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.Dear Name, the rock on which I build,
My shield and hiding place,
My never failing treasury, filled
With boundless stores of grace!Jesus! My Shepherd, Guardian, Friend,
My Prophet, Priest, and King,
My Lord, my Life, my Way, my End,
Accept the praise I bring.Weak is the effort of my heart,
And cold my warmest thought;
But when I see thee as thou art,
I'll praise thee as I ought.Till then I would thy love proclaim
With every fleeting breath,
And may the music of thy Name
Refresh my soul in death.
Muddlesome's Subtractions
Let us repeat Mr. Muddlesome's aims. He wants to blunt what is personal. He wants to muffle expressions that stress the distance between us and God. He wants to rob language of its power to suggest the sacred. He does not care if his revisions result in awkwardness, or even meaninglessness. The operative word is "less." Muddlesome is a subtractor.
So let's take things stanza by stanza. In the first, Newton suggests that the holy name of Jesus is sweet, like music to the ear. It has the healing and refreshing effect of music, especially, as we hear in the final stanza, to the man about to die. The sweetness has to go.
The Name is also personal. It rings in someone's ear—the ear of the believer. It soothes sorrow, heals wounds, and drives away fear, perhaps the ultimate fear of eternal loss. We must blunt what is too personal:
How GOOD the name of Jesus sounds
TO ALL BELIEVING EARS!
It soothes our sorrows, heals our wounds,
And drives away our FEARS.
There's no notion of music at all in that stanza. "Sounds good to me," we say, colloquially, about something indifferent.
The second stanza, too, is far too personal to survive. The name of Jesus heals in four ways, one to each line of the verse. It heals wounds; it calms; it is manna to the hungry; it is rest to the weary. Which single word would give Muddlesome the vapors? Obviously it is "breast." Muddlesome mutters, his red pen in his mouth, "Someone here might think of the breast, and not what it means." Excuse me, sir, but the breast is precisely intended. We see the heaving of a troubled breast, and the name of Jesus calms it, settles it, and the poor, troubled sinner can breathe easily again. Figuratively, the breast suggests not just thoughts but also passions, and those that strike all too close to the heart. Can't have that.
The trouble is that "breast" is the final word of the line. If you get rid of it, you'll have to alter the rhyme in the last line also. If you do that, you will probably ruin the pattern that Newton has set, building to the calm conclusion, rest. But that's all right for Muddlesome. Remember that he is not really careful about clarity. Confusion and incoherence and clumsiness are all right. It is poetry—and its reach toward the divine—that is suspect. Here is the wet blanket:
It makes the wounded spirit whole,
And calms the troubled MIND;
HIS manna for each hungry soul,
THE LOST AND weary FIND.
The rest is gone. The fine parallelism is gone. The strength of comfort for the breast is gone. But untangle that final sentence from what is now an awkward inversion of verb and object: The lost and weary find his manna for each hungry soul. That is bad English. The only person in the stanza to whom "his" can refer is the wounded spirit or the troubled mind or the lost and weary—not to Jesus, who is not in the stanza at all. The original stanza's pronoun was "it," repeated in the third line, and clearly referring to the name of Jesus, picking up the reference from the pronoun it in the first stanza.
So whose manna is his manna? We don't immediately know. Are the lost and weary finding manna for themselves or for somebody else? Are they the same as the hungry soul, or are they different? Or are we supposed to care? People who are lost do not need manna; they need a guide. People who are weary do not need manna; they need rest. A person who is hungry needs manna, but he isn't finding it here, unless he is they, plural, the lost and weary. Awkward and vague.
What about the third stanza? What is most personal in it? What most clearly suggests the utter dependence of sinful man upon God's grace? What is most poetic and suggestive? What image do you remember most clearly? Isn't it the treasury, filled with boundless stores of grace? "Where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more," says St. Paul, in that verse so close to the heart of
John Newton. Here is Muddlesome's muddling:
BLEST Name! The rock on which WE build,
OUR shield and RESTING place,
OUR never failing COMFORT, filled
With BLESSINGS of HIS grace.
Gone is the intensely personal "dear," and the singer speaking in his own person. Gone is the notion that we hide within the walls of Christ's fortress and behind his shield. Gone also is that treasury. Again, the final two lines purchase mediocrity at the price of clarity. What does it mean to say that the name of Jesus is our "comfort filled with blessings of his grace"? Is the grace blessing the name? How do you fill a comfort? How do you fill a comfort with blessings? Is the grace blessing, or is it being blessed? Is the comfort being blessed? Does it matter?
There wasn't much that Muddlesome could do to the list of titles in the fourth stanza, though again he blunted its force. He removed the personal pronoun "my" from the first line entirely, making up for the lost syllable by inserting his all-purpose "O" at the beginning. Then he substituted "our" for the pronoun "my" in the rest of the stanza, and "we" for "I" at the end.
Forgetting the Finest
But what about the finest stanzas of all? The fifth, with its frank and manly confession of incapacity, and its longing to look upon Jesus face to face? The final, with its determination to utter the name of Jesus all his life long, and then hope to hear its sweetness at the moment of death? What could Muddlesome do with them?
He could forget them, that's what. Remember, Muddle-some is a subtractor. You do not want people ever to anticipate the dread moment of death. So he didn't bother to print them. A good inch and a half of white space stands above the hymn as printed in Worship III. That was plenty of room.
So, reader, I beg you—get rid of the costume jewelry and bring back the pearls.
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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