Illuminations
His Sweet Name
by Anthony Esolen
“She shall bring forth a son,” said the angel to Joseph, “and thou shalt call his name JESUS. For he shall save his people from their sins.” This was done, says the evangelist, “that it might be fulfilled which the Lord spoke by the prophet, saying, Behold a virgin shall be with child, and bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us” (Matt. 1:21–23). One name illuminates the other. Yeshu’ah, the Lord saves, not from without, by the sheer exercise of his might, but from within and from among us. ‘Emmanu-El, God is in our midst, and in the last way that we might suppose. He is in our midst as one of us, son both of God and of man.
I’ve long had the impression that in the early centuries of the Church, Christ was less the object of meditative love than of reverence and awe, as was right and just. But when the Arian threat had passed—when our thoughts about Christ were no longer likely to collapse into the merely human—we could then with assurance look upon the man, Jesus, our Savior and our Lord, and sing of him with all the loving warmth we might be blessed to feel. So did St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091–1153), in the beautiful Latin hymn, Jesu, Dulcis Memoria. The Latin is written in Long Meter, four lines of eight syllables, with rising rhythm; I recommend the melody Duguet as beautifully fitting the thought and feeling, more than the namesake melody Jesu Dulcis Memoria.
The Hymn
The splendid Edward Caswall translated Bernard’s hymn into Common Meter, as “Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee” (sing it to the melody St. Agnes, well known for “Shepherd of Souls”). The thought of the poem works by an implicit argument a fortiori. If it is sweet just to think about Jesus, what must it be to dwell in his presence?
Jesus, the very thought of thee
With sweetness fills the breast;
But sweeter far thy face to see,
And in thy presence rest.
And indeed it is sweet to think about Jesus. His very name is sweet to us, because it recalls his person, and what he came to do for us:
No voice can sing, no heart can frame,
Nor can the memory find
A sweeter sound than thy blest Name,
O Savior of mankind
He is not just the savior as someone who once performed a task, and the thing was done. He continues to save. He is always Jesus, calling to us, demanding a response from us, our high priest interceding on our behalf; the Good Shepherd, the inspiration, the guide, and the goal of our search:
O hope of every contrite heart,
O joy of all the meek,
To those who fall, how kind thou art!
How good to those who seek!
All who seek, says Jesus, shall find. Every human soul will one day look upon him whom we have pierced. A terror to the wicked, but to the penitent, to all who have lingered with gratitude upon all that he has done for us, there are no words that can express it. Caswall does well to interrupt his first line with a gasp of speechlessness:
But what to those who find? Ah, this
Nor tongue nor pen can show;
The love of Jesus, what it is,
None but his loved ones know.
At this point there is no more but to return to the first stanza, and raise it to the key of the everlasting:
Jesus, our only joy be thou,
As thou our prize wilt be;
In thee be all our glory now,
And through eternity.
The Vandalism
How can you improve upon Edward Caswall and St. Bernard? You can’t. But that doesn’t prevent the editors of our hymnals from smearing their grubby little fingers all over these works of art. I make a point of this, because I regularly meet people who think that they and their fellows are singing real hymns, but who don’t know what has been done to them. Imagine The Creation of Adam turned into a cartoon and then supplied with speech bubbles and politically motivated slang. Would that be Michelangelo?
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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