Hymnological Studies
_by_
MATTHEW N. LUNDQUIST
A.M., Mus. Doc.
_WARTBURG PUBLISHING HOUSE_
_Chicago_
PREFACE
This humble little work is the outcome of personal interest and some
lecture work in the field of Hymnology. I trust that this little volume
will be of some value, especially to fellow Lutheran organists and choir
directors. For further study the student is referred to John Julian’s
great “Dictionary of Hymnology” and Benson’s “The English Hymn,” as well
as works by Duffield, Breed, Ninde, and others. Every organist and choir
director ought to read “The Hymn as Literature” by Jeremiah Bascom
Reeves.
MATTHEW N. LUNDQUIST
January, 1926
Wartburg College
Clinton, Iowa
CONTENTS
I. THE HYMNODY OF THE LUTHERAN CHURCH 1
Religious Character (Biblical and Congregational) 1
Poetical Quality (Lyrical Beauty) 8
II. THE LUTHERAN HYMN BOOK 15
Arrangements of Hymns in the Hymnal 15
Dogmatic Method of Arrangement 15
Liturgical Method of Arrangement 15
GENERAL SURVEY OF THE HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH HYMNS 19
III. EARLY CHRISTIAN HYMNODY 19
Early Greek Hymns 20
Early Latin Hymns 22
IV. MEDIAEVAL CHRISTIAN HYMNODY 27
Mediaeval Latin Hymns 28
Mediaeval German Hymns 32
Mediaeval Scandinavian Hymnody 34
The Sequences 35
St. Gall 36
V. LUTHERAN HYMNOLOGY 39
Martin Luther 41
German Lutheran Hymnody 44
Scandinavian Lutheran Hymnody 50
American Lutheran Hymnody 54
Conclusion 61
ADDENDA
Reformed Church Song 69
A List of Hymnists 71
SECTION I
THE HYMNODY OF THE LUTHERAN CHURCH
The hymnody of the Lutheran Church is the body of sacred songs sung by
the Church. These songs may be studied in their twofold aspect; as to
their religious and as to their poetical character; they are _church
hymns_ and also _sacred poems_.
(The Lutheran church hymns have been called psalms. According to old
linguistic usage, psalm is the same thing as sacred or religious song,
not song in general. In secular Greek the word psalm does not mean song,
but it refers more particularly to the ability or technique in playing
upon stringed instruments—the Greek word “psalmos” means to play a
stringed instrument. By psalm we mean a sacred song or lyric, as of the
Old Testament Book of Psalms; a hymn.)
THE RELIGIOUS CHARACTER
With respect to the religious character of the Lutheran church hymns, it
must be quite clear that if these hymns have grown up out of the soil of
the Church, if they are expressions of the spirit of the Church, then
they ought to reflect quite faithfully the nature and peculiarities of
the Church. The Church, the Communion of Saints, where the Gospel is
preached in its purity and where the Sacraments are administered
according to the teachings of the Gospel, may be considered partly with
regard to the unique _religious life-content_, which is communicated to
the faithful through the Word and the Sacraments and which not only
unites them to Christ, the Head of the Church, but also unites them with
one another; partly with regard to her nature as a _congregation_, a
communion or community in external form with characteristic expressions
and order of life. The same twofold point of view arises in our study of
the church hymns. The religious character of the church hymn may,
therefore, be determined partly from the point of view of religious
life, having its source and standard in Holy Writ, and partly from the
point of view of the church communion or the congregation, of whose
common life the church hymn is an expression and reflection, and whose
common purpose it seeks to promote. The religious character of the
church hymn thus centers in the fact that both as to content and form it
must be Biblical and congregational.
1. The Biblical character of the church hymn:
First of all, the church hymn must be thoroughly Biblical. It cannot
move only in the realm of general religious truth, not only sing the
praise of certain abstract ideas about God’s being, about the
immortality of the soul, about virtue, etc. Not even such subjects as
God’s attributes, the providence of God, Creation, “man’s physical and
spiritual attributes, reason, will, conscience, nature and purpose,”
have any place in the hymns of the Church, when these subjects are
treated in an abstract way, isolated from God’s revelation through Jesus
Christ and detached from human life. The subject of the church hymn,
provided it possesses sound religious character, is, briefly stated,
_Christ for us and Christ in us_; on the one hand the objective saving
grace through Jesus Christ, and on the other hand the subjective
appropriation of faith, with love and submission and devotion to God.
The sphere of the church hymn will not thereby be restricted to an
incessant reiteration of the name of Jesus, his wounds and blood, his
love, etc. The church hymn sings the praise of God’s entire means of
salvation: God’s thoughts and works of love through Christ for humanity;
His sure and saving institutions of grace upon earth; the work of the
Holy Spirit in the hearts of men unto repentance, faith and
sanctification; the benefits, struggles and victories of His kingdom of
grace; the glory of the heavenly bridegroom; death and judgment; the
world to come and eternal life. All these subjects become the object of
the hymns of the Church. The faithful express through the church hymn
their ardent desire for these things; they meditate upon these things,
they rejoice in their possession, they describe them and they extol
them; they adore, thank, and laud their Saviour, and they give
themselves up to God. Since the content of positive Christian faith, or
God’s revelation of salvation through Jesus Christ, is the principal
subject of the church hymn, it is clear that the church hymn must be in
perfect harmony with the Word of God, the Bible, the very source of the
revelation of salvation. But this does not mean that the Church should
use exclusively the hymns of the Bible, as, for example, the Psalms of
David. It is perfectly well to use other hymns, provided they are
permeated by the Holy Spirit and constitute a vital reproduction of
Biblical truths, grown up out of the soul-experiences of the Church in
perfect harmony with Holy Writ. Then the liturgical principles of truth
and freedom will come into proper use in congregational hymn singing.
With this character of religious truth in the objective sense, or the
conformity of the church hymn to Holy Writ, goes also the matter of
religious truth in the subjective or psychological sense. This means
that the religious experience, expressed in the church hymn, is not
merely a product of human imagination, more or less foreign to those who
gather their spiritual life and their soul experiences from the fountain
of Holy Writ under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but it is far more
an experience gained from the reality of true spiritual life, and
thoroughly accordant therewith, something to which, therefore, every
true Christian can easily agree.
Finally, the Biblical character of the true church hymn reveals itself
also in the style of language, which follows very closely Biblical
expression, idiom and form. The language of the church hymn harmonizes
very well with that type of religious language which has attained a deep
appreciation among Christians; the language of the popular old religious
books of the Church; Biblical language. This old hymnic language
possesses very decidedly a character of immortality, depending upon the
character of the content, whose linguistic garb it is, and with which it
has become so closely united. As the content is rooted in eternity and
fundamentally consists of God’s incorruptible thoughts and works, so the
hymnic language, which is the vessel for these realities of the eternal
world, in a way also attains a character of eternity. The history of the
church hymns also shows very clearly that whenever this peculiar
character of hymnic language has been disregarded, whenever there have
been vigorous attempts at modernization of the good old church hymns,
when new and modern hymns have been sought, to satisfy some modern
aesthetic or aristocratic need, then the true church hymn has suffered
very greatly and lost much of its original soundness and genuineness.
Indeed, the hymn writer, like any other poet, is influenced more or less
by his age; his hymns may show more or less the influence of the
peculiar turn of mind, the stage of development and the demands of the
age in which he lives; personal ability as a poet and personal life
experiences may be distinctly reflected in his hymns. But it should also
be true, that if the poet is a sincere student and lover of the Bible
and delights in singing its praises, then his hymns ought to possess
Biblical tone and content, since there is a very close union between
content and form in every human religious product. A church hymn
possessing Biblical tone and language ought to be understood and
appreciated by the present age. Biblical language is antique but it will
never be antiquated; it is old but eternally new and youthful. In all
ages and in all churches the thoroughly Biblical church hymn holds the
prize for youthful health and beauty.
2. The congregational character of the church hymn:
In the second place, the church hymn should be suitable for use in the
congregation, it should possess a congregational character. This quality
of the church hymn implies, of course, that it must not contain anything
which is at variance with the confession or the doctrines of the Church.
The Lutheran Church may use hymns that have been written by non-Lutheran
hymn writers, provided these hymns contain nothing offensive to sound
Lutheran doctrine. So Lutheran hymnals may contain hymns taken from the
Reformed Churches, and Reformed church hymnals may contain many Lutheran
hymns.
The congregational element in the Lutheran church hymn further means
that it must be free from all unsound and unjustifiable subjectivity.
The church hymn is the work of a poet who is vitally united with the
religious organism—he is a member of the Church—and from this
consciousness of perfect communion his hymns emerge. Writes Dr. Martin
Luther: “Church hymns are so called, because the Church has accepted
them and uses them as if produced by the Church and as her own hymns. We
do not say: thus sings Ambrose, Gregory the Great, Prudentius, Sedulius;
but we say: thus sings the Christian Church. It is the songs of the
Church that Ambrose, Prudentius and others sing with the Church and the
Church with them; when they are dead and gone, the Church remains, and
continues to sing their songs.” Personal poetic gifts and temporal
conditions and circumstances influence the church hymns. The true church
hymn does not lack individuality; but it is free from individualism. The
experiences which the church hymn expresses, the soul states which it
describes, should not be of an extreme, a singular or an abnormal
character, but they should be normal and common to the Church. Not that
the church hymn must restrict itself to what every member, in whatsoever
condition of spiritual life, would readily subscribe to. Such a
requirement would be unreasonable, because the participants in divine
worship have reached different stages of spiritual development; in fact,
this would restrict the subject matter of the church hymn to only
certain general facts and abstract ideas. But it must be required of
every church hymn that it express only such religious experiences as are
_in the main_ common to the whole communion of the faithful, only such
soul states and spiritual stages of development as are _essentially_
experienced by every true Christian.
If the requirement of community in the church hymnody permits dealing
with special situations and experiences in the realm of spiritual life,
then it ought to follow that this character of community will not be
violated if the content of the church hymn bears upon certain external
conditions and circumstances in which the entire congregation never can
find itself at any one time. Since there are liturgical acts which
directly affect only certain individuals in the congregation, not the
congregation as a whole, there may be church hymns for certain
individuals and special occasions. There are church hymns for marriage,
confirmation, ordination, etc. It is also perfectly well to have church
hymns for the aged, for the sick, for the dying, for prisoners, in time
of war, etc. Since the church members should be kindly and lovingly
interested in each other, the congregation may well give expression to
certain sympathetic feelings in the church hymns. But such conditions
and circumstances in the life of an individual as are quite exceptional
and of special interest only to him, not to the congregation as such,
are unsuitable as subjects for church hymns, since they may quite easily
form a disturbing digression from that character of community which
should distinguish the church hymns as such. Hymns “for a father or a
mother at New Year, for a poor young man, for a young lady, for a blind
man,” and the like, really have no place in the hymnal.
The congregational character of the church hymn also finds expression in
the language and style of presentation. This must be plain and clear, so
that the hymn may be easily understood and appreciated by all who
possess a reasonable religious training, young or old. The mode of
expression is original, naive, true-hearted and graphic. The true church
hymn avoids startling phrases, prettiness, and mere rhetoric.
THE POETICAL QUALITY
The other point of view from which the church hymn may be considered is
the poetical; the church hymn is a _song_ thus a product of poetical
art. Before attempting to analyze the poetical quality of the church
hymn, it may be well to consider what kinds of poetry are used in the
hymnody of the Church.
The three main kinds of poetry are the epic, the drama, and the lyric.
Epic and drama are not extensively used in the Lutheran Church. Works
exist which show that the graphic and plastic style of epic poetry has
been employed in the Christian Church when stories from sacred history
were paraphrased in metrical form. The Gospel lessons have often been
read or chanted in metrical form, as hymns. This poetical work may be
classified as didactic hymnody with an epic touch. The epic, strictly
speaking, requires an imaginative adornment of the historical material
to be treated, and this cannot very well be applied to Biblical history
without a certain amount of injury. Besides, it would be difficult to
excel the beauty of the Biblical presentation, with its pre-eminent epic
vividness and simplicity. The mediaeval Church employed the dramatic
form in the mysteries and miracles, religious plays, which were used
especially at great festival occasions to present to the laity in a
dramatic and effective way the historical facts pertaining to the
festival. More closely related to the Christian cultus was the Passion
play, performed by the clergy in the churches during Lent. The Passion
play, and a number of dramatic-liturgical ceremonies, especially at
Christmas and Easter, were quite freely employed in the early Lutheran
Church. But this dramatic activity did not remain permanently in the
Lutheran Church. Perhaps the Church felt that the dramatic reproduction
of Biblical history did not harmonize very well with that element of
personal truth which must exist throughout the cultus and which may
suffer injury as the dramatic illusion becomes greater.
While epic and dramatic poetry have little or no place in the
Evangelical Lutheran cultus, and so can not very well be employed in the
hymnody of the Church, the third kind of poetry, the lyric, is very
extensively used. A noteworthy characteristic of lyrical poetry is that
the object of the song is most closely united with the singing subject;
they are as one; the object lives within the subject and is the real
content of the subject. If the cultus is a meeting between God and the
Church, in which God imparts his gifts to the congregation and the
latter faithfully receives, enjoys, and acknowledges the divine gifts of
grace; a meeting, in other words, in which the divine objects join the
worshipping subject, in which the latter is permeated by the former,
then it seems only very natural that religious lyrical poetry should
here find its proper use; when the worshipping congregation gives
expression to its life of faith and love through sacred song, through
the hymns of the Church, these hymns are lyrical poetry.
Although the fusion of the object and the subject is a characteristic
feature of all religious lyrics, it is to be noted that these two
elements, the objective and the subjective, are never present in equal
degree in the church hymns, but that the one or the other element
predominates, wherefore it becomes necessary to classify the church
hymns into the _relatively objective_ hymns and the _relatively
subjective_ hymns. To the former class belong the hymn proper and the
didactic or doctrinal hymns; the latter class, the lyrical hymns in a
narrower sense, consists of what may be called hymns of experience and
sacrifice. The hymn proper sings the praises of God’s majesty and
highness, God’s glorious works and attributes, not as something wholly
outside of the subject, yet something which is looked up to with
worshipful joy and admiration. “A mighty Fortress is our God” is a good
example of this class of church hymns. The didactic or doctrinal hymn
presents for quiet and instructive contemplation either certain facts
from sacred history or certain parts of the Lutheran doctrine. Examples
of this kind are “Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g’mein” and “Es ist
das Heil uns kommen her.” In these relatively objective hymns, true
church hymns, the objective element is more or less permeated by the
life, emotion, and sympathy of the subject. In the hymn proper the
subject sings its own joy and its jubilation in the great God and His
glorious works. The didactic or doctrinal hymn is not merely rhymed
history or rhymed dogmatics, but in it the divine events and truths are
celebrated as treasures of faith, sources of spiritual life; by means of
it the congregation embraces, acknowledges and utters its confident Yea
and Amen to the divine revelation of salvation. The relatively
subjective church hymns, the lyrical church hymns in a restricted sense,
may be characterized as hymns of experience, because they describe and
express religious life in its inner experience, emotions, conditions and
manifestations, or because they include meditations which a Christian
engages in because of his inner and outer condition; to this class of
church hymns belong also the so-called hymns of sacrifice, which are
more directly an expression of individual devotion to Jesus Christ.
Since the chiefly subjective hymns, because of their nature, are subject
to the danger of losing themselves in the individual and the incidental,
it is very important that they be supported and permeated by a sound
religious philosophy. God’s revelation of salvation, especially Jesus
Christ, who in His person and work is at once the vital cause, the life,
and the living standard of all the various phenomena and forms in the
world of divine grace and truth, must form the background which
everywhere gleams forth in the hymnody of the Church, the sun that gives
light and warmth to the content, the perfect law which restricts the
description and keeps the subjectivity within proper bounds.
Since the church hymn is lyrical poetry, it should be beautiful. But the
beauty of the church hymn consists in what? It must be emphasized that
this beauty is not something applied to the church hymn from without,
but this beauty grows up naturally and spontaneously out of the subject
which is to be celebrated in song. This beauty is nothing else than the
faithful reflection, the telling concrete revelation of its inner
harmony, nobility and sublimity. The communion of the congregation with
God through Jesus Christ, which seeks concrete expression in the church
hymn, is in itself the highest, the most noble, and the most harmonious
of all the realities of human life. When this divine communion seeks
expression in the church hymn, then the poetical art to be employed must
be such as will adequately express and convey the emotions and
experiences peculiar to this communion. The inner harmony of the matter
should reveal itself in the poetical form of presentation as outer
harmony, as beauty. The entire tone of the church hymn will then become,
by an inner necessity, graceful, elevated, sublime. It is to be noted
that this hymnic beauty is modified according to the specific character
of the hymn. In the church hymn proper, like “Ein’ feste Burg,” this
hymnic beauty is more elevated, majestic, sublime. In the didactic or
doctrinal hymn, it is characterized by the purity, positiveness, and
sonorousness of the faithful testimony of truth. In the lyrical church
hymn in a restricted sense, it is more colored by subjective qualities
such as fervor, sincerity, and affection. The lyrical beauty of the
church hymn is free from ostentation; it is distinguished by simplicity
and naturalness. This simplicity of expression is a poetical as well as
a congregational requirement. Also, the entire presentation of the
subject must bear the impress of spontaneity, of freshness. The church
hymn should not present abstract ideas, reflective thought, conceptions,
and definitions; but, instead, it should present to the eyes of the
heart living pictures, concrete realities; just as the Biblical
presentation, which the church hymn must follow, and Christianity
itself, which the church hymn must reflect, pre-eminently possess this
character of concrete and vital reality.
The beauty of the church hymn implies further that its line of thought
and disposition be clear and well arranged, that each stanza express a
complete thought, and that there be not too many stanzas—the church hymn
must not be too long. The phraseology, syntax and metrical form must be
free from such defects as mar and desecrate the sublime content of the
hymn or make it offensive, unclear, or even incomprehensible to the
congregation. This does not mean to commend that vandalism whereby
modernists have sought to remove from the old church hymns every
obsolete word and construction as well as everything which seemed to be
at variance with the rules of secular poetry—a process whereby many
excellent old church hymns have been deprived of their original power
and simplicity. Most certainly, revision and purification of the outer
form of the old church hymns is sometimes necessary, in order to make
them popularly intelligible and usable. But such revision and
purification should be undertaken only by Christians of poetic mind and
sound authority.