Homeric Hymns

“ Moon and Sun, Selene and Helios, appear as quite distinct from Artemis and Apollo; Gæa, the Earth, is equally distinct from Demeter. The Hymn to Ares is quite un-Homeric in character, and is oddly conceived in the spirit of the Scottish poltroon, who cries to his friend, “Haud me, haud me, or I’ll fecht!” The war-god is implored to moderate the martial eagerness of the poet. The original collector here showed lack of discrimination. At no time, however, was Ares a popular God in Greece; in Homer he is a braggart and coward. ”

“ Thence, swift as thought, he speeds from earth to Olympus, to the house of Zeus, to join the gathering of the other gods: then straightway the undying gods think only of the lyre and song, and all the Muses together, voice sweetly answering voice, hymn the unending gifts the gods enjoy and the sufferings of men, all that they endure at the hands of the deathless gods, and how they live witless and helpless and cannot find healing for death or defence against old age. ”

“ To the English reader familiar with the Iliad and Odyssey the Hymns must appear disappointing, if he come to them with an expectation of discovering merits like those of the immortal epics. He will not find that they stand to the Iliad as Milton’s “Ode to the Nativity” stands to “Paradise Lost.” There is in the Hymns, in fact, no scope for the epic knowledge of human nature in every mood and aspect. We are not so p. 7much interested in the Homeric Gods as in the Homeric mortals, yet the Hymns are chiefly concerned not with men, but with Gods and their mythical adventures. ”

“ The arrangement adopted in this edition, by which the complete and fragmentary poems are restored to the order in which they would probably have appeared had the Hesiodic corpus survived intact, is unusual, but should not need apology; the true place for the Catalogues (for example) , fragmentary as they are, is certainly after the Theogony.
In preparing the text of the Homeric Hymns my chief debt — and it is a heavy one — is to the edition of Allen and Sikes (1904) and to the series of articles in the Journal of Hellenic Studies (vols. xv. sqq.) by T. W. Allen. ”

“ But many historic faiths have lost their melody, and we must go far back in the annals of ethnic life to find the songs they sung.
Worship appears to have been a primitive human instinct; and even when many gods took the place of One in the blinder faith of men it was nature worship making deities of the elements and addressing them with supplication and praise. Ancient hymns have been found on the monumental tablets of the cities of Nimrod; fragments of the Orphic and Homeric hymns are preserved in Greek anthology ”

“ The humour of the Hymn is rather rustic: cattle theft is the chief joke, cattle theft by a baby. The God, divine as he is, feels his mouth water for roast beef, a primitive conception. In fact, throughout this Hymn we are far from the solemn regard paid to Apollo, from the wistful beauty of the Hymn to Demeter, and from the gladness and melancholy of the Hymn to Aphrodite. Sportive myths are treated sportively, as in the story of Ares and Aphrodite in the Odyssey. Myths contained all conceivable elements, among others that of humour, to which the poet here abandons himself. ”

“ What is true of ornament is true of myth, rite, and belief. Greece only offers a gracious modification of the beliefs, rites, and myths of the races who now are “nearest the beginning,” however remote from that unknown beginning they may be. To understand this is to come closer to a true conception of the evolution of Greek faith and art than we can reach by any other path. Yet to insist on this is not to ignore the unmeasured advance of the Greeks in development of society and art. On that head the Hymns, like all Greek poetry, bear their own free testimony. ”

“ The mice gather to avenge the loss of their prince; a great battle ensues, and but for the interference of Jupiter the frogs would have been annihilated.
The so-called Homeric Hymns, which the ancients believed to be the work of Homer, if somewhat inferior in age to the Iliad and Odyssey, are undoubtedly older than the pieces named above. Those addressed to Apollo, Mercury, Venus, [Pg 151] and Ceres, the finest in the collection, are regular poems of some length ”

“ The practice of poets or rhapsodists contending for the prize at the great religious festivals is of considerable antiquity, though apparently post-Homeric. It is brought vividly before us in the Hymn to Apollo (see the passage mentioned above) , and in two Hymns to Aphrodite (v. and ix.) . The latter of these may evidently be taken to belong to Salamis in Cyprus and the festival of the Cyprian Aphrodite, in the same way that the Hymn to Apollo belongs to Delos and the Delian gathering. ”

“ such is the holy gift of the Muses to men. For it is through the Muses and far-shooting Apollo that there are singers and harpers upon the earth; but princes are of Zeus, and happy is he whom the Muses love: sweet flows speech from his mouth. For though a man have sorrow and grief in his newly-troubled soul and live in dread because his heart is distressed, yet, when a singer, the servant of the Muses, chants the glorious deeds of men of old and the blessed gods who inhabit Olympus, at once he forgets his heaviness and remembers not his sorrows at all; ”

“ A moderate rather than an extreme position, however, upon the identity of hymn sources in the New Testament seems more likely to be productive of a genuine appreciation of the style, subject matter and number of primitive Christian hymns.
Traces of poetic improvisation, which is so closely allied to hymnody, must be seriously considered at this point. The art of improvisation belongs to no one age or country. It happens that the Greeks had practiced it for centuries and that illustrations exist from the time of Homer. ”

“ A hymn is the rhythmic aspiration of the race. No one can look through a good hymnal—through Hymns Ancient and Modern, for instance, or the Church Hymnary—without feeling that therein is bound up the devotional life of the world. The spiritual outlook is cosmic. Our every mood of penitence, praise, and aspiration resounds in melodious and time-defying strains.
In art, the religious spirit broods over the great work of the world. In Angelo, Francesca, Veronese, Botticelli, Titian, Raphael, Tintoretto, and Correggio, the brush of the painter has set forth the adoration of the Church of God. ”

“ No student can leave the consideration of early Christian hymnology without a sense of defeat. The past cannot be forced to yield the hidden knowledge of which it is the custodian. Sources are very scanty, especially in proportion to other literary remains of early Christianity. Specifically, there is no collection of hymns in existence which might correspond to a modern hymnary. ”

“ The original passage to which Paul refers has been translated as follows:
Thee it is meet that mortals should invoke,
For we Thine offspring are and sole of all
Created things that live and move on earth
Receive from Thee the image of the One. [39]
It is evident that the Christian hymns embedded in the books of the New Testament were not constructed after a classical model of this type. The influence of Old Testament poetry was too strong, the associations of paganism repellant and, moreover, the Greek poetry, familiar to the average man of that day, quite different. ”

“ The twentieth century has produced an impressive literature centered about the mystery religions and the problem of their influence upon Christianity; but in the field of hymnology there have been discovered only the faintest of traces. These are wholly stylistic. Christian hymns which reveal the characteristics of the repetition of direct address, or of relative clauses or predicates, previously mentioned, illustrate poetic forms which are, in the final analysis, oriental rather than Greek. ”

“ Our study of English hymns has carried us through three centuries and a half—from the rough, halting lines of Coverdale to the smooth and easy rhythm of the hymn-writers of to-day.
From Sternhold and Hopkins to the modern hymn-book is a long and delightful journey. ‘I envy not in any mood’ the man who finds in devotional poetry only matter for criticism. If it be true that the heart makes the theologian, it is more true that the heart makes the hymnologist. ”

“ Where an English hymn opens up the human blessings, and seeks to bring home the great truths of religion to heart and conscience, the Greek hymnist is absorbed with the doctrine itself. The human aspect is either made secondary or entirely overlooked. The contrast between the genius of the Greek and the Latin race is strikingly evident in the hymnology of the two churches, as indeed in the whole course of their history. One is speculative, the other practical. The Eastern hymns on the divine perfections and the Incarnation differ widely from 'our self-regarding mode of praise'. ”

“ I believe that one great reason for a child's love of hymns, such as mine was, is that they are either addressed to a Person, to the Divine Person,—or they bring Him before the mind in some distinct way, instead of being written upon a subject, like a sermon. To make Him real is the only way to make our own spirits real to ourselves.
I think more gratefully now of the verses I learned from the Bible and the Hymn-Book than of almost anything that came to me in that time of beginnings. The whole Hymn-Book was not for me then, any more than the whole Bible. ”

“ An eminent Episcopal divine, (says the Christian Register,) one Trinity Sunday, at the close of his sermon, read three hymns by Unitarian authors: one to God the Father, by Samuel Longfellow, one to Jesus, by Theodore Parker, and one to the Holy Spirit, by N.L. Frothingham. “There,” he said, “you have the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
It is natural to speak of hymns as “poems,” indiscriminately, for they have the same structure. But a hymn is not necessarily a poem, while a poem that can be sung as a hymn is something more than a poem. Imagination makes poems; devotion makes hymns. ”

“ The most that can be said for them is that they are imaginative and picturesque. They are usually strong in emotional appeal. The same is true of the tunes composed for them. They are usually very light in character, with a lilt and movement that make them easily singable, but lacking in the rich harmony found in the standard hymns and chorales. No doubt there will always be a certain demand for this type of religious song, and a few of the Gospel Hymns will probably live on, but the present trend in all of the principal Christian denominations is toward a higher standard of hymnody. ”

“ Tersteegen’s conception of the high place which hymnody should occupy in Christian worship is revealed in his writings. He says: “The pious, reverential singing of hymns has something angelic about it and is accompanied by divine blessing. It quiets and subdues the troubled emotions; it drives away cares and anxieties; it strengthens, refreshes and encourages the soul; it draws the mind unconsciously from external things, lifts up the soul to joyful adoration, and thus prepares us to worship in spirit and in truth. ”

“ Our best accounts of early Christian hymnody are often subordinated to a general history of Christian hymns. This is the case with the article, entitled, Hymnes, by H. Leclercq, in the Dictionnaire D’ Archéologie Chrétienne et de Liturgie, probably the best short account in any language, containing a section on the hymnology of the first three centuries. [1] Charles Stanley Phillips drew generously from this source for the first chapter of Hymnody, Past and Present, which is written from the liturgical standpoint. [2] Independent studies are rare. ”

“ To Hugo, a Dominican monk, who was Bishop of Strasburg toward the close of the century, and had taught theology with success, is ascribed the Ave mundi domina, in which Mary is greeted as a fiddle—Ave dulcis figella!
The fourteenth century, like the seventh, furnishes us with the name of not a single hymn-writer of real eminence, and of very few who are not eminent. Yet this century and the next exceed all others in the number of the hymns, which either certainly were written in this age, or can be traced no farther back. But the quality falls short as the quantity increases. ”

“ If they praise aught but God, they are not hymns.” Even now there are hymnologists who insist upon this limited conception. No less a writer than W. Garrett Horder, in his fresh and illuminating The Hymn Lover, insists that “the cardinal test of a hymn should be that it is in some one, if not the 26 whole of its parts, addressed to God.” This shuts out the use of sacred poetry in instruction, inspiration, exhortation, and special practical applications of hymns. ”

“ Are we to suppose that the Christians in the Mediterranean world of the first three centuries, representing the average inhabitant of these lands, had no hymns except those cited above? Or others like them? If they had, we are unacquainted with them. It is fair to assume that secular poetry and music eventually exerted an influence upon hymnody. At least the beginning of such influence was apparent in the adoption of popular meters by heretical poets, as well as by the orthodox. [86] Later, Ambrose perpetuated aspects of popular verse and perhaps music as well. ”

“ If we seek after the reason of this remarkable effect, which we feel in hearing these old Christian hymns, we find it somewhat peculiar. It is anything but the novelty of the thoughts which here touches and there shakes us. Thoughts in these hymns are found but sparingly. Many are merely solemn recitations of a well-known story, or they are familiar petitions and prayers. They nearly all repeat each other. Nor is it frequently surprisingly fine and novel sentiments with which they somehow permeate us; the novel and the fine are not objects in the hymns. What, then, is it that touches us? ”