Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan | Page 8

and systematizer of Church music. "Veni, redemptor gentium" is above
all things stately and severe, in harmony with the austere character of
the zealous foe of the Arian heretics, the champion of monasticism. It is
the theological aspect alone of Christmas, the redemption of sinful man
by the mystery of the Incarnation and the miracle of the Virgin Birth,
that we find in St. Ambrose's terse and pregnant Latin; there is no
feeling for the human pathos and poetry of the scene at Bethlehem--
"Veni, redemptor gentium, Ostende partum virginis; Miretur omne
saeculum: Talis decet partus Deum. |32| Non ex virili semine, Sed
mystico spiramine, Verbum Dei factum caro, Fructusque ventris
floruit."[9]{2}
* * * * *
Another fine hymn often heard in English churches is of a slightly later
date. "Corde natus ex Parentis" ("Of the Father's love begotten") is a
cento from a larger hymn by the Spanish poet Prudentius (c. 348-413).
Prudentius did not write for liturgical purposes, and it was several
centuries before "Corde natus" was adopted into the cycle of Latin
hymns. Its elaborate rhetoric is very unlike the severity of "Veni,
redemptor gentium," but again the note is purely theological; the
Incarnation as a world-event is its theme. It sings the Birth of Him who
is

"Corde natus ex Parentis Ante mundi exordium, Alpha et O
cognominatus, Ipse fons et clausula Omnium quae sunt, fuerunt,
Quaeque post futura sunt Saeculorum saeculis."[10]{3}
Other early hymns are "A solis ortus cardine" ("From east to west, from
shore to shore"), by a certain Coelius Sedulius (d. c. 450), still sung by
the Roman Church at Lauds on Christmas Day, and "Jesu, redemptor
omnium" (sixth century), the office hymn at Christmas Vespers. Like
the poems of Ambrose and Prudentius, they are in classical metres,
unrhymed, and based upon quantity, not accent, and they have the same
general character, doctrinal rather than humanly tender.
In the ninth and tenth centuries arose a new form of hymnody, the
Prose or Sequence sung after the Gradual (the anthem between the
Epistle and Gospel at Mass). The earliest writer of sequences was
Notker, a monk of the abbey of St. Gall, near |33| the Lake of
Constance. Among those that are probably his work is the Christmas
"Natus ante saecula Dei filius." The most famous Nativity sequence,
however, is the "Laetabundus, exsultet fidelis chorus" of St. Bernard of
Clairvaux (d. 1153), once sung all over Europe, and especially popular
in England and France. Here are its opening verses:--
"Laetabundus, Exsultet fidelis chorus; Alleluia! Regem regum Intactae
profudit thorus; Res miranda!
Angelus consilii Natus est de Virgine, Sol de stella! Sol occasum
nesciens, Stella semper rutilans, Semper clara."[11]{4}
The "Laetabundus" is in rhymed stanzas; in this it differs from most
early proses. The writing of rhymed sequences, however, became
common through the example of the Parisian monk, Adam of St. Victor,
in the second half of the twelfth century. He adopted an entirely new
style of versification and music, derived from popular songs; and he
and his successors in |34| the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries wrote
various proses for the Christmas festival.
If we consider the Latin Christmas hymns from the fourth century to
the thirteenth, we shall find that however much they differ in form, they

have one common characteristic: they are essentially
theological--dwelling on the Incarnation and the Nativity as part of the
process of man's redemption--rather than realistic. There is little
attempt to imagine the scene in the stable at Bethlehem, little interest in
the Child as a child, little sense of the human pathos of the Nativity.
The explanation is, I think, very simple, and it lights up the whole
observance of Christmas as a Church festival in the centuries we are
considering: this poetry is the poetry of monks, or of men imbued with
the monastic spirit.
The two centuries following the institution of Christmas saw the
break-up of the Roman Empire in the west, and the incursions of
barbarians threatening the very existence of the Christian civilization
that had conquered classic paganism. It was by her army of monks that
the Church tamed and Christianized the barbarians, and both religion
and culture till the middle of the twelfth century were predominantly
monastic. "In writing of any eminently religious man of this period"
[the eleventh century], says Dean Church, "it must be taken almost as a
matter of course that he was a monk."{5} And a monastery was not the
place for human feeling about Christmas; the monk was--at any rate in
ideal--cut off from the world; not for him were the joys of parenthood
or tender feelings for a new-born child. To the monk the world was, at
least in theory, the vale of misery; birth and generation were, one may
almost say, tolerated as necessary evils among lay