The Singing Church: The Hymns It Wrote and SangLorenz, Edmund S. (Edmund Simon)
Religion
The Singing Church: The Hymns It Wrote and Sang
Lorenz, Edmund S. (Edmund Simon)
Hymns -- History and criticism
Cardinal Newman held that John Keble was the originator of the Oxford
Movement[1] by his great Assize sermon on “The Great Apostasy”
preached at Oxford, and by his emphasis of the church’s calendar in
his _The Christian Year_; but he can hardly be associated with the
school of hymn writers that grew out of it, for some of them
repudiated the literary hymn entirely.
John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was the leader of the movement back to
the ideals of the pre-Reformation church. He wrote some poetry,
notably “The Dream of Gerontius,” and a few hymns. Of these, “Lead,
kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom” is the most widely known,
because of its attractive music, as he himself testifies. “Praise to
the Holiest in the height” is really a more serviceable hymn for
actual church services.
His disciples, Edward Caswall (1814-1878) and John Mason Neale
(1818-1866), opened new veins of hymnic wealth in their translations
from the Latin and the Greek, with which they greatly enriched the
treasury of sacred song. In the enthusiasm evoked by their success,
the suggestion was seriously made that all the post-Reformation
hymnody be set aside to give way to the medieval and even earlier
hymns!
Caswall devoted himself to the Latin medieval hymns and sequences and
made some surpassing translations, or, if you please,
transformations—e.g., “Jesus, the very thought of Thee,” “The sun is
sinking fast,” “My God, I love Thee, not because,” and “When morning
gilds the skies” from the German. He was a Church of England man, but
in 1847 he entered the Roman Catholic Church, following his leader,
Dr. Newman.
Dr. Neale did not leave the English Church, but was quite prominent in
High-Church circles. He was intensely interested in the liturgics of
his church, which led to his studies of the early Greek church and its
breviaries. He brought to his translations of Greek hymns a literary
skill, a spiritual insight, and a fervor that made him the primate
among those who found their inspiration in these ancient books of
service and breathed into these ancient lyrics the breath of modern
life. Among his most notable successes are: “Art thou weary, art thou
languid?” “Christian, dost thou see them?” “The day is past and over,”
“Fierce was the wild billow,” “’Tis the day of resurrection,” “Brief
life is here our portion,” “Jerusalem the golden.” It must be
remembered that these are not literal translations, but English hymns
made up of ideas suggested by phrases in the originals. Only a poet
imbued with devout feelings, responding to the vague suggestions of
the often obscure originals, could have produced them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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