‘Audi Benigne Conditor!’
The Poetry of the Roman Breviary
This article by Dr David Daintree * is the second in an occasional series on the hymns of the Roman Breviary
St Ambrose (c. 340 – 397) was such a successful hymn
writer that his work attracted many imitators. In the ancient world, of course,
what we might nowadays term plagiarism was not so much a sin as a courtesy and a
mark of respect: chasing originality was not nearly so important to a Latin
writer (if it was important at all) as it has become to us. So the Ambrosian
quatrain became a sort of living tradition, with the consequence that it is
extremely difficult to distinguish the authentic compositions of Ambrose from
those of his successors.
Raby (A History of
Christian-Latin Poetry), whose opinion is
still probably as good as anybody's, claims that four such hymns have a perfect
pedigree, being vouched for by St Augustine himself. Ten more, he says, are
almost certainly by St Ambrose, on the grounds of style, ancient attribution and
inclusion in the Milanese liturgy; another four are supported by less convincing
evidence, though he is generous enough to say that "if Ambrose did not
compose them, they are the work of a poet of equal genius". We thus have a total of eighteen surviving hymns which
are certainly, or pretty certainly, from the pen of Ambrose himself as well as
dozens, even hundreds, of others which plod happily (for the most part) in the
master's footsteps.
Now of these eighteen most securely Ambrosian
originals, the Roman Breviary includes only seven: one from category one
(unassailable), two from category two (almost certain) and four (i.e. all) from
category three (probable). Let us begin our study with the Breviary's single
'category one' hymn, the immortal office hymn for Lauds on Sunday. I have furnished an inelegant literal translation whose
only merit is that it follows the original line by line and may thus help
readers whose Latin is weak.
As I foretold you in Part I, the poem, read in Latin as it deserves to be, may sound odd to our ears. The metre, which is strictly quantitative, consists of a sequence of four iambuses (one short syllable followed by one long) in each line:
u - / u - / u - / u -
Or at least it does so
in theory! In practice, however, the first and the third short syllables are
allowed to be long (remember, we are not talking about stress here, but about quantity or
syllable length), and the
very last syllable is allowed to be short, though it is considered to be
lengthened by position. The aural effect, then, is that the second and last feet
are always heard as true iambuses, while the first and/or third may be spondees.
Shakespeare, of course, does the same sort of thing in
English stress-based verse: how tedious it would sound if every line had exactly
the same unvarying iambic unstress-stress-unstress-stress rhythmic pattern! His
verses may be basically iambic, but they are certainly not repetitively so. If
you like, an iambic theme or flavour predominates, in both cases, but it is tempered with
variety.
But enough of metre. Note, above all, the economical
compactness of the Latin and the power that comes from solemn reticence, wherein
lies the genius of the language. A full exposition of the text is impossible
within the scope allowed me by the editor, but the reader is encouraged to look
for the lovely symmetries which are of the essence of the classical tradition.
Observe, for example, the way in which the italicized words belong grammatically
together, keeping the mind focused on the cock or rooster, until we learn that
it was the crying ('canente')
of the cock that made St Peter weep. I would advise any reader who has even a
little Latin to read the poem aloud, several times, and to look for more signs
of the artifice that is so stylishly concealed there.
Ambrose rules Thomas, OK
Let us now leap forward 900 years, observing as we do so how incredibly enduring was - or indeed is - the classical tradition. St Thomas Aquinas wrote a set of hymns for the feast of Corpus Christi. The one that follows, intended also for use at Lauds, employs the ambrosian quatrain and may thus be fitly contrasted with the previous poem. There are differences, however. If you read it aloud, as you really must, you will discover two things. Firstly, you will find that it sounds rhythmical to the modern ear, and this is because the author, while adhering to the classical rules of quantity, has so contrived his verses that the stresses (which had become an important aspect of language by his time) coincide with the long syllables. He thereby straddles two literary worlds, observing the classical canons, and pleasing our modern ears as well! The second thing you will notice is that rhyme is now out in the open, no longer an occasional embellishment, but a regular and predictable aide-memoire.
This dignified and
splendid hymn perfectly complements the previous one. It is the least
'theological' of St Thomas's eucharistic hymns, though the third stanza touches
lightly on the formal doctrine. The use of the word aemulis in the second stanza deserves
comment. Many translators have rendered it enemies, but its root meaning is rivals or even imitators; at any
rate there is certainly a strong implication of jealousy. This, I think, is an engaging concept.
It is intriguing also to try to imagine how such high
medieval verses would have sounded to an ancient ear. The ancients, we know,
could certainly recognize word stress, though to them it was of secondary
importance to quantity. They enjoyed the interplay between regularly recurring
quantitative patterns and irregular stress. The effect must have been similar to that of musical
counterpoint, when two or more voices sing different but related melodies. In
writing poetry in which stress and long syllables coincided, however, I believe
that St Thomas produced something that would have sounded somewhat unsubtle and
jinglelike to the cultivated ancient ear, though in saying that I emphasize that
such an opinion relates only to metrics, and not at all to thought and content.
The language of the poem is Latin of the utmost vigour,
clarity, lucidity and elegance: it might be 'medieval', but it is certainly not
decadent or corrupt. Fortunately we have now moved beyond the narrow-minded
judgement of the renaissance to the effect that all post-classical Latin was of
poor quality, though it must be observed in passing that such an attitude
greatly influenced the editors of the Breviary and is the chief reason why so
much good hymnody was omitted in favour of a quantity of very correct, very
'classical', very uninspiring verse by renaissance churchmen of little poetry
and much learning. Nothing changes, it seems, and the Church keeps on lurching
from one Marty Haugen to the next.
We conclude our study with a brief look at another ancient hymn. By my count the Breviary contains five hymns by one of St Ambrose's contemporaries, Prudentius (Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, 348 - c.410). The office hymn for lauds on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, like the other two hymns we have studied, is written in the 'ambrosian' quatrain. Was Prudentius an early imitator, or did both writers settle independently upon this metre for its relative simplicity and accessibility to unlettered congregations? We cannot be sure, but it is clear that Prudentius's poems are in a more elevated literary style: he probably never imagined that they would become popular hymns. We have space for two stanzas:
If you count the syllables, you will find that three
lines (2, 3 and 8) have nine each rather than eight. This is because each of
these lines contains an example of elision: a vowel at the end of one word has
been dropped before a vowel at the beginning of the following word. This is a
perfectly normal occurrence in any language – we do it all the time in English
– and it means that though these lines appear to have nine syllables
they actually have only eight when read aloud.
I leave it to readers to discover them for themselves. Notice that elision was not employed at all in the
poems of Ambrose and Aquinas that we read above. They probably avoided it
deliberately in their effort to maintain the simplicity of the metre for the use
of simple people.
I think that line 2 contains an
attractive double entendre. Lucis can mean life or light, and it
may here mean both: the Innocents are slain at the beginning of their lives
and the coming of the light (Christ) into the world.
Otherwise the lines and the imagery are simple enough.
The language is clean and crisp: all style and no padding. The metre is purely quantitative, and thus (like
Ambrose's) it has that slightly odd hoariness of antiquity about it which gives
it an unselfconscious charm that will never fade so long as Latin is read.
*Dr David Daintree is a Classics scholar and Master of
Jane Franklin Hall at the University of Tasmania.
