VENANTIUS FORTUNATUS
Like all languages, Latin was never a fixed, unchanging entity, among those who used it as the common parlance of everyday life. New usages were introduced, and old ones dropped. There were local dialects. There was slang. Novelties of pronunciation and grammar may have been looked down on for a while by educated persons, who tend to be conservative in such matters, and who nourish a snobbish disdain for the locutions of the great unwashed. But in the end, vox populi always wins, and academicians watch helplessly as the linguistic ground shifts under their feet. They cannot turn back the clock; but they can annotate the alterations wrought by time. In the case of Latin, they traced the development of the classical language from its primitive roots in Latium; they mapped the literary landscape of the short-lived golden age, from Caesar to Tacitus; they lamented the stylistic decay that followed; they gave account of Latin as the lingua franca of the vast Roman Empire; they recorded its equally vast spread as the lingua franca of western Christendom; they chronicled its relegation, almost everywhere, to a subject of study in school, less and less mastered as time went by; they honoured it as parent of all the Romance languages; and they noted its survival as an obscure vernacular in the Romansch-speaking cantons of Switzerland. Throughout its two-and-a-half millennia of existence, Latin had never ceased to change.
There was, however, one context in which Latin did not change at all: in the liturgies of the Roman Catholic Church. The text of the Mass and of other services was settled on, with official endorsement, in the early Middle Ages, from then on, it remained virtually fixed (with a few minor additions and deletions) until the Second Ecumenical Council, in the mid-twentieth century, substituted vernacular liturgies world-wide. This was a cultural revolution of seismic proportions. Effectively, it meant the death of Latin, except in Switzerland and in Papal encyclicals.
Romansch is a valid spoken language in its two cantons. But the use of written Latin in encyclicals is simply a clinging to tradition. It does have the merit of establishing an official text that is unambiguous and universal, not subject to the subtle differences of interpretation that would arise from the use of multitudinous vernaculars. But its use, inevitably, gives an impression of anachronism, almost of falsity, that puts the Church seemingly out of touch with the modern world, and irrelevant to the needs of living souls.
Encyclical Latin does make necessary concessions to modern reality, at least in coining words or phrases that refer to modern technology. But for the most part it uses the grammar and vocabulary of classical Latin. In that respect, the language can be described as fixed, as frozen in time, so to speak. Increasingly, though, the encyclicals are drafted by expert Latinists within the Vatican: most clergy nowadays live and work in the vernacular and have only a cursory acquaintance, if any, with Latin; they rely on translations to get the message.
Similarly, most students today rely on translations, if they enroll in courses of classical studies. But there do still survive, here and there, traditional courses, in which students learn to read classical Latin and to write in it, approaching it as just a written language, not a spoken one. Most such courses are valuable, culturally, and are only sneered at by people who regard education as having no good purpose beyond the utilitarian. However, there is one course that is quite pointless and truly bizarre: the course that requires students to demonstrate expertise in the writing of classical Latin verse. It is a skill as unnatural as that involved in training a circus lion to jump through a flaming hoop.
The results, inarguably, cannot be poetry. True poetry can only be written in the mother tongue, or in a second language known since infancy. Anything else is mere versification. There is, however, a huge contrast between versifying in a modern foreign language and versifying in classical Latin. In all the modern languages of the West, verse has a metrical tradition based on the rhythms and stresses of speech. Verse in classical Latin is utterly different: it obeys rules of prosody based on an abstract system of quantity — quantity being the length of a vowel, as arbitrarily established by its juxtaposition or non-juxtaposition to certain consonants, and having nothing to do with how the vowel was pronounced or stressed or not stressed. To compose according to those rules is like forcing a language into a strait jacket. Within such strictures, a genius like Vergil or Ovid or Horace could write real poetry; but even the cleverest Latinist of today can only create the written equivalent of a mechanical toy. It is a futile exercise.
Despite the great achievements of poets like Vergil and Ovid and Horace, it has to be conceded that classical Latin prosody is fundamentally an artificial system of versification. Where poetry is concerned, the human ear feels far more at home with a metrical system that corresponds to the rhythms and stresses of common speech. So it was probably inevitable that Latin should move in that direction. The traditional prosody lingered on for a while. But it was eventually supplanted by a more natural metre. As usually happens in such cultural makeovers, there was a period of transition. And within such a period, there are cases of writers who mine both veins, the old and the new. The pre-eminent example is Venantius Fortunatus, who wrote in the second half of the sixth century and the first decade of the seventh.
Venantius was a prolific author. He wrote prose biographies of St Hilary of Poitiers, of St Germanus of Paris, and of St Radegunde, who founded a convent near Poitiers, where he served as chaplain and was her friend. His other biography, of St Martin of Tours, was in verse; and he also wrote eleven books of occasional verse, which are distinguished by their mastery of traditional technique. But as a cleric with a strong pastoral bent, he evidently sensed that the needs of the faithful were ill served by a prosody which bore only an indirect and sophisticated relation to current speech, and would be better served by a metre which rang true to the ear. So he wrote hymns to meet that need, trochaic and iambic — the stuff of verse as we have known it ever since in the vernacular. One commentator has described him “not as the last of the Roman but as the first of the mediaeval poets”. It is a just description. Almost all the poets of the Middle Ages, both sacred and secular, followed where he had led.
Two of Venantius’ hymns won a permanent place in Roman Catholic worship: “Vexilla Regis prodeunt” is the Vespers hymn for Passion Sunday; and “Pange lingua gloriosi” is sung during the solemn afternoon liturgy of Good Friday. Both hymns were early set to beautiful Gregorian melodies. That has ensured their continuing survival in churches where the chant is still in use, albeit with the text translated into the vernacular. None of the translations does justice to the strength and beauty of Venantius’ original. But thanks to Pope Benedict XVI, it is now possible to hear that original Latin chanted in churches that choose to return to the Latin liturgy. Such churches are not thick on the ground, of course: they are about as common as the Anglican churches that choose to return to the Book of Common Prayer, in place of the ghastly Book of Alternative Services that has come into widespread but deplorable use. However, lovers of authentic hymnology do not have to try and track down a church where Venantius’ text is sung in Latin to Gregorian chant. Any good lending-library of musical recordings should contain a copy of “The Hymn of Jesus” by Gustav Holst, for double-choir and large orchestra. The body of the work is a setting, in English translation, of mystical Greek texts, preserved in Gnostic manuscripts. But the Prologue contains the Venantius hymns, first played by solo trombone and then chanted, in Latin, by a male chorus.
It is interesting to note, by the way, that Holst had been exposed to the revised English Hymnal, as edited by his friend, Ralph Vaughan Williams. It contained both of Venantius’ Passiontide hymns, in their Gregorian version; and it is undoubtedly that source he drew on for the chants he used in his Prologue. In each case, Vaughan Williams took the melody from the ancient Sarum Use, and it differs somewhat from the melody contained in the official Roman Use: the latter is marred by some unnecessary and inelegant decoration; the Sarum version is simpler, clearly more authentic, and musically superior. In its direct eloquence, it evokes the vanished world Venantius worked in, which laid foundations for the great ages of faith that succeeded it. That faith persisted, largely unchanged, for several centuries. Among its bulwarks were the abbeys and convents, which served as houses of prayer, scholarship, and good works. One such was the abbey of St Germain in Paris, founded in 542 by St Germanus, whose life Venantius wrote. For many generations, its community upheld traditions of liturgy that would have been entirely familiar to him. In a later time, when humanism loosened the grip Christianity held on the Western world, such communities lost some of their appeal, fell prey to doubt and laxity, and were actually disbanded under the French Revolution. Some of the buildings were converted to secular use. But many of the abbey churches survived, to become in due course parish churches. One of them is the well-known church of St-Germain-des-Prés, which continues, in our largely post-Christian age, to offer the few remaining faithful a glimpse of the devout world Venantius inhabited and graced with his gifts.
Meanwhile, outside its walls, in the neighbourhood of St-Germain-des-Prés, a secular life goes on, that has little to do with God or salvation: its ethos is existentialist angst; and its ohanteuse, clad in nihilistic black, confronts a desert reality with the vocal equivalent of a Gallic shrug.
Venantius Fortunatus and Juliette Gréco: they span a gulf between two worlds as seemingly at odds as can be imagined. The one, in his time, focusing intently on holy certitudes, on the promise of redemption. The other, in hers, facing with bleak resignation a present that has no future but more of the empty same. One only thing they have in common: the gift of utterance, of telling their separate creeds in song, with matchless purity. And who shall say which, in the end, is true coin?
