to the Virgin and to the saints, but there are some others—the Paule doctor Egregie, the Paschalis festi gaudium, the Christe sanctorum gloria, and the two powerful judgment hymns, Gravi me terrore and O Quam dira, quam horrenda—which are worthy of note. This Gravi me terrore of the eleventh century ranks with the Apparebit repentina of the seventh century. These, together with the Dies Irae of the fourteenth century, form the great judgment triad of Latin psalmody.

Yet of all the hymns of that or any later time, nothing approaches the beauty of the Ad perennis vitae fontem, of which this Peter Damiani sings. It is born of Augustine’s thoughts and dreams of the heavenly land, and some of its phrases are exquisite beyond the possibility of translation. When Frater Honestus on February 23d, 1072, forever left that convent of Fonte Avellana, whither Dante went upon his last recorded journey, then that noble landscape might preserve these sixty-one lines of Latin verse among the choicest treasures of its dell and grove. This was no lark that sang against the sun with clarion notes calling us to such praise as rings through the ancient morning hymn of Hilary. It was the nightingale of Faenza, sending out those thrilling tones from the midst of the walls which beheld the eager scholar and to which the weary cardinal had returned to die. Upon his fame it is set therefore not like the lark’s song, but the nightingale’s, not as the flashing diamond, but (in Daniel’s very words) “as a precious pearl for our treasury.” Mrs. Charles has rendered it into English with grace and success. Mr. Morgan appends this autograph note to the version in the copy of his book which is in my possession: “N. B.—This hymn was printed without revision. If reprinted the metres will be made equal.” He has not attempted to follow the versification of the original. I know of no other translation except that of R. F. Littledale in Lyra Mystica.

Another beautiful hymn which was suggested by the prose of Augustine, and is ascribed to Peter Damiani by Anselm of Canterbury, who was his younger contemporary, is the Quid tyranne, quid minaris. It is commonly called

THE ANTIDOTE OF ST. AUGUSTINE AGAINST THE TYRANNY OF SIN.

What are threats of thine, O tyrant,

How can any torture move,

When, for all of thy contriving,

Nothing yet can equal love.

Sweet it is to suffer sorrow,

Futile is the force of pain;

I had sooner die than borrow

Any spot that love to stain.

Heap the fagots as thou pleasest,

Do what evil hearts approve,

Add the sword and cross together,

Nothing yet can equal love.

Pain itself is quite too gentle,

One poor death too brief must be,

I would suffer thousand tortures—

Every woe is light to me!

CHAPTER XVII.
HILDEBERT AND HIS HYMN.

Those who love the “Golden Legend” of Longfellow will remember how effectively he has there used the Latin songs and hymns. Friar Paul is so very like the famous Friar John of Rabelais, that he is probably copied from that worthy. Indeed his Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, with its dog-Latin and its broad satire on the habits of the monks, was a most effective weapon in the hands of the reformers. There were a great many learned men who were by no means equally as pious, and who found their bodily contentment in the cloister. Against these and all like them came the constant shafts of ridicule or reproach.

But now, when this same Friar Paul “tunes his mellow pipe” to a bacchanalian solo in the refectory, we can almost forgive him, forasmuch as he sings in such capital measure. There is a Gaudiolum—a regular merry-making of monks—down in the cellar; in which, by the way, Lucifer, disguised in the gray habit, takes his appropriate place. And when Friar Paul begins on the praise of good liquor, he parodies the metre and rhyme of the current religious sequences. Listen to him:

“Felix venter quem intrabis,

Felix guttur quod rigabis,

Felix os quod tu lavabis,

Et beata labia!”

Or, as we may express it in our own language:

“Blessed stomach which thou warmest,

Blessed throat which thou reformest,

Blessed mouth whose thirst thou stormest,

Blessed lips to taste of thee!”

Here and there Professor Longfellow introduces also into this “Golden Legend” his own renderings from the Latin, in little transcriptions which are exquisitely felicitous. But presently, in sharp contrast to the ribald Paul and the dissolute Cuthbert and the rest of the noisy crew in the refectory, he allows us to hear the song of the pilgrims. They are chanting the Hymn of Hildebert of Lavardin, Archbishop of Tours:

Me receptet Sion illa,

Sion David, urbs tranquilla,

Cujus faber auctor lucis,

Cujus portae lignum crucis,

Cujus claves lingua Petri,

Cujus cives semper laeti,

Cujus muri lapis vivus,

Cujus custos Rex festivus.”

It is the hope of the Holy City of which they are telling:

“Me, that Sion soon shall pity—

David’s Sion, peaceful city!

Whose designer made the morning;

Whose are gates, the cross adorning;

Whose keys are to Peter given;

Whose glad throng are saints in heaven;

Whose are walls of living splendor;

Whose a royal, true Defender!”

These pilgrims, every now and then, break in with some snatch of melody from this fine old anthem. And yet there are doubtless those who never have gone back to see for themselves whence all this beauty has been taken. But the Hymn of Hildebert would well repay them if they did.

It is the composition of a man who was the Admirable Crichton of his time—Hildebert of Lavardin, a student under Berenger and Hugo of Cluny. This is the same poet who, with Wichard of Lyons, is mentioned by Bernard of Cluny in his preface to the Hora Novissima. He says there, that even these eminent versifiers had never dared to attempt the measure of his own three thousand lines. And we have abundant other testimony that Hildebert was an accomplished orator, a successful controversialist, a brilliant rhetorician, a poet of ten thousand lines, and the author of this majestic and beautiful composition. He was born in the year 1057 (or 1055) at Lavardin, near Vendôme, in France, was first head-master of a school, then an archdeacon, then instructor in theology and Bishop of Le Mans (1097), and finally (1125), Archbishop of Tours, from which he derives his name of “Turonensis.” He was of humble origin and not connected with the celebrated family of Lavardia, except through the accident of his birthplace being in their vicinity.

Perhaps—if we follow one scurrilous old biographer—we may fancy the holy Hildebert to have been very little of a saint in his early days. Baronius indeed lends color to the assertion (made originally by Godfrey, the Dean of Le Mans) that the vices which Hildebert afterward attacked were matters of personal experience with himself. A certain coarse assault was undoubtedly made upon him; but envy and malignity went even to greater lengths then than now—and they are not noticeably moderate or truthful at present. He was a “wise and gentle prelate,” says Trench, “although not wanting in courage to dare, and fortitude to endure, when the cause of truth required it.” Neander’s estimate of his character (The Life of St. Bernard) is also kind. I doubt, therefore, whether any such statements can be maintained. But we all know too well what that age was, for us to be over-enthusiastic in the defence of our favorites. And still it can truly be said that Hildebert established his innocence there and then. He finally died in 1134, and his works, with those of Marbod, were collected and published in Paris by the Benedictines, at the comparatively recent date of 1708. His hymn, Oratio devotissima ad tres Personas Sanctissimae Trinitatis, first appeared in the Appendix to Archbishop Ussher’s De Symbolis (1660), and again was published by the Norman Jacques Hommey in 1684.

The poem is, as Chancellor Benedict has well said, almost epic in its completeness. And I can do no better than to summarize it in his own words—for he linked his name to it by a translation which he published in 1867: “Its beginning [is] the knowledge of God—Fides orthodoxa—the true creed, as to the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity, exhibiting their attributes as the foundation of the Christian character; its middle, the weakness, the trials, and the temptations of the Christian life, in its progress to perfect trust and confidence in God and assurance of His final grace; its end, the joys and glories of the heavenly home of the blessed.” It has been greatly neglected, as any one will find who looks for it outside of the most recent collections of sacred Latin poetry. Why this has been so, except because the praise of Mary and of the saints was more congenial to collectors than a lofty and pure spiritual fervor, it is not easy to discern. Hugo of St. Victor—Hildebert’s contemporary—does actually quote six lines, but calls the author quidam, or, as we would say, “somebody,” in referring to these half dozen verses extracted to give point to his own discourse. Yet Hildebert was in his day a most important personage, not below the persecution of a king of England, and not above a quarrel with a king of France. But he and the king were reconciled at last, and with honor.

That Professor Longfellow is not indebted to Trench’s text for his little quotations, is shown by a curious fact. The Sacred Latin Poetry of Archbishop (then Dean) Trench was first published in 1849, and the “Golden Legend” appeared in Boston in 1851—the time seeming to indicate that the poet had been reading in the small book of the prelate. But Professor March has very acutely noticed that the Church of England, in the person of its editor, did a great deal of expurgation, and that the lines

“Cujus claves lingua Petri,

Cujus cives semper laeti,”

are not included by Trench at all! It was not proper, the Dean thought, to encourage Romish superstitions, and so Peter and his keys were omitted. It is not impossible that Longfellow took his text from a little volume published at Auburn, N. Y., in 1844, which contains “The Hymn of Hildebert and the Ode of Xavier, with English Versions,” probably by Dr. Henry Mills, professor in the Theological Seminary at Auburn, who also published a volume of translations of German hymns (1845 and 1856). Dr. Mills reprints the entire hymn from Ussher, but ignores in his translation the lines

“Deus pater tantum Dei

Virgo mater est, sed Dei.”

The book is memorable as the first American publication in this field. Besides the American translations by Dr. Mills and Chancellor Benedict, there are English versions by Crashaw, by John Mason Neale, and, best of all, by Herbert Kynaston in the Lyra Mystica (London, 1869), copied from his Occasional Hymns.

Further to speak of Hildebert, it can be said that he, like others, took his share of imprisonments, confiscations, and exiles.

Trench quotes from his poetry two compositions in hexameter and pentameter—classic in language, but not always classic in prosody; and two complete poems, one of which is the famous hymn, and which commences

“A et Ω magne Deus.”

The other is a vision and lament over the Church of Poitiers. Of this the editor says: “I know of no nobler piece of versification, nor more skilful management of rhyme in the whole circle of Latin rhymed poetry.” It begins

“Nocte quadam, via fessus”—

an important hint for a person who wishes to find anything in the German anthologies, where, as a rule, the indexing is hideous and the arrangement is heartrending, and the poems are designated, hit-or-miss, by their initial line.

The poem De Exilio Suo, beginning

“Nuper eram locuples, multisque beatus amicis,”

is an example of the classic measures into which I have tried to shape my own rendering, although I have copied Hildebert even in his inaccuracies and repetitions:

UPON HIS EXILE.

Once I was rich and blessed with friends beyond measure,

And, for awhile, Fortune was prosperous too.

You would have said that the gods had heard my petition,

And that success had taught me to conquer anew.

Often I said to myself: “What means this wealthy condition?

What does it claim, this swift great store of my gain?”—

Woe to myself! for faith and confidence perish;

Even my property teaches how I have heaped it in vain!

Lightly the wing sweeps men and the things that they cherish,

And from the highest station ruin pours down to the plain.

What you possess to-day, perchance you will lose by to-morrow,

Or, indeed, as you speak, it ceases perhaps to be yours.

These are the tricks of our fate; and haughtiest kings to their sorrow,

And humblest slaves shall find that no future endures.

Lo, what is Man! and what has he right to inherit?

What is the thing that his wretchedness claims as its own?

This, this only is man; the years press down on his spirit

Always in saddest condition to utter his final groan.

It is man’s lot to have nothing—in nakedness coming; and going

Back to his mother’s breast to bear her no riches again.

It is man’s lot to decay, his dust on the desert bestowing,

And by sad steps to climb to the pyre of his pain.

Such is his heirship of good, and here upon earth he may gather

Nothing more certain than these, the spoils of a vanishing fate.

Riches and honor may greet him, yea, be his servants the rather;

Wealthy at morn though his station, poor shall at night be his state.

Nor can a man discern the permanent law of possession

Save as he seeks to discover the nature of mortal affairs.

Yet does God give them their law, conferring them through his concession

Unto the weak by his grace; and their going and coming he shares.

He by himself alone provides for and manages solely,

Nor does he doubt to provide nor vary in management still.

For what he sees to be done he does, and his ruling is wholly

Laborless, fixing the form and the time and the bounds of his will.

Yea, through his zeal for our growth he places our limits and changes

These by his occult laws, himself remaining the same.

Himself remaining the same, while sickness and health he arranges,

Swaying the world and showing how hope must be set on his name.

If it be right to trust thee, then, all that thou doest or takest

He is behind it, O Fortune, and he is the source of thy strength.

Nay, I affirm, O Fortune, however thou fixest or shakest

Thou canst not grieve me, nor overmuch cheer me at length.

He is almighty and tender, the concord and trust of my treasure;

I shall be his forever, when all his purpose is through!

It may perhaps be well for us to observe the characteristics of Hildebert as we discover them in his hymn. They will be found to be those of an oratorical repetition, and indeed of that “fatal octosyllabic” fluency, demonstrated in later times by Skelton, by Butler, and by Scott. To a certain degree the verse is incapable of anything large or exultant. But it is admirable for the purpose to which he puts it. Indeed, I knew no better way, when Hildebert’s best admirer passed from this to a nobler world, than to express my own sadness in similar Latin; and I venture to close this chapter with the closing lines of that tribute. Mr. E. C. Benedict made it his happiest recreation to turn the strains of these ancient singers into modern verse. And it seemed fitting that he should be commemorated in the very rhythm he loved so well:

“Vir honeste, vir praeclare!

Tibi quidvis possim dare

His versiculis confeci;

Hic, coronam superjeci.

Autem, illic, lux perennis

Proferet floresque pennis

Aves pictis puro die;—

Nihil deest, O tu pie!

Tu qui terra serus abis

Christum unice laudabis.

Vale! quia non moraris;

Ave! quia nunc laetaris!”

“Unto thee sincere and worthy

Here I bring a tribute earthy.

In these verses I have pressed it;

Here upon thy tomb I rest it.

But thyself, in light eternal

Seest flowers; and birds supernal

Brightly flit through sunny portals—

Thou dost lack no joy of mortals!

Thou who late from us dost sever

There shall praise the Lord forever!

Farewell! for thou wilt not linger;

Hail! for thou art there a singer!”

Yes, when once these old monks “soared beyond chains and prison”—when they dreamed by night and talked by day of the land that is very far off—they drew to them all loving hearts from the most distant ages. Doubtless Hildebert knew—and rejoiced in knowing—that his aspirations had been caught in a modern city and by a weary lawyer, who found rest and peace in their strain. And doubtless in the perfectness of the present rejoicing they both see and love what they once sighed to obtain.

CHAPTER XVIII.
BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX.

There is no lack of material for a copious account of Bernard of Clairvaux. He was a man to become distinguished in any age of the world, and he took and maintained the highest place of his time. His faults are as patent as his virtues. But, if he had not these faults, he would never have enjoyed certain kinds of success. His very austerity was a merit when it held his keen intellect steadily to its mark. And his intolerance, narrowness, ambition, and love of dialectics, were themselves a part of the great demand which his generation made upon him.

I shall be responsible here simply for a condensation and compilation of facts, a very different proceeding from that which is usually needed. In the case of almost all these hymn-writers the materials are so slight and meagre as to require large research; in this case one is overwhelmed with riches. I do not profess to say how many lives of Bernard have been written, but I know of a goodly number; and no history of his time has failed to give attention to so prominent a figure in religion and in statecraft.

He was singularly situated in point of time and place. Born in Burgundy, not far from Dijon, of a fighting family, who owned a castle and were well represented in the wars, he saw the light in 1091. His father Tesselin was a man who had learned in the school of Christ to be more careful not to wrong his neighbor than not to be wronged by him. His mother Alith was the model chatelaine of the times, full of kindness to the poor and helpfulness to the needy. He was born at the omphalos and centre of the Middle Ages. Peter the Hermit whirled along his wild battalions almost beside his very cradle. The little lad of four years must have seen the strange excited throngs, with their red crosses and their banners, and in the dust of their passing and in the chants of their praise, he must have been conscious of a certain enthusiasm which was to run throughout his life.

For several years this news was to men the staple of all conversation. The body of their own duke was finally brought back from Palestine to his ancient heritage, and laid, by his own desire, in the cemetery of the poor monks of Citeaux. There, in this comparatively recent monastery near Dijon, he had selected his last home, in preference to many more opulent and renowned establishments. The son of Burgundy’s vassal Tesselin beheld this and other incidents. His brothers went to the wars with the next duke, but he himself grew less and less inclined toward such pursuits. Books formed his world. His cell was afterward said to be stored with them; and he obtained easily the credit of being the best instructed person of his time in the Bible and in the works of the fathers of the Church.

And already these tendencies were aroused in the youth of eighteen or nineteen years who had begun the old-fashioned austerities on his own account. We are not surprised to find him neck-deep in ice-water; stung into intellectual vigor by the recent victory of Abelard over William of Champeaux; aroused into an actual preaching fervor, in which he denounces the sins of the age; continually mindful of his dead mother Alith’s prayers, and finally resolved upon entering the monastic order and upon carrying all his friends and relations with him.

That singular mastery of other minds, which was his at every period henceforth, now displayed itself. It did not matter that his brother Guido had a wife and family; nor that his brother Gerard loved to fight a good deal better than he loved to pray. Into the cloister they must go! Gerard indeed was something after the manner of Lot’s wife, disposed to look back. But his brother touched him on the side, and by some strange prescience or happy guess, predicted to him a spear-wound, which actually happened. On being thus remarkably warned, the soldier relented as they carried him wounded off the field, and cried, “I turn monk, monk of Citeaux.” This was the Gerard over whom, long afterward, Bernard delivered that touching sermon, where he branched out from the Song of Solomon (1:5) to declare that this body “is not the mansion of the citizen, nor the house of the native, but either the soldier’s tent or the traveller’s inn;” and then poured forth his full heart in a tide of uncontrollable and lofty grief.

So the youth marched into the poor monastery of Citeaux, where scanty food, rough clothing, harsh surroundings and occasional epidemic disorders had nearly disheartened and broken up the company of monks. Stephen Harding, their English abbot, was proudly indifferent to all patronage; but he was not so blind as not to perceive that Bernard, with thirty captives of the bow and spear of his eloquence, was a valuable addition to a depleted community.

These Cistercians, then and always, were rigidists. Up they got at two in the morning to prayer and “matins;” and for full two hours were busy, in a cold dark chapel, over them. Then, with the first dawn of light, out again to “lauds.” Before this service, and after it, the monk’s time was fairly his own; but at two o’clock he dined, at nightfall he had “vespers,” and at six or eight (according to the season) came “compline,” and then immediately the dormitory and bed. Such was the life, with a little more of it on Sundays, and with sermons interspersed at intervals. There is no mention of breakfast or supper!

And in such a life the ecstatic, mystical character of Bernard rose into visions and prophecies. His body was nearly subjugated, and his taste, and, indeed, all his senses, appeared to have deserted him. He watched, he dug, he hewed and carried wood; he kept the very letter, and more than the letter of his monastic rule. And yet, as Morison acutely observes, this very abstraction from people and things gave him that delight in nature from which, so often in the future, he was to catch the illustration or the inspiration of his discourse. “Beeches and oaks,” he said, “had ever been his best teachers in the Word of God.”

But now Citeaux (suddenly become prosperous) must colonize; and who so fit to lead the swarm from the gates and found the new hive as this same Bernard? Into his hands Abbot Stephen puts the cross, and he and his twelve companions march solemnly across the interdicted boundaries of their little Cistercian home, and nearly a hundred miles to the northward. There he chooses a place which exhibits, as Bernard’s actions generally do, the far-sighted sagacity which takes mean and worthless matters and makes them what, with right handling, they are able to become. It is a valley—the “Valley of Wormwood.” It is grown up with underbrush and is a haunt of robbers. But here, with the river Aube winding down between the hills, with the hills themselves capable of culture, and with the future of this little vale revealed to his prophetic eye, he sets his cloister and calls it Clairvaux—“Fair Valley,” or “Brightdale.”

I wish that I could quote the beautiful picture that Vaughan (Hours with the Mystics, Book V., chap. 1) has given of this fine enterprise. We should see Bernard and his monks chopping and binding fagots; planting vines and trees of goodly fruit; rearing their cloistral buildings, when the time arrived, out of the very materials about them, and so steadily transforming purgatory into paradise. There should we see the river bending its great shoulders to the wheels that drive fulling-mill and grist-mill; or toiling for them in their tannery, or filling their caldarium. We should see the monks at vintage or at harvest; pressing the clusters from yonder hill, or gathering the hay from yonder meadow. And everywhere throughout this busy, energetic life, we should behold the wasted figure of their chief—austere, sincere, severe. And we should feel that unaccountable personality—that intrinsic, magnetic, controlling quality which made this the man above all others to be the opposer of schismatics, the counsellor of kings, the establisher of popes, and the preacher of the Second Crusade. Clairvaux was his kingdom, and from Clairvaux he ruled the mediaeval world.

His personal appearance was in keeping with this idea—it was the evident cause of an evident effect. He was taller than the middle height and exceedingly thin. His complexion was “clear, transparent, red-and-white;” and always he had some color in his wasted face. His beard was reddish, and—according to his ancestral derivation, called Sorus or “yellow-haired”—his own hair was light and perhaps tawny. This beard grows whiter in the course of years, and these hollow cheeks glow with the enthusiasm of the orator as he speaks. Then he is at his best! He flings aside all feebleness; he disregards every consideration except the truth; he flashes and glitters as the tremendous squadrons of his brilliant logic, or still more brilliant exhortation, press down upon the listening soul. He had indeed a perfect confidence in himself, in his methods, and in his ultimate success. He was like a modern ocean steamer, iron-hulled, steam-driven, sharp-prowed, cutting through all storms without detention, and riding the wildest waves in his triumphant course to victory.

There is in Bernard of Clairvaux a most singular combination of the dreamer and the man of affairs. Vaughan has too admirably condensed the story of these interruptions and occupations, for me to avoid quoting, at least this much, from his capital monograph:

“Struggling Christendom,” he says, “sent incessant monks and priests, couriers and men-at-arms to knock and blow horns at the gate of Clairvaux Abbey; for Bernard, and none but he, must come out and fight that audacious Abelard; Bernard must decide between rival popes, and cross the Alps, time after time, to quiet tossing Italy; Bernard alone is the hope of fugitive Pope and trembling Church; he only can win back turbulent nobles, alienated people, recreant priests, when Arnold of Brescia is in arms at Rome, and when Catharists, Petrobrusians, Waldenses and heretics of every shade, threaten the hierarchy on either side the Alps; and at the preaching of Bernard the Christian world pours out to meet the disaster of a new crusade.”

Yet with all this he is a profound scholar, and his comments on Scripture are of a mystical, and often of a serenely spiritual and thoughtful kind, as though no intrusion could jar the harmony and poise of his soul. His was that strange contradiction of nature which found its calm in tumult and its ecstasy in conflict. Obstructions pass away.

Like that later mystic, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), there are no hindrances in his communion with the unseen world; he could, perhaps, do as Novalis did when Sophie Kühn died. For the poor fellow records in his diary: “Much noise in the house. I went to her grave and had a few wild moments of joy.” And of him also Just declares: “No spirit-dream was too high, no business detail too low;” for Novalis in 1799 was “Assessor and Law-adviser to the Salt Mines of Thuringia.” Pegasus in harness appears no worse a contradiction than a mystic in a salt-pan, or a Bernard epistolizing the Count of Champagne about a drove of stolen pigs.

Prose and poetry, poetry and prose! And yet the brain and soul that can do good work in the one are by no means disqualified for the other; and your truest mystics are not likely to wear long hair and talk raving nonsense among impractical neologists. For Bernard, even though he made converts wherever he went, and drew increasing numbers into cloister walls, exerted a potent and prevalent influence upon his time. He is one of the lighthouses, as we sail down the coast of the Middle Ages; and not until we pass him and his compeers, do the real darkness and the dull ignorance, the shoals and the unmarked rocks appear, ready to wreck the ventures of the mind. How gladly one would linger over these fascinating incidents in this remarkable career! The man’s life was expressed in some of his own aphorisms. They are such as these:

“There is no truer wretchedness than a false joy.” “He does not please who pleases not himself.” “You will give to your voice the voice of virtue if you have first persuaded yourself of what you would persuade others.” “Hold the middle line unless you wish to miss the true method.”

These are the maxims of an orator as well as of a statesman. And the junction of imagination, analysis, logic, fervor, and faith, made this man what he was. Already he had tried his wings in preaching to his own monks at morning and evening; and they had listened to him as though he had come from another world. He dealt with the great and vital questions of the moral nature. Like the best of our modern preachers, he aimed to sustain the soul, to arouse and to cheer it, and to bid it press forward to a victory which he himself foresaw. He might have said of such aspiring saints as surrounded him what Roscoe says:

“I see, or the glory blinds me

Of a soul divinely fair,

Peace after great tribulation

And victory hung in the air.”

He felt, with Lacordaire, that the Gospel had a new meaning, when he discovered that it was intended for the comfort of the human heart. He was at one with his monks; and as he reached out toward the social life about him, and toward the turbid torrents of politics and ecclesiasticism over which he must throw the bridge of charity or of faith, he simply transferred the Clairvaux method into the affairs of men.

It was an age of destruction, and into it he was casting the salt of the Gospel, hoping at least to make it salvable. Around his life needless legends and superstitious traditions have combined to cluster, but the real Bernard is distinct from both. He never relaxed his grip upon himself or upon others. And while this is not yet the place to speak of the famous controversy with Abelard, it may be properly said that Bernard saw tendencies in that philosophy which were genuinely dangerous; and that he defeated them because truth (however narrow and selfishly employed) is always stronger than error. Such was also his power in preaching the crusade in 1145, when he was about fifty-five years of age. It sprang from the quenchless fire of his zeal, as when at Vezelai, standing by the side of Louis VII., he caused such enthusiasm in the crowd beneath, that he did nothing so long as he remained in the town but make crosses for them to wear in sign of their holy purpose.

He had lived to see the Knights Templars, which had received his own especial approval, become one of the most famous orders on the globe. The Knights Hospitallers had been incorporated in 1113, and the Templars were founded in 1118 by Hugo de Paganis and others. But in 1128, at the Council of Troyes, there were but nine of them, all told, to keep their vow of “chastity, obedience, and poverty,” to “guard the passes and roads against robbers,” and to “watch over the safety of pilgrims.” Hugo then appealed to Bernard, and by his influence the council recognized this weak thing, destined so soon to be a mighty force, and which combined two of the strongest of our instincts—that to fight and that to pray. And now as in his old age he saw the corruption which was creeping into it and into other agencies on which his heart had been set, he relaxed no atom of his vigilance. He had seen the failure of his crusade, but it did not much affect him. His thoughts were now of heaven, and his watching was that he might be prepared to enter its gates. His principal friends had all died; Suger, in 1150, Theobald of Champagne, in 1152, and Pope Eugenius, his loved disciple, in 1153.

It was in this year that Bernard also made himself ready to go. On January 12th he said the Lord’s Prayer, and then, raising up what his admirers were wont to call his “dove-like” eyes, he prayed that God’s will might be done. And so, quietly and peacefully, he passed away. He has left behind him much as an ecclesiast, but more as a poet. I hold Bernard to be the real author of the modern hymn—the hymn of faith and worship. The poetry of Faber, which is now so near to the heart of the Church, is peculiarly in this key. The Salve Caput cruentatum came to us through Paul Gerhardt, and has become (through the translation of Dr. J. W. Alexander, a man of kindred spirit with Bernard) our

“O sacred head, now wounded.”

Gerhardt’s own hymn-writing—the most efficient, except Luther’s, in the German tongue—is wonderfully affected by Bernard. The Jesu dulcis memoria was rendered by Count Zinzendorf and became famous among those spiritual souls, the Moravians. And Edward Caswell’s translations—as I have already noticed—are supremely fine in spirit and in expression. I shall not attempt here what has been so capitally done already. The Church universal has made Bernard her own; and the very translations of his verses have been half-inspired. And while we sing,

“Jesus, the very thought of thee

With sweetness fills my breast,”

we shall sing “with the spirit and with the understanding,” the very strain that the Abbot of Clairvaux was sent on earth to teach! They canonized him in 1174—but it is better to have written a song for all saints than to be found in any breviary.

CHAPTER XIX.
ABELARD.

From the foreground of the waving banners and the flashing arms of the Crusaders, of the dark throng of the chanting monks, and of feudal pageantry and glitter—and from that background of dead uniformity which equally characterized those mediaeval times—emerges a figure unique and notable. It is that of a man in the prime and pride of life—lofty in stature, handsome in face, captivating in address. He is already a tried debater and an unsurpassed logician. He has Aristotle at the tip of his tongue; he has read much and thought a little, and his ambition is great.

Such a man came one day into the lecture hall of William of Champeaux at Paris. It was in the early part of the twelfth century, and William was the most celebrated teacher of the period, his “doctrine of universals” being accepted almost as though it were inspired. But this morning, while the master lectured and the disciples drank in his words without criticism or debate, the visitor stirred uneasily in his place. When the lecture closed he availed himself of the usual freedom to ask some questions. To William’s dogmatic answers the stranger in his turn proposed shrewd difficulties. It was no longer the harmony of teacher and taught, but the clash of two rival minds maintaining opposite systems of logic. And in that short struggle William the Archdeacon went down before the free lance of Peter Abelard, the rustic challenger from Palais (Le Pallet) in Brittany. And from that agitation went out the widening circles whose story we are now to note, and whose latest ripples break faintly on a tomb in Père-la-Chaise visited by thousands of modern tourists. Few tales are sadder or more suggestive.

The name of Abelard is variously spelled. It appears in divers authorities as Abelard, Abaelard, Abaielardus, Abailard, Abaillard, Abelhardus, and Abeillard. The true name (on the authority of Ch. de Rémusat) was, however, not Abelard, but Beranger or Berenger; and the future controversialist was christened Pierre or Peter. His birthplace is near Nantes, the house being represented a few years ago by a square brier-grown ruin back of the church. The date of his birth is given as 1079—a period when the world was feudal and military. But this lad was born for debate and not for battle. It may even be seriously doubted if he ever possessed much physical courage of a sort to stand the rough shock of actual warfare. He preferred the method of those who intermeddle among metaphysical subtleties to those who must keep sword edges sharp and armor furbished. His delight was to dispute, to be engaged in undertakings

“Whose chief devotion lies

In odd perverse antipathies;

In falling out with that or this

And finding somewhat still amiss.”

In those days not to be a warrior was to be—almost of compulsion—a monk. But Abelard’s independence forbade the second as his disputatious spirit had forbidden the first. He would neither risk his neck in the wars nor his opinions in the cloister. Instead of these he preferred the irregular combats of the scholar, and Bayle—with a touch of poetry—beholds him as he comes shining out of Brittany “darting syllogisms on every side.” Such was Peter Abelard—vain, handsome, opinionated, bound to swear by no master, a mighty voice crying in the desert of the Dark Ages for “free speech and free thought.”

The expedition to Paris hurt neither his reputation nor his purse. He arrived at perihelion as quickly as a comet. William of Champeaux—having first pushed him off and forced him to lecture on his own account at Melun and Corbeil—found that he returned like a cork thrust under water. The man’s buoyant, aggressive self-reliance, not to say self-conceit, was never contented with an inferior place. And while Alberic and Littulf and some of the older and more staid of his pupils held with William, it was plain that the popular favor inclined to the other side. The younger men were all for Abelard. The “doctrine of universals” was exploded as if with some of Friar Bacon’s “villainous saltpetre,” and doubtless the loss was small enough to mankind. His principal fort being taken, there was nothing left for the opposing general but a masterly retreat. Hence, by a convenient arrangement, combining several advantages, Guillaume des Champeaux became Bishop of Chalons-sur-Marne. And it was, of course, beneath the dignity of a bishop to hold lectures or to engage in logical controversies!

But, as generally happens, a sand-bag substitute was put in the bishop’s place; and Abelard came back to open a school on Mt. St. Genevieve and to bombard this professor. The battle was short and decisive, for the next we learn of this nameless champion of a defeated cause, he is absolutely enrolled as a humble follower of the great logician. This is but a fair sample of the general success which attended the new ideas. Everywhere they gained currency, attracting inquiry, arousing envy, awaking ecclesiastical suspicion, and inflaming the hatred of his defeated opponents.

About this time of inception and premonition, say 1113, Abelard undertook to examine the instruction given by William’s teacher, Anselm of Laon, who there vegetated as dean of the cathedral church. We must not confuse his name with that of the great Archbishop of Canterbury, whose method and science have outlasted the most of his contemporaries, and whom Neander styles “the Augustine of the twelfth century.” Had he been the teacher and Abelard the pupil, history might have made a different record. A profounder and a more reverent line of thought might have affected the acute and daring mind of the rising dialectician. And, above every other consideration, the new philosophy might have contained those elements of religion whose absence neutralized for centuries that wholesome independence which held mere dogmatism cheap as compared to the sacred light of truth. It would, indeed, have been well if such an Anselm had been at Laon, but the dean was a weak and futile person. And so it was inevitable that Abelard should again be in trouble and almost in disgrace, but even in his pathetic Historia Calamitatum the pupil did not forget to satirize his master. “He was that sort of a man,” he says, “that if any went to him being uncertain he returned more uncertain still.... When he lit a fire he filled his house with smoke, but he did not brighten it with light.” He adds, sarcastically, that Anselm’s philosophy always suggested to his mind the story of the fig-tree that our Lord cursed because it bore plenty of leaves and no fruit.

Abelard himself, however, was a genuine educator, and many bishops and other ecclesiastics, with nineteen cardinals and two popes, came from the ranks of his pupils. He loved liberty, although he loved it to that extent to which his own will—and no other authority, human or divine—restricted it. In this he differed from Anselm of Canterbury, who loved liberty, not according to license but according to law. Mere freedom to inquire, to complain, or to theorize, does not invariably carry with it profitable results. And Abelard—whose very freedom was in itself a noble revelation to the shackled intellects of his age—committed the grave error of supposing that the sweep of a free hand would certainly give lines of beauty and forms of grace. Something deeper than the mere distaste of false opinions is needful for this. Art, meditation, truth—all must lie beneath the O of Giotto or the masterly strokes of Apelles. And our rhetorician would have done well to have confined himself to the Trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. When he undertook theology he first quarrelled with Anselm of Laon, and next he encountered all Christendom and Bernard of Clairvaux. His was the fatal blunder of every “free inquirer” who forgets reverence, and who, in his pride of intellect, may likely fall as the angels fell. Surely no Lucifer ever plunged more swiftly down from heaven’s battlements than did poor Peter Abelard from the dizzy height of his sudden success.

This is no place to criticise his “system,” if system it can be properly called. The Sic et Non—“Yes and No”—his most famous work, is really a mere challenge. He quotes the Bible against the Fathers and the Fathers against the Bible, touching on deep tideways and bogs and quicksands which he never attempts to ford, fathom, or bridge. The Arians, Sabellians, Nestorians and Pelagians are resuscitated in these pages. He flings their doubts before us like a gauntlet cast into the arena of debate. One may choose which side he will take. Such a man, arising in the nineteenth century and claiming sympathy with Christianity, would be by some suspected as a secret enemy and his vanity would loosen his armor for the entrance of many a venomed shaft. His genuine ardor would be misunderstood and his opinions would be heavily attacked before they could deploy at their full strength. If this be true to-day how infinitely more true must it have been of an age narrower, more illiterate, and with an arm which wielded not in vain the sword of excision against heretics!

This, then, was the man who in the prime of manhood and at the topmost peak of prosperity found himself with money in his pocket, in Paris, and his own master. He had not yet said of the dogmas of Mother Church as Luther said of Tetzel, “By God’s help I will go down and beat a hole in your drum.” Hitherto he had safely kept to Aristotle—at once the blessing and the bane of Middle-Age reasoners—and he had the vainglorious sense that five thousand students hung breathless on his words. He considered himself upon the firmest footing that one could desire, and behold, he fell!

The “damned spot” of Abelard’s character is that which, after all, has insured his fame. And, since it is indispensable, a few sentences must exhibit it in its repulsive ugliness. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we do not need the help of any other biographer than his own bitter soul. His Historia Calamitatum is the sufficient history. In this he tells us that his life had been previously irreproachable and of the strictest moral correctness. Now, however, he began to “let himself go”—how far, or how fast, it is of no use for us to investigate. But Fulbert, the Canon of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, had a perfect Hypatia for a niece, and to this lady Abelard’s gaze was turned.

She was eighteen, and there was an irresistible charm about her, as of some fragrant white lily. She was a woman fit to lend grace and beauty to prosaic surroundings. And Abelard has the unspeakable audacity to declare that he, a man of thirty-eight, deliberately selected this pure and perfect flower and meant to take it for himself. Not to marry; for the truth demands that we should perceive his own thorough appreciation of the fact that marriage would sink him out of the ranks of scholars into those of tradesmen and would be the death-blow to his ambition. Not to marry; for it was a bad age, and sin sometimes clothed itself in the cowl of the monk and the robe of the prelate, and such a sin was better forgiven than such a blunder. Let all contemporaneous history bear witness! For every account of the lives of Heloise and Abelard reveals the impossibility of passing these unpleasant facts without notice or comment. On this pivot turns the golden world of that deathless love.

So the avaricious Fulbert took Abelard to dwell in his own house, and gave his niece’s education entirely into his care, and, as her teacher himself expresses it, delivered her “like a lamb to a hungry wolf.”

Heloise was probably the better educated of the two. She was the child of unknown parents. Bayle asserts that she was the daughter of a priest, and his facilities and laboriousness respecting such abstruse particulars no one will question. The authority from which he is possibly quoting, says that this priest was John “Somebody” (nescio cujus) and a canon of the same cathedral with Fulbert at Paris. Doubtless the trace of her ancestry is utterly lost to us beyond these meagre items. Even Fulbert’s alleged relationship has been questioned. But the scholarship of Heloise speaks for itself in a terse, sparkling Latin style, which is as pleasant beside Abelard’s lumbering sentences as a bright mountain brook beside a turbid and turbulent stream. Count de Bussy-Rabutin—no mean critic—has put on record that he never read more elegant Latin. She also understood Greek and Hebrew, with neither of which, strange to say, was Abelard acquainted. And at first blush it would seem that the teacher should have been the pupil.

Absolute justice requires that the ugly and disgraceful slurs in the Historia Calamitatum, and even in the correspondence, should not be overlooked. Here is what will serve for a fair example. He says of her, Quae cum per faciem non esset infima, per abundantiam litterarum erat suprema—while she was not exactly the worst-looking of them, she was the best educated; and therefore he selected her! The spretae injuria formae never went further than this. But this is by no means the solitary instance of that low snarl in which the currish nature of the Breton rustic now and then indulged.

What, then, could have been the spell by which this charming woman drew Christendom after her? Popes and bishops called her “beloved daughter,” priests entitled her “sister,” and all laymen laid claim to her as “mother.” If she were not so beautiful as some authorities positively state, she must certainly have been marvellously captivating. But chiefest of her many graces was her crowning loyalty and love. It showed itself in perfect sympathy, in entire self-devotion. Michelet, indeed, has observed that the legend of Abelard and Heloise is all that has survived in France out of the story of the Middle Ages.

Nor has the unanimity of literary judgment upon these lovers been less remarkable than the interest which they have inspired. With one voice Abelard is condemned and with one voice Heloise is extolled. “She was,” says a brilliant writer, “a great, heroic woman, one of those formed out of the finest clay of humanity.” “With the Grecian fire,” says another, “she had the Roman firmness.” And even the rude picture which the mechanical touch of Alexander Pope has painted, leaves to us in the “Epistle of Heloise” a trace of the same beauty, and affords one line—