Missives

During this season at MBC, we devote the month of December to singing Christmas hymns and carols.  “O Come, O Come, Emanuel” is a favorite, whose history reaches back to Apostolic times.  It is a form of antiphonal music, which refers to any call-and-response style of singing. Antiphonal chants of early Christianity had its root in the synagogue, where early Christians borrowed the traditions of the chanting of psalms. Socrates of Constantinople wrote that antiphony was introduced into Christian worship by Ignatius of Antioch (~100 AD). Antiphonal singing was an element of Jewish liturgy believed to have entered the monasteries of Syria and Palestine in the 4^th century from Jewish communities such as the one in Antioch.

Antiphons have remained an integral part of the worship in the Byzantine and Armenian Rites. The practice did not become part of the Latin church until more than two centuries later. Ambrose and Gregory the Great are credited with 'antiphonaries', collections of works suitable for antiphon.[1]  For over 12 centuries, monasteries and convents in the Latin church, during the final week of Advent, chanted a series of verses known as the “Great O Antiphons” for each name of Christ by a different biblical title: Wisdom, Adonai, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring or Radiant Dawn, King of Nations, Emmanuel. These Antiphons are the source of today’s hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” one of the few hymns and carols adapted by Protestants.

Around 1100 AD, an unknown author transformed these antiphons into a metrical Latin poem. Shortly after 1700, another unknown editor printed this metrical version in a Psalter collection. A little less than 150 years later, the poem caught the attention of Anglican priest and hymn writer John Mason Neale (1818–1866), who translated many great early and medieval Greek and Latin hymns. Among Neale’s hymnal collections, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” appears in Medieval Hymns and Sequences (1851), with the notation: “This Advent hymn is little more than a versification of some of the Christmas antiphons commonly called the O’s.”

For instance, “O Oriens” (O Dayspring) was initially: “O Radiant Dawn, brightness of light eternal and sun of all justice; O come and illumine those who live in deep darkness and in the shadow of death.” Today, one hymnal translates that same stanza about the true source of our joy: “O Come, thou Dayspring, come and cheer/ Our spirits by thy coming here;/ Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,/ And death’s dark shadows put to flight.”

Neale’s translation of the hymn slipped into the Church of England’s official hymnal in 1861 and spread throughout Protestantism. Along the way, various translators tweaked the text. The version commonly used today combines Neale’s with alterations from the 1940 Episcopal Hymnal and stanzas on Christ as Wisdom and Desire of Nations translated by Presbyterian preacher and social activist Henry Sloane Coffin (1877–1954). (Now that’s a grave name. – Ed.)

In Neale’s day, hymnals for congregations were published in sizes small enough to carry to church in a pocket or bag. Unfortunately, most tunes were dropped to conserve space.  However, in Neale’s tune collection The Hymnal Noted (1854), he copied the melody, using it for the first stanza and refrain, from “French sources.”

For many years, no one knew quite what or who Neale’s “French sources” were.  Its origin was eventually traced to a fifteenth-century French processional funeral hymn, found in a manuscript in the National Library of Paris. An odd origin, perhaps, but his matching of tune and text are heavenly; it is difficult to imagine the words set to any other music — especially when the verses are sung in a contemplative unison and the “Rejoice!” bursts forth in sudden, amazing harmony.

What is it about this text, whether as prose or poetry, that helped it to survive so long, in so many different traditions, to witness a continuing presence? In a world, and sadly even in churches, that celebrate Christmas as an endless obligation of organized exuberance, these words remind us that true Christians are to long for a heavenly country, one where the coming Messiah wipes the tears of the sorrowing and casts the mighty from their thrones into outer darkness. It is Him, in the darkness of our world, for Whom we wait; and, in the glory of His second coming, in Whom we will arise victorious. [2]