Hymns of All Nations

Sing with the Understanding

G.R. Balleine (1954)

 

CHAPTER 1:

HYMNS OF ALL NATIONS

 

Hail, gladdening Light

 

AMOST every Religion seems to have worshipped its Gods with song. The clay tablets of Babylon three thousand years old are full of hymns to Tammuz and Istar and Merodach, The papyri of Egypt contain hundreds of hymns to Ra and Amen and Osiris. One written about 1200 B.C. begins:

 

Homage to Thee Who art Ra,

Lord of Heaven and Earth,

Creator of all in the Heights

And all who dwell in the Deeps!

Hail, King of the World!

Hail, Lord of Eternity!

Ruler Everlasting!

 

India was chanting its Vedic Hymns about 800 B.C. ; and in Greece the Homeric Hymn to Demeter is assigned to the same century. St. Paul in his sermon on Mars' Hill quoted another Greek pagan hymn, written by Cleanthes:

Thee it is meet that mortals should invoke,

For we Thine offspring are.

 

Later Horace was writing in Rome, "Sing to Diana, gentle maids," ending with a kindly prayer that Plague and Famine might be banished from Italy and—sent to Britain! Even Confucianism, which has never regarded its Founder as a God, intones hymns in his praise:

 

Confucius! Confucius!

Great indeed art Thou, Confucius!

Before Thee was none like Thee!

After Thee has been none like Thee!

Confucius! Confucius!

Great indeed art Thou, Confucius!

 

Among the Jews, after their return from exile, Psalm-singing became a highly developed art:

 

Praise Him in the sound of the trumpet!

Praise Him upon the lute and harp I

 

Three large choirs of professional singers, called after early musicians, the Sons of Asaph, the Sons of Heman, and the Sons of Korah, were on duty daily in the Temple, and we still have in our present Psalter the hymn-book that they used.

 

So the Christian Church inherited from its start a great tradition of Psalm-singing. At the close of the Last Supper we read that our Lord and His Apostles, "when they had sung a hymn, went out into the Mount of Olives." When St. Paul and Silas were in prison at Philippi with their legs in the stocks, "at midnight they sang praises unto God, and the prisoners heard them." The Epistle to the Ephesians urges its readers: "Be filled with the Spirit, speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord." And St. James wrote; "Is any merry? Let him sing Psalms."

 

Even the heathen noticed that singing was a conspicuous feature in Christian worship. When Pliny wrote his report to the Emperor Trajan about A.D. 105; on the doings of the Christians in Bithynia, he said: "They assemble together early in the morning and sing a song to Christ as God."

 

The oldest hymn-book of the Church was the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Psalms into Greek; but, taking these as a model, before long Christians began to produce fresh Psalms for themselves. Not however without opposition. Eusebius tells how Paul of Samosata, who was Bishop of Antioch from 260 to 270, suppressed "the Psalms that were being sung there in honour of our Lord Jesus Christ" on the ground that "they were novelties and the composition of men."

 

We shall find this point of view, that nothing should be sung in public worship but the Psalms of the Old Testament, cropping up with surprising frequency in the history of hymn-singing. Nevertheless the new Christian Psalms steadily won their way. The oldest collection yet discovered is the so-called Odes of Solomon, which cannot be later than A.D, 200, and may be considerably earlier. Whether this was originally compiled as a Christian hymn-book, or whether it is a Jewish hymn-book drastically re-edited for use at Christian meetings, is still a disputed point. But its forty-two prose-poems in the style of the Psalms are, says Rendel Harris, their editor, "redolent of antiquity, but radiant with spiritual light."

 

All the oldest Christian hymns followed this pattern. One well-known example is the Greater Doxology, "Glory be to God on High. . . . We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we worship Thee, we glorify Thee, we give thanks to Thee for Thy great glory," For seventeen hundred years this has been the daily Morning Hymn of the Eastern Church. When it reached the West and was translated into Latin, it became known as the Gloria in Excelsis, and was promoted to a place in the Roman Mass, and it still remains part of the Anglican Communion Service. The Te Deum, "We praise Thee, 0 God. We acknowledge Thee to be the Lord," is another hymn of the same type, evidently composed by someone whose whole conception of hymn-writing was drawn from the Psalter.

 

The only hymn of this type to be found in modern hymn-books is the Greek Phôs Hilaron (Gladdening Light), the Sunset Canticle that is still sung daily throughout the Eastern Church. It is of unknown authorship and date, but as early as 370 St. Basil appealed to it as "an ancient document which the people recite," and based a doctrinal argument on it, almost as though it were one of the authoritative Creeds of the Church. By his day it had become associated with the ceremony of the Lighting of the Lamps. Some years before, the Apostolic Constitutions had ordered the Faithful to assemble together every evening to sing Psalms and offer prayers.

 

So the Greeks had turned the humdrum process of lighting the church lamps for Vespers, the Service held just before sunset, into an impressive and popular rite. Amid chanting of many Antiphons, "The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom then shall I fear?" "Thou, Lord, shalt light my lamp. Lord, make my darkness light, ' ' one Deacon brought in the little saucer-

shaped lamps; another Deacon lighted them; the Priest chanted the One Hundred and Fourth Psalm, "Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening"; and the people sang together this very simple little hymn: "Now, as we come to the sun's hour of rest and the lights of evening round us shine, we turn to Christ, the gladsome Light Who proceeds from the glory of the Father. Worthy art Thou at all times to be hymned with undefiled tongues, Son of God, Giver of life. Therefore the whole world glorifies Thee."

 

Most hymn-books choose John Keble's translation, ' ' Hail, gladdening Light," set to Stainer's tune Sebaste, but English Hymnal gives a version by Robert Bridges, the late Poet Laureate.

 

Other well-known hymns in our books come from Greek sources, for example, "The day is past and over," "Christian, dost thou see them?" "Come, ye faithful, raise the strain," and "The day of resurrection," but these are the work of a later generation of Greek hymnists, and remained entirely unknown in England, until Neale published in 1862 his Hymns of the Eastern Church. So the study of these can be postponed till we come to the nineteenth century.