Читать книгу Sing With the Understanding - George Reginald Balleine - Страница 9

Table of Contents

A.M.; E.H.; A.M.R.; S.P.; Meth.; Presb.; Cong.; Cong.P.; Bp.; R.C.; Irish; Can.; Am.

Few hymns have had a stranger origin than these. About 1140 a monk in the Abbey of Cluny named Bernard (not of course his famous contemporary, St. Bernard of Clairvaux) wrote an immense poem of 2,991 lines, which he called On Scorn of the World (De Contemptu Mundi). It was a bitter satire in which he scourged with great gusto all the corruptions of his age. Here, for example, is his picture of a Bishop returning from the chase: “His butler pours out Falernian wine. He reclines on luxurious cushions. Cut glass gleams and golden plate. Venison is brought; a fat fowl follows. More wine flows. At last he goes to bed. His servant turns back the silken quilt. This ball of flesh snores.” “This is an evil-smelling age,” wrote Bernard, “I call it not filthy, for it has become the very incarnation of filth. A race that has cast off all restraint is galloping headlong to Hell.”

Church and State are alike rotten to the core. “Rome, thou art a bottomless whirlpool. The more thou receivest, the wider dost thou open thy jaws crying, ‘More! more!’ Gold is thy God, not Jesus.” The Bishops are worse than the people. “Those who are highest in position are often the foulest in sin. Any blackguard can become a Bishop. Men who ought to be hanged buy their mitres for gold.” His fellow-monks and the parochial clergy are just as fiercely castigated. But it is when he comes to speak of women that he really lets himself go: “Woman is a stench. Woman is a viper. Woman is Satan’s masterpiece, a wild beast, a seductive rottenness, vicious, perfidious, besmirching.” Raby says in his Christian Latin Poetry: “He attacks vice with a savage outspokenness which Juvenal never attempted and with a minuteness of description which knows neither reticence nor restraint.” The Dictionary of Hymnology remarks: “The character of the vices which he lashes makes it impossible to expect and undesirable to obtain a literal translation of the whole.” Even Professor Jackson of New York, who has recently published a scholarly edition of the poem, has been forced to give a list of the lines which decency compelled him to omit.

Two-thirds of the book are taken up with this revolting picture of depravity; but from time to time he turns aside to discuss the Future Life. His gloating over the tortures of Hell is sheer Sadism: “Black and penetrating is the scorching flame, and no water anywhere. The fires of earth are a cooling shade compared with those quenchless flames. Eyes, lips, breasts, legs, all feed the 45 blaze, yet never are they consumed. Sinners are nailed head downwards on crosses. Serpents sting them. Dragons breathe fire on them. Vultures gnaw eternally at their livers.” And so on, and so on, for six closely printed pages. Of this gruesome side of the poem our hymn-books retain no hint, except the lines:

The world is very evil.

The times are waxing late.

But from this dunghill of a book four jewels have been rescued. Against this murky background here and there Bernard painted little cameos of Heaven. These Neale translated into English verse, and parts of his version have found a place in almost every hymnal, generally divided into several separate hymns. Bernard made no attempt to be original. He kept closely to his New Testament, and simply reproduced hopes that he found there. He confessed that on the subject of Heaven we must be largely agnostic:

I know not, oh, I know not

What joys await us there.

And in so saying he was only re-echoing what Apostles had said before him. “It doth not yet appear what we shall be,” wrote St. John; and St. Paul agreed, “Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.” The unborn puppy in its mother’s womb cannot guess what life will be like when it frisks about in the sunshine. The grub wriggling in slime at the bottom of a pool has no idea what joys 46 await it when it becomes a dragonfly. And no human being can really picture what Heaven will be like.

Nevertheless St. John set down in the Book of Revelation a few things that he felt must be true; and Bernard reproduced these. The question is sometimes asked, Which is most desirable, town or country life? St. John voted for the town. Some Mystics have cried, “Leave me alone with the Alone.” But St. John, the greatest of Mystics, said, “I long for a city. I want neighbours. Solitude implies self-centredness. Fellowship is Heaven.” So Bernard too pictured Heaven as a city, a new Jerusalem. The earthly Jerusalem, once hailed by Prophets and Psalmists as a City of God, had proved a ghastly failure; but he hoped to find a new and finer Jerusalem in the Future Life, Jerusalem the Golden.

It would be a City Beautiful. The Jews often expressed beauty in terms of precious stones. The Book of Tobit had foretold that the earthly Jerusalem would be “builded with sapphires and emeralds and precious stones; its walls and battlements shall be pure gold. Its streets shall be paved with beryl and carbuncle.” No one was expected to take this literally. It was Oriental poetry, not a town-planner’s prospectus. St. John used the same imagery when he pictured his Heavenly Jerusalem, and Bernard followed in his steps:

With jaspers glow thy bulwarks;

Thy streets with emeralds blaze;

The sardius and the topaz

Unite in thee their rays.

All of which, when boiled down into sober prose, 47 merely amounts to this, that every imaginable form of beauty will be united in Heaven.

He remembered too a text about “an innumerable company of Angels and the spirits of just men made perfect”; so he looked forward to a joyous, even an uproarious, Family Reunion of all the scattered branches of God’s family:

They stand, those halls of Sion,

All jubilant with song,

And bright with many an Angel,

And all the Martyr throng;

and he pictured Heaven as ringing with

The shout of them that triumph,

The song of them that feast.

But to New Testament Christians the most thrilling thought about Life after Death was that they would be with Christ. To be “absent from the body” is “to be present with the Lord.” So he added:

And He Whom now we trust in

Shall then be seen and known,

And they that know and see Him

Shall have Him for their own.

This thought recurs in almost every hymn about the Future. In one Watts even declared:

And Heaven without Thy Presence there

Would be a tiresome place.

But those who believe in a Future Life must prepare for it. “Let us labour to enter into that rest.”

Arise, arise, good Christian,

Let right to wrong succeed.

Let penitential sorrow

To heavenly gladness lead.

Our future will be largely coloured by how we live now. Death will not make us Angels. Death is only a short tunnel from one phase of life to another; and no train ever entered a tunnel coal-trucks and came out Pullmans.

Strive, man, to win that glory.

Toil, man, to gain that light.

Send hope before to grasp it,

Till hope be lost in sight.

The verse, which in most books closes each section, “O sweet and blessed country,” was not part of the original poem. It was added with Neale’s full approval by the editors of Ancient and Modern. The tunes used for the different portions all date from the nineteenth century.