Hear the Angel Voices
Thomas Howard on the Versified Dogma of Christian Worship
For Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians, the singing of hymns—at least in the sense in which hymnody is understood and practiced in the Anglican and Protestant churches—does not occupy exactly the place that it does in those latter two sectors of Christendom. The move away from the liturgy at the Reformation fostered an enormous efflorescence of hymnody. Martin Luther, Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and others brought to their congregations a treasury of hymns for which tens of thousands of Christian believers have been grateful.
There is, however, a treasury of hymnody almost unknown now, except, as it happens, in the traditional Anglican Church. For it is the Anglicans who, many years ago, found, and opened up, and started singing, the hymns from the early and medieval churches both in the East and in the West. Catholics, of course, have kept in a central place the hymns of St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, O Salutaris Hostia and Tantum Ergo Sacramentum; and the Orthodox liturgy seems, at least to a Roman Catholic like myself, to be borne along on an almost ceaseless outpouring of glorious chant. But the phenomenon of vigorous congregational singing seems to be a particular specialty of the Anglican and the Protestant churches.
I myself grew up in that especially energetic quarter of Christendom known as Evangelicalism, and I must say that it was there that I was tutored faithfully in Scripture and in a muscular personal faith in Jesus Christ. We sang—and sang—the strong hymns of Luther, Watts, and Wesley. It might almost be said that faith among us virtually lived and moved and had its being in “the great hymns of the church” as we called them, meaning mostly eighteenth and nineteenth century hymns, although we very much loved St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s Jesu, Dulcis Memoria—“Jesus, the very thought of Thee / With sweetness fills my breast.” We also drew upon a late-arriving genre of songs generally referred to as “Gospel songs,” such as “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” and “O That Will Be Glory for Me,” many of them drawn from the evangelistic campaigns of D. L. Moody and Ira Sankey.
A New Vista
When I became an Anglican in l962, I discovered a whole world of hymnody that was new to me.
These were hymns from the early and medieval Church by such (to me) strangers as St. Joseph the Hymnographer (ninth century), St. Rabanus Maurus (eighth century), and Venantius Fortunatus (sixth century). It was as though the scrim that hangs between our ordinary mortal experience and The Ineffable were suddenly drawn aside.
“Father, we thank Thee who has planted / Thy holy Name within our hearts,” from the Greek Didache of a.d. 110, was one of them. “The great Creator of the worlds / The sovereign God of heaven,” from the Greek Epistle to Diognetus, a.d. 150, was another, and, from the high Middle Ages, there was Peter Abelard’s O Quanta qualia / sunt illa sabbata”—O what their joy and their glory must be / Those endless Sabbaths the blessed ones see.” These hymns struck a note that seemed to me to approach the Mysterium Tremendum itself.
The Eucharistic hymns from earlier centuries in the Church are particularly rich, among them “O Food of Men Wayfaring,” a Latin hymn from the seventeenth century, and “Draw nigh and take the Body of the Lord / And drink the holy Blood for you outpoured,” from the seventh century.
Hymns of Grandeur
There are two hymns that, in an especially notable way, seemed to me to open out onto daunting vistas of the sort that one comes upon in St. John’s Apocalypse.
St. Joseph the Hymnographer’s ninth-century hymn, “Stars of the morning, so gloriously bright,” and St. Rabanus Maurus’s “Christ, the fair glory of the holy angels” from the eighth century, draw us deeply into those vistas. It may not be amiss to quote a stanza or two from these two hymns for the benefit of readers who may not have come across them.
St. Joseph’s hymn speaks this way:
“Who like the Lord?” thunders Michael the chief;
Raphael, “the cure of God,” comforteth grief;
And, as at Nazareth, prophet of peace,
Gabriel, “the light of God,” bringeth release.Then, when the earth was first poised in mid-space,
Then, when the planets first sped on their race,
Then, when were ended the six days’ employ,
Then all the sons of God shouted for joy.
(It must be added here that the grandeur of these hymns is vastly enhanced by the tunes to which they have been set. They are worth hunting up in the 1940 Episcopal hymnal.)
In his hymn “Christ the Fair Glory of the Holy Angels,” St. Rabanus, after invoking the three archangels, beckons us all right up into the empyrean with this:
May the blest mother of our Lord and Savior,
May the celestial company of angels,
May the assembly of the saints in heaven,
Help us to praise thee.
Beckoned by Angels
The point of all of this, of course, is that hymnody, under its own species, echoes what we find in the liturgy itself: we are set free from the shallow puddle of our own resources and experience, and drawn towards the mighty precincts where That Which addresses us looms. The titanic Objective, we might say. Here, the whole matter of “testimony” and “sharing” recedes. What have we, poor gabbling novices, to say when Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, and thrones, principalities, and powers (invoked in another stanza of St. Rabanus’s hymn) start up the chorus, led by the Theotokos herself?
W. H. Auden once remarked that the best hymns are “versified dogma.” It may not be a bad recipe. Such hymns bespeak what we find in the Te Deum and the Akathist, and in such hymns as arose in the Church when men were accustomed to bow and be silent until, as it were, the angelic summons to us mortals to join in was heard.
Thomas Howard taught for many years at St. John's Seminary College, the Roman Catholic seminary of the archdiocese of Boston. Among his many works are the books Christ the Tiger, Evangelical Is Not Enough, Lead Kindly Light, On Being Catholic, and The Secret of New York Revealed, and a videotape series of 13 lectures on "The Treasures of Catholicism" (all from Ignatius Press).
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