From Muslim Spain to Anglican choir stalls
My guess is that when WJ Birkbeck, known at home as Johnny, was at Eton and set up a little oratory for himself, with candles and coloured altar hangings, he did not escape comment from his contemporaries. For this was in the 1870s, when feelings on ritualism were running high.
Birkbeck went off to visit Rome with the 2nd Viscount Halifax in 1896 in an attempt to interest Pope Leo XIII in the Church of England.
But the reason I mention him here is that he became one of the editors of the New English Hymnal, which came out in 1906 and included his version of the Lent Prose with the refrain “Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us, for we have sinned against thee.”
It has since become pretty popular, I think, in both the Church of England and in English-speaking Catholic churches.
Where did this hymn for Lent come from? Sometimes one sees a note: “Mozarabic, 10th century”. The Mozarabs were the Christians living under Islamic rule in Spain from the eighth century. They worshipped not in Arabic, which was not their native tongue, but in Latin, like the rest of the Western Church. Their liturgy was sometimes called Gothic, because they were culturally Visigoths.
Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros preserved the Mozarabic rite in the early 16th century by building a chapel for its performance in Toledo cathedral, where it is still in use.
A Lent Prose is a piece of verse (not prose at all) to be chanted at this time of year. The one we’re looking at was used on the Thursday after Passion Sunday at the liturgical hour called Sext.
It is available online in the edition of the redoubtable Francisco Lorenzana, an 18th-century Archbishop of Toledo, who in 1799 organised a conclave in Venice to elect a new pope in the teeth of Napoleon. The Mozarabic liturgy has some pleasing archaisms and some of its prayers were, surprisingly enough, borrowed by Thomas Cranmer for the Book of Common Prayer. The verses of this Lent Prose were written in sapphic stanzas. The words differed a little in places from the version sung today, which can be found in the standard Liber Usualis (edited by the learned monks of Solesmes and also available online).
I am impressed by the figures employed by the hymn, which addresses Christ as Dextera Patris, lapis angularis, via salutis, janua caelestis – “O Thou chief Cornerstone, Right Hand of the Father: Way of Salvation, Gate of Life Celestial.” (A different translation by CS Phillips is used in Hymns Ancient and Modern.)
The words suit the music, itself taken from a bit of traditional plainsong included by the monks of Solesmes in a collection published in 1895.
The refrain after each stanza, sometimes sung in Latin (Attende, Domine, et miserere, quia peccavimus tibi) is not from the Mozarabic source. It was added by another monk of Solesmes, Dom Joseph Pothier, who took it from a Processional book published in Paris in 1824.
He worked in the line of Dom Prosper Guéranger, who had begun scientific study of Gregorian chant in the 1830s. It’s amazing what these monks achieved between singing their own office each day and being exiled by hostile regimes like that of France in 1901. The monks of Solesmes took refuge for some years on the Isle of Wight, and Dom Joseph spent time there too when duty didn’t take him to Rome.
Their work must have seemed obscure and inessential in those difficult times, but we benefit from it now.