Column: Illuminations
Muddled Hymns
by Anthony Esolen
I often meet people who say that they mix in plenty of traditional hymns with the off-Broadway fare that fills up most contemporary hymnals, such as the Roman Catholic Worship series, now in its fourth edition. What most of them don't know is that the texts have been mangled. They are not wine, but watered-down apple juice, sometimes with a little oil slick for good measure.
I'd like to give a name to all the revisers of the old poems. It's inspired by the one man who seems to have been responsible for more than twenty years of bad texts in Worship: Mr. Muddlesome.
Why revise at all? Muddlesome uses as his excuse the belief that all language must be transparent. A bureaucrat's language should be transparent, but seldom is. But transparency is death to poetry. That does not mean that poetry should be clotted, incoherent, ungrammatical, or without any obvious literal meaning at all. A poem should make grammatical sense at the least. It must refer to things we can see and touch, at the least.
What Muddlesome does not understand is that true poetic language suggests the figurative through the literal, and the ineffable through what can be spoken and heard. The bureaucrat employs vague and abstract language so that he cannot be held responsible for what it means. It hides the person, and always means less than what it says. Such is his loftiness. But for the poet, "high" language is super-concrete and manifoldly precise; it always says more than it seems to say at first, and means more than it can say. It reveals the heart of what it means to be a person: "In the beginning was the Word."
So we find that Muddlesome, disdainful of highly wrought language, is also deaf to poetry, and strangely callous as regards human feelings. He blunts the edge of an honest man's confession, lest it offend. He tries to avert the conflict of passions among men by seeing to it that no one will feel any passion at all. His answer to the dangerous call of sanctity is to muffle it. Sanctity is a tiger; he gives us complaisance, the pussycat.
Newton's Hymn
So even when his revisions are not obviously imbecilic, they blunt the edge or smooth the good rough contours of man's encounter with the living God. Here, for -example, is a hymn written by a man who never blunted an edge, and who knew why he must not. He was John Newton, the slave-trader who turned away from his foul business and turned to God, devoting the rest of his life to preaching and to fighting the evil of slavery. Newton never wrote to comfort men by assuring them of their goodness. He knew better.
Here is his fine hymn, "How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds." In it, he acknowledges his utter dependence upon the unmerited grace of God:
How sweet the name of Jesus sounds
In a believer's ear!
It soothes our sorrows, heals our wounds,
And drives away our fear.It makes the wounded spirit whole,
And calms the troubled breast;
'Tis manna to the hungry soul,
And to the weary, rest.Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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