'AUDI BENIGNE CONDITOR!'

THE LATIN POETRY OF THE WESTERN TRADITION

Dr David Daintree concludes his three-part series on the poetry of the Roman Missal and Breviary. Though this article is to be understood as the third in a series, the observant reader will note a subtle change in the title: with the editor's permission I have moved the goal posts, transferring the emphasis from poems and hymns still found in the traditional liturgical books to works that are no longer there, but perhaps should be.

In previous articles I spoke of the tragic loss of a great deal of fine poetry as a consequence of the obsession of the Renaissance church with antiquity; this and subsequent forms of modernism have stripped the Catholic treasury of many beautiful things. In passing let us note the curious fact that modernism, in human affairs, is so often disguised antiquarianism. So it seems appropriate, having concentrated in the first two articles on the origins of hymnody and having studied two or three outstanding examples of hymns that are still loved and cherished, to turn our attention to some hymns that have been left behind and perhaps deserve better treatment than they have received.

Lost sequences

Let us begin by glancing at the venerable tradition of what is called the sequence. This peculiar form of hymnody had a very simple origin. The final syllable of the alleluia which was sung between the epistle and the gospel was extended extravagantly, words were added (one syllable to each note), and eventually a new art form arose - a series of unrhythmical prose strophes and alternating antistrophes, often preceded by a brief proem of three or four words, and concluding with a matching coda or tail. There is perhaps nothing in nature that better illustrates the emergence of the sequence than the growth of a mushroom: from what a tiny spore emerges a fruit of subtle and elaborate complexity!

Our first example is a Christmas sequence written by Notker Balbulus (c.840-912), and it comes from the earliest stages of the tradition. There is no proem, but nearly every line ends with an a, an intriguing relic of the original alleluia: Notker evidently still felt compelled to recognize the original function of his lines. This sequence disappeared from the Latin liturgy half a millennium ago, though it has received better treatment outside the mainstream Catholic tradition.

Adam of St Victor

 Adam of St Victor (c.1110-c.1180) is generally held to be the master of the sequence writers. Little is known about him personally, but his concise perfection of technique puts him in the very first rank of Latin poets. In the Easter sequence that follows, however, note how the form has departed far from its origins: there is neither proem nor coda, and the vestiges of that original alleluia are vanished. What remains is a perfect hymn, but a hymn doomed to be lost, for it was overshadowed by Aquinas' Lauda Sion written a hundred years later, whose language and style it interestingly prefigures. The poem has 26 stanzas; here are the first six and the last four:

  Zyma vetus expurgetur...

Cistercian rose

Finally, let us look at the so called 'Rosy Sequence' (page 17). Once ascribed to St Bernard of Clairvaux (c.1090-1153), this is now considered to be the work of an otherwise unknown English Cistercian of the late twelfth century. This sequence consists of the first seven and last two stanzas of a longer work of 42 stanzas written in accentual 'ambrosian' quatrains. Rhyme is a constant embellishment and it is used with ease and grace. This is in fact not a sequence at all, but was adopted to play the part of one when the rite of the Holy Name emerged in the fifteenth century under the influence of St Bernardino of Siena and others. The fact that it could be employed as a sequence illustrates the point that the origins of the genre as an extended jubilus at the conclusion of the alleluia had by now been forgotten.

Reformer’s folly

I claimed at the beginning of this article that modernism is so often antiquarianism in disguise, and I stand by that. How frequently in the Church's history have people been willing to destroy good and beautiful things in their striving to bring the Church up-to-date by recovering what they see as apostolic purity! Iconoclasm, Protestantism, various forms of Catholic pietism and monastic reformism, all these have attempted to restore the pristine integrity of the Christian community of the New Testament and post-apostolic eras. Few of us would question the fundamental sincerity and good intentions of many of those involved in these reforming processes, and yet such reforming zeal is fraught with danger: how does modern man grasp the fullness, the range, the richness, the subtlety, the diversity of a past age? Is there not a huge risk that, through misinterpretation or sheer ignorance, things of great value will be lost and that our recovery of the past will be distorted and unbalanced?

Jesu dulcis memoria…

So it has been, surely, with poetry and hymnody. But even worse, the most distressing thing about the liturgical changes of Pope Pius V’s Tridentine reform is not that they attempted to recover apostolic purity, but that they were far too heavily influenced by Renaissance ideas about the cultural superiority of Classical paganism! Thus, as I have indicated, too few of the authentic hymns of St Ambrose have been retained – they were too 'popular' in form for the aesthetes of Trent – and too many modern office hymns have been composed in the very best classical metres by men whose hearts contained much sound doctrine, perhaps, but little poetry. The sequence, that marvellous and innovative genre which is one of the crowning literary achievements of the Middle Ages, has all but vanished from the Missal. Why? Because the sequences were composed in metres which were unknown to Virgil and Horace. Does this line of thinking seem absurd to the modern Catholic? Certainly, but we are living with the fruits of it.

The only solution is balance, and that solution has always been there. The Vincentian Canon says it all, when it defines the Catholic Faith by setting a threefold test of catholicity: quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est: what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. A Catholicism which restricts itself to a single tradition is not Catholic at all, it is heretical by definition. Yes, perhaps we should be able to hear some of Marty Haugen's hymns in our churches from time to time, but we must also recover the sequences and sing them in their proper places, and listen to good settings of the Mass by Mozart and Haydn, and know how to chant the Creed in Latin. The poverty of the modern liturgy, especially in English-speaking countries, is devastating – but Trent is far from being the complete answer.

Return to Oriens, Winter, 2002

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