HYMNS AND CAROLS
Those who don’t want to sing or hum now, would be rather poor people.
Christmas time is singing time, there are songs and carols everywhere, on
public places and in shops we hear well known tunes, even if we sometimes
think it too much. The message they bring may remain unheard, maybe
many who hum the tunes can’t even remember the texts they once learned,
but in the old customs and images Christian culture lives on and resurfaces
at this time of the year. This culture often can be rather trivial, ‘kitsch’ like the
most famous of all carols ‘Silent Night’, now declared a ‘UNESCO cultural
heritage’, you must not look too closely at the text, written in 1816 with
‘poetic freedom’ by the Austrian parson Joseph Moor. His version tells of a
rather mature looking boy ‘in curly hair’ and of heavenly peace, while Luke
talks of a rather noisy scene around a newborn baby, with heavenly choirs
singing praise and shepherds crowding round. But the miracle of which Luke
and Matthew tell us has inspired many beautiful poems. Our history of
literature doesn’t often look at hymns, although this kind of poetry is still
flourishing.
Hymns were a kind of by-product of the Reformation. Martin Luther wanted
congregations to sing in their own language, so that they felt part of a family
and could understand the message given to them by the Gospels. Luther
himself wrote many hymns which these days are also sung by Catholic
congregations and have been translated into other languages. Luther saw in
these hymns a kind of ‘comfort in discouragement’, or ‘refreshment in
vexation’. Calvin and other Puritan reformers saw this differently, they
banned all music and images from churches, only the ‘Word’ should count.
Similarly the Church in Scotland didn’t want music, as we can see from the
fact, that the 18 th century church of St Andrews by the Green in Glasgow
was called the ‘whistling church’, since it was the first church in town to have
an organ (it was Episcopalian) . In the Catholic Liturgy hymns had no place
either. Latin was the language of the services, and after Pope Gregory the
Great unified the liturgies during the 7 th century, the great tradition of
Gregorian Songs started to spread even into the concert halls, although
these days they only play a modest part in Catholic services. The ‘Counter
Reformation’ of the Catholic Church brought about many hymns in native
languages which became popular also in Protestant churches.
From the development of hymns you can learn how religious language
changed with the years. Latin Mass songs were both prayers for help and
songs of praise. Language and imagery were based on the Bible, especially
the Psalms and the Prophets. In a book written in 2010 the Italian
philosopher Giorgio Agamben asked why God needed to be praised at all,
since the praise by the faithful does not add to the Glory of God. Agamben
thought that by singing ‘Glory to God in the Highest’ we were following
ancient forms of acclamation to kings, which had their models in rituals of
StOM Page 18