Hymns and Carols: Of the Father’s Heart Begotten — St Mary Magdalen School of Theology

Dec 19

Dec 19 Hymns and Carols: Of the Father’s Heart Begotten

In Advent and Christmas this year, we are running our first Hymns and Carols series. Today, Mthr Judith Brown reminds us of the historical and theological context of the hymn Of the Father’s Heart Begotten during the Nicene controversies. The hymn is a celebration of the incarnation of God in Christ: true God from true God, begotten not made.

Singing together in the Christian community goes back to its origins, as the earliest disciples were immersed in the Jewish tradition of singing psalms. In Mark’s account of the Last Supper (Mark 14: 26) we read of Jesus and his friends singing a hymn before they went out to the Mount of Olives. The hymn-singing practice of the early church is suggested by the writer to the Ephesian Christians who exhorted them not to get drunk with wine, but to “be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Eph 5:18-20).

It is not just this tradition stretching back to Christ himself which makes hymn singing so significant. Singing involves the whole person, body, mind, spirit and emotions. It binds singers together in a mutually supportive and interdependent enterprise. In hymn singing this shared enterprise is the worship of God, the naming of his mighty acts, and above all praising him for his redemption of humankind through the life and death of Christ. Hymns repeated over and over become powerful carriers of theology and spirituality. They provide solace and strength in dark times; and they often carry profound personal memories. If may draw be personal on this: I chose Ye that Know the Lord is Gracious for the funerals of my father and husband, for our wedding, and for my ordinations as deacon and priest. Or the particular hymn we are considering here is precious to me not just for its theology and its wonderful melody, but because I played it as a concluding voluntary at a quiet Christmas Eucharist, which my father celebrated for the patients in a nursing home just days before he himself died. Both hymns are an indelible part of whom I am, as a human, as a Christian and as a priest.

Hymns are particularly powerful in the spiritual experience and practice of Christians in the English-speaking world where we are heirs of some of the great hymn writers such as John and Charles Wesley in the 18th century. In the later 19th, some of the very earliest Christian hymns came into English via the great translator, John Mason Neale (1818-1866), an Anglican priest who had been deeply influenced by the Oxford Movement. Among them is Of the Father’s Heart Begotten (though this is often sung now in a rather different and slightly later version). Neale—you might recall from the first essay in this series—also made the first English translation of O come, O come, Emmanuel, and many other medieval Latin hymns such a St Bernard’s Jerusalem the Golden, Peter Abelard’s O What Their Joy and Their Glory Must Be, and Thomas Aquinas’s profound Eucharistic hymn, Of the Glorious Body Telling.

Of the Father’s Heart Begotten is one of the great Christmas processional hymns. (Remarkably it is not mentioned in the collection of radio talks given by John Betjeman in the 1970s and edited by Stephen Games, Sweet Songs of Zion (2007), though it is one of those chosen by M. Reeves and J. Worsley in their Favourite Hymns. 2000 Years of Magnificat (2001). Its author—or rather, the author of the poem on which the hymn is based, Corde Natus—was Aurelius Prudentius (348-c. 413), a Roman Christian poet from what is now northern Spain. He was a lawyer, provincial governor, and courtier; he then retired to lead an ascetic life, which among other things allowed him to write poetry and hymns. Among those who influenced him was his contemporary, Ambrose of Milan (c. 340-397), who famously tried to hide when acclaimed as Bishop of Milan. A very notable theologian, one of the Latin Doctors of the Church, he also influenced Augustine and baptised him. Ambrose was himself a writer of hymns, including the Christmas hymn Veni Redemptor Gentium (Come, Thou Redeemer of the Earth)—another of Neale’s translations. Ambrose was profoundly aware of the importance of hymn singing for church congregations, and may well have been significant in introducing the form of antiphonal chanting of the psalms from side to side of the congregation, which bears his name and which is still the most common style of performing the Daily Office.

Even more important as the background to the writing of Of the Father’s Heart Begotten were the theological controversies about the nature of Christ, which led to the First Council of Nicaea in 325. The Council decided against the Arian heresy that Christ was created by the Father and therefore had a “beginning”, and instead declared authoritatively that Christ was “begotten” of the Father. In the words of the Nicene Creed, still said regularly at the Eucharist, Christ is “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father, through him all things were made.”

Almost certainly this very recent Council and its authoritative declaration of the nature and person of Christ was in his mind when Prudentius composed this glorious hymn of praise centred on the great doctrine and feast of the Incarnation celebrated at Christmas: that God came to his people in love in the person of his Son, the Christ, who is beyond time and who is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of all things (echoing both Isaiah and the Book of Revelation). Christ, the very Word of God, through whom all things were created, emptied himself to be born of a woman, taking a human body, “frail and feeble, doomed to die, that the race from dust created might not perish utterly.” “Lo! he comes, the promised Saviour; let the world his praises cry!” Then comes the magnificent verse summoning the whole created universe to join in the song of praise:

Sing, ye heights of heaven, his praises;
Angels and Archangels, sing!
Wheresoe’er ye be, ye faithful,
Let your joyous anthems ring,
Every tongue his name confessing,
Countless voices answering,
Evermore and evermore.

This hymn hands on from generation to generation profound theological truths, indeed the very heart of our faith. But great hymns are made up of more than just good theology expressed in elegant and memorable language. They also need good melodies if they are to be properly performative in public worship and if they are to embed themselves into people’s hearts and souls.

The tune to which Of the Father’s Heart Begotten is now sung is Divinum Mysterium. This originated as an early medieval plainchant melody used in the Mass, and first appeared in print in a Finnish collection of sacred and secular school songs in 1582, Piae Cantiones. It came together with the Prudentius hymn in the nineteenth century though the friendship of Neale and Thomas Helmore (1811-1890), a London choir master and priest who eventually became Master of the Choristers at the Chapel Royal, St James’s. When Neale was given a copy of the Finnish song book by the British ambassador to Sweden, he gave it to Helmore as a noted English expert on plainsong (at a time when Anglican and Roman Catholic musicians were exploring it). Together they worked to produce English versions of the songs and published collections for Christmas and then Easter in 1853 and 1854. So Divinum Mysterium, a medieval trope for the Mass, found its way into English hymn books, as a simple but lilting melody, well within the musical competence of most Christians used to singing in church. Both words and music take us back through centuries of faith, joining us in the communion ofnsaints, as we sing the praise of Him who is our Creator and Redeemer, in time and in eternity.

He is alpha: from that fountain
All that is and has been flows;
He is Omega, of all things
Yet to come the mystic Close,
Evermore and evermore.

Of the Father’s heart begotten
Ere the world from chaos rose,
He is Alpha: from that Fountain,
All that is and hath been flows;
He is Omega, of all things
Yet to come the mystic Close,
Evermore and evermore.

By his word was all created;
He commanded and ’twas done;
Earth and sky and boundless ocean,
Universe of three in one,
All that sees the moon’s soft radiance,
All that breathes beneath the sun,
Evermore and evermore.

He assumed this mortal body,
Frail and feeble, doomed to die,
That the race from dust created
Might not perish utterly,
Which the dreadful Law had sentenced
In the depths of hell to lie,
Evermore and evermore.

O how blest that wondrous birthday,
When the Maid the curse retrieved,
Brought to birth mankind’s salvation,
By the Holy Ghost conceived,
And the Babe, the world’s Redeemer,
In her loving arms received,
Evermore and evermore.

This is he, whom seer and sybil
Sang in ages long gone by;
This is he of old revealed
In the page of prophecy;
Lo! he comes, the promised Saviour;
Let the world his praises cry!
Evermore and evermore.

Hail! thou Judge of souls departed;
Hail! of all the living King!
On the Father's right hand throned,
Through his courts thy praises ring,
Till at lest for all offences
Righteous judgement thou shalt bring,
Evermore and evermore.

Now let old and young uniting
Chant to thee harmonious lays
Maid and matron hymn thy glory,
Infant lips their anthem raise,
Boys and girls together singing
With pure heart their song of praise,
Evermore and evermore.

Let the storm and summer sunshine,
Gliding stream and sounding shore,
Sea and forest, frost and zephyr,
Day and night their Lord alone;
Let creation join to laud thee
Through the ages evermore,
Evermore and evermore. Amen.