ADAM of ST. VICTOR ~ SEQUENCES and HYMNS
The LITURGICAL POETRY of ADAM of ST. VICTOR
From the TEXT of M. GAUTIER
With TRANSLATIONS into ENGLISH in the ORIGINAL METRES by DIGBY S. WRANGHAM
PUBLISHED by KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & COMPANY of LONDON ~ MDCCCLXXXI
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Please note any typographical errors and e-mail them to danmitsui [at] hotmail [dot] com, with the subject line ADAM of ST. VICTOR - ERRORS.
Adam of St. Victor was, according to Dom Prosper Gueranger, the greatest poet of the Middle Ages. According to John Mason Neale, he was the greatest poet to write in Latin in any age, Middle or otherwise - greater, in his estimation, than Virgil or Ovid. In Dr. Neale's words:
All culminate in the full blase of glory which surrounds Adam of St. Victor, the greatest of all. And although Thomas of Celano in one unapproachable Sequence distanced him, and the author, whoever he were, of the Verbum Dei Deo natum once equalled him, what are we to think of the genius that could pour forth one hundred Sequences, of which fifty at least are unequalled save by the Dies Irae?
Working at the renowned Augustinian Abbey of St. Victor in France during the 12th century, Adam composed liturgical sequences and hymns as perfect in their poetics as in their religiosity. Although many were undoubtedly lost in the revolutionary depredations of monastic libraries, the 100 or so surviving sequences and hymns reveal a broad, varied and consistently excellent body of work.
Shockingly, Adam, one of the greatest poets in history, is all but forgotten. This is largely due to a decision made by liturgical reformers after the Council of Trent to remove the sequences from the Roman Catholic liturgy. Only four - the Victimae Paschali Laudes, the Veni Creator Spiritus, the Dies Irae and the Lauda Sion Salvatorum - remain in the Gradual; the Stabat Mater survived as a hymn; a few were retained in the liturgies of the religious orders. But tens of thousands of sequences, a large portion of the Roman Catholic musical tradition, were simply discarded and forgotten. To grasp the enormity of the proscribed repertory, please look over this list of extant sequences compiled by John Julian in 1892 - bearing in mind that wars, reformations and revolutions likely destroyed far more sequences than survived.
I have sometimes encountered the claim that the post-Tridentine liturgical reformers were right to proscribe the sequences, as they were rife with heretical content. I find the men who make this claim to be, almost without exception, ideologues - that is, men whose interpretation of history is not based on external reality, but on their desire to make certain parties look good and certain parties look bad. To their minds, defending the post-Tridentine liturgical reformers is the same as defending the Church. Trent was good; thus the sequences must have been bad.
The problem with this claim is that it is simply untrue. When I encounter it, I always demand the same thing: show me an example. Just one. To date, nobody has. The sequences were sung at Mass across Christendom for hundreds of years; to call them, on the whole, heretical is to impugn the orthodoxy of the clergy who composed and sang them, and the faithful who listened; it is to impugn the orthodoxy of the entire mediaeval church. That is a serious and dangerous accusation, one that ought not be made without a mountain of supporting evidence.
I do not doubt that some well-studied scholar can name a few sequences in the vast repertory that contain clumsy theological expressions. But I have read more mediaeval sequences than the average Catholic laymen, and I have never found a hint of heresy, which proves to me that enough excellent, impeccably orthodox sequences existed at the time of the Council of Trent to cover the entire liturgical year; with a little effort, they could have been edited and codified into the Missal of 1570. Adam's work is assuredly orthodox. The decision to ban it was rash and deleterious.
The post-Tridentine liturgical reformers were probably trying to avoid scandalizing Protestants. The sequences reflected the mediaeval religion in which they were created - with its magnificent hagiographies and symbolic exegesis - that was attacked with ever-increasing vehemence during the Reformation. Thus the sequences suffered the same fate as the mystery plays, and the iconographic traditions that the Catholic Church inherited from the Fathers and brought to the fullest expression of their genius in the High Middle Ages: abolished by short-sighted churchmen who never really understood their meaning or importance, and whose only concern was to deprive Protestants of cause to attack the Church. Thus so much treasure was turned to garbage, so quickly and so needlessly.
My purpose in creating this website dedicated to Adam of St. Victor is threefold. First, to share the riches of his poetry with a wider audience, for the edification of souls and the Glory of God. Second, to correct (in a very small way) the injustice done to Adam, that his work may be recognized for the literary, musical and spiritual treasure that it is. And third, to advance (in a very remote way) the restoration of the sequences to liturgical use. As a layman, I obviously have no authority to make decisions regarding the liturgy - but appreciation precedes restoration, and appreciation for the forgotten sequences is what I hope to foster. I do not yet possess the music for these sequences, but hopefully the words alone will give some measure of Adam's genius.
The content of the following web pages was first published in 1881. It includes the Latin text of all of Adam's surviving sequences as compiled by the French scholar Léon Gautier, as well as charming English translations (retaining their rhyme and meter - no easy task!) by Digby S. Wrangham. I purchased the three-volume set of Adam's complete works used from a seminary library in Melbourne, and found it sadly appropriate that its pages were uncut. In 126 years, I was the first person to read it. When I began transcribing it, no other online edition was available; the books later appeared in the Internet Archive, and I began to work (much more quickly) from the text files downloaded there, correcting the many errors of the transcription software by referencing the actual books. Still, typographical errors undoubtedly abound. Please e-mail me if you spot any.
Kind Regards,
Daniel Mitsui
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