Advent’s hymn of the Open Gate of heaven
Tennyson was moved to write his poetic sequence In Memoriam by the early death of Arthur Hallam. John Henry Newman was impelled to investigate the liturgical life of the Catholic Church by the early death of Hurrell Froude (1803-36).
Froude, a bright young Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, had been obliged to travel to warmer climes to resist the development of tuberculosis – consumption, as it was known then.
In 1835 he returned to his parental home in Dartington, Devon, and wrote asking a friend to bring him the copy of the Roman Breviary that he had. It seems never to have been fetched, for it was still on Froude’s shelves in Oxford when he died in February 1836. Froude’s father invited John Henry Newman, a friend and Fellow of Oriel too, to choose a keepsake, and he chose the Breviary.
A Breviary contains the psalms and prayers for the liturgical hours of the day, such as Matins, Vespers and, before bedtime, Compline. Newman, an expert on the early centuries of Church writings, came to see that the daily services in the Book of Common Prayer, devised much later by Archbishop Cranmer in the 16th century, were fundamentally based on the Breviary’s office of hours.
In the 1830s Newman was keen to defend the Book of Common Prayer and to present the Church of England as a wing of the universal Catholic Church. His historical appreciation of the Church of England encouraged him to produce a series of Tracts for the Times. In 1841, Tract Ninety (purporting to show that the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England could be understood in a thoroughly Catholic sense) turned metaphorically into that popular phenomenon of the day, a train crash. It was to separate Newman and the Cofe. But, before that, came Tract Seventy-five, in which Newman explained the contents of the Breviary and translated samples from it.
I was thinking about this because, now we’re in Advent, the sung antiphon at Compline is the Alma Redemptoris Mater (“Loving Mother of the Redeemer”) attributed to an author who died a decade before the Battle of Hastings, but based on earlier prayers. In Tract Seventy-five, Newman includes his own translation of the Latin, not at that time familiar to most in Britain.
His version went:
Kindly Mother of the Redeemer, who art ever of heaven
The open gate, and the star of the sea, aid a fallen people,
Which is trying to rise again; thou who didst give birth,
While Nature marvelled how, to thy Holy Creator,
Virgin both before and after, from Gabriel’s mouth
Accepting the All Hail, be merciful towards sinners.
I was surprised by how hard Newman came down on these Marian antiphons. The Alma Redemptoris Mater and the Salve Regina
he called “quite beyond the power of any defence”. He declared: “These portions of
the Breviary carry with them their own plain condemnation, in the judgment of an English Christian” – by soliciting the prayers of a saint. He argued that they were innovations in the Breviary – in this case originating in the 11th century, “a time fertile in other false steps in religion”, as he thought then.
It seemed at odds with this condemnation that he provided translations not just literal but couched in devotional lyric language. He did not use the Breviary in public worship as an Anglican, seeing it as unlawful. But the Breviary enriched his private prayer life and that of those living in an informal community at Littlemore, Oxford, from 1842 until 1845, when he resigned his Fellowship of Oriel and moved into a new world, via Birmingham.