Evermore and Evermore . . .
“Evermore and evermore.” Has a familiar ring, doesn’t it? It’s an English rendering of saeculorum saeculis. The Roman poet Aurelius Prudentius wrote these words, a variation of the more common in saecula saeculorum, as the last line, the final declaration, of a hymn he composed c. 400 AD. We still sing these words, and indeed Prudentius’s hymn, today. The English title is “Of the Father’s Love Begotten.” It is almost certainly the oldest Christmas song we sing today, and possibly the first of that distinguished lineage.
Before you chastise me for rushing ahead to Christmas before the Advent Season is complete, let me assure you that “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” often joins the lists of hymns for the preparatory season in addition to being a Christmas song proper. And, to be fair, Prudentius didn’t compose it exclusively for the Christmas season. In a sense, he was writing for eternity. Evermore and evermore indeed!
Echoes of the Past
We should note that the music we associate with the song today, although ancient, has a separate history. The tune started as a plainchant in the 9th or 10th century. Over the succeeding centuries, it has undergone a number of musical embellishments (harmony, etc.) that were not part of the original tune. Eventually, somewhere between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the melody was joined to a Eucharistic hymn called Divinum Mysterium. The tune itself still caries that name today. It didn’t come together with Prudentius’s hymn until 1851. That’s pretty recent, as these things go.
Speaking of Prudentius’s hymn, it goes back further than the music. Much further. Aurelius Prudentius was born in Hispania (Roman Spain) in the middle of the 4th century. He became a successful man of the world: lawyer, provincial governor, and eventually an aide to the emperor himself in Rome. Then, around the year 392 AD, he gave it all up. Prudentius went back to Spain and withdrew from the world. He spent the rest his time in this world living an extremely austere life. The former man of the world devoted his time to writing Christian poetry and apologetic works.
A True Roman, a Thorough Christian
Like his contemporary St. Augustine of Hippo, Prudentius was a true Roman, but also thoroughly Christian. Both men fully embodied the virtues of the ancient pagan civilization, but transformed that heritage into something completely at the service of Jesus Christ. St. Augustine, of course, became and remains one of the most important figures in the development of Christine Philosophy and Theology. While Prudentius no longer has such prominence, for a long time, certainly through the Middle Ages, he enjoyed a reputation as one the great Christian poets.
Prudentius’s most influential work through most of this time was his Psychomachia, or The War of the Soul. This poem is a mini-epic allegorically representing the battle between virtues and vices in the soul of every person. Prudentius models his style in this poem on Vergil’s in his great epic, the Aeneid. The Psychomachia as a whole is not much longer than one of the twelve books in Vergil’s work, but Prudentius does incorporate the dactylic hexameter meter that Vergil himself inherited from the Greek epics of Homer. Prudentius’s allegorical treatment of the virtues and vices was copied very extensively over the next millennium.
A Hymn for Every Hour
Prudentius emulates other poets from Rome’s Golden Age in some of his other works. He employs a lyric style more reminiscent of Vergil’s good friend Horace, for instance, in the Liber Cathemerinon. The title means something along the lines of Book of Daily Prayers. It’s a collection of twelve hymns intended to be sung in the daily liturgical prayer of the Church. Like the Psychomachia, these songs have never completely gone out of use. The ninth hymn, “Hymnus Omnis Horae” in the manuscripts, is the source of “Of the Father’s Love Begotten.”
As is the case with the tune, the text has undergone some adaptation in order to become the song we know today. Hymnus Omnis Horae means “Hymn For Every Hour.” It is the only hymn in the Liber Cathemerinon that is not designated for a particular time of day or festival. Instead, Prudentius gives us the entire story of Jesus Christ in thirty-eight stanzas. He seems to intend the hymn as an answer to the Arian Heresy, which denied the full divinity and eternal existence of Christ. In his third stanza, for instance, he asserts the orthodox teaching on the Incarnation:
Now we sing His deeds and proven miracles,
The universe is witness, nor does the earth deny what it saw,
God brought forth for teaching mortals face-to-face.
Facta nos et iam probata pangimus miracula,
testis orbis est, nec ipsa terra, quod vidit, negat,
cominus Deum docendis proditum mortalibus.
The final words of the song are a ringing declaration of eternity: seculorum seculis! That is, “within ages of ages,” or as our current translation puts it, “evermore and evermore.”
The Christmas Song
The present-day Christmas song first came about in 1851 when John Mason Neale translated verses 4-9 of Prudentius’s poem, the portion dealing with the Incarnation and Nativity, into English. His music editor set Neale’s translation to the melody of Divum Mysterium. Ten years later another hymnist, Henry W. Baker, went back to Prudentius’s “Hymnus IX” and retrieved the thirty-sixth and thirty-seventh stanzas. He added these to Neale’s version, along with a Trinitarian doxology as a final stanza. You can find a Latin/English copy of the Neale/Baker version of “Corde Natus ex Parentis/Of the Father’s Love Begotten” at the bottom of this post.
You might also hear another version of the song. Roby Furley Davis published his own translation in 1906. Davis keeps the first eight stanzas of the Neale/Baker translation, and he also sets his words to the music of Divinum Mysterium. In place of Baker’s Trinitarian doxology, however, he closes with the original final stanza from Prudentius. Both versions take seculorum seculis (“evermore and evermore”), which which appear only as the final words of Prudentius’s hymn, and use them as a refrain after each stanza.
Evermore and Evermore: A Promise of Eternity
“Evermore and evermore” is a fitting refrain. It’s fitting, to begin with, because it expresses an important theme of the original, much larger, hymn: the eternal existence of Jesus Christ. It is also a reminder to Christian believers of Christ’s promise, the final words of Matthew’s Gospel: “I am with you always, to the close of the age.” (Matthew 28:20) In the Latin of the Vulgate Bible, by the way, that’s ego vobiscum sum omnibus diebus usque ad consummationem saeculi. Notice that the refrain seculorum seculis echoes Jesus’ last word, which is itself a promise of eternity.
The repetition of “evermore” in this particular song also calls to mind the role of tradition in the life of the Church. The events of the Gospels and the experiences of our forebears in the faith are not just distant events that we remember in passing. We recreate the events of Salvation in the Liturgical Calendar. Even more significantly, the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ are a present reality, not simply a memory, in the liturgy of the Mass. We are invited into the life of God, and as St. Peter reminds us God does not experience time as we do: “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” (2 Peter 3:8)
Sharing the Life
In a similar (if more mundane) way we can also share in the life of previous generations of Christians. Just look at all the different versions of “Of the Father’s Love Begotten ” available on the internet. Prudentius’s hymn is still a living part of our celebration of the faith, more than sixteen centuries after its first publication. And it’s just as fresh (albeit in modern English rather than late Roman Latin) as when the poet (or his scribe) first inked the words on parchment.
Of course, the song is not only about “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8). It is about Jesus who entered into time to save us:
He is found in human fashion,
Death and sorrow here to know,
That the race of Adam’s children
Doomed by law to endless woe,
May not henceforth die and perish
In the dreadful gulf below,
Evermore and evermore!
Corporis formam caduci,
membra morti obnoxia
Induit, ne gens periret
primoplasti ex germine,
Merserat quem lex profundo
noxialis tartaro.
Sæculorum sæculis.
Whoever Sings
In this stanza, in fact, we see the most incredible part of the reality of the incarnation. Why should the eternal, infinite God enter into time, into death, sorrow, and woe just to save wretches like us, as the old song puts it. This, perhaps, explains why Neale starts his hymn with the fourth stanza of the original. We begin with the statement that Christ is begotten in love before the world’s beginning. Love, Corde (literally “heart”) is in fact the very first word in the Latin text. Jesus Christ is then begotten in love again, in time, in Bethlehem, in a fragile little human body. The God Who is eternal, it turns out, is Eternal Love (see 1 John 4:8).
He who does not love does not know God; for God is love. (1 John 4:8)
Adoration of the Christ Child, by Lorenzo Lotto, 1523
There’s something about song that turns abstract concepts into concrete experiences. St. Augustine supposedly said, “Whoever sings prays twice.” As it happens, he may not have actually said it, but there’s still some truth in it nevertheless. Take the schlocky “Christmas” songs (most of which actually have little or nothing to do with Christmas itself) that blare through the PA systems of retail stores from Thanksgiving through December 24th. They’re the only place that we still experience musical styles that died out decades ago. More importantly, they bring back (mostly) happy memories (and feelings and smells . . . ) of Christmases we celebrated and of people we knew over our lifetimes.
. . . to be with Him Evermore and Evermore.
If even those hackneyed tunes have at least that much virtue in them, how much more so this truly joyful hymn, begotten of the heart of a man who left the allure of worldly success to give his life to Jesus. Sixty human generations or more have passed since Aurelius Prudentius first published hymn IX of his Liber Cathereminon. We still sing it today as the Christmas hymn “Of the Father’s Love Begotten.” Every time we sing it, we stand in the presence of the Alpha and Omega, who was there before time began, entered into time at the Nativity, and has invited us to stay with him after time is no more . . . to be with him evermore and evermore.
Featured Image top of page: Christ Pantocrator, by Viktor Mikhaylovich Vasnetsov, 1885-1896
Of the Father’s Love Begotten (English):
Below you can find this song two of the many performances of this song available online. The first is an English version by Diana Pierce provided by St. Peter’s Church, North Wales. The second is a beautiful Latin version, Corde Natus ex Parentis, from Corpus Christi Watershed.
Finally, under the video clips I’ve posted a downoadable PDF copy of the Neale/Baker version of “Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” and one of Prudentius’s original Hymnus Omnis Horae. Both are in Latin and English.