_Ad completorium_ _Christe qui lux es et dies_ (Mozarabic) _Christe precamur adnue_ _Proprii de tempore_ _Intende qui regis_ _Illuminans altissimus_ _Dei fide qua vivimus_ _Meridie orandum es_ _Sic ter quaternis trahitur_ _Hic est dies verus Dei_ _Iam surgit hora tertia_ _Iam sexta sensim volvitur_ _Ter hora trina volvitur_ _Ad cenam agni providi_ _Aurora lucis rutilat_ _De communi martyrum_ _Aeterna Christi munera_ CHAPTER THREE The Ninth Century Revival: Hymns I. Background of Carolingian Culture To explain fully the origin of a great literary movement must always be difficult, for the subtle influences affecting its beginnings elude a scientific analysis of facts. One observes the revival of Latin hymnology between 750 and 900 A.D. with amazement. The voices of Ambrose, his contemporaries and his immediate imitators had been silenced for centuries. Venantius Fortunatus had stood forth, a solitary survival of the old Latin poetic genius or, perhaps more accurately, a solitary herald of the new medieval awakening. Then a flowering of religious poetry spread over western Europe, not to be withered by new barbarian invasions but to be the permanent possession of the Christian Church. In this period the older cycles of office hymns were revised and expanded and fresh cycles created in such numbers as to justify the new terminology of the _Later Hymnal_ or _Ninth Century Hymnal_. The sequence arose in the formal worship of the mass, affording a new inspirational to clerical poets and resulting in a body of sacred verse of increasing influence. The processional hymn and its related forms appeared in response to the new impulse toward a hymnic accompaniment to ceremonial acts. In effect, the hymn during the period under consideration, was well established in every aspect of formal worship. In the background of the age which created this literature must be sought the trends and motivation which make intelligible the voices of its interpreters. Accordingly, in the years from 750 to 900 A.D. when the Carolingian rulers, Pippin, Charlemagne, Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald were guiding the destinies of the Franks, the various influences affecting public worship must be surveyed. The most important were the liturgical reforms undertaken or sponsored by the Carolingian rulers; their promotion of ecclesiastical music and singing; their interest in the reform and expansion of the Benedictine Order; the literary activity of members of the Carolingian court circles who devoted themselves to liturgical studies or poetic expression; the part played by Celtic culture; the infiltration of Byzantine ideas and arts and the rise of Germanic genius.