One thinks of Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274) as the Aristotelian logician, the profound Augustinian theologian, the philosopher, the invincible protagonist of medieval orthodoxy, rather than as a hymn writer; yet some of our present day hymnals contain two communion hymns of profound thought and deep feeling written by him. “Pange, lingua, gloriosi” is perhaps the finer; here is one stanza of Edward Caswell’s version:
“Now, my tongue, the mystery telling Of the glorious body sing, And the blood, all price excelling Which the Gentile’s Lord and King Once on earth amongst us dwelling Shed for this world’s ransoming.”
The other, “Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem,” has been rendered by Alexander R. Thompson, as follows:
“Zion, to thy Saviour singing, To thy Prince and Shepherd bringing Sweetest hymns of love and praise, Thou wilt never reach the measure Of thy most ecstatic lays.”
We now reach the consideration of hymns and poems of great excellence in themselves but without the appeal, or practicability as hymns, possessed by the foregoing. Some of them appear in liturgical hymnals, or in more formal hymnals of non-liturgical churches, but their use is limited.
Among these is Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of the Sun,”[4] not a hymn, but a psalm of praise for all created things. For our day it has chiefly literary and antiquarian interest.
His follower and biographer, Thomas of Celano (?-1255), however, wrote a sequence or hymn that has intrigued the interest of generation after generation. Mozart’s “Requiem” uses parts of it as its text. Goethe introduces it in his “Faust.” Unnumbered translations of it have been made into all civilized languages. Theodore Parker called it the “damnation lyric.” In the original “Dies irae” there were eighteen stanzas. The version of W. J. Irons has fourteen stanzas of three lines each, a few of which follow:
“Day of Wrath! O day of mourning! See fulfilled the prophets’ warning, Heaven and earth in ashes burning!
Oh, what fear man’s bosom rendeth, When from heaven the Judge descendeth, On whose sentence all dependeth.”
Sir Walter Scott’s version is in four-line stanzas, three of which are used to make a practicable hymn. But who in our self-complacent age cares to sing any of these versions, portraying “The Last Judgment”?