Departures & Advents
I wonder sometimes at modern man’s restless hope, mingled with dread, to meet some being from beyond our world, someone endowed with wisdom and power, or perhaps, as more like our own selves, not wise but dangerously clever, and seeking to suppress and to dominate. To meet the latter, we need but go to a board room or a congress. To meet the former—I write partly in jest—we need but open a book written by or about someone alive a hundred years before our time of schooling as widespread as an underground fungus, with ignorance in its trail; a time when a man might die young of overwork in the fields, or of an outbreak of fever, and no one consider it unusual; when the exigencies of human life made it necessary for you to earn your bread by actually knowing how to do things with your back or your hands or your brain, and to do them well.
Joseph Anstice, the author of the Advent hymn “When Came in Flesh the Incarnate Word,” was only 28 years old when he died in 1836. He was an Oxford scholar, a teacher, a literary historian, and a poet, having published, among other things, a book of English verse translations of selections from the greatest Greek and Latin poets of antiquity. He seems to have been a devout and diligent man, not one to let his lamps run out of oil.
When he lay dying at Torquay, he would spend his mornings with his pupils, because he was then most at ease and cheerful, but when afternoon came on, the teaching became too strenuous for him. So, oppressed by the illness—tuberculosis, most likely—that would take him from this world, he tried to rest, while dictating hymns to his wife, because he knew his time was short. There were 52 of them, all composed in his last few weeks, in his mind and not with pen in hand. Later, Mrs. Anstice put them together in a book for his friends; in 1841, the indefatigable Frances Mary Yonge included many of them in The Child’s Christian Year.
I daresay you would be more likely to land a spaceship on a planet far away and find the stone-age natives speaking English than you’d be to find now a single young person at Oxford at all like Joseph Anstice. That is not because the current Oxonians are more likely to transcend their place and time, while Anstice was bound to his. The reverse is true.
Where shall social and political fads go but to oblivion, or the worm? But the imagination of the Christian man ranges from heaven to earth and under the earth; it extends from the first flash of light when God spoke the universe into existence, to the glory of the New Jerusalem, bathed in light as Christ sits upon the throne, the Lamb of God, Son of God, and Son of man. Nor does it dissolve into the vague conjectures of the Platonic mind. It is as intimate and human as the touch of a child’s hand. For God saves not ideas but men; as he became not a notion, but flesh; and as he will come again in power, not as an abstraction or a political program, but as God, in the flesh.
First & Second Comings
Let that then serve as an introduction to our hymn, fit for Advent, and also—do we have such hymns now?—fit to be sung at the bed of someone soon to depart. Anstice composed it in Common Meter, the 8-6-8-6 stanza of so many simple English ballads, with rhymes on alternate lines. In the first stanza, he imagines the night when Christ first appeared to the world:
When came in flesh the incarnate Word,
The heedless world slept on,
And only simple shepherds heard
That God had sent his Son.
The greatest stealth operation in the history of warfare, we might say; nor can we imagine a greater. But the lines are straightforward, quiet, and clear. The world is heedless, asleep. The shepherds were the only ones to hear the tidings, brought to them by angels from on high, yet there may have been people within earshot, snoring placidly away, who heard nothing of it.
The Second Coming of the Word will be far different:
When comes the Savior at the last,
From east to west shall shine
The awful pomp, and earth aghast
Shall tremble at the sign.
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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