Chapter XXIII Thomas of Celano
Hymnologists have their favorites among the sacred singers of the Middle Ages, but all concede the first place to the poet who gave the world the Dies Irae, the great sequence or “prose” sung in the service for the dead of the Latin Church. It has attracted more attention than any other single hymn. Whole books have been written about it. It is indissolubly associated in the history of music with Mozart’s wonderful “Requiem,” and in that of literature with the concluding scenes of the first part of “Faust.” More translations have been made of it than of any other poem in the Latin language, or perhaps in any language. All Christendom rejoices in it as a common treasure, the gift of God through a devout Italian monk of the thirteenth century.
It was in an age full of vitality that this “hymn of the giants” was written—the most interesting century in the history of Christendom, Matthew Arnold says. In all directions we encounter the play or collision of great forces. The Papacy, the Empire, the Crusades, the Mendicant Orders, and even, in its way, the Inquisition, give evidence of the working of a spirit of energy and movement, which places the century in sharp contrast to the less explicit development which had preceded, and the age of comparative exhaustion which followed. Nowhere was this more visible than in the characters of the great Churchmen of the thirteenth century. Popes like Innocent III. and Gregory IX., founders of orders like Dominic and Francis, theologians like Aquinas and Bonaventura, may excite our admiration or our censure, but they are men of such magnitude as are not to be found in other centuries in the same number. They were live men, and they have made a lasting impression upon the world by the force of their vitality.
Two of these, Aquinas and Bonaventura, we shall meet again as hymn-writers. But first we have to deal with one whose chief claim to recollection is a single great hymn. Thomas of Celano was an Italian at a time when Italy was stirred by the great battle of Pope with Emperor into an intellectual life, which was to culminate in Dante at the close of the century. Exactly in its last year the writing of the Divina Commedia was to begin. The troubles of his time must have come very close to Thomas. His native city of Celano, a town of the old Marsians, was one of the first to suffer under the hand of Frederick II. In 1223 it was forced to capitulate by the Count of Acerra, Thomas of Aquinas, the warlike uncle and namesake of the great theologian. The inhabitants were compelled to leave their houses, taking all their movables, and the place was burned to the ground, only the church of St John being left standing among the ruins. The people, to punish their disloyalty to the Emperor, were transported to Sicily, Malta, and Calabria, whence they returned to rebuild their town after their enemy’s death. How old Thomas was at the time of this calamity, and whether it had anything to do with his becoming a monk of the Order of Francis of Assisi, we do not know. But certainly it is not impossible that the spectacle of this dies irae, when the sanctities of his boyhood’s home were left desolate, or even the news of its occurrence in his absence, may have left a permanent impression upon his mind, and may have suggested more or less directly his great hymn.
Celano lay in the northern end of the Kingdom of Naples, as it was afterward called, across the Apennines from Rome and slightly north of it. It was not far from the northern boundary of Frederick’s hereditary dominions, across which lay the Umbrian region, where Assisi is situated. At some time and in some way Thomas made his way to Assisi, and came under the influence of the wonderful man whose personality has made the mountain town a place of pilgrimage even for those who are not of the Latin communion.
Francis of Assisi is one of the strangest, if also one of the most beautiful figures in the history of Christendom. Protestants vie with Catholics, Karl Hase and Margaret Oliphant with Frederic Ozanam and Joseph Goerres, in depicting this devout and childlike spirit, who took poverty for his bride and set himself to realize in the utmost literalness the command to go forth to preach repentance and forgiveness of sins, taking neither scrip nor purse, and possessing no more than the absolute necessaries of human existence. At first he had no thought of founding an order, but only of helping the poor and the suffering for Christ’s sweet sake. But the divine fire of loving humility and childlike simplicity in the man drew others inevitably to his side, until there arose in his mind the sense of a great vocation to gather men into a new form of brotherhood. “Fear not,” he said to his earliest disciples, “in that ye seem few and simple-minded. Preach repentance to the world, trusting in Him who hath overcome the world, that His Spirit speaks through you. You will find some to receive you and your word with joy, if still more to resist and mock you. Bear all that with patience and meekness. Take no heed for your simplicity or mine. In a short time the wise and the noble will come to preach with you before princes and people, and many will be turned to the Lord. He has shown it to me, and in mine ears there is a sound of the multitude of disciples who are to come to us out of every people. The French are on the way; the Spaniards are hurrying; the Germans and English run; and a multitude of other tongues hasten hither.” So Thomas of Celano records his words in his biography of the saint, which is the freest from exaggerations and the most trustworthy of them all.
As Thomas survived Francis some thirty years, there is no reason to regard him as one of the group of the first disciples who began to gather around the founder as early as 1209. He is not named among “the twelve apostles” who came first. But the relation between the two men seems to have been more than usually close and intimate. Perhaps it was the more so as being founded on contrasts rather than on resemblances in their characters. For Francis was distinguished from other teachers of his age by the bright and cheerful views he entertained of God and His love to mankind. This was the theme of his sayings and his songs; this he preached to the poor when they streamed out of the Italian cities to welcome him as one who brought comfort and joy to the downcast. They emphasized their sense of the difference between him and the ordinary preachers by saying, “He hears those whom even God will not hear!” Thomas, on the other hand, seems to have been constitutionally predisposed to look at the darker side of things, to sing of judgment rather than of mercy. But he, too, found comfort in the heart-sunshine of his master. “His words were like fire,” he says, “penetrating the heart.” “How lovely, splendid, glorious he appeared in innocence of life, in simplicity of speech, in purity of heart, in divine delight, in brotherly love, in constant obedience, in loving harmony, in angelic aspect.” He found in Francis the most perfect realization of the Christian ideal that he or his century could conceive of; and shall we not admit with George Macdonald that a perfect monk is a very fine thing in his way, although much less so than a perfect man?
Their sympathies as poets must have drawn them together. Francis, as Joseph Goerres well says, was a troubadour as well as a saint. In his youth he had won distinction as a singer of worldly songs in the provençal French, which was then the language of literature in Northern Italy. After his conversion he burst out singing the praises of God in this same foreign and exotic tongue. But as he became more directly interested in the welfare of his fellow-men, he began to use his gift of song in his native Italian. How many of the poems that are printed under his name are really his own, and how many are the work of his disciple, Jacopone da Todi, is matter of dispute. But even Father Affo (1777), the most negative of critics on this point, does not deny his authorship of the wonderful “Song of the Sun,” also called the “Song of the Creatures,” in which the childlike delight of the saint in God’s works finds such charming expression, that Matthew Arnold has singled it out as the utterance of what is most exquisite in the spirit of his century. Thomas, too, it was known, had the poetic gift, and indeed was recognized by his brethren as the man of most literary power in the order. Upon him they laid the duty of compiling the founder’s biography, and of writing the “legend” of his life, which should be read in the breviary service on the day of his commemoration.
Yet he also was recognized as possessing practical gifts. The order had spread into Germany as well as in the other directions of which Francis had prophesied. The first attempts to establish it north of the Alps, made in 1216, were not happy. The Italians sent on this mission knew only one German word, “Ja!” “Are you heretics?” (Sind Sie Ketzer?) was the first question put to them on Teutonic soil; and knowing nothing else to say, they said “Ja!” So they were marched across the frontier again in disgrace. But brethren better provided in the matter of their Ollendorff had been sent five years later, and now Thomas of Celano was one of those who had been selected for the German mission, to give stability and unity to the work there. He was made “custos” of the monasteries at Mainz, Worms and Koeln (Cologne), and even took charge of the whole province when its head returned to Assisi. We find Thomas himself back in Assisi by 1230, where Jordan, the “custos” of the Thuringian monasteries, came to see him.
Francis had died in 1226, but whether Thomas was actual witness of his last days, or derived his knowledge of them from others, his is recognized as the authentic account of the saint’s departure. His own death is said to have occurred in 1255, but what events filled up the meantime, besides the biographic labors we have mentioned, is not known. Perhaps it was in those years that he composed his great sequence, as his mind, when less directly brightened by the influence of his master, would be more likely to revert to those trains of thought which corresponded to his natural disposition. Possibly it was as his own life was drawing to a close, and the shadows of the Great Day gathered nearer him, that he poured out his soul in his great hymn—the greatest of all hymns, unless we except the Te Deum.
Besides the Dies Irae, there are ascribed to Thomas two other sequences—
Fregit victor virtualis and
Sanctitatis nova signa, both in commemoration of Francis. As the founder of the Minor Friars was canonized two years after his death by Gregory IX., there was a demand very early for the hymns of this character. And as there was no one better fitted to write them than the poet who had known Francis so well, and whom the Pope had directed to prepare a life of the saint, there is no inherent improbability in the tradition which ascribes them to him. But they do not take rank beside the Dies Irae. They are poems written to order, not the spontaneous outpouring of the mind of the singer in the presence of the overwhelming realities of the spiritual universe.
There are no less than nine persons for whom the honor of the authorship of the Dies Irae has been claimed. Two of these are excluded as having lived too early to have written a poem of its structure and metrical character; they are Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux. Two others, Augustinus Bugellensis (ob. 1490) and Felix Hammerlein (ob. 1457) are excluded by the fact that the hymn is mentioned in a work written in 1285. This leaves four rivals to Thomas of Celano in his own century, viz., John Bonaventura (ob. 1274), his brother Cardinal, Latino Frangipani, a Dominican (ob. 1294), Humbert, a French Franciscan, who became the fifth general of his order (ob. 1277), and Matthew of Acqua-Sparta in Umbria, a Franciscan, who became Bishop of Albano and cardinal (ob. 1302). But it is to be noticed that for not one of these is there a witness earlier than the sixteenth century. The first and last are named as having had the authorship ascribed to them by Luke Wadding, the historian of the Franciscans in 1625; but he ascribes it to Thomas of Celano. The other two are named by the Jesuit, Antonio Possevino (1534-1611) and the Dominican, Leandro Alberti (1479-1552), the latter, of course, claiming the hymn for the Dominican cardinal, as to whom there is not the smallest evidence that he ever wrote any poetry whatever. Besides this, the Dies Irae is a Franciscan, not a Dominican poem. It deals with the practical and the devotional, not the doctrinal elements in religion. Had a Dominican written it, he would have been anxious only for correct doctrinal statement.
Thomas’s claim to its authorship does not rest on the weakness of rival pretensions. In the year 1285, when Thomas had been dead about thirty years and Dante was twenty years old, the Franciscan Bartholomew of Pisa wrote his Liber Conformitatum, in which he drew a labored parallel between the life of Francis of Assisi and that of our Lord. Having occasion to speak of Celano in this work, he goes on to describe it as “the place whence came Brother Thomas, who by order of the Pope wrote in polished speech the first legend of St. Francis, and is said to have composed the prose which is sung in the Mass for the Dead: Dies irae, dies illa.”11 This testimony out of Thomas’s own century is confirmed by parallel evidence. Wadding, whose big folios in clumsy Latin give us the tradition which prevailed within the order, says: “Brother Thomas of Celano sang that once celebrated sequence, Sanctitatis nova signa, which now has gone out of use, whose work also is that solemn one for the dead, Dies irae, dies illa, although others wish to ascribe it to Brother Matthew of Acqua-Sparta, a cardinal taken from among the Minorites.” Elsewhere Wadding says: “Thomas of Celano, of the province of Penna, a disciple and companion of St. Francis, published... a book about the Life and Miracles of St. Francis... commonly called by the brethren the Old Legend. Another shorter legend he had published previously which used to be read in the choir...; three sequences, or rhythmic proses, of which the first, in praise of St. Francis, begins, Fregit victor virtualis. The second begins, Sanctitatis nova signa. The third concerning the dead, adopted by the Church, Dies irae, dies illa. And this Benedict Gonon, the Coelestine [in 1625] rendered into French verse and ascribed to St. Bonaventura. Others ascribe it to Brother Matthew, of Acqua-Sparta, the cardinal; and others yet to other authors.”12
These direct testimonies are confirmed by local tradition in the province of Abruzzi, in which Celano is situated, and the Franciscan origin of the hymn by its existence as an inscription on a marble tablet in the church of St. Francis at Mantua, where it was seen by David Chytraeus, a German Lutheran, who visited Italy in 1565. That the author was an Italian is indicated by the peculiar three-line stanza, which approximates to the terza-rima structure of their poetry, but is not found in poetry of the Northern nations, except in later imitations.
The statement of Bartholomew of Pisa, that already in 1285 the Dies Irae was employed in the service for the dead, shows how early it made its way into church use. In earlier times there was no sequence in that service, for the reason that the “Hallelujah,” which the sequence always followed, being a song of rejoicing, was not sung in the funeral service. This enables us to form an opinion on the controversy as to whether it was written directly for church use, or adapted for that after being written as a meditation on the Day of Judgment for private edification. It would seem most probable that it was the wonderful beauty and power of the hymn which led the Church to break through its rule as to the sequence following a Hallelujah necessarily. The Dies Irae was not written to fill a place, but when written it made a place for itself.
This controversy connects itself with another as to the genuineness of certain verses which are prefixed or added to the eighteen of the text in the Missal. There are, in fact, three texts of the hymn: (1) That of the Missal, which is generally followed, and will be found at the end of this chapter. (2) That of the Mantuan marble tablet, which prefixes four verses:
1. Cogita, anima fidelis,
Ad quid respondere velis
Christo venture de coelis.
2. Cum deposcit rationem
Ob boni omissionem,
Ob mali commissionem.
3. Dies illa, dies irae,
Quam conemur praevenire
Obviamque Deo ire.
4. Seria contritione,
Gratiae apprehensione,
Vitae emendatione.
After these come in the Mantuan text the first sixteen verses of the Missal text, with slight and unimportant variations, but the seventeenth and eighteenth are omitted, and the following conclusion substituted:
17. Consors ut beatitatis
Vivam cum justificatis,
In aevum aeternitatis. Amen.
(3) The Hammerlein text, so called because found among the manuscripts of Felix Hammerlein after his death, which occurred about 1457. This also contains the first sixteen verses of the Missal text, but with far more variations than the Mantuan text shows, although not such as commend themselves by their merits. Then it proceeds, altering and expanding the seventeenth and eighteenth into three and adding five more:
17. Oro supplex a ruinis,
Cor contritum quasi cinis;
Gere curam mei finis.
18. Lacrymosa die illa,
Cum resurget ex favilla
Tanquam ignis ex scintilla,
19. Judicandus homo reus,—
Hinc ergo parce Deus,
Esto semper adjutor meus.
20. Quando coeli sunt movendi,
Dies adsunt tunc tremendi,
Nullum tempus poenitendi.
21. Sed salvatis laeta dies;
Et damnatis nulla quies,
Sed daemonum effigies.
22. O tu Deus majestatis,
Alme candor Trinitatis,
Nunc conjunge cum beatis.
23. Vitam meam fac felicem,
Propter tuam genetricem,
Jesse florem et radicem.
24. Praesta nobis tunc levamen,
Dulce nostrum fac certamen,
Ut clamemus omnes: Amen!
That neither of these additions at the beginning and end are parts of the original sequence, will be evident to any one who feels the terseness and power of the original. They are feeble, lumbering excrescences, and are fastened to it in such an external way as to destroy the unity of the poem, if left as they stand. The text in the Missal gives us a new conception of the powers of the Latin tongue. Its wonderful wedding of sense to sound—the u assonance in the second stanza, the o assonance in the third, and the a and i assonances in the fourth, for instance—the sense of organ music that runs through the hymn, even unaccompanied, as distinctly as through the opening verses of Lowell’s “Vision of Sir Launfal,” and the transitions as clearly marked in sound as in meaning from lofty adoration to pathetic entreaty, impart a grandeur and dignity to the Dies Irae which are unique in this kind of writing. Then the wonderful adaptation of the triple-rhyme to the theme—like blow following blow of hammer upon anvil, as Daniel says—impresses every reader. But to all this the supplementary verses add nothing.
Of the use of the hymn in literature I have spoken already. Sir Walter Scott introduces a vigorous and characteristic version of a portion into his “Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805). Lockhart, writing of the great Wizard’s death-bed, says of his unconscious and wandering utterances: “Whatever we could follow him in was some fragment of the Bible, or some petition of the Litany, or a verse of some psalm in the old Scotch metrical version, or some of the magnificent hymns of the Romish ritual. We very often heard distinctly the cadence of the Dies Irae.” So the Earl of Roscommon, in the previous century, died repeating his own version of the seventeenth stanza:
“Prostrate, my contrite heart I rend;
My God, my Father, and my Friend,
Do not forsake me in my end!”
Dr. Samuel Johnson never could repeat the tenth stanza without being moved to tears—the stanza Dean Stanley quotes in his description of Jacob’s Well. Goethe makes Gretchen in “Faust” faint with dismay and horror as she hears it sung in the cathedral, and from that moment of salutary pain she becomes another woman. Meinhold in his “Amber-Witch” (Die Bernsteinhexe), represents the very same verses as bringing comfort and assurance to a more stainless heroine in the hour of her sorest distress. Carlyle shows us the Romanticist tragedian Werner quoting the eighth stanza in his strange “last testament,” as his reason for having written neither a defence nor an accusation of his life: “With trembling I reflect that I myself shall first learn in its whole terrific compass what I properly was, when these lines shall be read by men; that is to say, in a point of time which for me will be no time; in a condition in which all experience will for me be too late:
‘Rex tremendae majestatis,
Qui salvandos salvas gratis,
Salva me, fons pietatis!!!’”
Justus Kerner, in his Wahnsinnige Brüder, depicts the overwhelming power of the hymn upon minds hardened by long continuance in sin, but suddenly awakened to reflection by its thunders of the Day of Reckoning. Daniel well compares it to the picture of the Day of Judgment, which was the means of converting the King of the Bulgars to Christianity.
The translations of our hymn into modern languages, especially into German and English, have been numbered by the hundred. Partly no doubt this is due to the entirely Evangelical type of its doctrine, its freedom from Mariolatry, its exaltation of divine mercy above human merit, and its picture of the soul’s free access to God without the intervention of Church and priest. Lisco (1840 and 1843) was able to specify eighty-seven German versions. Michael (1866) brought this number up to ninety, of which sixty-two are both complete and exact; and Dr. Philip Schaff says he can increase the list beyond a hundred without exhausting the number. Among the German translators are Andreas Gryphius (1650), A. W. Schlegel (1802), J. G. Fichte (1813), A. L. Follen (1819), J. F. von Meyer (1824), Claus Harms (1828), J. Emmanuel Veith (1829), C. J. C. Bunsen (1833), H. A. Daniel (1839), F. G. Lisco (1840), besides partial versions by J. G. von Herder (1802) and J. H. von Wessenberg (1820).
The translations into English begin with one by Joshua Sylvester in 1621, that of Richard Crashaw in 1646 coming second. There are four of that century and two of the next, the most notable being the Earl of Roscommon’s in 1717. In the first thirty years of the nineteenth century there are but four, the notable being the partial version by Sir Walter Scott in 1805, and Macaulay’s in 1826. Since Isaac Williams published his in 1831, there has been a steady succession of versions, bringing the number for the United Kingdom in this century up to fifty-one. Of these the most noteworthy are by John Chandler (1837), Henry Alford (1844), Richard C. Trench (1844), William J. Irons (1848), Edward Caswall (1849), Frederick G. Lee (1851), John Mason Neale (1851), William Bright (1858), Elizabeth R. Charles (1858), Herbert Kynaston (1862), Richard H. Hutton (1868), Dean Stanley (1868), William C. Dix (1871), and Hamilton McGill (1876).
In point of numbers at least America surpasses England and approaches Germany. Since 1841, when two anonymous versions appeared in this country, there have been at least ninety-six complete versions by American translators, bringing the total of enumerated versions in the language up to one hundred and fifty-four. Of American translators may be named William R. Williams (1843), H. H. Brownell (1847), Abraham Coles (1847 and later), William G. Dix (1852), S. Dryden Phelps (1855), John A. Dix (1863 and 1875), Marshall H. Bright (1866), Edward Slosson (1866), E. C. Benedict (1867), Margaret J. Preston (1868), Philip Schaff (1868), Samuel W. Duffield (1870 and later), John Anketell (1873), Charles W. Elliot (1881), Henry C. Lea (1882), M. W. Stryker (1883), H. L. Hastings (1886), and W. S. McKenzie (1887). This certainly, both by the length of the list and the weight of many of the names, constitutes a tribute to the power of the Dies Irae such as never has been offered to any other hymn! Only Luther’s Ein’ feste Burg, of which there are eighty-one versions in English alone, can compare with it.13
Of these English versions, those by Rev. W. J. Irons and Dean Stanley in England, and those of General John A. Dix and Mr. Edward Slosson in America, have enjoyed the most popularity. They certainly are excellent, but every translator seems somewhere to fail of complete success. Nor do those who have returned again and again to the attempt seem to accomplish their own ideal of a perfect translation. Dr. Abraham Coles, who has made some sixteen or seventeen renderings, is no better off than when he began. Nor do I think my own sixth version has carried me one inch beyond my first. The truth is that not even the Pange lingua gloriosi, which Dr. Neale calls the most difficult of poems, is in this respect the equal of this alluring and baffling hymn. But the reader, who has had no access to the hymn except through the poorest version, has the means to discern the fact that in it a great mind utters itself worthily on one of the greatest of themes.
It happened to me once to enter a crowded church, where presently a distinguished German divine arose to speak. Others had addressed the audience in English; but he, turning to his fellow-countrymen, began to pour forth a trumpet-strain of lofty eloquence in his native tongue. He spoke of the “better valley,” of a happy and peaceful land. He seemed to see its broad and gentle river and to hear the chiming of its Sabbath bells. He peopled the air with its lovely citizens and created about us the presence of its glorious joy. Faintly and brokenly, as now and then he uttered some familiar words, I could catch glimpses of that besseres Thal, and its brightness and beauty, and the awe of its holy calmness came upon me—upon me, the stranger and the foreigner, in whose speech no word was said.
But they who were of the lip and lineage of the land, they whose country was brought so near and whose hopes were raised on such strong and familiar wings—they truly were moved to the soul. I saw tears in their eyes; I heard their suppressed and laboring breath; I beheld their eager faces; and the glory of that land fell on them even as I gazed. So, though we cannot here perceive the fulness of the Franciscan’s hymn, yet do we discern the stately splendor of Messiah’s throne, and
“Catch betimes, with wakeful eyes and clear
Some radiant vista of the realm before us.”
This alone can justify another attempt—the resultant of four previous versions—to express something of the grandeur of this majestic hymn:
1. Dies irae, dies illa
Solvet saeclum in favilla,
Teste David cum Sybilla.
2. Quantus tremor est futurus,
Quando judex est venturus,
Cuncta stricte discussurus!
3. Tuba mirum sparget sonum
Per sepulcra regionum,
Coget omnes ante thronum.
4. Mors stupebit et natura,
Quum resurget creatura,
Judicanti responsura.
5. Liber scriptus proferetur,
In quo totum continetur,
Unde mundus judicetur.
6. Judex ergo cum sedebit,
Quidquid latet, apparebit,
Nil inultum remanebit.
7. Quid sum miser tunc dicturus,
Que, patronum rogaturus,
Dum vix justus sit securus?
8. Rex tremendae majestatis,
Qui salvandos salvas gratis,
Salva me, fons pietatis!
9. Recordare, Jesu pie,
Quod sum causa tuae viae;
Ne me perdas illâ die!
10. Quaerens me sedisti lassus,
Redemisti cruce passus:
Tantus labor non sit cassus!
11. Juste judex ultionis,
Donum fac remissionis
Ante diem rationis!
12. Ingemisco tanquam reus,
Culpa rubet vultus meus:
Supplicanti parce, Deus!
13. Qui Mariam absolvisti,
Et latronem exaudisti,
Mihi quoque spem dedisti
14. Preces meae non sunt dignae.
Sed tu bonus fac benigne,
Ne perenni cremer igne.
15. Inter oves locum praesta,
Et ab haedis me sequestra,
Statuens in parte dextrâ.
16. Confutatis maledictis,
Flammis acribus addictis,
Voca me cum benedictis.
17. Oro supplex et acclinis,
Cor contritum quasi cinis,
Gere curam mei finis.
18. Lachrymosa dies illa,
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus;
Huic ergo parce, Deus!
1. Day of wrath, thy fiery morning
Earth consumes, no longer scorning
David’s and the Sibyl’s warning.
2. Then what terror of each nation
When the Judge shall take his station
Strictly trying his creation!
3. When that trumpet tone amazing,
Through the tombs its message phrasing,
All before the throne is raising.
4. Death and Nature he surprises
Who, a creature, yet arises
Unto those most dread assizes.
5. There a written book remaineth
Whose sure registry containeth
That which all the world arraigneth.
6. Therefore when the Judge is seated
Each deceit shall be defeated,
Vengeance due shall then be meted.
7. With what answer shall I meet him,
By what advocate entreat him,
When the just may scarcely greet him?
8. King of majesty appalling,
Who dost save the elect from falling,
Save me! on thy pity calling.
9. Be thou mindful, Lord most lowly,
That for me thou diedst solely;
Leave me not to perish wholly!
10. Seeking me thy love outwore thee,
And the cross, my ransom, bore thee;
Let not this seem light before thee!
11. Righteous Judge of my condition,
Grant me, for my sins, remission
Ere the day which ends contrition.
12. In my guilt for pity yearning,
With my shame my face is burning—
Spare me, Lord, to thee returning!
13. Mary’s sin thou hast remitted
And the dying thief acquitted;
To my heart this hope is fitted.
14. Poorly are my prayers ascending
But do thou, in mercy bending,
Leave me not to flames unending!
15. Give me with thy sheep a station
Far from goats in separation—
On the right my habitation.
16. When the wicked meet conviction
Doomed to fires of sharp affliction,
Call me forth with benediction.
17. Prone and suppliant I sorrow,
Ashes for my heart I borrow;
Guard me on that awful morrow!
18. O, that day so full of weeping
When, in dust no longer sleeping,
Man must face his worst behavior!
Therefore spare me, God and Saviour!
CHAPTER XXIV.
THOMAS AQUINAS AND JOHN BONAVENTURA.
In Southern Italy, about midway between Rome and Naples, the road which connects these two cities passes near the site of the ancient city of Aquinum. It was a stronghold of the Volscians, although not mentioned in the account of their wars with the Romans. As a Roman municipality it rose to greater importance than the other cities of the district, and became the birthplace of the satirist Juvenal and other eminent men. But in the seventh century it was destroyed by the Lombards, and the site never re-occupied. What were left of its inhabitants found another site, more capable of defence in those wild days, and built Aquino on a mountain slope. It runs along the cliff in a single street, like our own Mauch Chunk, and the remains of its oldest buildings show that its mediaeval architects drew freely upon still earlier structures for their materials.
In one of these old structures, still known as the Casa Reale or royal house, lived the noble family who were the lords of Aquino. Here Thomas Aquinas was born in the year 1225, being one of the five children of Count Landulf of Aquino, and his wife, Theodora Caraccioli, Countess of Teano. The family was not a royal house, but it was connected by intermarriage with the royal caste of Europe. It is said, but I have not been able to verify the statement, that Thomas’s grandfather had married a sister of the Emperor Barbarossa. His mother was descended from the Tancred of Hauteville, whose sons, Roger and Robert Guiscard, effected the Norman conquest of the two Sicilies. Sibylla, Queen of the Tancred who ended the first line of Norman sovereigns, is said to have been a daughter of the family. But the real importance of the lords of Aquino was due to their strategic position on the northern frontier of Apulia and to their military spirit. Richard of Aquino, the grandfather of Thomas, was the mainstay of Tancred’s cause on the mainland of Italy, and merited, by his treachery and barbarity, the cruel death the Emperor Henry VI. inflicted on him after the final conquest of the two Sicilies. His father, Landulf, seems to have been a man of less warlike character; but his uncle, Thomas of Aquinas, who succeeded Richard in the countship of Acerra, was the ablest of the Ghibelline chiefs of Southern Italy, and one of Frederic the Second’s most trusted captains. That emperor enlarged the dominions of the family, and gave ample scope to their fighting propensities in his wars with the popes. And Thomas’s two brothers, who were older than himself, embraced the opportunity of a military life. His sisters formed illustrious alliances with the noble families of Southern Italy. Pope Honorius III. is said to have been his godfather.
Thomas’s youth seems to have been uneventful, with the exception of the calamity by which he lost a younger sister, who was killed by lightning while sleeping by his side. In his fifth year his education began. Less than five miles away, as the bird flies, lay the Monte Casino, the greatest and first of the monasteries of the Benedictine order. Here it was that Benedict of Nursia in 529 laid the foundation of the first great order of Western Christendom. And although Monte Casino had shared in the calamity of Aquino at the hands of the Lombards, and had lain desolate for a hundred and fifty years, it had been rebuilt with new splendor, and was at this time the grandest ecclesiastical establishment outside the city of Rome. And here, in 1227, Landulf Sinibald, himself of the Aquino family, had become abbot, thus attaining one of the highest dignities open to a Churchman. To his care the young Thomas was intrusted, and on Monte Casino he spent the next seven years of his life, undergoing the discipline and receiving the instruction for which the schools of the Benedictine fathers had always been famous. Probably it was the hope of the family of Aquino that the young man would enter the order and rise to the same dignity as his uncle, becoming a prince of the Church, and thus more powerful and wealthy than any of his uncles or brothers.
In 1239 the second outbreak of hostilities between the Pope and the Emperor led to the conversion of Monte Casino into a great fortress, in which were left but eight monks to carry on the routine of monastic services. The rest found a home in other Benedictine houses, the schools were suspended, and Thomas returned home. But the same year he seems to have proceeded to Naples to study in the university which Frederic had established in 1224, and amply endowed with wealth and privileges, and had revived in 1234, after its suspension during his first war with the papacy. He had forbidden his Italian subjects to leave the kingdom to attend foreign universities, and he had used every available means to make them contented with that of Naples, one of these being the employment of the ablest teachers he could secure in all the sciences then recognized as belonging to the higher education. We are told that Thomas pursued his studies two years in Naples, when the influence of his Dominican teachers led him to form the purpose to become a Dominican friar,14 and to put on the garb of a novice. This step was a most momentous one. Whether his family looked forward to his becoming a Benedictine monk and abbot, or contemplated his embracing the offers of promotion in the civil service of the kingdom, which Frederic II. had held out to the graduates of his pet university, they could not but regard his adoption of the life of a mendicant friar with indignation and disgust. To be a Benedictine Pater was to be a gentleman and a scholar, to have a share in the influence, wealth, and power of the order, and possibly to rise to the dignity of the Dux et Princeps omnium Abbatum et Religiosorum, the Abbot of Monte Casino. But the Mendicant orders were affairs of yesterday, with all the rawness if also the effusive enthusiasm of youth. Francis of Assisi died within a year of Thomas’s birth; Dominic, five years earlier. And the mendicant mode of life was most offensive to the proud Italian nobles, who must have recoiled from the idea that one of their race should carry the beggar’s wallet in his turn, and live always upon alms. In this respect the requirements of the orders were far stricter and more humiliating than in later times, when the practice, if not the rule, was relaxed. Those who were unaffected by their enthusiasm thought of the Mendicants as the average man thinks of the Salvation Army, or thought of the Methodists at the middle of the last century.
No notice was sent to Aquino of the step Thomas had taken. The monks always had their share of the wisdom of the serpent, and they were to show it in this case. But some of the vassals of the family had recognized the young novice under his Dominican garb on the streets of Naples or in the church; and through them the news reached his family. Landulf seems to have been dead; I can find no mention of him later than 1229. But the Countess Theodora hastened, with all a man’s energy, to rescue her son from the career of a mendicant. The friars learned of her coming and hurried their novice off to Rome, and to Rome his mother pursued him. To avoid her he was sent forward to France, but he had to pass the lines of the imperial army then engaged in the war with the Lombards. The influence of the powerful Ghibelline family roused the vigilance of the imperial authorities. At Acquapendente, on the frontiers of Tuscany, Thomas and the friars who escorted him were arrested, and the young noble was sent back to his family at Aquino.
Every means, foul as well as fair, seems to have been used to break him from his purpose to join the Dominicans, while he remained a prisoner at Aquino, or in some of the mountain castles of the family. But Thomas was assured of his vocation, and he had a fund of obstinacy in his character which showed to good purpose. It is said that the Pope interfered in his behalf, but this is hardly probable, as the Pope was waging war at the time on the Emperor and his vassals, the Lords of Aquino. At last the countess and her children abandoned the attempt to influence him, and at least connived at his escape to Naples, where he took the vows of obedience, celibacy, and poverty, which sealed his connection with the Dominican order, in 1243.
We have looked at this step through the eyes of his family, and seen its offensiveness. But if we regard it more impartially, we are impressed with its wisdom. It was among the Dominicans, not the Benedictines, that Thomas could serve his day and generation the best. The Benedictines, in the new age which the era of the Crusades opened to Europe, had fallen behind the times. It was because of this that that century saw the rise of the two great orders founded by Dominic and by Francis, and their rapid growth, until “a handful of corn on the top of the mountains” shook like the forests which clothe Lebanon. The Dominican order was still in the blossom of youth; the Benedictine had rather “gone to seed.” Thomas felt the difference when he met the Dominicans as professors of theology in the Studium at Naples. Scholarship rather than thought had been the strong point with the Benedictines. They would be apt to meet the questions which welled up in the mind of the eager youth by an inapposite quotation from some Church father, or to repress them altogether, as tending to vanity. What, indeed, could Abbot Landulf and his brethren on the hill-top do with a deep-eyed boy, who went from one to another with the question, “What is God?” But at Naples, and in contact with the more lively intellectual life of his age, his acute and alert intellect found a satisfaction and an encouragement which the Benedictines could not give him. He was encouraged to ask questions instead of being snubbed. There were opened to him vistas of research and speculation, which could not but attract a hungry and active mind like his. The Dominicans were the order which had undertaken to face and answer the questions of the age, and in Thomas these questions were craving a solution. What wonder if he fell in love with the preachers, and they with him! They discovered what capacity lay in the young noble, and knew that they had better use for him than his hum-drum uncle on the hills and among the hawks. And any scruples as to his admission to the novitiate without the consent or against the will of his family were set aside by the belief that his “vocation” was directly from God, and therefore set aside all merely human authority.
Having secured their prize, the Dominicans showed that they knew how to use it. The order was, on one side of it, a great educational institution to select and train young men to fight the intellectual battles of the Church. The young Dominican at once put on the yoke of the “course of study” (Ordo Studiorum), which had been prescribed by the General Chapter, and proceeded as far toward the highest dignities and responsibilities of learning as his abilities were thought to warrant. The decision on this point rested with the General of the Order, who at this time was John of Germany, the fourth in the succession begun by Dominic. He selected for Thomas as his best teacher, Albert of Bollstadt, better known as Albert the Great (Magnus), who was teaching in the monastic school at Koeln (Cologne), and who had the reputation of having absorbed all that Aristotle knew, and worked up his teaching into a harmony of Christian theology with Greek philosophy. According to his biographers generally, Thomas was sent at once to Koeln in 1245, and accompanied Albert when he proceeded to Paris in that same year to take his degree as Doctor of Theology, returning with him in 1248. Dr. Heinrich Denifle, however, assigns 1248 as the year when Thomas came to Koeln from Italy, and limits their intercourse as master and scholar to the two years required by the rules of the order. Whether their relations as such extended over five years or were limited to two, they were enough for the formation of a life-long friendship based on mutual respect and admiration. Strangely enough the young Italian from the garrulous South was noted more for silence than for speech among the students at Koeln. He had found a teacher whom he thought worth hearing in silence, and he heard to better purpose than his associates. Bos mutus, a dumb ox, they called him. Albert foretold that “the sound of his bellowing in doctrine would yet go through the whole world.”
In 1250, the year when Frederic II. died, Thomas proceeded to Paris by direction of the General of the Order. In that mother university of Christendom the Dominicans were allowed by their rule to receive the doctorate—in that and no other. For one year the candidate must hear and dispute in the Dominican school on St. Jacques Street; for another he must teach, but without ascending the cathedra, from which authoritative decisions were expected. But in Thomas’s case these two years of his Parisian apprenticeship were prolonged to seven. The university quarrelled with the representatives of the Mendicant orders just as Thomas was about to take his degree, and in the five years’ struggle which ensued all ordinary relations and procedures were suspended. For some time, indeed, the university itself was dissolved, to evade the bull of excommunication which the Pope aimed at it in the interest of the Mendicants.
In 1656 William of St. Amour sent the Pope his treatise Concerning the Dangers of these Last Times (De Periculis Novissimorum Temporum), in which he pleaded the cause of the university against the Mendicants, and told some home-truths about the greediness, the lawlessness, and the encroachments of the friars, but in an angry and excited tone, which harmed his cause. Both the assailed orders put forward their ablest men to make answer. For the Franciscans spoke John Fidanza, better known as John Bonaventura, who had come to Paris in the heat of the conflict, and had been delayed, as Thomas was, in obtaining his degree.
John was older than Thomas by several years, having been born in 1221. He had been recovered from an apparently mortal illness through the prayers of Francis of Assisi in his third year, and then received the name Bonaventura from the good man’s own lips. He entered the order in his twenty-second year, and studied in Paris under Alexander of Hales and John of Rochelle. The devout humility of the man, and his purity of character, produced as deep an impression upon his teachers as Thomas had produced upon his by the force and keenness of his intellect. Alexander used to say that “in Brother Bonaventura Adam seems not to have sinned.” John was probably the most perfect exemplar of the spirit of Francis of Assisi that was to be seen in the second generation of the order. Not by intellectual force, but by humble ministry to the commonest human needs, by the infection of an all-embracing love and the close imitation of our Lord’s humanity, he would save the world from its wanderings. Thomas and he were the best possible representatives of their respective orders, and it speaks well for both men that their differences only bound them more intimately in friendship. Each reverenced what was strongest in the other. When Thomas asked to see the books by whose help John had acquired his Christian erudition, the Franciscan pointed him to a crucifix, and said that from that he had learned all that he ever knew.
Their answers to William of St. Amour reflect the character of the men. Bonaventura defended the mendicant form of the monastic life as an ideal; but without admitting the truth of the dark picture William had drawn, he conceded that serious abuses had crept in, and that already there was need of a reformation unless matters were to be let grow worse. Thomas makes no concessions whatever. He entitles his book Against those who Assail the Worship of God and the Monastic Life (Contra Impugnantes Dei Cultum et Religionem). William and all who hold with him are the enemies of God and of His Church. The critics of the Mendicant rule are standing in the way of the forces which are sent of God to win the world to Christ. The monk, and especially the mendicant friar, is the only thorough Christian who keeps to the “counsels of perfection” our Lord gave His disciples, as well as to the precepts of obedience obligatory upon all. William uttered false and damnable doctrine when he tried to limit them to a purely ascetic life. They have the right to teach as well as to pray and mourn, and the Pope has power to open to them the doors of every secular college by his mandate.
The controversy was brought to an end in 1257, when Pope Alexander IV. at Anagni formally condemned the book of William of St. Amour, and bound the plenipotentiaries of the university by an oath to admit the Mendicants to their former footing in the university. And to signalize the victory of the friars, Thomas and Bonaventura were admitted to the doctorate on the same day, October 23d, 1257.
From the masters the head of the school in St. Jacques Street was chosen by the General of the Order, and naturally the choice fell on Thomas. Usually the place was held for a year only, and its occupant then transferred to some other field of labor. Thomas held it for four years, lecturing, preaching at least every Lent in the adjacent church, and exercising the discipline of the order over its students. The number who heard his lectures must have been great. The school at Paris, unlike that at Koeln, being a branch of the university, its lectures were open to all comers, and the renown of the Italian who had been more than a match for the ablest of the secular doctors would draw hearers. And those who came once, if they had any love for the play of pure intelligence and the fearless handling of great questions, would come again. Thomas, with all his orthodoxy, was a pretty thorough rationalist. He had full faith in the capacity of the human understanding to deal fruitfully and safely with the deepest mysteries. If his conclusions always are with the Church, it is not because he has shrunk from attending to, and even suggesting, what might be said against the doctrine under consideration. It is because he has satisfied himself that the balance of logical argument, after all objections have been weighed, is on the side of orthodoxy. In this respect his writings represent the highest point reached by the rationalistic tendency in the Middle Ages, just as Abelard represents its initiation. We find Duns Scotus, his great Franciscan rival, shrinking from his rationalism, and removing some of the mysteries of theology out of the field of logical discussion.
Of course, his most devoted hearers were the young men of the order. Of these some ninety were sent up every year from the schools in the provinces outside France; and in addition to these picked men, who came for the master’s degree, Paris had the training of all the students of Northern France. Some of the former were from Spain, where the order was engaged in combatting the Mohammedan doctors. Their needs drew Thomas’s attention to the subject of his first systematic work, the Summa contra Gentiles. Thomas puts himself upon the level of one who has no Christian convictions, but argues simply from principles of philosophic truth and of natural religion accepted by both parties. Besides these and other literary labors he attended the annual General Chapters of his order at Valenciennes in 1259, where he and Albrecht drew up the new order of studies for the young Dominicans.
In 1261 Michael Palaeologus, the Greek Emperor of Nicea, conquered Constantinople, and thus put an end to the Latin Empire established by the Fourth Crusade. But the wily Greek feared a general movement in Latin Christendom to recover the city from him, and to gain time by diplomacy he opened negotiations for the reconciliation of Eastern and Western Christendom with Urban IV., then newly chosen to the papacy. The Pope summoned Thomas Aquinas from Paris to Rome, to aid in these negotiations by his erudition and acuteness. The subject was one into which his previous studies had not conducted him, but a scholastic philosopher must be prepared to write on any topic. De omni scibili was his scope. So Thomas wrote his Treatise against the Errors of the Greeks (Opusculum contra Errores Graecorum) by the papal order. In its preparation he became at once the victim and the instrument of one of the most memorable forgeries in ecclesiastical literature. The Dominicans had followed the Latin Empire into the East, but found themselves at a loss for authorities to prove to the Greeks that the autocratic papacy was a venerable, much less a primitive institution, of the Christian Church. One of them conceived the bright thought of manufacturing a supply. So he sent to Urban IV. a long catena of quotations from the Greek fathers, especially the two Cyrils and the Council of Chalcedon, in which the papal authority and infallibility were set forth with a boldness never used even in the West. The Pope fully believed in their genuineness and handed them over to Thomas, who incorporated many of them into his opusculum, besides using them in his greater work. He knew too much about the teachings of the Greek fathers not to be staggered by the quotations as to the Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, and he expressed his doubts in a letter to Urban. But he was not staggered by the forger’s showing that the Greeks accepted the universal jurisdiction and infallible authority of the papacy. In this way the notion of a universal episcopate and an infallibility in the Bishop of Rome, from being the audacious whim of a few canonists, passed into the dogmatic theology of the Church, and came to be made an article of faith in our own time. (See Acton-Döllinger-Huber’s book, Janus, or the Pope and the Council, chap, iii., section 18.)
Urban IV. having brought Thomas to Italy, Clemens IV. kept him there as long as he lived, making him a professor in the university established by Innocent IV. within the Roman Curia, and as such carried him about from city to city as the Papal Court removed, and had him lecture on theology wherever the Court was staying. He also set him to the work of writing commentaries on part of the Scripture: Job, the Psalms, Canticles, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Paul’s Epistles, besides his catena of comments on the Gospels gathered from the Latin fathers. Most important of all for our purposes, he asked him to prepare the service for Corpus Christi Day—a festival established in 1264. It was for this that Thomas wrote four of the hymns which have given him his place in the annals of hymnology, and those are his finest. And it is said that he also began his Summa in these years, but that I doubt. But in 1269 Clemens died, and it was two years before another Pope was elected. Thomas took the opportunity to escape out of the throng and noise of the Curia, and made his way back to France and to his old manner of life. He came back to Paris and lectured in St. Jacques Street, but not as the head of the school. At Paris he now found critics as well as admirers. His doctrine that individuality is dependent upon matter was censured as involving a denial of immortality, and in 1269 he wrote a treatise, Contra Averroistas, to show that this was not a necessary or even a fair inference. In the same year we find him in London attending a Chapter General of his order.
In 1271 the vacancy in the papacy ended with the selection of Gregory X., one of the best of the popes. Thomas was recalled to Italy and offered the Archbishopric of Naples, doubtless at the suggestion of Charles of Anjou, whose hands were red with the blood of the young Conradin. Thomas wisely declined it, and when, in 1272, he agreed to go to Naples as a teacher of theology, it was with the reservation that this should not bring him into close relations with the Court. Enough of his Ghibelline traditions clung to him to make him abhor the murderer of his kinsman. So in Naples he taught, and wrote at his Summa, and prayed and saw visions—his biographers say—until one day the Pope summoned him to a General Council at Lyons, with the view of proclaiming a new crusade. He obeyed the summons, but when he reached the Cistercian monastery of Fossa Nuova, on the hills above the Pontine Marshes, below Rome, he fell ill and died, March 7th, 1274. Of course the Italians knew he was poisoned, and even Dante countenances the report. The Pontine Marshes in spring are so wholesome that no other hypothesis could account for his death! His friend Bonaventura reached Lyons, but died during the sessions of the council. His earlier friend and master, Albert the Great, although his senior by thirty years, outlived him by six, dying in 1280.
The position of Thomas Aquinas in history is determined by the fact that he is the greatest of the scholastic philosophers. What his master and other earlier thinkers had attempted, he more nearly did than ever has been done by any one else. He took the two great bodies of knowledge, secular and sacred, and fused them into a system more nearly consistent with itself than any other. On the one side was the encylopaedic philosophy of Aristotle, and the parallel but less perfect tradition of Platonic speculation; on the other the Scriptures, the dogmatic decisions of the councils and popes, and the teachings of the recognized authorities among the ecclesiastical writers, especially as these had been summarized by Peter Lombard. To blend these into one great system of theology, to subsidize the weapons of the Greek philosophy in defence of Christian truth, and to draw the line with accuracy between what reason can prove and faith accepts without proof—this was what he undertook in the Summa. And never was a more acute intellect employed on the great task of reconciling faith with reason. If he failed, it is not because he shrank from anticipating any and every kind of objection to the truths he was defending; his works are a perfect storehouse of such objections. If he failed, it was not from any want of confidence in the powers of the human mind to deal with the highest subjects of thought. No modern rationalist ever surpassed him in that respect. He failed because neither then nor now do the materials exist for such a work, and because his truths lost and his errors gained force by being worked into a system.
It would take a whole chapter even to describe the Summa. Of its three parts, the first, concerning God, and the second concerning man, were completed in the four years he gave to the work. In the third, which treats of the God-Man, he got no farther than the ninetieth question, and the discussion was completed by extracts from his commentary on Peter Lombard. But the completed part contains nearly two million Latin words, or with the supplement, two million one hundred thousand. It is six times as large as Calvin’s Institutio, or four times as large as the Latin Bible! And the Summa fills only two of the seventeen folios of his works, all written within the space of twenty-six years by a man actively engaged in teaching, lecturing, and advising popes and princes.
That so much of the formative period of his life was spent in a controversy, in which he was the applauded spokesman of a party whose cause he regarded as the cause of God, could not but affect his intellectual character. Professor Maurice thinks the delay in obtaining the master’s degree worked in the same direction. The master in those days was expected to pronounce decisions; those who had not attained that rank were occupied in disputations only. “Thus our author was a trained arguer,” and “the old habits remained with him when his decisions were most accepted as authorities. From first to last he was thinking of all that could be said on both sides of the question he was discussing.” I believe that he was conscious of the narrowing and dwarfing tendency of this habit of mind, even though he did not detect the source of the evil. We read of his seeking to prepare himself for his work by humble devotion. But to the last line of his last work the controversial habit and attitude of mind clings to him. It is only in his catechetical expositions, written before he left Koeln for Paris, that you find a different atmosphere, and escape the heretic-crushing Aristotelian dialectic of the scholastic disputant.
Even in his few hymns, which constitute his title to rank among the sacred poets, he is the great scholastic doctor, with his eye on the heresies which may distract the believer. He writes with the full panoply under his singing robes. All his hymns are concerned with the greatest of the Christian sacraments. It was in 1215, a year before the confirmation of the Dominican Order, and twelve years before Thomas was born, that the fourth Lateran Council made the transubstantiation of the elements into the body and blood of Christ an article of faith. But a Belgian ecstatic, Juliana of Liege, had a vision which called for a special annual festival in honor of the mystery. Urban IV. complied with this request in 1261, by requiring that the Thursday next after Trinity Sunday should be observed as Corpus Christi Day. This involved the preparation of an additional services for the Missal and Breviary, with suitable prayers and hymns, and the work was laid upon Thomas. For the Missal he wrote the sequence
Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem; and for the Breviary the three hymns
Pange, lingua, gloriosi Corporis mysterium, Sacris solemniis juncta sint gaudia, and Verbum supernum prodiens, Nec Patris.
The Paris Breviary connects a fifth hymn of his with the same festival, the Adoro Te devote, latens Deitas, assigning it for late (serotinas) services in the octave of Corpus Christi. So Newman; but Daniel declares he finds it in none of the breviaries of modern use, and in the missals only as a part of the priest’s private preparation for saying Mass. Even this rank has not been attained by the sixth hymn ascribed to him, the beautiful
O Esca viatorum, which Dr. Ray Palmer has made familiar to American worshippers by his exquisite version, first published in the Andover Sabbath Hymn-Book:
O Bread to pilgrims given.
Moll denies that Thomas wrote this, and says it is by a Jesuit poet, which is most probable. March calls it “a happy echo” of the undisputed hymns of Thomas Aquinas. But the echo is softened; the hymn is less masculine. Lympha fons alone would serve as a note to show that Aquinas never wrote it.
It has been said by Dr. Neale that the Pange, lingua, gloriosi
“contests the second place among those of the Western Church, with the Vexilla Regis, the Stabat Mater, the Jesu dulcis memoria, the Ad Regias Agni Dapes, the Ad Supernam, and one or two others, leaving the Dies Irae in its unapproachable glory.” But this judgment is the prejudiced one of a High Churchman, sufficiently in sympathy with the Roman doctrine of the sacraments to relish keenly Thomas’s concise and vigorous statement of that doctrine, and to mistake the relish for critical appreciation of the poetry. Dr. Neale even praises Thomas’s treatise On the Venerable Sacrament of the Altar as the finest devotional treatise of the Middle Ages, finer therefore than the Imitation itself! A calmer estimate will put the hymn decidedly below Bernard’s exquisite Jesu dulcia memoria, or the Veni, Creator Spiritus of Rabanus Maurus, or the Veni, Sancte Spiritus of Hermann Contractus. It is true that it excels all these in its peculiar qualities, its logical neatness, dogmatic precision, and force of almost argumentative statement; but these qualities are not poetical. In this respect it is not altogether unlike Toplady’s “Rock of Ages,” a hymn in which the intellect has cut a channel for the emotions to flow. That was written as a tail-piece to a controversial article in which Toplady discussed John Wesley’s doctrines in the matter of faith and works, and is a terse statement of theological discriminations on that point.
The Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem, as it is a much longer hymn, gives more scope for the exposition of the Roman doctrine. For this reason Martin Luther abhorred it, probably also because he had no good opinion of Thomas himself. He accuses him of perverting the Scripture in this hymn, “as though he were the worst enemy of God, or else an idiot.” But this harsh judgment did not succeed in expelling the hymn from the use of the Lutheran churches, and since the Oxford revival it has found its way into other Protestant churches. But the sixth, seventh and eighth verses express the doctrine of transubstantiation so distinctly, that one must have gone as far as Dr. Pusey, who avowed that he held “all Roman doctrine,” before using their words in any but a non-natural sense. In the fine version made by Dr. A. R. Thompson, first published in the Sunday-School Times in 1883, and included in Dr. Robinson’s Laudes Domini, only half the hymn is given, those verses being taken which deflect least from the general current of Christian thought about the sacrament. By the author’s kind permission, we give it here with his latest revision:
“Sion, to thy Saviour singing,
To thy Prince and Shepherd bringing
Sweetest hymns of love and praise,
Thou wilt never reach the measure
Of his worth, by all the treasure
Of thy most ecstatic lays.
“Of all wonders that can thrill thee,
And with adoration fill thee,
What than this can greater be,
That himself to thee he giveth?—
He that eateth, ever liveth—
For the bread of life is he.
“Fill thy lips to overflowing
With sweet praise, his mercy showing,
Who this heavenly table spread.
On this day so glad and holy,
To each longing spirit lowly
Giveth he the living Bread.
“Here the King hath spread his table,
Whereon eyes of faith are able
Christ our Passover to trace.
Shadows of the law are going,
Light and life and truth inflowing,
Night to day is giving place.
“Lo, this angels’ food descending
Heavenly love is hither sending,
Hungry lips on earth to feed!
So the paschal lamb was given,
So the manna came from heaven,
Isaac was his type indeed.
“O good Shepherd, Bread life-giving,
Us, thy grace and life receiving,
Feed and shelter evermore!
Thou on earth our weakness guiding,
We in heaven with thee abiding,
With all saints will thee adore.”
Thomas’s Franciscan friend, John Fidenza, better known by his nickname of John Bonaventura, was a hymn-writer also, but he did a good many other things better. To many Protestants his name has been made offensive through its association with the Psalter of Our Lady, a travesty of the Book of Psalms, with which he had nothing to do, and which was made in a later century. Indeed, as Martin Chemnitz pointed out three centuries ago, Bonaventura protested against the excessive reverence for the Virgin, which had already become common, as likely to lead to idolatry. That he was called the Seraphic Doctor shows that men felt in him a warmth of heart and a tenderness of devotion, which they missed in his greater contemporary, Thomas Aquinas, the Angelical Doctor. Indeed he was the incarnation of the Franciscan spirit of love and helpfulness, as Thomas of the Dominican spirit of theological research and orthodox defence. Yet Bonaventura’s Breviloquium has been praised by good judges as the best compend of Christian doctrine that the Middle Ages have left us.
Bonaventura’s Latin poems are rather devout meditations than hymns. They are not the voice of the Christian congregation in song, but of the monk meditating before his crucifix. To him is sometimes ascribed the Christmas hymn,
Adeste fideles,
but not on sufficient authority. His best known hymns are the Christum Ducem, qui per crucem, and Recordare sanctae crucis, of which latter we have English versions by Dr. Henry Harbaugh, Dr. J. W. Alexander, and E. C. Benedict. Five other hymns are ascribed to him in the collections. They all have the Franciscan note; they turn on our Lord’s human sympathy and sufferings. This explains the ascription to him of a long hymn on the members of our Lord’s body as affected by the passion, which is found in Mone (I., 171-74), but which is more frequently and quite as erroneously ascribed to Bernard of Clairvaux. It is not worthy of either, although Mone thinks the ascription to Bonaventura “worthy of attention.” The hymn furnishes the point of contact of the Latin hymnology with that of the later Moravians, the Franciscans of Protestantism.
So we leave the two great scholars, thinkers, doctors, and poets, each representing one of the two chief streams of spiritual influence in the Church of the thirteenth century. “They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in death they were not divided.”
CHAPTER XXV.
JACOPONUS AND THE “STABAT MATER.”
Jacoponus, known to us sometimes as Jacobus de Benedictis, and sometimes as Jacopo di Benedetto, or as Giacopone da Todi from his Italian birthplace, is a most quaint and singular singer. The name Jacoponus is a mere title of reproach, and signifies either “Big James” or “Silly James.” It was called after him on the street and he adopted it in a spirit of humility and as a badge of self abnegation. The man himself was an Italian jurist and nobleman, who lived in the thirteenth century. He led a wild life, lost his property, and eventually regained it by industry and ability. Evidently he neither cared nor scrupled about his ways of making money. A crisis came in his life in consequence of his wife’s sudden death. She was killed at the city games of Todi in the year of grace 1268, where with other women she had been watching the sports from a scaffold of wood. It was insecure and fell, killing her instantly. Poor Benedetto, on hurrying to the spot, found that beneath her garments she had been wearing a hair girdle next to the skin—according to the harsh custom of the time—and he was deeply affected by this evidence of her anxiety to please God. In those days such an action spoke volumes for the victim’s piety, and no one was more open to conviction than this erratic, sensitive, and brilliant man.
But it would seem that for a long time he struggled against his feelings, since we have a record that by 1298 he had been a religious person about twenty years. Indeed, there is a story that he was not received at once by the Minorites, and that he finally produced certain poems before they grew satisfied to take him in. However, when he was fairly within their walls he outdid all the other Franciscans in austerity. He had given up his position as Doctor of Laws and had surrendered his property; now it would appear that he was determined to advance beyond the rest in ascetic devotion. His penances and prayers were greatly in excess of prescribed rules, and he must have proved as sore a trial to any easy-going brother, as Simeon Stylites was when he too led the whole convent to denounce his ascetic habits. There is small doubt that the brain of Jacoponus was decidedly off its balance, even in these earliest days, and his subsequent conduct gave full evidence of his insanity. Still, we find in this self-abasement of his nothing that looks like pride or egotism. Where others display a complacency which is very Pharisaic, he only shows the monomania of a gifted soul. Some of his expressions are remarkable for their spiritual depth and power. Thus when he was pressed to explain how a Christian can be sure that he loves God, he replied, “I have the sign of charity; if I ask God for something, and He refuses me, I love Him notwithstanding; and when He opposes me I love Him twice as much.” “I would,” he says, “for the love of Christ, suffer with a perfect resignation all the toils of this life, every grief, anguish, pain, which word can express or thought conceive. I would also readily consent that, on leaving life, the demons should bear my soul into the place of tortures, there to endure all the torments due to my sins; to those of the just who suffer in purgatory, and even of the reprobates and demons if this could be; and that until the day of the last judgment, and longer still, according to the good pleasure of the Divine Majesty. And, above all, it would be to me a great pleasure and supreme satisfaction that all those for whom I should have suffered should enter heaven before me, and, finally, if I came after them that all should agree to declare to me that they owe me nothing.” Surely no modern theologian has ever stated the doctrine of “self-emptiness” in any shape which at all compares with this!
Nor was he deficient in wit. “I enjoy the realm of France,” he once said, “more than does the King of France; for I take part in all the happiness that comes to him and I haven’t the care of his business.” At another time he entered the market-place on all fours naked, a saddle on his back and a bit between his teeth, for what symbolic purpose no one has ever explained. Again, he literally tarred and feathered himself, covering his body with a sticky oil and then rolling in feathers of various colors and kinds. In this elegant wedding attire he made his appearance at his brother’s house to honor the marriage of his niece. The guests, as might be expected, departed in confusion and disgust. But to all remonstrances upon his conduct he retorted, “My brother thinks to illumine our name by his magnificence; I shall do it by my folly.” He was really a leaf taken out of Rabelais or Boccaccio—a jester whose folly and wisdom were mingled unequally, much in the fashion of that Wamba son of Witless, immortalized for us in the pages of Ivanhoe.
The man’s great mind had doubtless been shaken by his affliction and by the gloomy theology of his time. Otherwise these performances, so inconsistent with his genius, could never have taken place. The irregularity of his productions, sometimes delicate as the most graceful stanzas of the troubadours, and some times as coarse and rough as Villon at his worst, are in exact proof of this assertion.
In theology he was, to quote Ozanam, “no longer a dogmatic but a mystic.” He really became the leader of a band of pure and elevated minds which continued, by direct genealogy, through Hugo and Richard of St. Victor, and Tauler down to St. Theresa, Madame Guyon, Fénelon, and our own Thomas C. Upham. It is an honor of no slight consequence to have inspired so much of the spirit of the Apostle John into that turbid current of mediaeval religion. And it does not surprise us, therefore, to find the Cur mundus militat of Jacoponus credited to Bernard of Clairvaux, nor the Jesu, dulcis memoria of Bernard attributed to Jacoponus. The two men were very similar, but the opportunities of the French abbot were infinitely superior to those of the Italian monk. And after a very careful inquiry I remain convinced, like other hymnologists, that these two great hymns have already been properly assigned. It is certainly a staggering piece of testimony when the latter is found in an old MS. of Jacoponus’s poems, precisely in the form in which it appears in the most critical edition of the writings of Bernard. And it is equally unsettling for us to come upon the Cur mundus militat in the works of the saint, when we know, on no doubtful evidence, that this was the passport of the sinner into his Franciscan convent. Once more it is worth our while to repeat the warning that any positive designation of Latin hymns by their authors’ names must rest upon a firmer foundation than the mere fact that they can be discovered in this man’s or that man’s printed works.
Jacoponus also interests us in view of his Protestant spirit. He never fancied Boniface VIII., and when that pope had a dream in which he saw a great bell without a tongue, and consulted the keen-witted friar upon its meaning, he received the reproof valiant, “Know, your holiness,” said the undaunted monk, “that the great size of the bell signifies the pontifical power which embraces the world. But take heed lest the tongue be that good example which you will not give.” For this and other liberties which he took it is no wonder that he presently found himself in prison, where he suffered everything patiently, and announced that he would go out when Boniface was ready to come in. And this, indeed, actually occurred. He was excommunicated, too, but from this sentence Benedict XI. released him on December 23d, 1303.
I cannot refrain from quoting some more of his religious aphorisms and meditations which instinctively suggest to us the pious musings of À Kempis. Here is one: “I have always thought, and I think now, that it is a great thing to know how to enjoy God. Why? Because in these hours of joy, humility is exercised with respect. But I have thought, and I think now, that the greatest thing is to know how to rest deprived of God. Why? Because in these hours of trial, faith is exercised without evidence, hope without attempt at fulfilment, and charity without any sign of the divine benevolence.” And here is a fragment from his last poem: “Love, I see that thou art transfiguring me, and making me become Love like thee, so that I dwell no longer in my own heart and that I know no longer how to find myself again. If I perceive in a man any evil, or vice, or temptation, I am transformed and I enter into him; I am penetrated with his pain.”
It must not be supposed that these poems were in the Latin language in every instance. Very few of the entire number are truly within our own sphere of research, and all those composed in Italian are accessible to us only through a French prose translation. But his “Praise of Poverty” deserves a place even in these pages, for it reveals the nature of the poet and helps us to comprehend the pathos and tenderness of his unregulated genius:
“Sweet Poverty, how much in truth
Should we love thee!
For, child, thou hast a sister named
Humility.
A common bowl, for food and drink,
Is all thy need;
Bread, water, and a few poor herbs,
Suffice indeed.
“And, if a guest should come, she adds
A pinch of salt;
She travels fearless, and no foe
Can bid her halt;
Thieves do not plunder her; she dies
At length in peace;
She makes no will; no grasping hands
Clutch her increase.
“Poor little thing! Behold thou art
Heaven’s citizen;
No vulgar earthly wishes draw
Thee down to men;
Thine is the greatest sceptre, thine
The kingdom here,
For what thou carest not to seek
Still crowdeth near.
“O science most profound and deep!
For thus we rise,
And gain our freedom by the things
We most despise!
O gracious Poverty, supplied
With joy and rest,
Thine is the plenty of the heart,
And that is best!”
It is strangely incongruous with this almost idyllic gentleness for us to find such a man hanging a coveted bit of meat in his cell until the odor of its putrefaction disgusted the rest of the monks, as well as put an end to his own craving for the forbidden dainty. Then, too, we have several other anecdotes of his grim humor and bold denunciation of sin. Take, for example, the story told of his peculiar half-satirical conduct in an instance which Wadding, the historian of the Franciscan Order, relates with great gusto. A citizen of Todi, a relative of the poet, had bought a pair of chickens, and not wishing to be inconvenienced by them, he said to Jacoponus, “Take them and carry them for me, if you please; I don’t care to burden myself with them.” To which Jacoponus answered, “Trust me! I’ll carry your chickens home.” He then went direct to the church of Fortunatus, in which his own monument was afterward placed, and pulling up a gravestone he thrust the chickens in and replaced the slab. The worthy citizen on his return of course found no chickens, and therefore at once hunted out Jacoponus in the public square and reproached him. “I took them to your house,” retorted the Franciscan. “But I have just come from it and my wife says she has not seen you,” the Tudescan asserted. Thereupon Jacoponus took him to the church and having removed the stone, said to him: “Friend, isn’t that your home?” The citizen, says Wadding, took his chickens, being a man evidently of frugal mind, and, “not without fear, went his way absorbed in thought.”
This mad Solomon is at times so keen in his denunciations of the corruption of the Church, and so evidently sincere in his own religion, that more than one hymnologist has thought that his folly was largely assumed as a guise under which he had greater freedom. The court fool was a “chartered libertine” as to his language, and when we read the epitaph of Jacoponus it seems as if he had reversed the saying of Shakespeare and had stolen Satan’s livery to serve Heaven in. There is no question but that this satirical freedom actually cost the poor jester some considerable share of imprisonment, and this heightens the likelihood that he was playing Brutus in order to abolish Caesar. Boniface VIII., whom he had very plainly rebuked, was the one who imprisoned him, and he was not released before the case—as he had indeed predicted—was precisely reversed. Let me record my own conviction, based upon the poem of which I append a translation, and upon the other facts of his life, that this view of his career has much in its favor. Those days and these are not to be compared in respect to liberty. Where Bernard of Cluny swung his sling about his head and let the pebbles fly to right and left with no very tangible result, Jacoponus took bow and arrows and drove his shaft into the target. No one meddled with Bernard; but Jacoponus, a century later, was a Tell for the ecclesiastical Gessler.
Of the Stabat Mater Dolorosa, carried by the Flagellants into every corner of Europe as they flogged themselves in public to its anthem, it can be said that it is one of the very greatest hymns—if not actually the greatest—of the Roman Catholic Church. The Dies Irae, the Veni, Sancte Spiritus, and the Hymn of Bernard of Cluny, are catholic rather than Roman. This is Roman rather than catholic. It is full of Mariolatry. Take a stanza from a prose translation by way of example:
“Virgin of virgins, illustrious, be not now bitter to me, make me mourn with thee, make me carry about the death of Christ, make me a sharer in His passion, adoring His suffering.” And again: “O Christ, when I go hence, give me, through Thy mother, to attain the palm of victory,” etc.
For this reason the Protestant metrical versions of the Stabat Mater are few in number and generally accompanied by disclaimers of one kind or another. Of course the music, on whose wings the hymn has now flown world-wide, will need no word of mine. If the Stabat Mater itself receives commonly the second rank among hymns, it follows that Rossini, Pergolesi, Palestrina and Haydn have not detracted from its glory. And though in the terse language of one of our best hymnologists, we say, “It is simple Mariolatry, most of it,” the human pathos of the verses appeals strongly to those who refuse the added errors of the poem.
Of the Stabat Mater Speciosa I confess to a decided doubt. It is in the nature of a paraphrase, almost of a parody. It is unworthy of the brain that formed the Mater Dolorosa, and the jester must have gone beyond common folly if he descended to this imitation of himself. It is more likely—and there is good ground for the opinion—that it is the work of some later hand. Archbishop Trench, by the way, will not include either of them in his collection.
Of the other writings of Jacoponus it may be interesting to say that he composed hymns and satires in great abundance, both in Latin and in Italian, which were collected by Franciscus Tressatus, a Minorite brother, and published in seven books. The Cur mundus militat (which Wadding quotes at length) meets this editor’s highest praise. Of the Italian poems we can say that they are now regarded by Symonds and others as the fountain-head of Italian literature, and that they contained many of the crude expressions of the common people mixed with an elegance of phraseology to which Dante and Petrarch were accustoming their mother tongue. Indeed, I know no other similar poet, unless it be John Skelton, rector of “gloomy Dis” in England, who about a century later shot the same kind of shafts at the same manner of target and with much the same bitter, gibing wit.
But of all the compositions of our mad monk which I have seen, I am most especially interested in this Cur mundus militat. Its attractiveness consists, first of all, in its dactylic measure and in its singular adaptation to the character of Jacoponus. It is hard, in the translation, to catch that strange jingle of the cap and bells and that tossing of the fool’s bauble which accompany the exhortation. Only in the last stanza does it appear as if he deigned to be serious. All that precedes this is the quaint world-weariness of the man too wise for his time, and who is therefore well pleased to be stultus propter Christum—a “fool for Christ’s sake.”
THE VANITY OF EARTH.
Why should this world of ours strive to be glorious
Since its prosperity is not victorious?
Swiftly its power and its beauty are perishing
Like to frail vases which once we were cherishing.
Trust more to letters carved fair on some frostiness
Than to this brittle world’s empty untrustiness.
False in her honors, in semblance of purity,
Never as yet had she time for security.
More should be trusted to glass, which is treacherous,
Than to Earth’s happiness wretched and venturous—
Filled with false vanities, lured by false madnesses,
Worn with false knowledges, sick of false gladnesses.
Where now is Solomon, once so pre-eminent?
Where is that Samson, so valiantly prominent?
Where the fair Absalom, stalwart and beautiful?
Where the sweet Jonathan, lovely and dutiful?
Whither went Caesar, that monarch illustrious?
Or the proud Dives, at table industrious?
Tell me of Tullius, lofty in eloquence;
Or Aristoteles, first in grandiloquence.
So many heroes, such spacious activity,
Dancers and mountebanks, kingdoms and levity;
Rulers of earth who were tyrannous o’er us all—
Swift as a glance they are gone from before us all!
What a short holiday this of Earth’s best estate!
Joys, which to man are like dreams that attest his fate;
Which, the rewards of eternity banishing,
Lead him through paths where his comfort is vanishing.
Food of the worm thou art—clod of the common clay!
O dew! O vanity! Why praise thy common way?
Thou who art ignorant whether the morrow come!
Do good to all ere the time of thy sorrow come.
Much though we value this glory of earthiness,
Scripture declareth, as grass, its unworthiness;
Like the light leaf, by the mighty wind hurried off,
So is this life, by the darkness soon carried off.
Nothing is thine which thy spirit may lose again—
What this world gave it intendeth to choose again;
Lift up thy thought where the heart hath its treasure-house—
Happy art thou to despise this Earth’s pleasure-house!
We are not to imagine that these stirring verses, whether in Latin or in Italian, went unnoticed. In the various productions of his muse the humble monk enjoyed a popularity like that of Abelard. Numerous manuscripts of his writings were scattered through Italy, France, and Spain, and translations in these different languages helped to increase his fame. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries at least eight editions appeared. But for critical purposes they are not so valuable as might be supposed, since there are interpolations by other hands which confuse and deter the investigator. They were supplemented in 1819 by the publication of a number hitherto unknown, which were edited by Alessandro da Mortara.
Of the Latin poetry ascribed to him the Jesu dulcis memoria is certainly Bernard’s, for Morel discovered it in an Einsiedeln MS. “older than 1288.” There are two hymns—Crux te, te volo conqueri and Ave regis angelorum—of which we merely know the opening lines and have no accessible originals. The Verbum caro factum est, the Ave fuit prima salus, and the Cur mundus militat are doubtless his own. The Mater Speciosa I take the liberty to discredit because of its gross Latinity—a point which Ozanam concedes in spite of his belief in its genuine character. The Mater Dolorosa itself has not escaped question, for Benedict XIV. declared it to be the work of Innocent III., to whom, with about the same amount of truth, has also been attributed the Veni, Sancte Spiritus.
In the year 1306, after imprisonment and excommunication had both passed over his head and spent their force harmlessly, the aged Jacoponus drew near his end. His companions urged him to ask for the final sacrament, but he was in no haste. He would wait, he said, for John of Alvernia, his true friend, and from his hands only would he receive it. They considered this another proof of his untamed and rebellious nature, and loudly lamented around his bed. But the dying man gave no heed to their weakness. He raised himself upon his arm and with lifted face began to chant the Anima benedetta—the song of a blessed soul. Scarcely had his voice uttered the closing words ere two men were seen hastening across the field. One was that very John of Alvernia, moved by some strange presentiment to visit his friend. He entered the room and greeted Jacoponus with a kiss of peace. Then he administered the sacrament of the Eucharist. And thereupon the failing singer, his desire being at last fulfilled, sang the Jesu nostra fidanza and relapsed into silence for a time. Then he exhorted those about him to live holy lives, and, lifting his hands toward heaven, gently expired. It was on Christmas eve and, in the neighboring church, the choir had just begun to chant the Gloria in Excelsis.
Two hundred and ninety years after his death his tombstone and its inscription were placed. The words, when rendered from Latin into English, are these:
“The bones of the blessed Jacoponus de Benedictis of Todi, who, a fool for Christ’s sake, deluded the world by a new art and took heaven by force.”
There is in the Lenox Gallery a small picture by Zamacois, which represents a jester leaning against a head of Pan. The rude, broken bust stands on an antique pedestal, its mouth, in its half-tragic, half-comic curves, appearing to whisper into the ear of its companion. He, scarlet-clad and with his bauble swinging idly in his hands, inclines his head toward it and seems in a sad gravity to listen to its words. There, indeed, do I see Jacoponus! The eager heart of the great misunderstood, inconsistent, vain, and empty World tells him of its nothingness—a broken and abandoned deity deserted in its garden of Eden. An inexpressible sadness comes over me. Quietly I put by the Stabat Mater; I do not love it!—but I close the page softly over the poor mad prophet who rests his weary head on the steps of Solomon’s throne.
The contributions of Holland to the devotional poetry of Christendom have not been extensive; but in the Middle Ages she could show several Latin hymn-writers. The best known of these, however, is by far more famous for his prose works. Thomas Hemerken, called afterward Thomas à Kempis, was not by birth a Hollander. He was born in 1379 or 1380 at Kempen, a small city in the diocese of Koeln (Cologne), not far from what became the boundary line between the two nations. But in those days, and, indeed, until the Peace of Westphalia, Holland, like Switzerland, was reckoned a part of Germany. His father, John Hemerken, was an artisan of the poorer class, probably a silversmith; and both his parents were devout and God-fearing people. His elder brother John had gone to Deventer to obtain an education, after the fashion of the times, when boys wandered from city to city in search of instruction, and supported themselves by singing, begging, and sometimes by thieving. But at Deventer John had fallen in with some good people who had pity upon these wandering scholars, and had made arrangements to furnish them lodgings and copying-work in addition to what they would earn by singing in the choir.
The chief person in this group was Gerard Groote, a man of wealthy family and some strange vicissitudes in life. He had studied at the universities of Paris and Prague, and had taken minor orders to qualify himself to hold the two canonries family influence secured to him, but without giving any indication of a vocation to the sacred office. He seems even to have led a dissolute life. Then a great change came over him, chiefly through the influence of a friend of his youth named Henry Eger, now the prior of a Cistercian convent at Munkhuisen. Gerard resigned his benefices, and spent five years in a monastic retreat, from which he emerged as a zealous preacher of the Gospel to the clergy and people of what now is Holland, using both Latin and Dutch as occasion served. He especially dwelt on the utter worldliness of that dreary time, when priests, nobles, and tradesmen alike had lost all idea of serving God and men, and had set up gain and pleasure as the recognized ends of life. His sharp rebukes, and his exaltation of humility, simplicity, and poverty, attracted the lower classes, but roused the opposition of both the burghers and the Mendicants against him. After a brief and stormy career he was silenced by the Archbishop of Utrecht, and was obliged to find vent for his zeal in some other channel.
His purity and unworldliness had gathered around him, in his native Deventer, men and women like-minded with him, who, according to the tendency of the time, drifted naturally into a kind of monastic life. Brother-houses and sister-houses were organized, and they became known as the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life. They took no vows, and yet practised celibacy, common ownership and labor, and obedience to the rector of the house. They adopted no common dress, but came to wear the simplest gray robe of the same cut. Both laymen and clergy lived together in the brother-houses, and each took his turn in the common services of the brotherhood. They observed no canonical hours beyond what the Church exacted of the priests among them. They assumed none of the professions of the monks, and yet they realized the monkish ideal better than did the monks themselves. The four principles which governed Gerard’s own life and became the four corner-stones of this fraternity, were “contempt of the world and of self, imitation of the lowly life of Christ, good-will, and the grace of devoutness” (contemptus mundi et sui ipsius, imitatio humilis vitae Christi, bona voluntas, gratia devotionis). All this was summed up in the phrase moderna devotio, used both by the brethren and the outside world to designate the distinctive character of the order.
The experience Christendom had had of the results of mendicancy led Groote and his associates to base the new brotherhood on honest labor. The shape this took reflects his own character. He was a great book-lover—semper avarus et peravarus librorum, he says himself. When in peril of his life in a storm by sea, he managed to save the six books he had with him. He possessed a considerable library, and when the brotherhood came to adopt the principle of community of goods, he and the rest put their books into the common stock. And all who were able to write were to labor in copying books for sale—the clergy in Latin, the laymen in Dutch. It was this employment he extended to the poor scholars of the Deventer school. Indeed, it seems not improbable that he began it with them, and that the first brotherhood was composed of young friends of this class, who had grown to manhood in this employment. It is certain that in Deventer, in Zwolle, and for all we know in the other cities where the brotherhood took root, near by the brother-house stood a poor-scholars’ house, in which the boys attending the school of the city were lodged, kept under discipline, and to some degree given work also. But the Brethren of the Common Life were not an educating body, as has been very generally supposed. They aimed only at saving boys from the moral injury which too often attended their homeless life, at keeping good discipline over them, and at imparting moral and religious training. They aimed to do for the school-boys what the founders of colleges in the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris tried to do for the myriads of students who lived like vagrants in those seats of learning.
But before Gerard Groote died the question was raised whether it would not be advisable to establish a strictly monastic order of life for those of the brethren who felt a vocation to it. To this he agreed, but dissuaded his friends from adopting the severe rules of the Cistercians and the Carthusians for the new order. Rather he suggested that of the Canons Regular under the rule of St. Augustine as preferable, since it would be more in keeping with the spirit of the brotherhood, and would bind on no one too heavy burdens. This advice marks an advance upon Dominic, Francis, and the “reformers” of the Benedictine and Mendicant orders, in an evangelical direction. They all sought progress to perfection in deeper austerity. In his case the preference perhaps was caused by his friendship for the monastery of Canons Regular at Groenendal, in Flanders, whose prior was Jan Rusbroek, the great Flemish mystic. Gerard made several visits to Groenendal after his conversion, and translated two of his friend’s books into Latin.
Gerard Groote was carried off by the great pestilence of 1384, in his forty-fourth year. But he left the work in good hands, for a Deventer priest named Florens Radewinzoon succeeded him as rector of the brother-house, and proceeded with the building of the new monastery at Windesheim, near Deventer. It was opened in 1386, and John à Kempis, who had become a member of the brotherhood, was one of the six who first assumed the monastic vows.
It was six years later, in 1392, that Thomas set out to seek his brother at Deventer; for although the distance was not much over a hundred miles, he had heard nothing of John’s profession at Windesheim, so uncertain and irregular were the means of communication. On learning what had happened, he proceeded to Windesheim, where his brother welcomed him warmly. But there was no school at Windesheim, and John advised him to return to Deventer to attend the city school and place himself under the care of Florens. He did so and became an inmate of the poor-scholars’ house, which had been given to the brotherhood by a devout matron of the city. Here he lived for six years, attending school under Master Johann Boehme, singing in the choir of the church of which Florens was vicar, and earning a little money by copying books for him. The good rector showed him very great kindness, and in 1398, when his school studies were complete, he received him into the brotherhood. The year before this another pestilence had visited Deventer, carrying off Johann Kessel, the saintly cook of the brother-house, and prostrating Thomas himself, who recovered with difficulty. Indeed, it seemed as though the brotherhood would become extinct, and Florens and six others withdrew for a time from the plague-smitten city to guard against this catastrophe.
In 1399 Thomas, at Florens’s instance, decided to assume the monastic vows. A second house of the order had been established at Agnietenberg (or Mount St. Agnes) near the city of Zwolle. Of this John à Kempis had been made the second prior in 1398, and held that office until 1408. Thither Thomas proceeded in 1399, stopping at Zwolle to obtain the indulgence lately proclaimed by the Pope for the benefit of a new church in that city. After a novitiate of seven years he took the vows in 1406, and in 1414 was ordained to the priesthood.
The monastic life is studiously and intentionally monotonous. It aims at the exclusion of all that gives zest and interest to ordinary existence, and at the reduction of life’s employments to a routine. Its variety and color are to be sought in the inner life of its members, and that of Thomas was not wanting in these elements. If his inner experience be reflected in his Soliloquy of the Soul, he passed through those shifting seasons of gloom and gladness which characterize the experience of an introverted religion. His religious character was formed on the lines of the modern devotion, as defined by Gerard Groote, and as reflected in the lives and the writings of Florens Radewinzoon, Gerard Zerbolt, Johann Mande, Gerlach Peterszoon, and Johann Brinckerinck, the earlier notable men of the brotherhood or of the Windesheim congregation. His was not a bold and originative mind to strike out new paths for himself. He had not even those gifts of practical administration for which Florens, John à Kempis, and others of the order were notable. Even when he had attained recognition as the most eminent man at Agnietenberg, his brethren twice passed him by in selecting their prior, and never gave him any dignity higher than the sub-priorate, which probably was a sinecure. An early biographer goes so far as to describe him as sitting silent whenever ordinary and worldly matters were discussed, because of his ignorance of the very terms used at such times. But this is an exaggeration. His Chronicle of the Monastery of Mt. St. Agnes shows him taking a mild and not unintelligent interest in the secular side of the monastic life, and sharing the joy of his brethren in the fine apple-crop or the large take of fish, and the like. But this Chronicle shows how limited his range of vision and interest. He lived through the Papal Schism, the Asiatic conquests of Timour, the Council of Constance, the Hussite wars, Henry the Fifth’s invasion of France, the exploits of Jeanne d’Arc, the Council of Basle, the rise of the Medici in Florence, and of the Duchy of Burgundy, the Council of Florence, the exploits of Scanderberg and Hunyadi Janos, the Wars of the Roses, the revival of letters, the invention of printing, the fall of Constantinople, the Florentine Academy, the Portuguese discoveries in the Atlantic, and much more that might be thought likely to be discussed even within the walls of a Dutch monastery. But the record is silent as to all these things; for the most part they are part of the doings of that “world” which the disciples of the modern devotion trained themselves to despise.
No doubt the great question of the Papal Schism was of interest at Agnietenberg, and also the two great councils which brought it to an end. At the Council of Constance the Brethren of the Common Life were arraigned by a zealous Mendicant as violating Church law by observing the three rules of the monastic life without belonging to any recognized order. But this Mendicant notion was declared heretical, thanks to two great French doctors, Pierre d’Ailly and John Gerson, the second of whom was to be associated so closely with Thomas in a famous controversy.
In 1427 the troubles of the outside world did reach the convent at Agnietenberg and its associates. There had been a disputed election to the princely diocese of Utrecht, then one of the largest and wealthiest in Latin Christendom. The Pope recognized one candidate and the people of the cities another. To break down their obstinacy the diocese was laid under an interdict, which put an end to every act of public worship. Thereupon the brotherhood and the order were given their choice by the citizens, either to go on with their services as usual in church and chapel, or to leave the diocese. With one consent they chose the latter alternative, and in 1429 they distributed themselves among the associated brother-houses and monasteries outside the diocese. The twenty-four clerical and lay brethren of Agnietenberg found a home at Luvenkerk in Friesland, in a disordered monastery which had been placed under the rule of the Windesheim congregation, and which they used this opportunity to reform. After three years of exile they were allowed to return, a new Pope having yielded to the people. But Thomas did not return so soon, for he had been called away to Arnheim to the death-bed of his brother John, the brother he had found at Windesheim instead of Deventer, and under whose priorship at Agnietenberg he took the vows.
In 1451 Deventer was visited by a great Churchman and notable thinker, the Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa, who, like Thomas, was born east of what is now the German frontier, but had received his schooling in Deventer, where he learned to love and honor the Brethren of the Common Life. He came now as papal legate to reform the abuses which had arisen in the churches of Germany during the great schism; and when he came to his loved Deventer he hastened to indicate his especial regard for his old friends. He granted a special indulgence to both the brotherhood and the order, and permitted the Windesheim congregation to establish a second congregation, with equal privileges, to accommodate the rapidly increasing number of convents of Canons Regular.
Thomas survived his brother by nearly forty years. His cloister life moved on through three decades with the external monotony of an existence subjected to rule. Five years of the forty were years of pestilence and popular distress, which he duly chronicles. But the only real interruption of his routine which still has a living interest was his acquaintance with young Johan Wessel, who came to pursue his studies in Zwolle, being drawn by the charm of the Imitation into the neighborhood of its author. This probably was about 1460, when he sought and made Thomas’s acquaintance, and often conversed with him upon the greatest of themes. But the earliest biography of Wessel belongs to the next century, and is by a Protestant pastor in Bremen; so the statements that Wessel found Thomas and his brother monks all too superstitious, and rebuked the Mariolatry of the author of the Imitation, are open to doubt. That Wessel, the forerunner of Luther, influenced Thomas in the writing of the Imitation is a palpable absurdity.
For a short time he was procurator or steward of the monastery, a task which must have been uncongenial to him, but which he would discharge with his best diligence, as his first biographer, Jodocus Badius Ascensius, says he did. Then he was sub-prior a second time in 1448.
The chronicle of Mount St. Agnes ends with January 17th, 1471; its author died July 26th of the same year. His health had been singularly good, but toward the close of his life he suffered from dropsy. His eyesight never failed him, and he retained all his faculties in full vigor to the last. As the end drew near, the sense of all he had been to his brethren as a friend and counsellor deepened in them at the prospect of losing him. All that their love could do and his ascetic principles would permit, they did to lighten the burdens and relieve the pains of his illness. He died in his ninety-second year, after having been sixty-three years in the order and fifty-eight in the priesthood.
He was buried within the cloisters of the monastery. There his bones continued to rest even after the dissolution of the monastery at the Reformation in 1573, and thence they were disinterred in 1672 and placed in a shrine. But no miracles were wrought at his grave or by his bones. Whatever the faults of the Brethren of the Common Life, it was not in the atmosphere of the modern devotion that men learned to crave after such evidence of sanctity in the servants of God. So the brotherhood and its affiliated order have made no contributions to the list of Roman Catholic saints. There is room in that long and motley list for Giovanni da Capistrano, the cruel and implacable inquisitor, whose path across Europe was marked with blood and fire. But none has been found for the gentle and loving Thomas à Kempis, who has wooed millions of souls to a closer communion with his Master, and whose own life preached humility, patience, gentleness, renunciation of the world, conformity to the will of God, and likeness to Christ, as distinctly as does his great book. Well, he is content. Ama nesciri—love to be unknown—was a precept often on his lips and illustrated in his life. Of small matter to him would have been the attempt to deny his authorship of the Imitation, and the controversy of two centuries’ duration it provoked. Of no greater moment the refusal of the name of saint to one whose only miracles were wrought upon the spirits of his brethren. But the Church catholic says of him, “Surely this was a holy man of God.”
While the copying of books was the general employment of the brotherhood and of the order, there was from the first a good deal of independent authorship among them, and always on the lines of the “modern devotion.” Groote himself labored chiefly by preaching and correspondence. But some of his letters are tracts in that form, and had a wide circulation as such. Florens was not much even of a letter-writer, but he wrote one devotional tract which has been discovered. It was in Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen, his altera manus, that he found a fit organ for the expression of his ideas in writing. To us Protestants Zerbolt is memorable as the author of a treatise asserting the right and duty of unlearned men to have good books—the Bible and their prayer-books included—in their own tongue. But he was much better known by his writing certain widely circulated books of devotion—modern, of course. Hendrik Mande, the Seer, was a Windesheim monk whose mysticism took the bolder and more ecstatic flight of Rusbroek, and like Rusbroek he found his native tongue more suitable than Latin. Lastly, Gerlach Peterszoon, sometimes called “the second Thomas à Kempis,” although he died in 1411, before Thomas himself had become an author, wrote in both Latin and Dutch sundry works, one of which still is reprinted for edification even by Protestants. Through all this literature runs the same strain of thought and feeling, in spite of personal differences. They all insist on a deeper renunciation of the world than is satisfied by any external monastic compliances. They all hold forth the imitation of Christ’s humility and meekness as the essence of the Christian life. They all insist on devotion to the will of God and good-will to men as the two essential channels in which the Christian life must run.
Thomas à Kempis’s works as a whole fit into the writings of this group of disciples of Gerard Groote, just as his Imitation of Christ fits into the rest of his works. He simply is the best writer they had, as the Imitation is the best thing he ever wrote. If none of the many manuscripts of the Imitation bore his name, as nearly all of them do; and if none of the contemporaries who knew him had certified to his authorship of it, as so many of them do; and if none of the printed editions bore his name, as twenty-one of the fifteenth century and forty of the sixteenth do, we still would have been obliged to ascribe it to him. No other century than his could have produced it. It reflects the ideas of no other group than that of the disciples of Gerard and Florens. The very title, De Imitatione Christi, et de Contemptu Omnium Vanitatum Mundi, expresses the twofold aspect of the moderna devotio of which Gerard and Florens were the sponsors. Among those disciples there is no one but the author of the Soliloquy of the Soul and the Valley of Lilies, to whom we could give it. It differs no more in point of worth from Thomas’s other books than does the Pilgrim’s Progress from Bunyan’s other writings, Grace Abounding always excepted.
While it is by his formal hymns Thomas à Kempis acquires his right to a place here, it is true at the same time that the Imitation itself is a great Christian poem, not only in substance but in form. A Belgian, who was his contemporary, says he had written the book metrice, or in rhythm and rhyme. As it was printed always as prose until our own times, this statement was somewhat puzzling, as was the title, Musica Ecclesiastica, found in some of the manuscripts. But Rev. Karl Hirsche, Lutheran pastor in Hamburg, has vindicated both expressions by showing that Thomas has followed such models as the sequence, Victimae paschali, in the composition of his work. And he has given us an edition based on Thomas’s autograph of the year 1441, in which this peculiarity is made visible.15 It is true that this way of writing what we may call rhymed and rhythmical prose is not confined to Thomas or to the Imitation among his works. Among others Jan van Schoonhooven, a Belgian disciple of Jan Rusbroek’s, uses this form frequently; and Pastor Hirsche has pointed out its frequency in others of Thomas’s works. But in no other book approaching the Imitation in length is the restriction of rhythm and rhyme so steadily accepted. As an instance, take this brief passage from the fifth chapter of the third book:
“Amans volat, currit, et laetatur;
Liber est, et non tenetur
Dat omnia pro omnibus,
Et habet omnia in omnibus;
Quia in uno summo super omnia quiescit
Ex quo omne bonum fluit et procedit.
Non respecit ad dona
Sed ad donantem se convertit super omnia bona.
Amor modo saepe nescit,
Sed super omnem modum fervescit.
Amor onus non sentit,
Labores non reputat;
Plus affectat quam valet;
De impossibilitate non causatur
Quia cuncta sibi posse et licere arbitrator.”
Or in Rev. W. Benham’s admirable version: “He who loveth flyeth, runneth, and is glad; he is free and not hindered. He giveth all things for all things, and has all things in all things, because he resteth in One who is high above all, from whom every good floweth and proceedeth. He looketh not for gifts, but turneth himself to the Giver, above all good things. Love oftentimes knoweth no measure, but breaketh out above all measure; love feeleth no burden, reckoneth not labors, striveth after more than it is able to do, pleadeth not impossibility, because it judgeth all things which are lawful for it to be possible.”16
The Imitation has obtained a place next to the Bible in the devotional literature of Christendom. The fact that the author was a Roman Catholic and that the fourth book is a preparation for the devout reception of the Eucharist in accordance with the Roman Catholic theory of its nature, has not prevented stanch Protestants from translating and commending it. Dr. Chalmers wrote a commendatory preface to a Scotch reprint of John Payne’s translation. And in Germany, Holland, and England the Protestant versions have far exceeded those made by Roman Catholics. The first Protestant version was that from the mediaeval into Ciceronian Latin, by Sebastian Castellio (Basle, 1556); the second was into German by the great and good John Arndt. But the book has achieved a still more notable conquest than this. In Corneille’s metrical version (1651) it was a favorite with Auguste Comte, who recommended it to the Benthamist, Sir William Molesworth, as well worth reading. It has obtained a sort of recognition among Comtists as a canonical work, and selections from it often are read at the Positivist services. And English readers will remember the passage in which George Eliot, writing in Comte’s spirit, describes its effect on the sensitive spirit of Maggie Tulliver:
“She knew nothing of doctrines and systems—of mysticism or quietism; but this voice out of the far-off Middle Ages was the direct human communication of a human soul’s belief and experience, and came to Maggie as an unquestioned message.
“I suppose that is the reason why the small, old-fashioned book, for which you need pay only sixpence at a book-stall, works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness, while expensive sermons and treatises, newly issued, leave all things as they were before. It was written down by a hand that waited for the heart’s prompting; it is the chronicle of a solitary hidden anguish, struggle, trust, and triumph—not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains to all time a lasting record of human needs and consolations; the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt and suffered and renounced, in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from ours, but under the same silent, far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, and with the same strivings, the same failures, the same weariness.”—The Mill on the Floss, Book IV., chap. 3.
All true; but less than the truth; for Thomas’s power lies not in these negations, but in his personal relation to “the supreme, invisible Teacher, the pattern of sorrow, the source of all strength,” from whom Marian Evans turned away to fill up her life with “yearnings and strivings and failures,” while her only comfort was in the consideration that she had stilled her pain by no “false anodynes.”
It is a little uncertain at what time the Imitation was written. It seems not improbable that it was begun in Thomas’s youth, when he had assumed or was about to assume the responsibilities of the priesthood. A lofty regard for the sanctity of that office was one of the traditions of the brotherhood. Groote himself, in view of the stains of his earlier life, never would assume it, although his ordination would have enabled him to resume his work of preaching through the Archdiocese of Utrecht. He never was more than deacon, and the order which silenced him merely forbade deacons to preach without especial permission. It is not impossible that in the case of Thomas, as in that of Luther, the responsibility seemed greater than he could bear, and that it drove him into a closer and more consecrated fellowship with his Master, which bore fruit in the first book of this wonderful manual. He was ordained priest in 1414; there seems good reason to believe that this first book—the Imitation proper—was known and read at Windesheim, and even translated into Dutch by Jan Scutken, as early as the year 1420; and that the other three were written, each as an independent work, before 1425, and then united as one manual of devotion.17 The oldest manuscript of the Latin still in existence bears the date 1425, and testifies to his authorship. The oldest in Thomas’s own handwriting was made in 1441, and forms part of a series of his works, which he then collected probably for the first time.
Of Thomas’s purely poetical works, besides a few hortatory poems and anagrams on the names of the saints, there were known until recently sixteen Cantica Spiritualia, to wit:
Adversa mundi tolera, Agnetis Christi virginis, Ama Jesum cum Agnete, Ave florens rosa, Christe Redemptor omnium, Vere salus, Christe sanctorum gloria, Et piorum, Cives coeli attendite, En virginis Caeciliae, Gaude, mater Ecclesia, De praecursoris, Jesu Salvador seculi, O dulcissime Jesu, O Jesu mi dulcissime, Spes et solamen, O qualis quantaque laetitia, O vera summa Trinitas, Tota vita Jesu Christi, Vitam Jesu stude imitari.
In 1882 Father O. A. Spitzen found in a manuscript in Zwolle ten other Cantica Spiritualia, which he published that year as the work of Thomas à Kempis, to wit:
Angelorum si haberem, Creaturarum omnium merita, Cum sub cruce sedet moerens, Jerusalem gloriosa, Mirum est si non lugeat, Nec quisquam oculis vidit, O quid laudis, quis honoris, Quanta Mihi cura de te, Serve meus noli metuere, Ubi modo est Jesus, ubi est Maria.
Six of these had already appeared in Mone’s collection, and credited to a fifteenth century manuscript found at Carlsruhe, a fact which does not militate against Spitzen’s view of their authorship. The latter found them along with the hymns generally ascribed to Thomas in a MS. which had belonged to the brother-house in Zwolle, and had been written in the latter half of that century, probably between 1477 and 1483. Most of them bear the ear-marks of Thomas’s style, and have a congruity with the matter of his works which lends probability to Father Spitzen’s conjecture.
Of all these hymns two only have attained any recognition as contributions to the sacred songs of Christendom. These two are the Adversa mundi tolera, which is rather an exhortation in the tone of the Imitation than a hymn; and the
O qualis quantaque laetitia, better known, through the general omission of its first verse, as the Adstant angelorum chori.
Dr. Trench well says that the whole of our author’s poetry will not yield a second passage at all to be compared in beauty with this. Indeed, most of Thomas’s poetry lacks the inspiration which characterizes his best prose. He is a poet in prose and a prosy poet, and writes in verse because he has been required to fill up some empty place in the hymn-list of his monastery. His acquaintance with the hymn-writer’s art is bounded by his daily familiarity with the hymns of his breviary, and he betrays the fact by starting from the first lines of well-known hymns in his own work. But in this hymn on the joys of heaven he for once struck the right key, although even here he shows some stiffness of the joints, like a monk more used to a seat in the Scriptorium than to the saddle of Pegasus. The hymn is known to English readers by the admirable version of Mrs. Charles:
“High the angel choirs are raising
Heart and voice in harmony.”
CHAPTER XXVII.
FRANCIS XAVIER, MISSIONARY TO THE INDIES (1506-52).
No man, since the days of the Apostles, has been more commended for his zeal than Xavier. He has been the moon of that “Society of Jesus” of which Ignatius Loyola was the guiding sun. His privations, heroism, and success have been the constant theme of the Roman Catholic Church. And it is impossible to study his life without a conviction that there was in it a devout and gallant purpose to bless the world.
Our limits and our line of thought alike demand of us that we shall not attempt, in any exhaustive form, to treat of Francis Xavier from the theologic or controversial side. He interests us, apart from his personal character, simply because two Latin hymns have been accredited to his pen. These have the same opening line,
“O Deus ego amo Te,”
but, after this exordium, they proceed quite differently. The second of them, as we find it placed in Daniel’s collection, has received the greatest share of esteem, and is known to the entire world of English-speaking Christians by the admirable translation of Mr. Caswall:
“My God, I love thee, not because
I seek for heaven thereby,” etc.
There is good reason to discredit its authorship, if this be a question of accuracy with us. Schlosser’s language (Vol. i., p. 407) would indicate that he regarded it as “generally conceded” to be the “love-sigh [Liebesseufzer] of the holy Francis Xavier.” But no proof has yet been offered which positively identifies this hymn with its reputed composer. Its spirit—and that of its companion lyric—is precisely his own. But so, it may be added, is the spirit of that touching poem,
“I am old and blind—
Men point to me as stricken by God’s frown,”
the same as that of John Milton, its once reputed author. No true student of Milton’s times or of Milton’s language was ever deceived by it; and the innocent and amiable Quaker lady of our own century, who wrote it, was perfectly guileless in this impersonation of his grief. But, nevertheless, it passed current for a long time on the strength of some one’s literary sagacity.
This species of argument is a very common inheritance to the editors of Latin hymns, from Thomasius and Clichtove downward. But it is quite as unsafe as to assign
“I am dying, Egypt, dying,”
to the actual Mark Antony when we know it to have been written by William Henry Lytle, an American, born in 1829 and dying in 1863. Therefore, it is scarcely proper authoritatively to accredit these hymns to Xavier, or, indeed, to any other poet. The utmost that we can say for them is that no one can prove the converse of the proposition, and that their style and form are appropriate to the period at which he lived. He is not known to have written other verses. These may have been the only exudations of that bruised and wounded spirit which have hardened into amber and thus have become precious to us. And we would prefer to believe that he truly appears in these lines in such an exquisite mystic apotheosis rather than to intermeddle with lower questions, and so, perhaps, prevent any discussion of himself in these pages at all.
We have been prohibited by much the same destructive analysis from treating of Augustine, who never wrote a hymn, and to whom the Ad perennis vitae fontem has been wrongly ascribed, for we know it now to be the undoubted composition of St. Peter Damiani. In this and in other similar cases where there is any literary question concerned, it may be worth our while to investigate with great carefulness. As a rule, however, the internal evidence offered in the hymns themselves will set us on the true path. They range in structure from the lowest corundum up to the choicest diamond, and are as various as any gems in their prosodic form and spiritual color. Like these gems, also, they are notable for varieties of crystallization—the Dark Ages showing imperfect angles and crude attempts, and the Renaissance exhibiting again the old sharp-cut classicism of a time anterior even to Hilary and Ambrose.
From the higher critical standpoint, then, these hymns are not unacceptable as Xavier’s own work. They feel as if they belonged to his age and to his life. They are transfused and shot through by a personal sense of absorption into the divine love, which has fused and crystallized them in its fiercest heat. It is proper to inquire, moreover, if Xavier did not write them, who did? Their author must have been as much superior to his own circumstances and surroundings as Xavier was to his; and he must also have been as much possessed by this same holy zeal. It is absolutely incredible that, with these qualities given, he should not have been known to us in other relations, and, sooner or later, identified as the true source of their being. The sixteenth century was a time when literary knowledge was closer and keener than it had been in the twelfth, and a hymn of that period could not be attributed to Heloise without exposing its own fallacy; for in the Requiescat a labore we have such a comparatively modern lyric, which Daniel rightly tests and finds wanting. “It seems to me,” he says, “that this song is the production of a later age.” And he might well say it, for its crystallization, so to speak, is too accurate, too many-sided, for it to belong in the twelfth century and to the sad Abbess of the Paraclete.
One cannot, however, declare this so positively of Xavier’s two hymns. In style and composition the first is inferior to the second; but both have a simplicity and directness of utterance which may easily secure that pardon which their rhythm is faulty enough to require. If one were to assign any special date to them, it would naturally be in the neighborhood of that pathetic little petition which comes from the prayer-book of Mary Queen of Scots. The Domine Deus, speravi in Te is pitched in the same key with these. And as Mary lived from 1542 to 1587, and Xavier from 1506 to 1552, there is certainly room for these two compositions to have been prepared by another hand, in the days of enthusiasm over his triumphant successes and of sorrow over his early death.
With these arguments for and against the authenticity of the hymns, we must rest content. Bartoli and Maffei, in their Life of Xavier, are silent upon the subject; and the careful Königsfeld enters the better hymn in his collection as anonymous. If we retain the reputed authorship ourselves, it must be, therefore, rather as Christians than as scholars.
But, having done so, we are entitled to speak of Francis Xavier, and of his life and his work. The date of his birth is apparently fixed by a manuscript note in Spanish in a family record possessed by the Xaviers, which places it upon April 7th, 1506. His father was Don John Giasso, a man of legal acquirements and of good social position. He was at one time auditor of the royal council under King John III. For a wife he chose Donna Maria d’Azpilqueta y Xavier, and the child Francis was born at the castle of Xavier, a few miles distant from Pampeluna in Navarre, on the southern slope of the Pyrenees. He was the youngest of a large family, and the castle where he saw the light gave to him the patronymic by which he is always known. The family were originally called Asuarez, but altered their name to Xavier when King Theobald gave them this property. The mother’s title was thus perpetuated in one of her sons, but there seems to be some confusion still remaining, for a brother of the missionary was Captain John Azpilqueta, who also apparently had exchanged his father’s name of Giasso for one of the designations borne by his mother.
The biographies of Francis Xavier are naturally of a kind to excite the critical instincts of a scholar. They are, from the original life by Torsellini, to the latest Jesuit compilation, remarkable for their enthusiasm and unlimited credulity. It is only in such calmer treatises as those of Nicolini, Stephen, Venn, and others, that we get the more just conception of his character. But to be entirely fair to him we should take him from the picture painted by his co-religionists, refusing only those things which are manifestly incongruous or absurd. The work of Bartoli and Maffei may, for example, be regarded as entirely safe in its general statements.
From the portraits left to us and preserved in the pages of Nicolini and Mrs. Jameson, we derive a vivid impression of the man’s personal intensity. His eyes are deep and thoughtful; his nose strong, rather blunt, and withal sagacious; and his face is that of a mystic. He is usually represented as gazing upward in religious rapture and his lips are parted. His features are more rugged and forcible than refined. They indicate a rude strength of body and of will rather than a delicate and sensitive nature. Should we have met him personally, he would have given us the impression of an enthusiast, deeply affectionate and profoundly loyal to anything like a military organization. These opinions would have been approved by the fact.
We read that his parents desired to educate him as a cavalier, and that he was at first instructed at home in the usual topics. But as he showed zeal and intelligence he was sent, in his eighteenth year, to the College of Ste. Barbe at Paris. Here he completed the study of philosophy, received the degree of Master, and began to give instruction to others. His most intimate friend was Peter Faber, afterward to become one of the earliest adherents of Ignatius Loyola. And the biographers are unwearied in their eulogy of Xavier’s and Faber’s purity of life and morals in the midst of the great temptations of a corrupt city.
To these two young men, ardent of mind and eager in their ambition, now enters the influence which shapes their destiny. Faber was a Savoyard, poor and of humble birth, while Xavier was well-to-do and possessed the haughty spirit of a Spanish grandee. They were, however, kindling each other up to some scheme of future glory when Ignatius Loyola made his way to Paris. He had been converted a few years before this and had already begun to gather proselytes to his opinions. His purpose in visiting Paris was not merely to avail himself of better facilities for study, but also to secure more followers. It is not strange to us that Loyola, with his great sagacity, should have singled out the two companions and have set himself to win them. Faber’s allegiance, indeed, it was an easy matter to obtain. But Xavier did not so readily fall in with the wishes of the great general of the Jesuits.
Faber’s conversion was rapidly accomplished. He was supplied with the Spiritual Exercises, which is, of all books, the best adapted to produce the proper self-abandonment and plastic condition of soul which befit the neophyte of the Society of Jesus. And this work, composed, say the Roman Catholic authorities, in the cavern of Manresa with the help of the Virgin Mary, may be regarded as the keenest instrument by which men’s lives were ever carved into the patterns designed by a superior will. We have no space for a discussion of Jesuitism further than to indicate its methods when they affect the subject before us, but Faber’s behavior undoubtedly had its weight upon Xavier. The Savoyard took to fasting with a perfect fury. In his debilitated condition he was the fit vehicle for spiritual impressions, for ecstasies, and for mystical dreams. He would kneel in the open court in the snow, and sometimes allow himself to be covered with icicles. His bundle of fuel he made into a bed and slept upon it for the few hours of what one biography “scarcely knows whether to call torture or repose.” In fact, he so outran the instruction of Loyola, that that keen observer checked him and prevented what would have reacted against his own designs. “For,” saith quaint Matthew Henry, speaking of another subject, “there is a great deal of doing which, by overdoing, is altogether undone.”
Xavier was, however, more important to Loyola than Faber. And Xavier was of tougher material and harder to reach. Upon him the intense Loyola bent the blow-pipe flame of his own spirit. He had failed to touch him by texts or by austerities. He therefore changed his tactics altogether and began to soften him by praise, by judicious cultivation of his sympathies, by procuring new scholars for him, and even by attending his lectures and feigning a deep interest in whatever he did. In short, he applied flattery and deference in such a way that he insinuated himself very soon into the confidence of Xavier, and allowed the haughty Don to recognize the high birth and good breeding which he could also claim. This was a master stroke. Faber was after all only a Savoyard; but Loyola was born in a castle, had been a page at the court of Ferdinand, and had led soldiers into the deadliest places of battle. He had also the advantage of being Xavier’s senior by fully fourteen years, for his birth had been contemporaneous with Columbus’s expedition in search of the new world.
Here, then, the influence of this strong, undaunted, unflinching spirit began to focus itself upon the young teacher of philosophy. “Resistance to praise,” says the bitter La Rochefoucauld, “is a desire to be praised twice.” And to so acute a student of human nature as Loyola it soon grew evident that he was making progress. This was proved even by the modesty of Xavier. Therefore he redoubled his energies and utilized that marvellous power of adaptation, which was his chief legacy to his order, in obtaining a definite result. He gained ground so fast that Michael Navarro, a faithful servant of the young scholar, became determined to break off this dangerous fascination, and even attempted to kill Loyola in his private apartments. But he, too, was dealing with a brain which never relaxed its vigilance and with a magnetic personality which felt a danger, and moved safely, cat-like, through the dark. He was halted and challenged by the man he came to kill, and being crushed down in confusion was thereupon treated with magnanimity, and went away revolving many things in his mind.
This was the power of Loyola—a power which sprang, first of all, from his peculiar constitution, and, second, from his fanatical ambition. It has been the key by which the Jesuit has ever since unlocked the doors of palaces and contrived to whisper in the ears of kings. Its extent has been that of the civilized and uncivilized world. In the matter of organization no human fraternity has ever equalled the Society of Jesus. The germs which we behold at Ste. Barbe in Paris have grown into a tree whose roots have taken hold on every soil, and whose fruit has dropped in every clime. The order has invariably employed strategy, intrigue, ingenuity, and perfect combination to secure its ends. It is, as a system, far from being either dead or insignificant. And its real vitality has always sprung from its maxim that its associated members, vowed to celibacy and to the accomplishment of its purposes, should be Perinde ac si cadavera—absolutely subordinate and dead to any other will—in the hands of the “general” who is at the head of its affairs. It has worked, first for itself, second for the Roman Catholic Church, and third for the proselytizing of the heathen and the heretics. It has never neglected to procure in every manner the information it needed to the full extent or to employ its principle that the end to be gained justifies the means that are taken to gain it. Thus it is the legitimate outgrowth of the soldier-courtier-fanatic mind of its founder. And this was the mind which was now spending its splendid resources upon Xavier, playing with him like a trout upon the hook, until it should land him, a completely surrendered man, within its own control.
In another sphere and under other influences, Xavier might have been a far different person. He, at least, was sincere in his devotion to the cause. He identified Jesuitism with Christianity and Loyola with Jesus Himself. Hence his character and labors have blinded many persons to the methods which he used and to the results which he sought.
It must be sufficient for us that Ignatius Loyola had now gotten the mastery of Francis Xavier so perfectly that he could be “applied to the Spiritual Exercises, the furnace in which he [Loyola] was accustomed to refine and purify his chosen vessels.” A sister of the future missionary had become one of the Barefooted Clares, and had aided in dissuading her father from interference. And now we behold Xavier praying with hands and feet tightly bound by cords; or journeying with similar cords about his arms and the calves of his legs until inflammation and ulceration ensued. There were now nine of these converts, but this man outdid the others in his austerities, and finally travelled on foot with them to meet Loyola at Venice in 1537. The society had really been formed on August 15th, 1534, at Montmartre near Paris, and this was but its natural outward movement.
At Venice, on January 8th, 1537, they again met their leader and were assigned for duty to the two hospitals of the city. That of the “Incurables” fell to Xavier’s share, and we read that with the morbid devotion characteristic of a devout student of the Exercises, he determined now to conquer his natural repugnance to disease. In the course of his duties he had an unusually hideous ulcer to dress for one of the patients. And the authentic history relates that “encouraging himself to the utmost, he stooped down, kissed the pestilent cancer, licked it several times with his tongue, and finally sucked out the virulent matter to the last drop.” (Bartoli and Maffei, p. 35.) There could be nothing worse than that certainly. And a man who had resolutely sounded this deepest abyss of self-abandonment was marked for the highest honor that the new society could bestow. We cannot doubt Xavier’s sincerity, but the gigantic horror of this performance is of a sort to place the man who has achieved it upon an eminence apart from less daring minds. It was Loyola’s way of facing human nature and forcing it to concede the supreme self-devotion of his followers. The world looks with amazement upon such actions, but when it sees them, it yields a kind of stupefied allegiance to those who have thus rushed beyond the bounds. And to a close analysis there is as much concealed spiritual pride about this nastiness as there is an unnecessary shock given to the sense of decency. Thus, as Mozoomdar says, in his Oriental Christ, “Instead of abasing self, in many cases it serves the opposite end.” It “imposes a sort of indebtedness upon Heaven” (p. 66). Yet the poor wretch who felt those lips upon his awful wound could not but worship the frightful hero who plunged into such nauseous contact with his loathsomeness.
Yes, this was and is the power of it all. It was and it is the key-note of much that is potent with the world. When Victor Hugo pictures Jean Valjean in the toils of the Thenardiers laying that white, hot, hissing bar of iron upon his arm and calmly standing before them while they shrink—ogres as they are—from the stench and the sight, he merely uses this same element. Whatever, in short, among us brings out the old savage nature; whatever plunges outside of the conventionalities, the proprieties, or even the common decencies of life; whatever defies the lightning, or dares the volcano, or tramples upon the coiled serpent, that is the thing which controls the world.
It is worthy of note that this is not a Christian but a Jesuit act. It is born of that exaggerated sentimentalism which chooses to go beyond Christ and His apostles in its fallacious abnegation of self. But wherever such acts are performed they rank as the marks of saintship and as the stigmata of a crucifixion which proudly places itself on the same Golgotha with another and nobler cross. The records, not merely of Xavier’s life, but of the lives of the saints, swarm with these creeping, slimy frogs of Egypt, raised up by enchanters of the human mind to make Pharaoh believe them to be equal to a far higher Providence. And if we say little in these pages about such strange developments and morbid growths of piety, it need not be forgotten that they existed, and that they have been fostered and encouraged by the Roman Church. The Breviary, for instance, commends a roll of self-flagellators who used the whip upon their naked backs, and Xavier heads the list with his iron flail. Cardinal Damiani, who wrote one of our loveliest hymns, introduced this fashion of scourging in 1056, and the holy nun, St. Theresa, after such exercises and an additional repose upon a bed of thorns, was “accustomed to converse with God.” [Aliquando inter spinas volutaret sic Deum alloqui solita.] This topic, with its allied suggestions, is altogether out of our present scope; but in order to see Xavier as he was, we must appreciate to what extent his spirit was subdued before his belief.
This was the man, tested and edged and tempered, to whom was now committed the “salvation of the Indies.” It was during the papacy of Paul III., the same Pope who excommunicated Henry VIII. of England. And Xavier, who had practised many austerities both in life and in behavior, was at first sent to Bologna, while Loyola, with Faber and Laynez, went to Rome. It was subsequently at Rome that Xavier had his famous vision, in which he awoke crying, “Yet more, O Lord, yet more!” for he fancied that—as the Apostle Paul once did—he had beheld his future career and was glorying in trials and persecutions. Especially did he often have a dream in which he seemed to be carrying an Indian on his shoulders and toiling with him over the roughest and hardest roads. And when at last Govea, the Rector of the College of Ste. Barbe, happened to be in Rome, Ignatius and his companions were brought by him to the notice of John III. of Portugal, and the king desired to have six of them for use in India. The Pope did not show any special desire to secure their services, and when the question came up he referred it to Ignatius to decide it as he pleased. That sagacious general objected to taking six from ten and leaving only four to the rest of the world, for his ambition now extended to the orb of the earth. He accordingly chose Rodriguez and Bobadilla for India, men who were evidently well selected, for the first became a great propagandist in Portugal, and the other was a decided obstacle to the Reformation in Germany. When Rodriguez, however, fell ill with an intermittent fever Xavier naturally occurred to Loyola as the proper substitute. He therefore commissioned him for the service, and the worn and wasted ascetic patched up his old coat, said farewell to his friends, and having craved the Pope’s blessing, set off from Rome with the Portuguese Ambassador, Mascarenhas, on March 16th, 1540. He started in such poverty that Loyola took his own waistcoat and put it upon him, and he left behind him a written paper of consecration to the society, expressing in it his desire that Loyola should be its head, with Faber as alternate, and in which he took the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the order under whose auspices he was going forth.
At the Portuguese Court in Lisbon, both Xavier and his companion were diligent in their religious work. The morals of the capital were quite reformed, and when it came time for the ships to sail to the East the king would only spare Xavier and detained Rodriguez, by the advice of Loyola, further to improve the affairs at home.
Xavier now sailed as Nuncio with papal commendation and with a poverty of outfit which had its due effect upon his companions on board the ship. The vessel itself was one of those great galleons of Spanish or Portuguese origin, carrying often a thousand persons, and having from four to seven decks. They were huge, unwieldy constructions and were generally freighted with large amounts of rich merchandise. The course was that pursued by Vasco da Gama—around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean—and the voyage often lasted beyond eight months. It is quaintly related of travellers by these precarious sea-paths that they used to take their shrouds and winding-sheets with them in case they died by the way.
The company on shipboard was as bad as the provisions, which were often execrable. The peninsular sailors never had the art either of discipline or of storing a ship and supplying what was needful for a voyage, as the English sea-kings had it. Hence their vessels were great floating caravansaries of human beings, full of the scum and offscouring of society—with lords and ladies on the quarter-deck, and robbers and murderers, harlots and gamblers down below. The crew was as prompt as that of Jonah’s ship to cry upon their gods whenever the wind blew. Such inventions as the ship’s pump, the chain-cable, and the bowsprit were not known to them. And when we see Sir Richard Grenville in the little Revenge fighting fifteen great Dons for as many hours, or Sir John Hawkins beating his way out of the harbor of Vera Cruz when the Jesus of Lubec was lost by Spanish treachery, we see how utterly cumbrous and awkward these galleons were when compared with English vessels.
Sickness also, in the form of fevers and scurvy, was very frequent. And there was such laxity of discipline that a six months’ voyage generally turned the great hulk into a hell of misery and riot. Here, therefore, Xavier was in his element. He slept on the deck; he begged his own bread, and the delicacies pressed upon him by the captain he divided among the neediest of the poor sufferers; he invented games to amuse those who were inclined toward amusement; and by degrees he commingled his sympathy and friendly offices with the necessities of the crew and passengers until they called him the “holy father.” He constantly preached, taught, and labored in this manner until he finally succumbed to an epidemic fever which broke out when they were not far from Mozambique. Here he was landed and for a time was in hospital, at length completing his voyage to India in a different ship from that in which he had first embarked.
Scattered through his story, both then and afterward, we have accounts of various miracles, of his exhibition of a spirit of prophecy, and eventually of his raising the dead. These demand a moment’s consideration. He is said, for instance, to have predicted the loss of the San Jago, in which he sailed from Portugal and which was wrecked after he left her. He did the same with one or two other vessels and assured several persons of their own impending death or misfortune. Sometimes he was observed to speak as though he were holding conversation with unseen companions, and he was apparently conscious of events which were afterward found to have occurred at the very time in distant places. There is also a series of phenomena connected with the “gift of tongues” in his case, by which this power appears to have been intermittent, or at least dependent to a great degree upon a remarkable intensity of scholarship and keenness of analysis combined with a powerful memory. It is not claimed that he exercised this gift in such a manner as “to converse in a foreign tongue the moment he landed in this foreign country.” And then there is a further class of remarkable experiences connected with fevers and diseases and the raising of the dead.
Of these latter miracles it may be well to treat first. He is said to have raised up Anthony Miranda, an Indian, who had been bitten by a cobra; to have restored four dead persons at Travancore; to have resuscitated a young girl in Japan and a child in Malacca, and to have actually brought to the ship, alive and well, a lad who had fallen overboard and been apparently lost. These incidents are related with great gravity by the biographers and are accepted by the faithful as being strictly true. To impugn them is as if one impugned the Scriptures. Nevertheless there is an opening for scepticism in sundry cases, and it may be that we shall do well to agree with the saint’s own statement made to Doctor Diego Borba. “Ah, my Jesus!” he answered, “can it be said that such a wretch as I have been able to raise the dead? Surely, my dear Diego, you have not believed such folly? They brought a young man to me whom they supposed to be dead; I commanded him to arise, and the common people, who make a miracle of everything, gave out the report that a dead man had been raised to life.” For the rest, we may well believe that the same exaggeration and lack of scientific attention to details have accompanied the various accounts, in some such manner as appears in the little sketch of his personal characteristics which a young Coquimban named Vaz has given to us. This enthusiastic admirer describes his going afoot with a patched and faded garment and an old black cloth hat. He took nothing from the rich or great unless he applied it to the uses of the poor. He spoke languages fluently without having learned them, and the crowds which flocked to hear him often amounted to five or six thousand persons. He celebrated Mass in the open air and preached from the branches of a tree when he had no other pulpit. But of this healing of the sick and raising of the dead we are not offered any better testimonials than the “Acts of his Canonization.” Moreover, in a manner quite contrary to the experiences recorded in the Gospels, these various miracles seem to be looked upon as the decisive stroke of Christian policy. Upon their occurrence tribes and kingdoms bow before the truth—a thing which did not happen at the tomb of Lazarus, or before the walls of Nain, or within the house of Jairus. In those cases the evangelists are content to tell us that the influence was limited and confined to a very moderate area.
Yet when we come to the cures of sick people, to the singular predictions, and to the exalted condition into which Xavier must often have been lifted, we must allow to the man a very high degree of mystical and mesmeric and even clairvoyant power. We are wise enough nowadays to observe the influence of a devoted personality, as when Florence Nightingale traverses the hospital wards at Scutari, or David Livingstone moves through savage tribes, to his dying hour at Lake Lincoln. And when profound Church historians will not altogether discredit the miracles of the Nicene Age which Ambrose and Augustine relate, it causes us to be charitable even toward the miracles of Bernard of Clairvaux, who recorded at large his own sense of uneasiness respecting his power of curing the sick. But it somewhat relieves the mind when the very chapters which relate these experiences of St. Francis Xavier, mention also that a crab came out of the sea and brought him his lost crucifix, and that after he had lived in a certain house two children and a woman fell out of the window at different times and received not so much as a single bruise, though they dropped from an immense height upon the sea-wall. The credulity which includes such palpable absurdities must surely have exposed itself to misstatements and exaggerations in other directions.
It is far pleasanter for us to follow Xavier from his arrival at Goa, May 6th, 1542, to the fisheries of Cape Comorin; thence to Malacca, and so to the Banda Islands, Amboyna, and the Moluccas in 1546; again to Malacca in 1547; to Ceylon and back to Goa in 1548, and finally to Japan. In 1551 he planned a visit to China, but was disappointed, and at the moment when he was hoping to accomplish a great purpose he died on the island of San Chan, December 22d, 1552, at the early age of forty-six years.
Closely studying himself and his methods we find him greatly and always devout, his breviary, however, being his Bible. He prayed much and labored incessantly. His charity to small and great was untiring. He would go through the streets ringing a little bell and calling people to come to religious worship, being frequently attended by a throng of children who seem to have loved him and been beloved by him. He had noble and sweet and modest traits in his character. But we often notice the reliance he places on baptism—sometimes conferring this rite until his arm dropped from weariness. And we observe how much of the wisdom of the serpent can be discerned in his ways with the people whom he desired to secure.
The indefatigable exertions of Xavier are above all praise. He never appears to have slackened in his zeal, nor does he ever show hesitation, doubt, or uncertainty of any kind. On one occasion when roused by a great crisis he displayed a military authority worthy of Loyola himself. He stood once in front of an invading host of Badages and forbade them to attack the Paravans, shouting to them, “In the name of the living God I command you to return whence you came.” No wonder that the semi-barbarous people were affected by this fearless and singular presence, and spoke of Xavier as a person of gigantic stature dressed in black and whose flashing eyes dazzled and daunted them.
But upon other occasions he was gentle and amenable to every agreeable trait in his companions. He could even take the cards from a broken gamester, shuffle them to give him good fortune, and send him back to try his luck with fifty reals borrowed from another passenger. The man’s success is thereupon made a basis for his penitence. And so with the wicked cavalier of Meliapore, whose friendship he gained by being unconscious of his vices until the time for exhortation arrived. In these and similar instances we cannot fail to observe a thorough knowledge of human nature, and a Jesuit’s keen power of using it for his own purposes.
He was not always prospered in his enterprises. Once at least he literally shook off the dust from his shoes against an offending tribe. At another time he was wounded by an arrow. But, as a rule, he had a complete moral victory in whatever he undertook. In one of his letters he speaks of the people being maliciously disposed and ready to poison both food and drink. But he will take no antidotes with him, and is determined to avoid all human remedies whatsoever. It is in such superb examples of his absolute trust in God that he presents to us the really grand side of his character. He did not know what fear was, and as for death, he was too familiar with daily dying to be concerned at it. His personal faith was such as to beget faith in others, as when an earthquake interrupted his preaching upon St. Michael’s Day, and he announced that the archangel was then driving the devils of that unhappy country back to the pit. This was said so earnestly as to produce a profound conviction of its truth and to remove all alarm from his audience.
But when we are asked to believe that the two Pereiras ever beheld him elevated from the earth and actually transfigured, or when it is stated that he lifted a great beam as though it had been a lath, we must be excused for being doubtful of the statement. There is nothing more destructive of religion than superstition, and nothing which kills faith like credulity. Xavier, with all his false notions, was a most sincere and even majestic figure—a hero of the faith, who shows us the power of a thoroughly devoted spirit unencumbered by any earthly tie and unobstructed by any earthly want. The entire self-immolation of this career constitutes its amazing power. It is the missionary spirit carried to its loftiest height.
Perhaps one of his most ingenious ways to secure the good-will of his companions was by endeavoring to excite their benevolence. He would encourage them to little acts of kindness and would repay these by similar favors and services. Particularly he used persuasion rather than denunciation, and personal efforts rather than general harangues. He was “all things to all men,” going “privately to those of reputation,” as Paul, his great model, was wont to do. He once wrote: “It is better to do a little with peace than a great deal with turbulence and scandal.”
On April 14th, 1552, he set sail from Goa for Malacca where a pestilence was raging. This delayed him awhile from China, and he was held back still longer by the envious quarrellings of those who aspired to the honor of attending him on his voyage. Xavier was reduced to the necessity of producing the papal authority which constituted him Nuncio, and of threatening with excommunication Don Alvaro Ataïde, the most troublesome person. In addition to this difficulty he found himself insulted and reviled in the open street, but accepted everything with meekness and patience; which, however, did not prevent his finally excommunicating Ataïde in the regular form. The vessel on which he embarked was manned mostly by those in the pay of Ataïde, but he did not shrink from the voyage. The voyage itself is decorated with many legends, as might be expected. The saint is reported to have changed salt water into fresh; to have rescued a child from death in a miraculous manner, and to have become suddenly so much taller and larger than those about him as to have been compelled to lower his arms when he baptized the converts. They sailed from Chinchoo to San Chan, an island in which the Portuguese had some trading privileges. It was here that Xavier uttered a prediction which may serve to explain other singular occurrences. He would seem to have possessed more than an ordinary amount of medical skill in diagnosis, and looking earnestly upon an old friend named Vellio, he bade him prepare for death whenever the wine he drank tasted bitter. This might easily be from either of two causes—poison, or a disorganized state of the system. And it is recorded that the result fulfilled the prophecy. Nor is there much doubt that Vellio’s entire faith in the prediction helped on his death.
From San Chan Xavier now proposed to cross to China. He arranged to be smuggled thither in a small boat, but the residents of San Chan, English as well as Portuguese, became alarmed at the consequences which they foresaw from this desperate scheme of intrusion into the forbidden empire. And to crown all his woes he fell sick with a fever, from which, however, he convalesced in a fortnight. He was now more anxious than ever to go on with his project. But all the Portuguese ships had sailed back again except the Santa Cruz, on which he had arrived. And now he was truly deserted and neglected. He had scarcely the bare necessaries of life, sometimes being deprived entirely of food. The sailors were mostly in Ataïde’s pay and inimical to his purpose. At length he became convinced that he would himself soon die, and so would often walk in meditation and prayer by the seashore gazing toward the prohibited coast.
At this time the young Chinese Anthony was his only hope as an interpreter; and he was now deprived of the services of the merchant and his son who had agreed to row him over to Canton. They had deserted him, and only Anthony and one more young lad remained true to the dying missionary. On November 20th the fever again seized him after he had celebrated Mass. He was taken to a floating hospital, but being disturbed by its motion he begged to be landed. This was done and he was left upon the beach in the bleak wind. A poor Portuguese named George Alvarez then took pity on him and removed him to his own hut of boughs and straw. Rude medical care was given him, but on December 2d, about two o’clock in the afternoon, he had reached the limit of his life. His latest words were, In te, Domine, speravi—non confundar in aeternum—O Lord, I have trusted in Thee, I shall never be confounded, world without end.
Thus died Francis Xavier, for ten years and seven months a missionary in the most dangerous and deadly regions of the earth. At the date of his death he was of full and robust figure in spite of his privations, with eyes of a bluish-gray, and hair that had changed its dark chestnut color somewhat through his toils and sufferings. His forehead was broad, his nose good, and his expression pleasant and affable. His beard, like his hair, was thick, and his temperament was nearly a pure sanguine.
They buried him first at San Chan, then removed him to Goa, where in solemn procession they conducted his mortal body to its final rest. But his right arm was taken off and it is to be observed that “the saint seems not to have been pleased at the amputation of his arm,” which, however, did not prevent the Jesuit, General Claude Acquaviva, from insisting upon the mutilation.
Down to the present time his memory has received many honors. Churches have been erected, prayers have been offered, and much religious worship has been transacted in his name. But to us who are looking upon him from another angle altogether, there are apparent in him a piety, a zeal, a courage, and a “hot-hearted prudence” (to quote F. W. Faber’s words) which arouse our admiration. And in the two hymns which bear his name we are able to discover that fine attar which is the precious residuum of many crushed and fragrant aspirations, which grew above the thorns of sharp trial and were strewn at last upon the wind-swept beach of that poor Pisgah island from which he truly beheld the distant Land.
O DEUS, EGO AMO TE.
O Lord, I love thee, for of old
Thy love hath reached to me.
Lo, I would lay my freedom by
And freely follow thee!
Let memory never have a thought
Thy glory cannot claim,
Nor let the mind be wise at all
Unless she seek thy name.
For nothing further do I wish
Except as thou dost will;
What things thy gift allows as mine
My gift shall give thee still.
Receive what I have had from thee
And guide me in thy way,
And govern as thou knowest best,
Who lovest me each day.
Give unto me thy love alone,
That I may love thee too,
For other things are dreams; but this
Embraceth all things true.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE HYMN-WRITERS OF THE BREVIARY.
There are three principal liturgical books in use in the Roman Catholic Church. Originally there were two: the Ritual, which contained all the sacramental offices, and the Breviary, which contained the rest. But for convenience the eucharistic office in its various forms now has a book to itself called the Missal, and the other six sacraments recognized in the Church of Rome make up the Ritual.
It is with the Breviary, however, that hymnology is especially concerned, as it is in it that the hymns of the Church are mostly to be found, while the sequences belong to the Missal. It contains the prayers said in the Church’s behalf every day at the canonical hours by the priests and the members of the religious orders. Originally there were only three of these canonical hours, and they were based on Old Testament usage. These were at the third, sixth, and ninth hour of the Scriptures (nine o’clock, noon, and three in the afternoon), and in the Western Church are called Tierce, Sext, and Nones, for that reason. The number afterward was increased to five and then to seven. To these three day hours were added three night hours, with two at the transition from night to day (Prime), and from day to night (Vespers). But to get up thrice in the night was too much for even monastic discipline, so they said two night services together at midnight, and then they slept till dawn. As this daily service differs in its contents according to the seasons of the Church year, and also is adapted to the commemoration of the saints of the Calendar, the Breviary is the most voluminous prayer-book known to Christendom. It generally is published in four substantial volumes, one each for the four natural seasons. It is used in such public services as are not accompanied by a celebration of any sacrament and in the choir service of the religious houses. In theory, however, the Church is present even at the solitary recitation of the hours by a secular priest; and when two say them in company they must say them aloud.
Hymns were not in the services of the Breviary from the beginning. As late as the sixth century there was a controversy as to admitting anything but the words of Scripture to be sung. We find a Gallic synod sanctioning their use, and a Spanish synod taking common ground with our Psalm-singing Presbyterians. But in the next century even Spain, through the Council of Toledo (A.D. 633), appeals to early precedent in behalf of hymns, and decides that if people may use uninspired words in prayer, they may do the same in their praises—Sicut ergo orationes, ita et hymnos in laudem Dei compositos nullus vestrum ulterius improbet—which went to the core of the question and silenced the exclusive Psalm-singers. Twenty years later another Council of Toledo required of candidates for orders that they should know both the Psalter and the hymns by heart. Yet in the Roman Breviary no hymns were introduced before the thirteenth century, when Haymo, the General of the Franciscan Order, reformed it in 1244 with the sanction of Gregory IX. and Nicholas III.
In the view of Roman Catholic liturgists, the Psalms set forth the praise of God in general, while hymns are written and used with reference to some single mystery of the faith, or the commemoration of some saint. This harmonizes with their use in the Breviary, and their division into hymns de tempore for the festivals of the Church year, or the days of the week, or the hours of the day; and hymns de sanctis for the days of commemoration in the Church Calendar. Even when the same hymn is used on a series of days, its conclusion is altered to give it a special adaptation to each of these days. This classification, of course, does not describe the whole body of the Latin hymns. Some few even of those in the Breviary, as, for instance, the Te Deum, have to be classed as psalms, and are called Canticles (Cantica); and many outside it will not fit into any such definition of what a hymn is. But it illustrates the general character and purpose of the hymns of the Roman and other breviaries, as designed for a special temporal or personal application by way of supplement to the Psalter.
At present the Roman Breviary, prepared with the sanction of the Council of Trent, has driven nearly all the others out of use. But at the era of the Reformation there was a great number of breviaries, every diocese and religious order having a right to its own. Panzer enumerates no less than seventy-one which were printed before 1536, some of them in several editions.18 Even now the Roman Breviary is supplemented by special services in honor of the saints of each order or country, and by services of a more general kind which are peculiar to some localities. But in Luther’s time the endless variety in breviaries and missals formed a striking feature of the confusion which to his mind characterized the Church of Rome.
With the development of a more fastidious taste, through the study of the Latin classics as literary models, there arose in the sixteenth century, and even before the Reformation, a demand for a reformation of the Breviary. Besides its defects of form, such as violations of Latin grammar, the constant use of terms which grated on the ears of the humanists, and the use of hymns in which rhyme rather added to the offence of want of correct metre, the contents of the Breviary were found faulty by a critical age. The selections from the Fathers to be read by way of homily were in some cases from spurious works; and the narratives of saints’ lives for the days dedicated to them were not always edifying, and in some cases palpably untrue. It became a proverbial saying that a person lied like the second nocturn office of the Breviary, that being the service in which these legends are found. But the badness of the Latin and the metrical faults of the hymns counted for quite as much with the critics of that day. We hear of a cardinal warning a young cleric not to be too constant in reading his Breviary, if he wished to preserve his ear for correct Latinity.
As might have been expected, it was the elegant Medicean Pope Leo X. who first put his hand to the work of reform. He selected for this purpose Zacharia Ferreri, Bishop of Guarda-Alfieri, a man of fine Latin scholarship and some ability as a poet. By 1525 Ferreri had the hymns for a new Breviary ready, and published them with the promise of the Breviary itself on the title-page.[19] Clement VII., also of the house of Medici, was Pope when the book appeared, and he authorized the substitution of these new hymns for the old, but did not command this.
The book is furnished with an introduction by Marino Becichemi, a forgotten humanist, who was then professor of eloquence at Padua. It is worth quoting as exhibiting the attitude of the Renaissance to the earlier Christian literature. He praises Ferreri as a shining light in every kind of science, human and divine, prosaic and poetical. He cannot say too much of the beauty of his style, its gravity and dignity, its purity, its spontaneity and freedom from artificiality. “That his hymns and odes, beyond all doubt, will secure him immortality, I need not conceal. Certainly I have read nothing in Christian poets sweeter, purer, terser, or brighter. How brief and how copious, each in its place—how polished! Everywhere the stream flows in full channel with that antique Roman mode of speech, except where of full purpose it turns in another direction.” That means how Ciceronian Ferreri’s speech, except where he remembers that he is a Christian poet and bishop writing for Christian worshippers. “More than once have I exhorted him that it belonged to the duty and dignity of his episcopal (pontificii) office to make public these Church hymns.”
“You know, my reader, what hymns they sing everywhere in the temples, that they are almost all faulty, silly, full of barbarism, and composed without reference to the number of feet or the quantity of the syllables, so as to excite educated persons to laughter, and to bring priests, if they are men of letters, to despise the services of the Church. I say men of letters. As for those who are not, and who are the gluttons of the Roman curia, or who have no wisdom, it is enough for them to stand like dragons close by the sacred ark, or to drift about like the clouds, to live like idle bellies, given over to the pursuit of sleep, good living, sensual pleasures, and to gather up the money by which they make themselves hucksters in religion and plunderers of the Christian people and practice their deceits upon both gods and men equally, until the vine of the Lord degenerates into a wild plant.”
The Italianized Greek would see no difference between a Tetzel and a Ferreri. But there still were sincerely good people who relished the old hymns better than the polished paganism of the Bishop of Guarda-Alfieri. Ferreri’s hymns struck no root in spite of the favor of two Medicean popes. They seem never to have reached a second edition. Their frankly pagan vocabulary for the expression of Christian ideas seems to have been too much for even the humanists.
Bishop Ferreri does not seem to have lived to prepare his shorter and easier Breviary after the same elegant but unsuitable fashion as his hymns. So Clement VII. put the preparation of a new Breviary into the hands of another and a better man, Cardinal Francesco de Quiñonez. He was a Spanish Franciscan, had been general of his order, and was made Cardinal by Clement in acknowledgment of diplomatic services. He enjoyed the confidence of the Emperor Charles V., and used it to rescue the Pope from his detention in the Castle of San Angelo, when he was besieged there after the taking of Rome by the Imperial troops in 1529. This is hardly the kind of record which would lead us to look for a reformer under the red hat of our cardinal. But, so far as the Breviary was concerned, he proved himself too rigorous a reformer, if anything. His work was governed by two leading principles. The first was to simplify the services by dropping out those parts which had been added last. The second was to use the space thus obtained to insert ampler Scripture lessons and more Psalms, so that, as in earlier times, the Bible might be read through once a year and the Psalter once a week. It is this last feature which has elicited the praise of Protestant liturgists, and it is known that the Breviary of Quiñonez furnished the basis for the services of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, excepting, of course, the Communion Service. But unfortunately hymnologists are not able to join in this praise. To get the Psalms said or sung through once a week, he dealt nearly as ruthlessly with the hymns as if he were a Seceder.
His Breviary appeared in 1535,20 and for thirty-three years its use was permitted to ecclesiastics in their private recitation of the hours. It appeared in a large number of editions in different parts of Europe, so that its use must have been extensive. But it did not pass unchallenged. The doctors of the Sorbonne at Paris hurried into the arena with their condemnation of it before the ink was fully dry on the first copies. They declared it a thing unheard of to introduce into Church use a book which was the production of a single author, and he—as they wrongly alleged—not even a member of any religious order. Furthermore, he had so shortened and eviscerated the legends for the saints’ days, besides omitting many, that nobody could tell what virtues and what miracles entitled them to commemoration. Above all he had omitted Peter Damiani’s Little Office of the Blessed Virgin! Much better founded was the objection to the omission of parts long established in use, such as the antiphons and many of the hymns. Here we must side with the Sorbonne against Quiñonez.
It was not until 1568 that the present Roman Breviary appeared. When the Council of Trent met in its final session in 1562, the first drafts of a reformed Breviary and Missal were transmitted to the Fathers by Pius IV.; but they were too busy with questions of discipline to do more than return these with their approbation. The work was published by Pius V. in July, 1568, and its use was made obligatory upon all dioceses which had not had a Breviary of their own in use for two hundred years previously. This is in substance the Breviary now in use throughout the Roman Catholic Church. It underwent, however, two further revisions. That under Clement VIII., finished in 1602, was by a commission in which Cardinals Bellarmine, Baronius, and Silvius Antonianus were members. That under Urban VIII., completed in 1631, concerns us more directly, and especially the part of it which was effected by three learned Jesuits: Famiano Strada, Hieronimo Petrucci, and Tarquinio Galucci, who had in their hands the revision of the hymns.
The three revisers, all of them poets of some distinction, and the first famous for his history of the wars in the Low Countries, had to steer a middle course in the matter of revision. None of them were radical humanists after the fashion of Zacharia Ferreri; that fashion, indeed, had gone out with the rise of the counter-reformation and of the great order to which they belonged. Yet in the matter of “metre and Latinity,” of which Ferreri boasted on his title page a hundred years before, the revival of classical scholarship had established a standard to which the old hymns even of the Ambrosian period did not conform. The revisers profess their anxiety to make as few changes as possible; but Pope Urban, in his bull Psalmodiam sanctam prefixed to the book, announces that all the hymns—except the very few which made no pretension to metrical form—had been conformed to the laws of prosody and of the Latin tongue, those which could not be amended in any milder way being rewritten throughout. Bartolomeo Gavanti, a member of the Commission of Revision, but laboring in another department, tells us that more than nine hundred alterations were made for the sake of correct metre, with the result of changing the first lines of more than thirty of the ninety-six hymns the Breviary then contained; that the three by Aquinas on the sacrament, the Ave Maris stella, the Custodes hominum, and a very few others, were left as they were.
This, then, is the genesis of the class of hymns designated in the collections as traceable no farther back than the Roman Breviary. Some of them are original, being the work of Silvius Antonianus, Bellarmine, or Urban VIII. himself, or of authors of that age whose authorship has not been traced. But the greater part are recasts of ancient hymns to meet the demands of the humanist standards of metre and Latinity.
It is not easy to give a merely English reader any adequate idea of the sort of changes by which Strada and his associates adapted the old hymns to modern use. But for those who can read Latin some specimens are worth giving. Take first the great sacramental hymn of the eighth or ninth century:
Ad coenam Agni providi
Et stolis albis candidi,
Post transitum maris Rubri
Christo canamus principi,
Cujus corpus sanctissimum
In ara crucis torridum,
Cruore ejus roseo
Gustando vivimus Deo
Protecti paschae vespero
A devastante angelo
Erepti de durissimo
Pharaonis imperio.
Jam pascha nostrum Christus est
Qui immolatus agnus est,
Sinceritatis azyma
Caro ejus oblata est.
O vera digna hostia
Per quam fracta sunt tartara
Redempta plebs captivata,
Reddita vitae praemia
Cum surgit Christus tumulo
Victor redit de barathro,
Tyrannum trudens vinculo,
Et reserans paradisum
Quaesumus, auctor omnium
In hoc paschali gaudio:
Ab omni mortis impetu
Tuum defende populum.
Ad regias Agni dapes
Stolis amicti candidis
Post transitum maris Rubri
Christo canamus principi:
Divina cujus charitas
Sacrum propinat sanguinem,
Almique membra corporis
Amor sacerdos immolat
Sparsum cruorem postibus
Vastator horret angelus:
Fugitque divisum mare
Merguntur hostes fluctibus.
Jam Pascha nostrum Christus est
Paschalis idem victima,
Et pura puris mentibus
Sinceritatis azyma
O vera coeli victima
Subjecta cui sunt tartara,
Soluta mortis vincula,
Recepta vitae praemia
Victor subactis inferis
Trophaea Christus explicat,
Coeloque aperto, subditum
Regem tenebrarum trahit.
Ut sis perenne mentibus
Paschale, Jesu, gaudium:
A morte dira criminum
Vitae renatos libera.
Now it is impossible to deny to the revised version merits of its own. Not only does it use the Latin words which classic usage requires—as dapes in poetry for coena, recepta for reddita, inferis for barathro—but it brings into clearer view the facts of the Old Testament story which the hymn treats as typical of the Christian passover. The (imperfect) rhyme of the original is everywhere sacrificed to the demands of metre, which probably is no loss. But the gain is not in simplicity, vigor, and freshness. In these the old hymn is much superior. The last verse but one, for instance, presents in the old hymn a distinct and living picture—the picture Luther tells us he delighted in when a boy chorister singing the Easter songs of the Church. But in the recast the vividness is blurred, and classic reminiscence takes the place of the simple and direct speech the early Church made for itself out of the Latin tongue.
Take again the first part of the dedication hymn, of which Angulare fundamentum is the conclusion:
Urbs beata Hierusalem
Dicta pacis visio
Quae construitur in coelis
Vivis ex lapidibus
Et angelis coronata
Ut sponsata comite
Nova veniens e coelo
Nuptiali thalamo
Praeparata, ut sponsata
Copulatur domino,
Plateae et muri ejus
Ex auro purissimo
Portae nitent margaritis
Adytis patentibus,
Et virtute meritorum
Illuc introducitur
Omnis, qui pro Christi nomine
Hoc in mundo premitur
Tunsionibus, pressuris
Expoliti lapides
Suis coaptantur locis
Per manum artificis,
Disponuntur permansuri
Sacris aedificiis.
Coelestis urbs Jerusalem
Beata pacis visio
Quae celsa de viventibus
Saxis ad astra tolleris,
Sponsaeque ritu cingeris
Mille angelorum millibus.
O sorte nupta prospera,
Dotata Patris gloria,
Respersa Sponsi gratia
Regina formosissima,
Christo jugata principi
Coelo corusca civitas.
Hic margaritis emicant
Patentque cunctis ostia,
Virtute namque praevia
Mortalis illuc ducitur
Amore Christi percitus
Tormenta quisquis sustinent.
Scalpri salubris ictibus
Et tunsione plurima,
Fabri polita malleo
Hanc saxa molem construunt,
Aptisque juncta nexibus
Locantur in fastidia.
Daniel in his first volume prints fifty-five of these recasts in parallel columns with the originals, and to that we will refer our readers for further specimens. It is gratifying to know that not all the scholarship of that age was insensible to the qualities which the revisers sacrificed. Henry Valesius, although only a layman and a lover of good Latin—as his versions of the historians of the early Church show—uttered a fierce but ineffectual protest in favor of the early and mediaeval hymns. And the Marquis of Bute, a convert to Catholicism, who published an English translation of the Breviary in 1879, says that the revisers of 1602 “with deplorable taste made a series of changes in the texts of the hymns, which has been disastrous both to the literary merit and the historical interest of the poems.” He hopes for a further revision which shall undo this mischief, but in other respects return to the type furnished by the Breviary of Quiñonez.
The translations from the hymns of the Roman Breviary have been very abundant. Those by Protestants have been due to the fact that the texts even of ancient hymns were so much more accessible in their Breviary version than in their original form. Among Roman Catholics, of course, other considerations have weight; and in Mr. Edward Caswall’s Lyra Catholica and Mr. Orby Shipley’s Annus Sanctus will be found some very admirable versions. The latter book is an anthology from the Roman Catholic translators from John Dryden to John Henry Newman.
From the Breviary text Mr. Duffield has made the following translations of two hymns by Gregory the Great:
JAM LUCIS ORTO SIDERE.
Now with the risen star of dawn,
To God as suppliants we pray,
That he may keep us free from harm,
And guide us through an active day.
May he, restraining, guard the tongue,
Lest it be found to strive and cry,
And, lest it drink in vanities,
May he protect the wayward eye.
Let all our inmost thoughts be pure,
And heedlessness of heart be gone;
Let self-denying drink and food
Hold pride and flesh securely down,
That when the day at length is past,
And night in turn has come to men,
Through abstinence from earth, we may
Give thee the only glory then.
To God the Father be the praise,
And to his sole-begotten Son,
And to the Holy Paraclete,
Now and until all time be done.
ECCE JAM NOCTIS TENUATUR UMBRA.
Lo, now, the shadows of the night are breaking,
While in the east the rising daylight brightens,
Therefore with praises will we all adore thee,
Lord God Almighty!
How doth our God, commiserating mortals,
Drive away sorrow, offering them safety,
Since he shall give us, through paternal kindness,
Rule in the heavens!
This let the blessed Deity afford us,
Father and Son and equal Holy Spirit,
Whose through the earth be glory in all places
Ever resounding.
Also this translation of the Breviary recast of the Urbs beata Hierusalem of the seventh or eighth century:
COELESTIS URBS JERUSALEM.
O heavenly town, Jerusalem,
Thou blessed dawn of peace,
How lofty from the living rock
Thy starry walls increase,
Where thousand, thousand angels stand,
And praises never cease.
O bride, whose lot is aye serene,
The Father’s state is thine;
Thou art the ever-fairest queen
Adorned with grace divine;
United unto Christ, thy Head,
Thy heavenly form doth shine.
How softly gleam thy pearly gates
Which open wide to all,
Here virtue entered long ago,
And unto men doth call,
Who loved the Lord through mortal pain,
And fought and did not fall.
Thy beauty came by chisel stroke
And many a hammer-blow;
The workman’s hammer wrought the stone
Which buildeth thee below;
And joined with bonds of aptest skill
Thy splendid turrets glow.
Then honor unto God most high
As it was due of yore;
And thus the Father’s only Son
And Spirit we adore,
To whom be glory, power, and praise
Through ages evermore.
To these Dr. A. R. Thompson permits us to add, as a specimen of the later hymns of the Latin Church, his translation of
CUR RELINQUIS, DEUS, COELUM.
O God, why didst thou put aside
For this vile earth thy heaven above?
Didst thou expect there would betide
Thee here the ministry of love?
That earth had honor, Lord, for thee?
Honor and love! nay, verily,
Lying in wickedness, earth knows
Not how to love thee, but thy foes.
Bethlehem proved what love for thee
This present evil world hath, when
She shut against thee cruelly
The doors left wide for other men,
And forced thee to the hovel, where—
Wide open to the winter air—
The very beasts could scarcely live;
No other shelter would she give.
Come, Jesus, from that hovel cold,
Exposed to all the winds that blow,
Chilled by discomfort manifold,
From the poor couch all wet with snow.
My all a couch for thee I make,
My heart the shelter thou shall take.
I give it all, I give my best,
That were for thee a better rest.
My heart to love thee, Lord, desires,
And, loving, proffers love’s warm kiss.
The kiss, to give which she aspires,
Honor and adoration is.
Take thou from me this honor true;
Take thou the love which is thy due;
For this, my loyal offering,
Out of my very heart I bring.
My heart, all burning with the fire
Of love to thee, would cherish thine;
But thou that love canst kindle higher,
And thou wilt rather cherish mine.
For thou art Love, and canst inflame
The hearts of them that love thy name
With thine own self, and not with wood;
Thou art the very Fire of God.
Come, then, O Fire of God, to me!
Come, Love, and never more depart!
Enter the place prepared for thee,
The shelter of my loving heart!
I’ll spread thee there a couch of rest,
And deem myself supremely blest,
If I may evermore abide
Loving, belovèd, at thy side.
While we have to treat rather of hymns than of hymn-writers in dealing with the Roman Breviary, there is much of personal interest attaching to the Breviary of Paris, its great rival in hymnological interest. A slight revision of the hymns of this Breviary was effected in 1527—of which the Urbs Jerusalem beata is a type—and only with the idea of correcting corruptions of the text. But the Roman revision of 1568-1631 affected the Gallican Church’s services very slightly. In no part of the Roman Catholic world were the rights of the national Church guarded so carefully as in France, until Napoleon bargained them away by the Concordat of 1801. The French bishops and monastic orders continued to retain their old service-books long after uniformity had been established, under plea of unity, in other parts of the Church; and they made such alterations in them as they thought necessary to the edification of their people.
It was the Order of Cluny which first took steps toward the substitution of new hymns for those whose use had been sanctioned by long tradition. The general chapter of that branch of the great Benedictine family in 1676-78 charged Paul Rabusson and Claude de Vert with the preparation of a new Breviary. On Rabusson, who was teaching theology in the monastery of St. Martin des Champs in Paris, the labor chiefly fell. He applied to Claude Santeul, a pensioner of the ecclesiastical seminary attached to the Abbey of St. Magloire, asking him to prepare the new hymns. Claude Santeul (Santolius Maglorianus) agreed to do so, and made some progress in the work. He finished six hymns, which were inserted in the new Breviary, and at his death (1684) he left two manuscript volumes of unfinished hymns among his papers. But he found that his being selected had excited the jealousy of his younger brother, Jean Santeul, a canon of the monastery of St. Victor (Santolius Victorinus), who already was recognized as the finest, but by no means the most edifying of the Latin poets of the France of his time.
Claude gladly gave place to his brother—who was accepted by the Cluny Fathers—in the hope that the work of writing hymns would divert him from the pagan poetizing, which was regarded as unbecoming to his cloth. Jean Santeul is the oddest figure in the annals of Latin hymnology, which is saying a good deal. He is “a man of whom it is hard to speak without falling into caricature,” Sainte-Beuve says (Causeries de Lundi, XII., 20-56). He combined the talent of a poet of nature’s making with the simplicity of a child and the vanity and wit of a genuine Frenchman. He recalls La Fontaine by many of his traits, and, under the name of “Theodas,” he has furnished La Bruyère with the materials for one of the cleverest portraits in the Caractères (1687). His mode of life was a scandal to De Rance and other severe Churchmen, who were laboring for the restoration of strict monastic discipline. His love of good living and the charm of his society and his talk carried him off from his monastery and his hours, sometimes for weeks together. His Latin inscriptions, which adorned the fountains, bridges, and public monuments of Paris, at once gave him recognition as the poet laureate and pensioner of the grande monarque, and as a priest whose poetry dealt more in the pagan deities than in any distinctively Christian references. He was not an immoral man in any gross sense. Even as a bon vivant, he does not seem to have transgressed what were recognized as the bounds of sobriety, and his poetry is as free as was his life from licentiousness. But he was frivolous, gay, reckless, and as worldly as was consistent with his being a grown-up child. Everybody, even severe and silent De Rance at La Trappe, liked him, but everybody shook his head over the inconsistency of his life with his monastic vocation, and none more sorrowfully than his good brother Claude at St. Magloire.
Now at last there seemed to be the opportunity to reclaim him by occupying his mind and his art with serious subjects, and by bringing him into edifying associations with good men. That he was not enough of a theologian to discharge the task satisfactorily of himself, was rather an advantage from this point of view. The eloquent and learned Jansenist, Nicolas le Tourneux, undertook the work of coaching him. The partnership worked reasonably well. Of course hymns produced by this kind of division of labor, in which one took care of the sense and another of the expression, have the defects of their method. But Le Tourneux was as careful of the poet as of his verse. His severe eye detected the play of Santeul’s vanity even in the work of writing hymns. “Reflect, my dear brother,” he wrote, “that while in the visible and militant Church one may sing the praises of God with an impure heart and defiled lips, it will not be so in heaven. You have burnt incense in your verse, but there was strange fire in the censer. Vanity furnishes your motive where it ought to be charity.” He objects to Santeul’s calling himself “the poet of Jesus Christ,” while he admits that vain glory leads him to write hymns. “If you and I were all we ought to be,” wrote the severe Jansenist, “we would quake with fear at having dared, you to sing and I to preach of the holiness of God, without a right sense of it. We shall be only too happy if He pardon our sermons and our verses.” Perhaps the severity was needed and did good.
So Le Tourneux suggested and all but wrote the prayer in which Santeul dedicated his hymns to our Lord: “Receive what is Thine; forgive what is mine. Thine is whatever I have uttered that is good and holy. Mine that I have handled Thy good things unworthily, and not from desire to please Thee, but from an undue pride of poetry, of which I am ashamed. Thou hast given me songs to praise Thee. Give me prayers, give me tears to wash away the stains of a life less than Christian.”
His hymns must have circulated in manuscript before their publication, for we find De Rance in 1683 praising those in commemoration of St. Bernard, while noticing that the old hymns, if less excellent as literature, had a more reverential spirit. In 1685, a year in advance of the new Breviary, Santeul published them in the first collection he made of them.21 Their merits made a much deeper impression than their defects. Scholars and Churchmen alike were struck by their rhetorical vigor, the frequent boldness of their conception, the beautiful succession of sentiments and images, the exquisite clearness of the sense, and not by the factitious character of their enthusiasm, as Sainte-Beuve puts it, or the frequent monotony in the treatment of cognate themes. The Breviary, in fact, had ceased to be the voice of the Christian congregation. The supersession of Latin by the national languages of Western Europe had made it the prayer-book of a class educated to relish only the classic forms of Latin verse, and to regard the simplicity of the early hymn-writers as barbarous. Santeul wrote for priests whose tastes had been formed on Horace and Virgil, and he brought into these rigid forms as much of genuine Christian feeling and doctrine as the age required. He was all the happier in these respects, as Le Tourneux, who himself contributed to the new Breviary, was of that Jansenist school in which religion, belittled by the pettiness and the casuistry of the Jesuits, once more presented itself in its grandeur and its severity.
The excellence of Santeul’s hymns at once created a demand for their introduction in other churches and dioceses, and for his services as a hymn-writer. Several of the best were introduced by Archbishop Harlay into the later editions of his revised Paris Breviary, which had appeared in 1680. So the bishops of many other French dioceses—Rouen, Sens, Narbonne, Massillon of Clermont, and others—adopted his hymns into their breviaries after his death. And as he gallantly said, he had the pleasure while still living of hearing them “sung by the angels at Port Royal.” Other orders begged him to commemorate their founders and their especial saints; dioceses and churches in other parts of France invoked his good offices. Hence it is that of his two hundred and twenty-eight hymns not one in five is occupied with the great festivals of the Church year, but are specific or general hymns to the honor of the saints, martyrs, and doctors of the Church of France especially.
The rush of popularity—not unaccompanied by solid rewards, for the good fathers of the Cluny Order gave him a pension—seems to have turned Santeul’s not very well-balanced head. Le Tourneux’s admonitions were forgotten. He ran from church to church to hear his hymns sung, and scandalized congregations by his demonstrations of delight or disgust as the music was appropriate or otherwise; he declaimed them in all sorts of places, suitable and unsuitable, to extort the admiration he loved so dearly. He did not forget to tell that even the severe De Rance had written from La Trappe to thank him for his hymn on St. Bernard, but that for his own part he valued the general hymn on the Doctors of the Church above any other. Naturally he had little good to say of the hymns his were to displace. If anything could make a pagan of him, it would be the bad grammar of those old monkish poets, who sacrificed sense and grammar alike to their stupid rhymes. And so he would run on by the hour to anybody who would listen, with an egotism whose very childishness and frankness made it inoffensive.
Of course he claimed the distinction of being the best Latin poet in France. French poetry he despised, as being written in a language incapable of the terse elegance of Latin. But in Latin verse he would hear of no rival. Du Périer, who had quite as much vanity, with only a fraction of his genius, challenged his pretensions. The two poets wrote verses on the same theme, and then set out to find an arbiter. The first friend to whom they appealed was Ménage, who evaded the responsibility by declaring them equally excellent. The next they met was Racine. He first got possession of the stakes and deposited them in the poor’s box at the door of a church near by, and then gave the poets a round scolding for their absurd rivalry!
The hymns of Santeul are best known to English readers through Hymns Ancient and Modern, which contain some very fine versions, original and selected. Not included there is that which Sainte Beuve pronounces his finest hymn, and for whose retention in the Breviary he pleads against the crusaders, who in the name of antiquity insist on replacing Santeul and Coffin by Strada and Galucci. Out of respect for the greatest of modern critics, we reprint it, with a translation from the pen of Dr. A. R. Thompson. It commemorates the Presentation of our Lord in the Temple.
Stupete gentes, fit Deus hostia:
Se sponte legi Legifer obligat:
Orbis Redemptor nunc redemptus:
Seque piat sine labe mater.
De more matrum, Virgo puerpera
Templo statutos abstinuit dies.
Intrare sanctam quid pavebas,
Facta Dei prius ipsa templum?
Ara sub una se vovit hostia
Triplex: honorem virgineum immolat
Virgo sacerdos, parva mollis
Membra puer, seniorque vitam.
Eheu! quot enses transadigent tuum
Pectus! quot altis nata doloribus,
O Virgo! Quem gestas, cruentam
Imbuet hic sacer Agnus aram.
Christus futuro, corpus adhuc tener,
Praeludit insons victima funeri:
Crescet; profuso vir cruore,
Omne scelus moriens piabit.
Sit summa Patri, summaque Filio,
Sanctoque compar gloria Flamini:
Sanctae litemus Trinitati
Perpetuo pia corda cultu.
Wonder, ye nations! divine is the sacrifice.
Lo, his own law the Lawgiver obeys!
Now the Redeemer redeemed is, and purifies
Herself the mother pure. Look with amaze!
All the days set by the law for a mother,
She from the temple of God hath delayed.
Why should she stay without, as might another,
She who the temple of God hath been made?
At the one altar threefold is the sacrifice.
Mother, who offers her pure virgin heart;
Babe, his fair body that in her fond arms lies;
Aged saint, life, ready now to depart.
Oh but what sword through her heart shall be going!
Oh to what sorrow is born her fair child!
Over what altar his blood will be flowing!
He whom she bears, the Lamb holy and mild.
Christ, in his infantile body so tender,
Spotless in purity, here hath foreshown,
Sign of the sacrifice he shall yet render,
Dying the sin of the world to atone.
Now to the Father in glory supernal,
Now to the Son, and the Spirit above,
Now to the Triune, all holy, eternal,
Worship be ever in faith and in love!
As a poet Santeul fell from grace in 1689, when he fell back on his pagan divinities in a poem addressed to the keeper of the royal gardens. Bossuet made a great ado over it, but Fénelon and others judged him more gently. Next year he goes to see La Trappe, and writes a fine poem on Holy Solitude (Sancta Solitudo), which extorted fresh praise from De Rance, and afterward from Sainte-Beuve. But four years later he got into the worst scrape of his life by a flattering epitaph on the great Arnauld, who died in 1694. Santeul always had been more or less associated with the Jansenist party, a fact which was not forgotten when his hymns were expelled from the churches of France in our own century. There is preserved an account of a visit he paid to Port Royal, in which he chattered to the nuns with equal freedom of his own hymns and of their virtues. But he was not of the stuff of which martyrs are made. The Jesuits had the king’s ear, and he was a pensioner of the king’s bounty. They assailed him for his eulogy of the arch-Jansenist, and threatened him with the disfavor of Louis XIV.; and he hastened to make amends in a poetical epistle, of which he made two copies. By the adroit change of the tense of a single word he made the copy for the Jesuits retract his praises of his great friend, while that for the general public did nothing of the sort. As a consequence he came off with no credit on either side. Both Jesuits and Jansenists resented his duplicity, and a fine shower of squibs and pamphlets fell on him from both the hostile forces, until he was forced to cry for quarter, and Bourdaloue made his peace.
He died in 1697 in Burgundy, whither he had accompanied the younger Condé to the meeting of the Estates. St. Simon has told a very unpleasant story of the cause of his death. He ascribes it to Condé’s having made him drink a bowl of wine into which he had emptied his snuff-box, “just to see what would come of it.” But the prince of scandalmongers has been disproven on this point. Santeul’s death was due to no such cause, but to an inflammation of the bowels and to the malpractice of his doctors, who gave him emetics under the false impression that he was suffering from a surfeit. He made a good end, dying with resignation, and begging pardon for the scandal his life had caused.
His hymns were not without their critics in his own age. Jean Baptiste Thiers, a parish priest of great learning and bad temper, assailed the Breviary of Cluny (in his Commentarii de novo Breviario Cluniacensi, Brussels, 1702), and did not spare Santeul’s hymns, which he declared to be much inferior to those which had come down from the earlier days of the Church. He declared that Santeul had a greater abundance of words than of sense, that he had almost no powers of thought, and that some of his images, such as that in which he wreathes a garland of stones for the martyr Stephen, were simply ridiculous. He was answered not by Rabusson, but by his associate, Claude de Vert, after what fashion I do not know.
It was in 1736 that the Breviary of the Diocese of Paris was published in its third and final revision by a commission of three ecclesiastics: François-Antoine Vigier, François-Philippe Mesengui, and Charles Coffin. It is a significant fact that the second belonged to that Jansenist party in the Church which the relentless efforts of the Pope, the hierarchy, and the kings of France had not been able to exterminate. Archbishop de Vintimille was as eager to accomplish that as his predecessors had been, and he was ably seconded by that pious and orthodox prince, Louis XV. But this revision, like that of 1670-80, was a concession to the historical criticism which the Jansenists had brought to bear upon the Church books both as to the legends of the saints and the extravagances of the growing devotion to the Mother of our Lord. Mesengui had been dismissed from the post Coffin had given him in the University of Paris for his opposition to the bull Unigenitus, which condemned Quesnel’s Jansenist Reflections on the New Testament. Coffin’s sympathies lay in the same direction.
Charles Coffin is the man of the three who chiefly concerns us here. Born at Buzancy, hard by Rheims, in 1676, he very early distinguished himself as a Latin poet and an educator. He graduated at Paris in 1701, and became a teacher in the College of Dormans-Beauvais, and then its principal in 1713. Five years later he was chosen to succeed Rollin as Rector of the University of Paris. He at once showed his force of character by revolutionizing the relation of the university to the public through abolishing the fees exacted of the students. To replace them he extended and developed the system of posts and messages, which the university had established in the thirteenth century and which coexisted with the post-office system of the government, of which it was the forerunner. He devoted its revenues to the support of the colleges. He must have been a character of great administrative capacity, as his plans had entire success, and probably did much to foster the development of the post-office system of France. After remaining rector for three years, he went back to his place at the head of the Dormans-Beauvais College, and remained there till his death.
It was in 1727 that Charles Coffin published his first volume of Latin poetry. The most notable piece in the collection was a fine ode in praise of Champagne. So much were the people of the Champagne country pleased with it, that they sent him a hamper of every vintage as long as he lived, which was twenty-two years. He also had a hand in carrying Cardinal de Polignac’s great poem, Anti-Lucretius, to the state of completeness in which it was given to the public in 1745, three years after its author’s death. He undertook the work of revising the old hymns and preparing new with great reluctance, yielding only to the entreaties of the archbishop.
It was in 1736 that the Breviary Commission finished their labors and the archbishop gave to the diocese the new Breviary, which was adopted by more than fifty French dioceses. Its general character does not concern us here. It is with its hymns alone we have to do. About seventy of the primitive and mediaeval hymns still held their place in the Breviary of 1680, nearly half of them the work of Ambrose and his school. The revisers spared very few of these. Only twenty-one hymns of the earlier period were left, while eighty-five of Jean Santeul’s, nearly a hundred by Coffin himself—including some recasts of old hymns—and ninety-seven by other authors, chiefly Frenchmen of later date, were inserted. There were eleven by Guillaume de la Brunetière, a friend of Bossuet’s; six each by Claude Santeul, Nicolas le Tourneux, and Sebastian Besnault, a priest of Sens; five by Isaac Habert, Bishop of Vabres; four by the Jesuit Jean Commire; two each by the Jesuit Francis Guyet and Simon Gourdan of the Abbey of St. Victor; one each by Marc Antoine Muretus, Denis Petau, and Guillaume du Plessis de Geste; one (or three) by M. Combault, a young friend of Charles Coffin’s. This was modernism with a vengeance! New hymns were nearly thirteen to one in proportion to those from the great storehouse of the ages before the Reformation. It is not wonderful that so extreme a policy called forth a reaction as soon as the Romanticist movement, with its juster appreciation of the Middle Ages, had reached France. But by the end of the eighteenth century the old Latin hymns were banished practically from France.
As compared with Jean Santeul, Charles Coffin displays much less poetic audacity than his predecessor. You do not feel that poetry filled the same place in his intellectual existence, or that he was under the same necessity to write it. He has less genius, but a great talent for verse. And—what the critics of that age valued the most—he was more correct in his handling of the vocabulary and the metre of Latin versification. Santeul found classic Latin, much as he admired it, something of a fetter to the free movement of his genius. It was a dead language he was trying to put intense life into—an old bottle for his new wine—and at times the bottle burst. Just because Charles Coffin’s wine is not so new, his inspiration not so fresh, the bottle holds out better. And then he had the greater advantage of a closer familiarity with the ideas he wished to embody in his hymns, and with their sources in the Scriptures, and a more practical capacity for the application of his powers to the object in hand. His hymns are always in place; they are hymns of the Breviary, not brilliant poems on Breviary subjects by a poet writing for glory. I do not say that Charles Coffin was the better man; God only knows; and I must confess to a liking for “the gay canon of St. Victor” which the rector of the university does not inspire in me. There is a Burns-like humanity in him and his harmless vanities which wins our love still, as it did that of his contemporaries. But Charles Coffin had a certain suitableness to his work which Jean Santeul lacked. He was an eminently dignified, respectable, and useful character, who impressed himself upon a whole generation of young Frenchmen, many of whom rose to eminence at the bar, in the public service, and even in the army. They all looked back to him with great respect. I wonder if they loved him as Mark Hopkins and George Allen are loved by those who studied under them. And in Charles Coffin’s hymns you meet the same admirable traits as in his public work. He is a man of enlightenment, dignity, devoutness, and eminent usefulness, without a touch of Rabelaisian abandon to remind you of Béranger’s saying: “All we Français are children of the great François.” Of that he reminds you only in his sparkling, effervescent ode to Champagne, in reply to Bénigne Grenan’s overpraise of Burgundy. It was to be expected that when the advocates of liturgical uniformity made their attack upon the Paris Breviary, beginning with Gueranger’s Institutions Liturgiques (1840-42), it was Santeul whom they especially attacked, although not he but Coffin was responsible for its hymnology.
Charles Coffin’s hymns have a high level of excellence, which makes it difficult to anthologize among them. Certainly not the worst are the four Advent hymns (Instantis adventum Dei; Jordanis oras praevia; Statuta decreto Dei; and In noctis umbra desides); that for Christmas (Jam desinant suspiria) and the Vesper hymn (O luce qui mortalibus); the Passion hymn (Opprobriis Jesu satur); the fine series of seven hymns for the nocturn services throughout the week, based on the seven days of Creation; and the hymn for Epiphany (Quae stella sole pulchrior). These and most of his acknowledged hymns are known to us in the translations of Williams, Chandler, and Mant, and several of these are in Hymns Ancient and Modern.
As an editor he altered and even tinkered, as well as adapted and wrote hymns. Even Jean Santeul did not escape his hand. One of the hymns ascribed to him in the Paris Breviary is a cento from no less than twelve of his own hymns. From the wrath he showed when such changes were made in his lifetime, we may infer that he would have liked this as little as did John Wesley. And the older hymns were handled in the same way. A good example of Charles Coffin’s method of recasting old hymns is furnished by his version of the Ad coenam Agni providi, which already has been given in its original shape and in that of the Roman Breviary. With these the reader may compare Coffin’s revision, which will be seen to vary very widely from the old text of the ninth century:
Forti tegente brachio,
Evasimus Rubrum mare,
Tandem durum perfidi
Jugum tyranni fregimus.
Nunc ergo laetas vindici
Grates rependamus Deo;
Agnique mensam candidis
Cingamus ornati stolis.
Hujus sacrato corpore,
Amoris igne fervidi,
Vescamur atque sanguine:
Vescendo, vivimus Deo.
Jam Pascha nostrum Christus est,
Hic agnus, haec est victima
Cruore cujus illitos
Transmittit ultor angelus.
O digna coelo victima,
Mors ipsa per quam vincitur,
Per quam refractis inferi
Praedam relaxant postibus.
Christi sepulchri faucibus
Emersus ad lucem redit;
Hostem retrudit tartaro,
Coelique pandit intima.
Da Christe, nos tecum mori
Tecum simul da surgere:
Terrena da contemnere;
Amare da coelestia.
It will be observed that while the ideas, and even to some extent the phraseology of the old hymn are retained in the first six verses, their order is so changed as to suggest that we have an original hymn before us, if we do not look closely. But the last verse is altogether different. The old poet prayed that the paschal joy might be made unending through the deliverance of the regenerate from the death eternal. The modern prays that we may share mystically in the death and resurrection of Christ, and learn thereby to set our affections on things above. Similar are his recasts of the Salvete flores Martyrum of Prudentius, and the Ambrosian Jam lucis orto sidere.
Mr. Duffield has left only one completed version of a hymn from the Paris Breviary, and that one whose authorship I am unable to determine. It attracted him as one of the surprisingly few hymns in which the comparison of the Christian life to a warfare, so frequently used by our Lord and the Apostle Paul, is employed as a leading idea. His interest in such hymns no doubt was first awakened by his father’s admirable and popular one:
“Stand up, stand up for Jesus,”
suggested by the dying words of Dudley Tyng. We give both the Latin and his English version:
Pugnate, Christi milites,
Fortes fide resistite:
Immensa promisit Deus
Pio labori praemia.
Non ille fluxas ac leves
Palmas dabit vincentibus;
Sed lucis aeternae decus,
Et pura semper gaudia.
Mentes beatas excipit
Formosa coelitum domus:
Hic turba, coelis altior,
Subjecta calcat sidera.
Caduca vobis praemia
Offert levis mundi favor:
Vultus ad astra tollite;
Hic ipse fit merces Deus.
Qui nos coronat, laus Patri,
Laus qui redemit, Filio;
Alma juvans nos gratia,
Sit par tibi laus, Spiritus.
Fight on, ye Christian soldiers,
And bravely keep the faith,
For great reward shall follow,
As God’s own promise saith.
Not palms that wave and flutter
Shall be the victor’s crown,
But grace of light eternal,
And joy of pure renown.
That blessed heavenly mansion
Shall take each happy soul;
Their throng, high raised in glory,
Shall tread the starry pole.
Earth’s honor is but failing,
Her gifts are light as air;
Lift up your eyes to heaven,
For God’s reward is there.
Praise God, who crowns the battle,
And Christ, who comes to save,
And praise the Holy Spirit,
Whose grace our spirits crave.
By kindness of Dr. A. R. Thompson we add two translations from Charles Coffin’s hymns:
QUA STELLA SOLE PULCHRIOR.
What star is this whose glorious light
Outshines the morn,
The herald of the King new-born!
Its radiance bright,
A heavenly sign,
Streams o’er the cradle of the Babe divine.
Faith, standing with the prophets old,
Sees down the skies
The promised Star from Jacob rise.
The sign foretold
She knows full well,
And straightway seeks the wondrous spectacle.
The lustrous star gives warning fair
To all the earth,
But chiefly men of Eastern birth,
With pious care,
The warning heed,
And seeking Christ upon their journey speed.
Their eager love knows no delay;
Danger nor toil
Their purpose resolute can foil.
They haste away
From home and kind,
And country, at God’s call, the Christ to find.
O Christ our Lord, thy star of grace
Leads us to thee!
Help these dull hearts of ours to be
First at the place,
Intent to prove
To thee, O Lord, our faith and hope and love.
LABENTE JAM SOLIS.
Now with the declining sun,
Day to night is passing on.
So doth mortal life descend
Swiftly to its destined end.
From the cross, thine arms spread wide
Fold the world, O Crucified!
Help us love the cross. In thy
Dear embrace help us to die!
Glory to the Eternal One,
Glory to the only Son,
Glory to the Spirit be,
Now and through eternity.
Of the other writers of the Breviary only a few need detain us. Most of them are poets of the conventional sort, whose verse evidences the care taken with their education rather than their possession of any native genius, although Jean Commire (1625-1702) was of wide reputation in his day. Even of good Claude Santeul the best that can be said is that several of his hymns have passed for the composition of his brother, and that the two Trinity hymns (Ter sancte, ter potens Deus and O luce quae tua lates) and the three on Lazarus (Redditum luce, Domino vocante, Panditur saxo tumulus remoto, and Intrante Christo Bethanicam domum) deserve the honor. They make us regret the loss of these two manuscript volumes. An unfinished translation of one of these, left by Mr. Duffield, has been completed for us by Dr. A. R. Thompson. The asterisk marks the transition from the one translator to the other—
O LUCE QUAE TUA LATES.
O hidden by the very light,
O ever-blessed Trinity,
Thee we confess, and thee believe,
With pious heart we long for thee!
O Holy Father of the saints,
O God of very God, the Son,
O Bond of Love, the Holy Ghost,
Who joinest all the Three in One!
That God the Father might behold
Himself, *coeval was the Son;
Also the Love that binds them both;
So, God of God, the perfect One.
Complete the Father in the Son,
The Son, the Father in complete,
And the full Spirit in them both;
The Father, Son, and Paraclete.
As is the Son, the Spirit is.
Each as the Father, verily.
The Three, One all transcendent Truth,
One all transcendent Love, the Three.
Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost
Eternally, let all adore;
Who liveth and who reigneth, God,
Ages on ages, evermore!
Next we have Nicolas le Tourneux (1640-1686), the severe Jansenist, whose preaching drew such crowds in Paris that the King asked the reason. “Sire,” replied Boileau, “your Majesty knows how people run after novelty; this is a preacher who preaches the Gospel. When he mounts the pulpit, he frightens you by his ugliness, so that you wish he would leave it; and when he begins to speak, you are afraid that he may.” It was his Année Chrétienne which suggested the Christian Year to John Keble. We have seen how he coached Jean Santeul both as to the matter of his hymns and the right spirit for a Christian poet. But the great preacher’s own hymns are sermoni propriores, “properer for a sermon,” to borrow Lamb’s mistranslation. Verse was a fetter to him, not a wing. His best are the Ascension hymn, Adeste, Coelitum chori, and that on the Baptist, Jussu tyranni pro fide. The former we give in the excellent translation of Rev. A. R. Thompson, D.D.:
ADESTE COELITUM CHORI.
Hither come, ye choirs immortal,
Singing joyful canticles!
Christ hath passed the grave’s dark portal,
With the dead no more he dwells.
All in vain doth malice station
Watchful guards the tomb before,
All in vain the faithless nation
Sets the seal upon the door.
Fruitless terror, from this prison
None have stolen him away,
But by his own strength arisen,
Victor, ends he death’s dread fray.
Prisoned, and the seal unbroken,
He can leave at will the tomb,
As at first—behold the token—
He could leave the Virgin’s womb.
When he on the tree hung dying,
Raving men, who round him stood,
“Come down from the cross,” were crying,
“Then we own thee Son of God.”
But, his Father’s will obeying
Even unto death, he dies;
Priest and Victim, ’tis the slaying
Of the world’s great Sacrifice.
Nay, the cross was not forsaken;
Dead, yet greater thing did he,
By himself, his life retaken
Proved him Son of God to be.
With thee dying, with thee rising,
Grant, O Christ, that we may be,
Earthly vanities despising,
Choosing heaven all lovingly!
Praise be to the Father given,
To the Son, our Leader. He
Calleth us with him to heaven;
Spirit, equal praise to thee!
A man of very different powers is the Abbé Sebastian Besnault, of whom nothing is told us except that he was chaplain of the parish of St. Maurice in Sens, and died in 1726. The six hymns ascribed to him in the Paris Breviary are among the finest in that collection. Three are hymns on the Circumcision (Debilis cessent elementa legis; Felix dies, quam proprio; and Noxium Christus simul introivit); one is an Ascension hymn (Promissa, tellus, concipe gaudium), and two are Dedication hymns (Ecce sedes hic Tonantis and Urbs beata, vera pacis), the latter being a recast of the Urbs beata Hierusalem. Quite justly does A. Gazier (in his thesis De Santolii Victorini Sacris Hymnis, Paris, 1875) say that if Besnault equalled Jean Santeul in the volume of his hymns, he would not rank below him as a sacred poet, since he quite equals him in his Latinity and is his superior as a spiritual writer. We give Dr. A. R. Thompson’s version of his recast of the Urbs beata Hierusalem:
URBS BEATA, VERA PACIS.
Blessed city, vision true
Of sweet peace, Jerusalem,
How majestic to the view
Rise thy lofty walls, in them
Living stones in beauty stand,
Polished, set, by God’s own hand.
Every several gate of thine
Of one pearl effulgent is,
Golden fair thy wall doth shine,
Blended lustrously with this,
And thy wall doth rest alone
Upon Christ the Corner-stone.
Thy sun is the martyred Lamb,
God thy temple. Angels vie
With the saints, a joyful psalm
Ever lifting up on high,
And the Holiest worshipping,
Holy, Holy, Holy sing.
Evermore stand open wide,
Heavenly city, all thy gates.
But, who would in thee abide,
Who thy walls to enter waits,
Must, that meed of life to win,
Agonize to conquer sin.
To the Father, to the Son,
Endless adoration be!
Spirit, binding both in One,
Endless worship unto thee!
Hallowed by thy chrism divine,
We become thy living shrine.
Along with Coffin should be named one of his friends, a young advocate named Combault, who possessed something of the spirit and energy of Jean Santeul. How far he contributed to the Breviary of 1736 I am unable to say, but a well-founded tradition designates him as the author of a splendid rhetorical hymn in commemoration of the Apostles Peter and Paul (Tandem laborum gloriosi Principes), which has been much admired. Combault died in 1785.
The whole impression which this school of hymn-writers makes upon us is like that of the Greco-French architecture of our own age. Both reflect the critical and useful, but somewhat exclusive spirit of the Renaissance. Both are capable of fine effects, great structural beauty, and a certain grandeur not of the highest order. But a Greco-French church will not bear comparison with Notre Dame; and the hymns of Santeul and Coffin will hardly better endure a comparison with the Christian singers who wrote when Notre Dame was new.