Hymns

Summary: What metaphors about life, death and afterlife is found in hymns often sung in
funerals? In order to get an historical perspective on this issue I analyse and compare the
metaphors in two hymns, one popular hymn from the Middle Ages, translated from German
to Norwegian, and one popular hymn from the 1980’s, written by a Norwegian priest and
pop artist. Both hymns portray life as a journey for a poor wanderer and his companion. The
companion in the oldest hymn is with no doubt Christ, whereas the companion in the modern
hymn can be Christ or another human being, depending on the context. Death is personified
as a violent person in the oldest hymn and as something you have to taste in the modern hymn.
The hymn from the Middle Ages portray life after death as living with Christ in a castle of gold
in eternal joy in heaven, whereas the modern hymn does not mention heaven at all. The main
metaphor in the oldest hymns is the castle of gold, maybe as a result of the fact that Germans in
the Middle Ages all had a castle in the mountains before their eyes. The main metaphor in the
modern hymn is Understanding is Seeing, as the life companion cannot do anything but see
the wanderer’s trouble and share it with him. This is compared to how modern Scandinavian
priests in hospices talk to dying patients: they cannot talk about heaven directly in their own
words, but they can follow the patients’ thoughts about heaven. In this way the modern hymn
is a symptom of a typical secularized society.
Keywords: afterlife, death, funerals, hymns, metaphors

The Israelites celebrated the freedom to observe the Sabbath as a benefit of their escape from Egyptian enslavement. Exodus theology and the liberation of mid-19th c. American blacks have likewise been an oft-recurring theme in the AME church’s rich collection of hymns. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, Sundays represented a time and place when enslaved blacks might gather in a community less (directly) overseen by others. After 1863, hymns reflected social constraints that still made life hard. Social Gospel hymns appeared in the 1900s.

Christopher Buck, “Sapiential Theosis: A New Reading of Ephrem the Syrian’s Hymns on Paradise.” Journal of the Assyrian Academic Society 9.2 (1995): 80–125. 

ABSTRACT

A fresh reading of the Hymns on Paradise (HdP) discloses how Ephrem the Syrian reworked soteriological presuppositions and thought-forms current in fourth-century Syria to effect a transformation of the doctrine of theōsis (deification), freeing it from its substantive categories, to lay emphasis on divinization at the sapiential level. See, for instance, HdP XII.15, where Ephrem states that “the human person can become / the likeness of God, / endowed with immortal life [i.e. theōsis] / and wisdom [i.e. sapience] that does not err” (HdP XII.15, HyP 166). While the form of the doctrine with its anthropological considerations was kept intact, the manner of Ephrem’s affirmation of theōsis was tantamount to its sophistication, in what amounted to a reformulation of the doctrine itself. In Ephrem’s eschatological scheme—which exalts form over substance—body, soul and spirit are rarefied beyond physicality, while corporeality is maintained. Even the argument for the body’s afterlife existence—the instrumentality of the senses being required for the soul’s ability to perceive—is effectively undermined by the obviation or precluding of the senses in the soul’s immediate cognition of the delights of Paradise. This innovation lent Ephrem’s doctrine of theōsis a greater potential for realization, in which eschatological Paradise came to enjoy a more edifying immediacy among the faithful.

The Resurrection, therefore, in Ephrem’s conception of it, is not simply an “arising” in the sense of revivification. It is an “arising” in the sense of a spiritual ascent, in which the whole tripartite being of man is “raised” to new life and to new heights. In what manner may we conceive of this? In this present life, in what really amounts to a realized eschatology for Ephrem, “the mind ... is spiritual” and it is the mind in mystic transport, and, at the eschaton, something like the mind into which the resurrection body is transformed, that can attain the environs of Paradise and, by the blessing of its Creator, enter into its Garden. There is in fact the suggestion that the metaphors Ephrem employs for his portrayal of Paradise may be decoded. From HdP VI.6 and elsewhere, we may thus infer: Symbols of Paradise (Symbol = Referent): Bud = Heart; Produce = Rational Speech; Fruit = Words (Deeds, VI.11); Plants = Truth; Sweet Scents = Love; Blossoms = Chastity (VI.12); Beauty = Mind (VI.13); Flowers = Virtuous Life (VI.13); Garden = Free Will (VI.13); Earth = Human Thought (VI.13); Trees = “Victors” (VI.14); Treasure Store = Hidden Mysteries (VI.25).

Paradise and paradigm:

Images and ideas are the twin hemispheres of the religious mind. The bicameral interaction of the imaginal and the abstract focus the believer on the archetypes of belief. To give a more complete description of any religious worldview, concepts should be complemented by conceits. In Ephrem, the Church is imagistically conceived of as Paradise. Since it is an extended metaphor, its imagery is extensible. Individually and collectively, paradise imagery can represent different facets of church life and experience. The phrase from the Lord’s Prayer—“on earth, as it is in Heaven”—perfectly expresses both imagistically and ideologically the Ephrem’s artifice at work in the HdP.

Ephrem’s Paradise is at once ecclesiastical and eschatological. Its imagery expresses a paradigm of purity. This is a purity that “cures.” It cleanses the soul of the “disease” of mortality. It restores primordial immortality. Life in Paradise, in both worlds, is for the pure. The pure in heart are Christians who are sexually pure and morally stainless. On this point, perhaps Ephrem and Bardaiṣan might agree. In a quote from Theodore bar Koni, Bardaiṣan, in one of his lost songs, taught: “And lo, the natures, all of them—with created things they hastened, to purify themselves and remove what was mingled with the nature of evil” (Segal 1970, 38). Although Ephrem rejects Bardaiṣan’s creation myth, the pursuit of ethical purity in both systems is, in nonascetic terms, comparable. In fine, Syriac Christianity’s response to Late Antiquity is the quest for purity, in which chrism, baptism, and the Eucharist become the ointment, fountain, and elixir of immortality, while the imagery of Paradise ennobles the sanctified soul.

Although the Holy Shroud has always attracted attention, musical traces of this relic are rare. Willaert’s hymn O iubar, nostrae specimen salutis is, however, an exception. The piece was published in Hymnorum musica (Venice, 1542), ten years after the Shroud was miracously saved from a fire in the Sainte-Chapelle of Chambéry. A close investigation of O iubar reveals a series of anomalies, such as its place in the church calendar and in Willaert’s collection. The provenance of its text and melody is also unclear. In this article, I present hypotheses that might help us to contextualize the hymn and to explain its presence in Willaert’s Hymnorum musica.

Could it be, contra to many spiritual songs, that heaven has already been prepared? It is a kingdom and a city already constructed. Heaven has been ready for indwelling by the elect of God since before the foundation of the earth. As a matter of fact, many elect are presently there right now. The necessary preparation that Jesus was referring to cannot be divorced from His words about the way He must go and the Way we must go to get to the Father. We could not enter heaven with glorified bodies if the work of redemption was not accomplished.

There is a divine order to things and Christ is the first-fruits of that order. Jesus is referring to the purchase of our place in heaven, which did not occur until the cross-work of the Messiah/Servant was completed. This was the necessary preparation that Jesus was “going away” from His band of eleven to do. Now that the Messiah’s work of redemption is complete, we can say that in every sense, heaven is truly a prepared place for a prepared people.

How I wept at your hymns and songs, keenly moved by the sweet-sounding voices of your church!” wrote the recently converted Augustine in his Confessions. Christians from the earliest period consecrated the hours of the day and the sacred calendar, liturgical seasons and festivals of saints. This volume collects one hundred of the most important and beloved Late Antique and Medieval Latin hymns from Western Europe.

These religious voices span a geographical range that stretches from Ireland through France to Spain and Italy. They meditate on the ineffable, from Passion to Paradise, in love and trembling and praise. The authors represented here range from Ambrose in the late fourth century CE down to Bonaventure in the thirteenth. The texts cover a broad gamut in their poetic forms and meters. Although often the music has not survived, most of them would have been sung. Some of them have continued to inspire composers, such as the great thirteenth-century hymns, the Stabat mater and Dies irae.

Written down around the time of Moses 1400 BC, these songs to the gods have been around for many centuries before they were written.

For more information about the gods, consult elsewhere.
It sure helps to learn even just the basics about the primary gods of India. 

Even if it is polytheism, and it is often obsolete, and from a different age,  the lessons ingrained in the hymns are often valuable legal wisdom and sage advice.  Hindu religion in India represents the earliest stage of human evolution, and was supposed to be embraced by most all the world in some ways.  Early religion in India is sometimes corrupt, yet usually it is universal wisdom laid down in legends and philosophical teachings of spiritual wisdom.  Like the Greeks, the pantheons of immortals is a legal representation of certain epics of human history, and the legal framework that surrounds certain evens and people. 

In the Bible the concept of angel and arch-angel are basically the same idea, with great gods, lesser gods, demi-gods, and little child gods, and them also greater and lesser demons and devils.  All that rule over the wayward mortals that have not the same divine grace and honors.  All that is supposed to be based on the caste system, and who-did-what in each generation. 

The caste system actually seems to be the way to go.  It makes a case for each level of person, and yet is supposed to allow upward mobility for them that wish to study the oceans of law, crossing over to the far side of being a Brahmin priest, the highest caste in society.  (The godless and lawless don't want anybody sobering up, so they say the caste system is bad news)

The living creatures of the Bible, incidentally, appear to be the proverbial teenager.  We are supposed to figure out where we stand when we start our life, at 7, and then settle into that caste(s) appropriately, yet with striving to acquire a higher position in society for your children.

Its sort of a utopian idea, that all the good people are going places, and all the crooked people are being left behind the others, yet that was how it was in India much of the time.  Sure there were a lot of bandits, yet they were able to maintain law and order for many generations in several areas too.  (Then the English really took over after Napoleon in the early 1800s).  Even though its a utopian idea, we should be drawn to it and try it to our utmost capacity, since the doctrines are from Heaven, most of them.  If there are problems, we should work them out.  Balancing the work load on all people equitably is the main idea.

This chapter examines the role music may have played in Bishop Richard Allen’s struggle for African American liberation from slavery and empowerment as full participants in church and state affairs. It begins with a broad survey of music in American and British abolitionist efforts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including two hymns of Allen’s own composition, to provide context for Allen’s engagement with music. In comparison to such protest songs, the hymns Allen selected for his hymnbooks were not overtly political.  Nevertheless, the theology of music they represented resonated with socio-political significance, coalescing around three key themes: musical worship as (a) a means for conversion and a telos for the Christian life; (b) a bridge between heaven and earth; and (c) a reflection of and aide to the formation of community and ecclesial unity.

Author: CBE International
Publisher: CBE International

Recent hymnody sometimes focuses on subjects never acknowledged in most of the hymns of earlier centuries—often because the subject matter was foreign to the hymn writers. “God of Concrete, God of Steel,” written in 1969 by Richard G. Jones, is one example. The same thing cannot be said about songs that celebrate women; for the most part, women have merely been ignored over two millennia.