155 - of roosters and repetitio - ambrose's aeterne rerum conditor

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Of Roosters and Repetitio: Ambrose’s Aeterne rerum conditor

Carl P.E. SpringerDepartment of English and Classical Studies Program Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Edwardsville, IL 62026-1431 USA

[email protected]

Abstract

This article examines Ambrose’s use of repetitio in his morning hymn Aeterne rerum conditor. Thanks in part to a long tradition of criticism that has focused primarily on the unadorned ‘simplicity’ of the Ambrosian hymn, relatively little attention has been paid to the poet’s artful use of rhetorical figures. Aeterne rerum conditor features a rooster whose repetitive cry is replicated in the third and fourth stanzas of the hymn in a striking figure that, upon a close reading, is found to be integrally connected with the poem’s meaning and message.

Keywords

Repetitio – hymns – Ambrose – rooster – poetics – Latin

…In memoriam Klaus Thraede

(6.3.1930-25.1.2013)

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VigiliaeChristianae

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vigiliae christianae 68 (2014) 155-177

I

Going back at least as far as the influential German philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), and continuing well into the 20th century,1 criticism of the Ambrosian hymn has tended to emphasize its straightfor-ward expression of theological subject matter and its relative lack of formal refinement.2 In the nineteenth century, the English Archbishop, Richard Trench, for example, declared emphatically: ‘The great objects of faith in their simplest expression are felt by him [Ambrose] so sufficient to stir up all the deepest feelings of the heart, that any attempt to dress them up, to array them in moving language, were merely superfluous’.3 Early in the twentieth century, Otto Bardenhewer praised the hymns for their ‘smooth and simple expression’ and their ‘naked lack of decoration’.4 More recently, Angelus Häussling has

1 Here, for example, is Herder on the importance of simplicity and truth for the medieval Latin hymn in general: ‘Selten sind es überraschend feine und neue Empfindungen, mit denen sie uns etwa durchströmen; aufs Neue und Feine ist in den Hymnen gar nicht gerechnet. Was ist’s denn, was uns rührt? Einfalt und Wahrheit. Hier tönet die Sprache eines allgemeinen Bekenntnisses, eines Herzens und Glaubens’. See C. Springer, ‘Ambrose’s Veni redemptor gentium: the Aesthetics of Antiphony’, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 34 (1991) 86.

2 The scholarship on Ambrose’s hymns is voluminous. In addition to studies cited elsewhere in this article, I list here a few others that I have found generally helpful: J. den Boeft, ‘Delight and Imagination: Ambrose’s Hymns’, Vigiliae Christianae 62 (2008) 425-40; G. Dreves, Aurelius Ambrosius, der Vater des Kirchengesanges: Eine hymnologische Studie (Freiburg 1893); J. Fontaine, ‘L’apport de la tradition poétique romaine a la formation de l’hymnodie latine chrétienne’, Revue des études latines 52 (1974) 318-55; M. Jullien, ‘Les sources de la tradition anci-enne des quatorze hymnes attribuées à Saint Ambroise’, Revue d’histoire des textes 39 (1989) 57-189; G. St. Laurent, ‘St. Ambrose’s Contribution to Latin Liturgical Hymnography’, Doctoral Dissertation, Catholic University of America, 1968; M. Simonetti, ‘Studi sull’innologia popo-lare cristiana dei primi secoli’, Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Memorie della classe di scienze morali, storiche, e filologiche, Ser. 8, Vol. 4.6 (1952) 341-485; A. Steier, ‘Untersuchungen über die Echtheit der Hymnen des Ambrosius’, Jahrbücher für klassische Philologie, Supplbd. 28 (1903) 549-662; J. Szövérffy, Die Annalen der lateinischen Hymnendichtung. Ein Handbuch (Berlin 1964-5) 48-68; K. and M. Zelzer, ‘Gli inni di Sant’Ambrogio’, Salesianum 62 (2000) 41-57; A. Zerfass, Mysterium mirabile: Poesie, Theologie und Liturgie in den Hymnen des Ambrosius von Mailand zu den Christusfesten des Kirchenjahres (Tübingen 2008).

3 R. Trench, Sacred Latin Poetry (London 31874) 88. 4 O. Bardenhewer, Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, Vol. 3 (Freiburg 1912) 546: ‘Der

Ausdruck ist schlicht und einfach, ja von einer gewissen nackten Schmucklosigkeit’.

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described the diction of the hymns as ‘knapp und klar’ and the construction of the sentences as ‘fast mathematisch einfach’.5

It certainly is important to observe that the hymns of the bishop of Milan were not written for the private delectation of educated religious literati or for the solo performance of a trained virtuoso, but rather for large groups of people gathered together in an ecclesiastical setting. They are neither so ambi-tious as the longer hymns of Hilary6 and Augustine’s Psalmus contra partem Donati,7 nor as verbally dense and complex as the later hymnic masterpieces of Prudentius’ Cathemerinon collection.8 In all of these respects, they are indeed relatively simple.

At the same time, however, it would be a mistake to deny that the hymns lack complexity of design or poetical adornment altogether, and more recently the critical pendulum has begun to swing in the opposite direction. Some stu-dents of the hymns in the last decades have pointed out that Ambrose’s hymns, simple though they may be perceived to be at some levels, are actually quite sophisticated literary compositions. Prominent among these studies is the magisterial treatment of the hymns in the volume edited by Jacques Fontaine in 1992, which pays special attention to questions such as ‘architecture’, rhe-torical figures and tropes, and metrical considerations.9

5 A. Häussling, ‘Heute die Hymnen von gestern singen? Das Fallbeispiel des Laudeshymnus Aeterne rerum conditor des Ambrosius’, in Christliche Identität aus der Liturgie; Theologische und Historische Studien zum Gottesdienst der Kirche, ed. M. Klöckener, B. Kranemann, M. Merz (Münster 1997) 91.

6 On Hilary’s hymns, see among others, W. Myers, The Hymns of Saint Hilary of Poitiers in the Codex Aretinus (Philadelphia 1928) and M. Pellegrino, ‘La poesia di sant’Ilario di Poitiers’, Vigiliae Christianae 1 (1947) 201-26.

7 See C. Springer, ‘The Prosopopoeia of the Church as Mother in Augustine’s Psalmus contra Partem Donati’, Augustinian Studies 18 (1987) 52-65, and more recently D. Nodes, ‘The Organization of the Psalmus contra Partem Donati’, Vigiliae Christianae 63 (2009), 390-408.

8 See W. Evenepoel, Zakelijke en literaire onderzoekingen betreffende het Liber Cathemerinon van Aurelius Prudentius (Brussels 1979).

9 J. Fontaine, ed., Ambroise de Milane, Hymnes, Texte établi, traduit et annoté sous la direction de J. Fontaine (Paris 1992) 70-1. It is noteworthy that the word ‘simplicité’ is still frequently used in the volume to describe the language of the hymns and their composition. The word also appears prominently in the volume’s ‘blurb’ on the back cover where it is appropriately quali-fied with the adjective ‘apparente’. On the oft repeated Aristotelian notion that it is the high-est art to conceal art, see P. D’Angelo, Ars est celare artem. Da Aristotele a Duchamp (Macerata 2005). For a consideration of the complex structure of one Ambrosian hymn, see C. Springer, ‘The Concinnity of Ambrose’s Illuminans Altissimus’, in Panchaia. Festschrift für Professor Klaus Thraede (Münster 1995) 228-237.

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Repetitio, or, as it was also called by the ancient Greek grammarians and rhetoricians, anaphora or epanaphora, is a figure that involves the repetition of a word (the same word must occur at least twice, according to Bede) ‘at the beginning of successive units’.10 A treatise which enjoyed considerable prestige from Jerome’s time forward (owing in some measure, no doubt, to its mistaken attribution to Cicero), the Rhetorica ad Herennium, describes the figure’s effect and appropriate use as follows: haec exornatio cum multum venustatis habet tum gravitatis et acrimoniae plurimum; quare videtur esse adhibenda ad ornandam et exaugendam orationem (Rhet. ad Her. 4.13.19).11 Here, it should be noted, is a well known ancient description of the figure of repetitio which describes it not only as ‘charming’, but also as characterized by ‘seriousness’ and ‘pungency’.12 This stylistic device is used for the purpose of adorning discourse in a decorative fashion, according to the Rhetorica ad Herennium, but it also serves to enhance its meaning and amplify the impact of the poem on the listener (or reader).

The figure of repetitio has a heightened effect when it is employed in verse. Jeffrey Wills observes that ‘the importance of repetition in oratory arises in part from the ability of figures to define units and give structure to the con-tinuing flow of words. But in verse, these patterns of repetition must then be integrated with metrical structures, themselves based on recurrent pat-terns’. Roman Jakobson makes a similar point as he draws a critical distinction between prose and verse (the former derived from proversa ‘speech turned straight’; the latter from versus ‘return’) and concludes: ‘The returns of verse establish a parallelism of units and the boundaries between those units are the major structures of poetry. Accordingly, the feature of returning sound, which is inherent in verse finds a special opportunity in word-repetition, for rep-etition also creates boundaries which define acoustic space’.13 Of course, we

10 Anafora, id est, relatio, cum eadem dictio bis saepiusve per principia versuum repetitur, ut: Dominus inluminatio mea et salus mea, quem timebo? Dominus defensor vitae meae (De schematibus et tropis II.1.6; CCSL 123A,146).

11 H. Caplan, ed., [Cicero] Ad C. Herennium. De ratione dicendi (Cambridge, MA 1977) trans-lates the passage as follows: ‘This figure has not only much charm, but also impressive-ness and vigour in highest degree; I therefore believe that it ought to be used for both the embellishment and the amplification of style’ (p. 277).

12 Caplan (see note 11, above) adduces an illustrative example from a speech (see Cicero, De Oratore 2.55.226), delivered by L. Licinius Crassus against M. Junius Brutus which would seem to convey a sense of acrimonia: ‘You dare behold the light of day? You dare look these people in the face? You dare present yourself in the forum, within the City, in the plain view of the citizens? You do not tremble in fear of that corpse, you do not tremble in fear of the very images?’ (pp. 276-7).

13 J. Wills, Repetition in Latin Poetry (Oxford 1996) 389.



might add, it is not only poetry but nature itself and human life that are highly repetitive. The cycles of day and night, the seasons or the routine nature of most human beings’ daily behavior, the unvarying larger pattern of birth, life, and death—all are extremely predictable. And, of even greater significance for the study of this hymn, there is also the profound significance of repetition in the traditional liturgy of the church which has its fixed festival days (e.g., Easter and Christmas), its well established rhythms of weekly, daily, and even hourly worship, as well as those important rituals that occur only once in a lifetime: e.g., baptisms, marriages, funerals.

Repetitio is a well known rhetorical figure employed in ancient Latin prose and verse. Wills observes that the phenomenon of what he calls ‘line-initial anaphora’, while ‘not usual, is also not uncommon—more than 2000 exam-ples can be found in the Latin poets up to Juvenal’.14 Cicero has an anaphoric sequence in one of his philosophical treatises in which the word si is repeated 23 times.15 So, it should come as no great surprise that this figure would appear fairly frequently in the Latin hymns of Ambrose. Over a dozen examples can be found in the fourteen hymns that most scholars today agree should be attrib-uted to Ambrose.16 One of the most obvious of these is a four-fold repetitio in the third stanza of Ambrose’s Deus creator omnium:

Te cordis ima concinant,Te vox canora concrepetTe diligat castus amor,Te mens adoret sobria.

[You, let the depth of our heart magnify,You, let our tuneful voice celebrate,You, let our chaste love cherish,You, let our clear-headed mind adore.]17

14 Wills, Repetition(see note 13, above) 397. 15 Cicero, Part. 112; see Wills, Repetition (see note 13, above), p. 353.16 There is little controversy about Ambrose’s authorship of this hymn. Augustine credits it

to him explicitly in his Retract. 1.21: In quo dixi quodam loco de apostolo Petro, quod in illo tamquam in petra fundata sit ecclesia, qui sensus etiam cantatur ore multorum in versibus beatissimi Ambrosii, ubi de gallo gallinacio ait: hoc ipsa petra ecclesiae / canente culpam diluit (CCSL 57,62).

17 Here, as elsewhere in this article, the translations from Latin are my own, unless indi-cated otherwise. I follow the texts of the Ambrosian hymns, with minor variations, as they appear in Fontaine’s volume.

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The repeated second person personal pronoun in Deus creator omnium (always in the accusative case) marks the beginning of each of these four lines in a most striking way, underscoring emphatically the object of the hymn, the deity to whom the singers’ hearts, voices, love, and minds are directing their song, and that deity’s personal nature. It seems unlikely that such an extended and concentrated example of repetitio is merely the result of poetic accident. There is a similar phenomenon in one of the most famous of all Latin songs of praise, the Te Deum, which was traditionally attributed, incorrectly, to Ambrose (and Augustine), where the second person personal pronoun (in the accusative, dative, and nominative cases) appears in first position in 14 of the first 20 lines.18

Not all of the occurrences of repetitio in the hymns of Ambrose appear to be so deliberately constructed as the one in Deus creator omnium, and to study each of them in detail would unduly extend the length of this study, so the pages that follow will concentrate on what is surely one of the most arrest-ing examples of Ambrose’s use of repetitio in any of his hymns, the repetition of the word hoc at the beginning of four successive distichs in the third and fourth stanzas of Aeterne rerum conditor.

II

In the first half of Ambrose’s celebrated morning hymn we find an extensive description of the rooster whose crowing heralds the coming of dawn:19

18 For a review of the scholarship devoted to the hymn, including the vexed question of authorship, see C. Springer, ‘Te Deum’ in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, Vol. 33 (2001) 23-28.

19 This particular hymn has attracted quite a lot of attention over the years. See, e.g., D. Allen, ‘Vaughan’s “Cock-Crowing” and the Tradition’, English Literary History 21 (1952), 94-106; J. den Boeft, ‘Aeterne rerum conditor: Ambrose’s Poem about “Time” ’, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Rome: Studies in Ancient Cultural Interaction in Honour of A. Hilhorst, ed. F. Martínez and G. Luttikhuizen (Leiden 2003) 27-40; J. Charlet, ‘Richesse spirituelle d’une hymne d’Ambroise: Aeterne rerum conditor’, Le Maison de Dieu 173 (1988) 61-9; G. Dreves, ‘Des h. Ambrosius Lied vom Hahnenschrei’, Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 51 (1896) 86-97; W. Fauth, ‘Der Morgenhymnus Aeterne rerum conditor des Ambrosius und Prudentius cath. 1 (Ad galli cantum). Eine synkritische Betrachtung mit dem Blick auf vergleichbare Passagen der frühchristlichen Hymnodie’, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 27/8 (1984/5) 97-115; A. Franz, Tageslauf und Heilsgeschichte. Untersuchungen zum literarischen Text und liturgi-schen Kontext der Tagzeitenhymnen des Ambrosius von Mailand (St. Ottilien 1994) 147-273; A. Häussling, ‘Et ora solvamus tibi . . .? Einfluss der Tagzeitenliturgie in der Textgeschichte des Ambrosius-Hymnus Aeterne rerum conditor’, in Christliche Identität aus der Liturgie;



Aeterne rerum conditor, Noctem diemque qui regisEt temporum das temporaUt alleves fastidium. (4)

Praeco diei iam sonat,Noctis profundae pervigil,Nocturna lux viantibus,A nocte noctem segregans. (8)

Hoc excitatus luciferSolvit polum caligine,Hoc omnis erronum chorusVias nocendi deserit. (12)

Hoc nauta vires colligit,Pontique mitescunt freta;Hoc ipse petra ecclesiaeCanente culpam diluit. (16)

[O eternal founder of the world,You who govern night and dayAnd establish the times of the seasonsTo relieve our fatigue, (4)

The herald of the dawn now sounds,After watching through the deep night,A nocturnal light for wanderers,Dividing one part of night from another. (8)

Theologische und Historische Studien zum Gottesdienst der Kirche, ed. M. Klöckener, B. Kranemann, M. Merz (Münster 1997) 110-3; H. Henry, ‘The Hymn Aeterne rerum condi-tor’, American Ecclesiastical Review 15 (1896) 349-73; A. Löhr, Abend und Morgen ein Tag. Die Hymnen der Herrentage und Wochentage im Stundengebet (Regensburg 1955) 341-70; K. Smolak, ‘Ein Morgenhymnus. Ambrosius, Aeterne rerum conditor ’ in Christentum und römischen Welt. Auswahl aus der christlichen Literatur (München 1984) 134-6; K. Thraede, ‘Und alsbald krähte der Hahn—Der Morgenhymnus des Ambrosius von Mailand’, in Hauptwerke der Literatur: Vortragsreihe der Universität Regensburg 17 (1990) 35-47; G. Van der Leeuw, ‘Gallicinium. De Haan in de oudste hymnen der westersche Kerk’ in Mededeelingen der Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen. Afdeling Letterkunde 4.19 (Amsterdam 1941), 833-52.

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At this song, awakened, the morning starReleases the sky from gloom;At this song, every band of prowlersAbandons the ways of violence; (12)

At this song, the sailor gathers strength,And the swelling waves of the sea subside;At this song, the church’s rock himselfWashed away his guilt.] (16)

The repetition of the demonstrative pronoun in the ablative, hoc, at the begin-ning of lines 9, 11, 13, and 15, strongly suggests the crowing of the rooster, if only by virtue of its repeated ‘action’, as Fontaine suggests: ‘L’anaphore de hoc, affirmant en tête de chaque distique l’action du coq, souligne l’autonomie de chacun et leur parallélisme quasi psalmique’.20 Roosters typically utter the same sound several times in their matutinal address to the barnyard. The ver-bal figure, as it used here, then, replicates a common natural phenomenon: the repetitive character of the rooster’s distinctive call. One crow is not enough for most roosters as they go about their morning duties of waking their diverse constituencies, and Ambrose’s rooster needs at least four crows before he can arouse and alert all of the parties listed in the distichs that follow each of the four hoc’s that introduce them.

Not only, moreover, does the repetitio itself suggest the repetitiveness of the cock’s cry, as Fontaine points out, but there is also a phonological dimension to the figure; the very sound of the repeated pronoun in question, hoc, conclud-ing as it does with a palatal voiceless stop, bears a close resemblance to the sound that roosters make when they crow. It is, of course, true that not every rooster always sounds the same or makes exactly the sound that other roosters do when they crow, or that every culture and language represents that sound in the same way. Still, it should be noted that in Latin the crowing of roosters

20 Fontaine, Ambroise (see note 9, above) 158. Henry, ‘Aeterne rerum conditor’ (see note 19, above) 366, notices the figure but does not elaborate in detail: ‘The Hoc repeated four times, and in the most prominent place in the verse, insists strongly on the text of the poem. Far from being an inelegancy, it is in reality a pleasant rhetorical device which, in addition to clearness, gives strength and knits together in consecutive order the several achievements of the native bellman of the night’. The present participle canente is explic-itly mentioned only in the last of the four distichs, but should also be understood in the first three instances as an adjectival descriptor of hoc.



is regularly represented with the hard ‘c’ or ‘k’ sound (cucurire).21 This is true of other languages, too, as for instance, German (‘kikerie’), French (‘cocorico’), and Serbian (‘kukurijekati’).22 The crowing of an Anglo-Saxon rooster is also characterized as beginning with a hard ‘c’ sound: ‘cock-a-doodle-do’.23

The rooster’s virtuoso performance in the third and fourth stanzas of the hymn is anticipated in the first two stanzas; the stage is set, so to speak, with considerable care. The hymn begins (lines 1-4) with an address to God the cre-ator, who has arranged night and day from the very beginning in such a way that time is divided into stages, providing some hours from each day for sleep. The next stanza describes the function of one of the creator’s creations, the praeco diei, who watches through the night until it is time to waken the sleeping world

21 See A. Reifferscheid, C. Suetoni Tranquilli praeter Caesarum Libros Reliquiae (Leipzig 1860) 251 and Carmen de Philomela, line 25, number 76, in Anthologia Latina (Leipzig 1906), ed. A. Riese, Part 1, fasc. 2, 246-50.

22 See C. Finch, ‘Suetonius’ Catalogue of Animal Sounds in Codex Vat. Lat. 6018’, American Journal of Philology 90 (1969) 459-63, and D. Benediktson, ‘Polemius Silvius’ Voces varie animancium and Related Catalogues of Animal Sounds’, Mnemosyne 53 (2000) 71-9. J. Schmidt, Handbuch der lateinischen und griechischen Synonymik (Leipzig 1889) has a sec-tion on ‘Stimmen der Vögel, Lurche und Kerfe’, 162-6.

23 Lest one argue that Ambrose’s choice of pronoun here is determined by the constraints of the poetic form he has chosen to use, it should be pointed out that hoc is also the word which the bishop of Milan employs in his commentary on the six days of creation, Exameron 5.24.88, a prose passage which parallels the hymn closely, where his choice of pronoun could not have been influenced by any sort of poetological consideration: Est etiam galli cantus suavis in noctibus—non solum suavis, sed etiam utilis, qui quasi bonus cohabitator et dormitantem excitat et sollicitum admonet et viantem solatur processum noctis canora significatione protestans. hoc canente latro suas relinquit insidias, hoc ipse lucifer excitatus oritur caelumque inluminat, hoc canente maestitiam trepidus nauta depo-nit omnisque crebro vespertinis flatibus excitata tempestas et procella mitescit, hoc devotus adfectus exsilit ad precandum, legendi quoque munus instaurat, hoc postremo canente ipse ecclesiae petra culpam suam diluit, quam priusquam gallus cantaret negando contraxerat (CSEL 32.1,201). My translation follows: ‘The song of the rooster also is sweet at night—not only sweet but also useful, which awakens the sleepy as though he were a good roommate and warns the busy one and comforts the traveler by testifying to the progress of the night with its meaningful song. When this one sings, the brigand leaves off his attacks; when this one sings, Lucifer itself, aroused, rises, and illuminates the sky; when this one sings, the nervous sailor casts off his gloom and every storm caused so frequently by the eve-ning winds and every breeze is softened; when this one sings, the devout one is moved to jump out of bed for prayer and performs the duty of reading; when this one sings, finally, the church’s rock himself washed away his guilt which he had incurred by his denial before the cock crowed’. On the Exameron, see R. Henke, Basilius und Ambrosius über das Sechstagewerk. Eine vergleichende Studie (Basel 2000.)

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to the new day with his cry.24 The rooster’s sound, as described metaphori-cally in the second stanza, is a ‘nocturnal light’. The poet employs a startling oxymoron: the crowing itself is an oral/aural phenomenon and has nothing to do with luminescence, but its effect is actually quite similar to that of a light that suddenly penetrates darkness;25 the rooster’s sound (sonat) communi-cates that morning is near, just as decisively and clearly as a watchman’s light-ing of a lantern. In this stanza we find, incidentally, another figure of speech, polyptoton, defined by the Rhetorica ad Herennium as a variety of paronomasia: tertium genus est quod versatur in casuum commutatione aut unius aut plurium nominum.26 In fact, polyptoton also involves repetition, in this case, variations on the initial syllable of the Latin noun nox. Unlike the neatly spaced and pre-dictable occurrences of hoc that appear in the stanzas that follow, however, the words that make up the polyptoton are scattered throughout the stanza and, as the figure requires, they occur in different cases: noctis, nocturna, nocte, and noctem.27 By contrast with the random occurrences of variations of nox in the second stanza, the repetition of the unvarying hoc in the next two stanzas, lines 9-16, occurs with clock-like precision, with each cry of the cock, as it were, defining (and waking) a distinct quarter or aspect of the cosmos; Franz uses the apt German word ‘Mikroeinheit’ to describe these miniature worlds, while Fontaine calls them‘medallions’.28

24 The antonomasia (see Quintilian 8.6.29) is quite effective here; that the ‘herald of the day’ is actually the gallus is not made explicitly clear until fourteen verses later, after we have had a chance to hear what the herald sounds like. (For this insight I am indebted to Jan den Boeft whom I should also like to thank for his thoughtful critique of this paper in general.) On the rooster’s unique, God-given, ability to determine the right time of the night to declare the coming of day, see Job 38:36: Quis dedit gallo intelligentiam?

25 On the oxymoron as a ‘characteristic figure of Ambrosian hymnody’ with numerous examples, see G. Nauroy, Ambroise de Milan. Écriture et esthétique d’une exégèse pastorale (Bern 2003), 570.

26 ‘The third kind is that which uses an alternation of cases, either of one or more nouns’ (Rhet. ad Her. 4.22.31).

27 I owe this insight to Danuta Shanzer whom I should like to thank, along with other mem-bers of the audience who listened and responded to this paper at the ‘Second Illinois Symposium on Late Antiquity’ held at the University of Illinois in 2006.

28 This may not be the only passage where Ambrose uses repetitio in connection with an animal sound. Consider, for example, the first words of the second stanza of the hymn

Agnes beatae virginis: Matura martyrio fuit, Matura martyrio fuit, Matura nondum nuptiis. Nutabat in viris fides, Cedebat effesus senex.



For the stanzas which follow, the anaphora performs a crucial function in helping the singer or reader to construe their meaning. As Fontaine observes, the figure underscores ‘the autonomy and parallelism’ of each of the four phrases that hoc so emphatically introduces. Each of these distichs is distinctly unique, but each of them is also not altogether unconnected with the others. Without the figure of repetitio, the question of the relatedness and distinctive-ness of the four passages would not be so immediately or urgently raised.

The first hoc is directed to an important part of the natural world, specifi-cally the heavens, where the morning star, Lucifer, begins, at this sound, to release the sky from the clouds of darkness.29 Ambrose begins his hymn with a large and fundamental natural domain, the first order of elements brought into existence by the eternal creator of things: the heavens and ‘the lights in the firmament of the heaven’ put there by divine fiat to divide ‘the day from the night . . . for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years’ (Gen. 1:14).

By contrast, the focus of the second distich beginning with hoc is shifted from nature in general and the dark night sky in particular to the oikoumene, the world inhabited by human beings, where bands of prowlers (notorious then as now for preferring the cover of darkness to the bright light of day) are

The repeated first words of the first two lines are balanced by the first words of the second two lines, nutabat and cedebat, whose last syllables are the same, as Fontaine, Ambroise (see note 9, above) 385, has observed: ‘isosyllabic and assonant, they correspond to the anaphoric matura which is also an initial trisyllable’. What has not been noticed until now, however, is the possible onomatopoeic flavor of the initial syllable of matura and the final syllable of nutabat and cedebat. Agnes, of course, is a Latinization of the Greek word for ‘holy’ or ‘pure’, but it also evokes strongly the Latin word agnus, used to describe the sacrificial lamb of God, as others have well observed, and it is striking to note how well this semantic connotation corresponds with the imagery of sacrifice which runs through this particular hymn. The anaphoric ma’s of the first two lines of stanza two, echoed by the two ba’s of the last syllables of the first words of the second two stanzas, suggest the bleating of the lamb. Balare is the verb which describes the sound which sheep make in Latin (Charisius, Instit. Gram. 4 [Keil 1, 274]) and the sound baa is the vox ovis, accord-ing to Sedulius Scotus (Carm. 2.41.116). While, it seems, not directly associated in Latin with the sound made by sheep or lambs, ma is very close phonetically to ba (one is a bilabial nasal and the other a bilabial stop), and it was one of the sounds Roman infants make, according to Petronius (Satyricon 57.8): tu lacticulosus, nec mu nec ma argutas. Ambrose does make it clear that Agnes is very young, not yet ready for marriage, even though her faith is mature. She is an innocent infant, hardly able to say ma, and she is also a martyr, sacrificed like a lamb (agnus) on the cruel altars of those who persecute the Christian faith.

29 Most scholars agree that this should be taken as referring, most immediately, not to the sun and certainly not to the devil or to Christ, but to the morning star, Venus.

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reminded by the rooster’s sound that the light is coming which will soon reveal their wicked deeds if they do not stop.30

The third crow is addressed to sailors, representatives of the oikoumene who make themselves especially vulnerable to the forces of nature, as it gives the promise of landfall to those who have forsaken the relative safety of home and town and country to make their honest living on the treacherous sea. The winds on the Mediterranean are famous for dying down in the early morning hours, as Ambrose points out in the Exameron (omnisque crebro vespertinis fla-tibus excitata tempestas et procella mitescit), and the cry of the rooster, a land animal, would certainly be a comforting sound to any sailor who was unsure whether he was within earshot of land or not.

The fourth distich beginning with hoc narrows the focus even more than the ones that precede it. Here we are dealing not with timeless nature or with those who live and work in a world whose rhythms are directly related to the alterna-tion of light and darkness, but with a specific event in the history of the church, whose founding rock (see Matth. 16:18), Peter, was ‘wakened’ to the knowledge

30 A. Walpole, Early Latin Hymns with Introduction and Notes (Cambridge 1922), and oth-ers have disagreed with each other about how best to read and interpret lines 9-12. Walpole reads errorum chorus as referring to ‘the roving demons’, arguing that Prudentius, Cath. 1.37-40: ( ferunt vagantes daemonas / laetos tenebris noctium / gallo canente exterritos / sparsim timere et cedere) must be a reference to Ambrose’s hymn. It may very well be the case that Prudentius had this verse from Ambrose in mind as he wrote his hymn, but that is not necessarily a conclusive argument that Ambrose meant errorum to refer to spiritual misleaders. Ambrose’s own prose paraphrase in the Exameron reads latro suas relinquit insidias, suggesting strongly that the author was not thinking of spiritual demons here but of very real, physical, thugs (Henry, Aeterne rerum conditor [see note 19, above] 356, refers to them as ‘footpads’). In fact, while it does not appear in the manuscripts, erronum has often been read for errorum, precisely because it corresponds more closely with Ambrose’s paraphrase. On this last point, see R. Merkelbach, ‘Erronum cohors: Zum Hymnus des Ambrosius Aeterne rerum conditor’, Vigiliae Christianae 40 (1986) 390-1. Fontaine reads errorum as a metonymic equivalent of errantium (see B.K. Braswell, ‘Kleine christliche Bemerkungen zu frühchristlichen Hymnen’, Vigiliae Christianae 19 [1967] 222-4) and understands errorum chorus in quite physical terms (‘rôdeurs’). Perhaps Ambrose is referring to a common Biblical idea, namely, that criminals work under the cover of darkness to accomplish their nefarious deeds (cf. John 3. 20 and 2 Peter 3.10). Walpole refers to Hamlet 1.1: ‘I have heard the cock that is the trumpet of the morn, doth with his lofty and shrill sounding throat awake the god of day; and at his warning . . . the extravagant and erring spirit hies to his confine’, but the Shakespearean allusion sheds little light on the answer to this textual crux. Häussling and others have argued that this is a reference to misleading stars or planets which (or, perhaps, who) have guided the sailor in the next distich astray.



of his sin as the sound of the rooster reminded him of the prediction that he would deny Jesus before the cock crowed. As he does in the previous distichs, here, too, Ambrose emphasizes the positive effect of the rooster’s cry. By means of this last crow Peter is not only brought to a vivid realization of what he has just done wrong, but is moved as well to leave the scene of denial and to weep bitterly for his sins (see Luke 22:62).31 The image of the hard rock washing away (diluit) his guilt with tears is quite striking; it may be meant to bring to mind the production of water from the rock in the wilderness of Sinai (Num. 20:7-11; Deut. 8:15) and the later identification of that rock with Christ (1 Cor. 10:4). It is his tearful repentance which makes it possible for the fallen Peter to be for-given and permits him to be restored by Christ as the rock of the church.

Each of these four distichs that begin with hoc have this in common: they propound a dark dilemma, whether it be night itself, or nocturnal criminal-ity, or the tendency of sailors to stray far from land and perish at sea, or the murky spiritual issues of forgetfulness and guilt at stake in the Gospel account of Peter’s denial of Christ. Each of the four areas of difficulty is resolved by the cock’s crow: the natural light of the sun puts the darkness of night to flight; justice is restored on earth, at least until evening falls again, while wrongdoers retreat from the exposure of daylight; comfort and hope is provided to those who, at sea, are especially susceptible to the dangerous and unforgiving forces of nature; and repentance with its healing tears comes to Peter when he real-izes that he has denied the one who was most important to him. Given the focus of the next four stanzas, this last would seem to be the climactic point to which this crescendo of cockle-doodle-do’s has been moving.

In the second half of the hymn, there is no comparable anaphoric structure, although gallus occurs at the beginning of lines 18 and 20 (gallo at the begin-ning of line 21), and in the last stanza there is another example of polyptoton: tu, te, and tibi.32 Lines 17-32 do, however, play off of the arresting images and language associated with the rooster and its crowing in the first four stanzas. The focus now, however, is on the church, not the world; it is its members, after all, who are singing this hymn, and it is their spiritual life that is the point of the hymn’s exhortation. (That the author includes himself in this community

31 See Ambrose’s remarks in his commentary on the Gospel (in Luc. 10.90): Flevit ergo et amarissime Petrus . . . et tu, si veniam vis mereri, dilue culpam lacrimis tuam (CSEL 32.2, 489-90).

32 Szövèrffy, Die Annalen (see note 2, above) 57, argues that there is a symmetrical arrange-ment in the hymn, with stanza 1 linked with stanza 8, 2 with 7, 3 with 6, and 4 with 5: ‘Es ist kein Zufall, dass in den Strophen 5 und 6 das Wort gallus in der gleichen Stellung wiederholt wird, dort wo in den Strophen 3 und 4 hoc steht’.

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is clear from his use of the first person plural pronoun and adjective.) Indeed, Aeterne rerum conditor was widely used in churches in the West as a hymn for late night or early morning services. Caesarius of Arles appointed it to be sung ad secundum nocturnum, and in the Mozarabic use it was to be sung ad pullo-rum cantum. In the Roman rite it was sung at Lauds or Matins on Sunday. The Ambrosian manuscripts simply describe it as ymnus nocturnalis.33

Surgamus ergo strenue:Gallus iacentes excitatEt somnolentos increpat:Gallus negantes arguit. (20)

[Let us then arise with vigor;The cock arouses the slug-a-bedsAnd upbraids the drowsy;The cock rebukes the unwilling.] (20)

Lines 17-20 describe the impact of the cock crow on the community who sing this morning hymn. Unlike the prowlers and sailors or even Peter, who after an initial attack of sleepiness in the Garden of Gethsemane stayed wide awake late into the night, the addressees in the second half of the hymn appear to be asleep (iacentes) or, at the very least, sleepy. But it is time, the hymn continues, for those who are listening to the rooster (or perhaps now the hymn itself ) to rise up from their beds (surgamus), and join the song, and for all, whether physically or spiritually asleep, to resume vigorously (strenue) the life of hope, faith, and salvation. The rooster tries to wake them up, but it is not easy to do so. As noted above, Ambrose uses gallus at the beginning of the second and fourth line of this stanza and ends each of the last three lines with an emphatic verb describing the effect that the rooster’s crow has on sleepyheads (somno-lentos). In real life, too, one wake-up call is not enough to rouse many from their sleep; repetition is required in such instances. Peter was also unwilling to waken from his sleep of the spirit (here there is a clear link with the theme of the previous stanza). When confronted by those outside the house of the high

33 See Walpole, Early Latin Hymns (see note 30, above) 29-30 and the literature there cited. Henry, ‘Aeterne rerum conditor’ (see note 19, above) 358, observes: ‘It was very properly selected for use ad Nocturnum de Tempore rather than for Lauds in the old Benedictine breviary. The most ancient breviaries entitle it Ad primum galli cantum, which would place its recitation at midnight. Lauds followed at daybreak. The first crowing of the cock was to summon the morning, not to announce its actual presence’.



priest on the night of Jesus’ betrayal who pressed him to admit that he was a Galilean and one of Jesus’ followers, Peter adamantly refused to do so, and it was finally only the accusatory rooster who was able to ‘waken’ him from his spiritual torpor. In the Markan account (14:72), the rooster does indeed have to repeat his crow before Peter realizes that he has been denying Jesus.

From the next stanza (21-24) we gather that the cock’s remonstrative crow is also restorative. Without mentioning his name again, it may well be that Ambrose has Peter in mind here, too. When he was admonished in the Garden of Gethsemane by Jesus to put up his sword (mucro), he did so. When he real-ized that he had denied Jesus at the crowing of the cock and repented, Peter was given hope, salvation, and faith once again. The word latro may also serve to remind the listener or reader of stanza three with its reference to the band of prowlers. It is clear that Ambrose is thinking here not just of the tragic but distant story of Peter’s transgression, but of others like him in the church of his own time who are still pursuing violence and falling from faith (lapsis):

Gallo canente, spes redit,Aegris salus refunditur,Mucro latronis conditur,Lapsis fides revertitur. (24)

[Hope returns at the song of the cock;Health is restored to the sick;The sword of the robber is sheathed;Confidence returns to the fallen.] (24)34

The concluding two stanzas (25-32) are once again addressed to Jesus, bringing the listener or reader back to the Aeterne rerum conditor of the first stanza, who should be identified with the Son of God, the creative word of God, without

34 The prose in the Exameron passage contains many parallels: Istius cantu spes omnibus redit, aegri relevatur incommodum, minuitur dolor vulnerum, febrium flagrantia mitigatur, revertitur fides lapsis, Iesus titubantes respicit, errantes corrigit. Denique respexit Petrum, et statim error abscessit, pulsa est negatio, secuta confessio. Quod non fortuito accidisse, sed ex sententia domini lectio docet. Sic enim scriptum est, quia dixit Iesus ad Simonem: non cantabit gallus, priusquam me ter neges. Bene fortis in die Petrus, nocte turbatur et ante galli cantum labitur et labitur tertio, ut scias non inconsulta effusione sermonis esse prolapsum, sed mentis quoque nutatione turbatum. Idem tamen post galli cantum fit fortior et iam dig-nus quem Christus aspiciat; oculi enim domini super iustos. Agnovit venisse remedium, post quod iam errare non posset, et in virtutem ab errore mutatus amarissime flevit, ut lacrimis suis lavaret errorem (CSEL 32.1, 201-2).

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whom nothing was made that was made ( John 1.1-2), who was, in the words of the Nicene Creed, ‘begotten of the Father before all worlds’. The rooster is not mentioned again, as the hymn writer proceeds to address his petition to this divine being, the light of the world, whose illuminating glance can have such a salutary effect on those who are inclined to backslide. Now it becomes clear that it was not only the rooster’s crowing that made the difference for Peter, but also the look that Jesus cast in Peter’s direction directly after the cock crowed (Luke 22:61). Here, too, Ambrose maintains his focus not on Peter, but on nos, that is to say, those in the church who are wavering, but who may be recalled by a look from the Lord, and whose guilt, like the repentant Apostle’s, may be washed away with tears:

Iesu, labantes respiceEt nos videndo corrige;Si respicis, lapsus caduntFletuque culpa solvitur. (28)

[O Jesus, look back at those who waver,And correct us with your glance;If you look back, our backslidings cease,And our guilt is washed away with weeping.] (28)

The hymn concludes with a prayer for divine light, a direct reference to Jesus as the light of the world (cf. John 9:5), to dispel the sleep of the mind. ‘The sun of righteousness’ has risen and the rooster’s crowing may now cease. In fact, this final stanza picks up the same word (sonare) used of the cock crow at the beginning of the hymn, only applied now to the community of singers who are at last awake and will ‘crow’ in turn, if you will, about their marvelous creator. As the hymn was used in early morning services in churches through-out the centuries, one imagines those who sang it at such times may well have viewed this final stanza as conveying the point of the entire hymn. This is a song about singing, a hymn that gets at the motivation for hymning. It is early in the morning, very early—in fact it is still dark—and singers are going to need some divine assistance from the light of lights if they are to shake off their own sleepiness and start singing with gusto:

Tu lux refulge sensibusMentisque somnum discute,Te nostra vox primum sonetEt vota solvamus tibi. (32)



[Shine, you our light, on our senses,And shake off the sleep of the mind.May you be the first sound of our voice,And may we discharge our vows to you.] (32)35

As it functions in this setting, then, it seems clear that the repetitio, however playful it may be, does more than simply ‘adorn’ the hymn, as though it were nothing more than an incidental bit of decoration. There is a serious aspect to this playful figure that appears to be integrally connected with the main mes-sage of the hymn, namely, that it is high time for believers to rouse themselves and others from physical and spiritual slumber to live wakeful lives in the light of Christ and to sing his praises vigorously. The rooster’s reiterated call cannot be ignored. The full effect of this startling figure, of course, is even more appar-ent when the stanzas in question are read (or sung) aloud, as they most cer-tainly would have been in the late fourth century, as opposed to being simply viewed and read on the printed page.36

III

There are plenty of precedents not only in classical literature, as we have seen, but also in biblical poetry and prose for Ambrose’s employment of repetitio. The figure is frequently found in the Psalter, as, for example, Psalm 150, with its remarkable succession of initial ‘praise him’s’, and Paul makes abundant use of it

35 The prose from the Exameron continues: Respice nos quoque, domine Iesu. Ut et nos pro-pria recognoscamus errata, solvamus piis fletibus culpam, mereamur indulgentiam pecca-torum. Ideo consulto sermonem protraximus, ut nobis quoque gallus cantaret et loquentibus subveniret, quo si quod delictum obrepsisset in verbo, culpam, Christe, donares. Da quaeso lacrimas Petri, nolo laetitiam peccatoris. Fleverunt Hebraei et per mare sunt undis dehis-centibus liberati. Laetatus est Pharao quod Hebraeos tenebat inclusos et mari mersus cum populo suo occidit. Exultavit et Iuda in mercede proditionis suae, sed ipsius se mercedis suae laqueo strangulavit. Flevit errorem suum Petrus et meruit ut aliorum aboleret errores (CSEL 32.1, 202-3).

36 That reading in Late Antiquity was rarely done silently, even when the reader was alone, we may gather from Augustine’s description of his own observation of Ambrose reading, Conf. 6.3: Sed cum legebat, oculi ducebantur per paginas et cor intellectum rimabatur, vox autem et lingua quiescebant. [‘But when he was reading, his eyes were drawn along over the pages and his was searching out the sense, but drew his eyes along over the leaves, but his voice and tongue kept silent’.] Here and elsewhere I use the edition of J. O’Donnell, ed., Augustine, Confessions (Oxford 1992).

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in his epistles.37 Nor was Ambrose the only Christian Latin poet of Late Antiquity to make skillful and effective use of the figure. Prudentius’ first Cathemerinon hymn plays anaphorically with a one-syllable word that ends with a hard ‘c’ sound (tunc), achieving a similar onomatopoeic effect in a similar context:

Inde est quod omnes credimusIllo quietis temporeQuo gallus exultans canitChristum redisse ex inferis.

Tunc mortis oppressus vigor,Tunc lex subacta est tartari,Tunc vis diei fortiorNoctem coegit cedere.

[Thence it is that we all believeIt was at that time of quietnessWhen the triumphant rooster singsThat Christ returned from the dead.

Then the strength of death was overcome,Then the law of Tartarus was undone,Then the force of day was strongerAnd forced night to yield.]38

37 One of the most famous examples in the New Testament is Matth. 5:1-11 (the Beatitudes) with a nine-fold repetition of the adjective at the beginning of each phrase. Examples from the Pauline epistles include: Rom. 8:33-34; 1 Cor. 3:9; 1 Cor. 6:11; 1 Cor. 11:3; 1 Cor. 13:7; 1 Cor. 13:8; 2 Cor. 7:11; 2 Cor. 11:26; Eph. 6:12; Phil. 3:2; Phil. 4:2; Phil. 4:8. That Ambrose himself was aware of contemporary questions that were being raised about the literary quality of the Bible is evident in Ep. 55: Negant plerique nostros secundum artem scripsisse. Nec nos obnitimur; non enim secundum artem scripserunt, sed secundum gratiam quae super omnem artem est. Scripserunt enim quae spiritus his loqui dabat. Sed tamen hi qui de arte scripserunt, de eorum scriptis artem invenerunt et condiderunt commenta artis et magisteria (CSEL 82.10.2,77). On this argument that the writings of the Bible transcend art but that at the same time the ‘principles of art are present in Scripture, although they are not set forth in a theoretical fashion’ see A. Kamesar, ‘Ambrose, Philo and the Presence of Art in the Bible’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 9 (2001) 73-103. For Ambrose’s possible influence on Augustine and the fourth book of his De Doctrina Christiana, see D. Norton, A History of the Bible as Literature (Cambridge 1993), Vol. 1, 41-2.

38 On this poem, see M. Fuhrmann, ‘Ad galli cantum. Ein Hymnus des Prudentius als Paradigma christlicher Dichtung’, Der altsprachliche Unterricht 14.3 (1971) 82-106. On nature symbol-



And the use of repetitio in Christian Latin verse continued into the Middle Ages and beyond—one need only think of Veni, veni Emmanuel, a reworking of the famous ‘O antiphons’ in which each of five successive stanzas begins with the word veni. One of the closest modern analogies to the way in which Ambrose uses repetitio to replicate an animal sound in Aeterne rerum conditor occurs in a poem written in 1918 by Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The Woodlark’, whose final stanza plays in a similar way with the English word ‘sweet” to imitate the sound of the woodlark:

Through the velvety wind V-wingedTo the nest’s nook I balance and buoyWith a sweet joy of a sweet joy,Sweet, of a sweet, of a sweet joyOf a sweet—a sweet—sweet—joy.

If, as we have seen, repetitio plays such an important role in verse composi-tion in general and in this poem in particular and was so commonly used by biblical, pagan, and Christian authors, why has its obvious presence and pos-sible significance here been so often overlooked by students of this Ambrosian hymn? The problem may well be that Aeterne rerum conditor and other hymns of Ambrose have been so often studied as though they were written by a theo-logian who was so absorbed in what he had to say that he had little concern for how to say it (a common denigration of rhetoric that goes back at least as far as Plato) and only used verse as a convenient vehicle, if you will, because it could be used so effectively to express doctrinal content in a popular way.39

Theological readings of Ambrose’s hymns are, of course, entirely legitimate. Ambrose himself suggests that the popularity of his hymns has everything to do with their theological content, not his own rhetorical talent. In a sermon he preached in 386, Ambrose says:

They also say that the people are bewitched by my hymns. I certainly do not deny this. This is a great charm, than which there is nothing more powerful. For what is more powerful than the confession of the Trinity,

ism in the hymns of Prudentius, see C. Gnilka, ‘Die Natursymbolik in den Tagesliedern des Prudentius’ in JbAC Ergänzungsband 8 (Münster 1980) 411-66.

39 A number of early Christian writers employed the argument made famous by Lucretius about using the sweetness of poetry to disguise the bitterness of the medicinal truth they were trying to communicate. See De rerum natura 1.936-50 and 4.11-25 as well as Lactantius, Inst. 1.1.14 and Jerome, Ep. 133.3.7. On this point see Klaus Thraede, ‘Untersuchungen zum Ursprung und zur Geschichte der christlichen Poesie’, JbAC 5 (1962) 149-50.

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which every day is celebrated on the lips of all the people? They all vie with each other to profess their faith; they know how to preach Father and Son and Holy Spirit in verse.40

Ambrose deftly deflects attention away from himself as the successful author of these bewitching hymns. It is the Trinitarian truth that his hymns express, he suggests, and the fact that they are sung by ‘all the people’, that makes them so effective, more than their author’s skill at versification. We would do well to remember, however, that Ambrose was an accomplished rhetor, and that self-deprecation is one of the most time honored expressions of rhetorical sophis-tication. This kind of expression of authorial humility is almost an obligatory ritual for most early Christian Latin poets, it seems, for it is frequently found in the prefatory material affixed to their works. Poets like Sedulius were as assiduous about giving credit to the Holy Spirit for their literary accomplish-ments as Homer and Vergil were about citing the Muses.41 It was the truth of the Scriptures that these poets were paraphrasing, they claimed, that made their Christian poetry superior to that of pagan precursors. One of the biblical epics of Late Antiquity has as its simple and confident one-word title the Greek word for “truth,” Alethia.

In fact, the powerful, charmlike quality that Ambrose’s critics detect in his hymns was not so much a function of their orthodox doctrinal content (after all there were Arian hymns in circulation long before Ambrose’s that also became very popular) as the fact that Ambrose had given so many people a powerful way, namely, verse, in which they could express that content (norunt versibus praedicare). With his description of the hymns as grande carmen, the latter a word that can mean both ‘song’ and ‘charm’, Ambrose himself appears to be fully aware of the kind of powerful effect that the sound of poetry, not just its sense, can have on listeners.

The strongly emotional response of one of Ambrose’s most famous audi-tors, Augustine, to what he calls ‘the hymns and canticles of the sweetly

40 Hymnorum quoque meorum carminibus deceptum populum ferunt, plane nec hoc abnuo. Grande carmen istud est quo nihil potentius; quid enim potentius quam confessione Trinitatis, quae cottidie totius populi ore celebratur? Certatim omnes student fidem fateri, patrem et filium et spiritum sanctum norunt versibus praedicare (Epist. 75a; CSEL 82.10.3,105). On the word carmen and its connotations in this passage, see J. den Boeft, ‘Qui cantat, vacuus est: Ambrose on Singing’, Studia Patristica 54 (2012), 1-5.

41 The ‘affected modesty’ topos goes back at least as far as Cicero (De inventione 1.16.22), and is still evident in John Milton’s Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity: ‘time is our tedious song should here have ending’. See E. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton 1953) 83-5.



sounding church’, bears eloquent testimony to the power of just such a set of poetic effects:

Quantum flevi in hymnis et canticis tuis, suave sonantis ecclesiae tuae voci-bus commutus acriter! Voces illae influebant auribus meis, et eliquabatur veritas in cor meum, et exaestuabat inde affectus pietatis, et currebant lac-rimae, et bene mihi erat cum eis.42

Clearly, for Augustine, it is not only the truth of what he hears that moves him so, but what he elsewhere calls ‘the pleasures of the ears’ and the delight that they caused his flesh. Indeed, it was precisely this power of music to ‘enervate his mind’ that made him so suspicious of the very singing in the church by which he confessed himself to be so moved.43

Many scholarly readings of the Ambrosian hymn, unfortunately, have focused on their doctrinal content or historical and liturgical context, while paying only minimal attention to purely poetic considerations. One recent study of this hymn that focuses on its theological significance, for exam-ple, goes so far as to assert: ‘Thus, the hymn does not speak about a rooster,

42 Augustine, Conf. 9.6. Later in the same work (9.12), Augustine actually quotes the veridicos versus of one of Ambrose’s hymns, Deus creator omnium, which he remembered after his mother died, and which moved him to tears: Et dimisi lacrimas quas continebam, ut efflu-erent quantum vellent, substernens eas cordi meo.

43 Like other Christians, before and since, Augustine was just barely able to tolerate the practice by which he admitted that he himself was so moved. See Conf. 10.33: Voluptates aurium tenacius me inplicaverant et subiugaverant, sed resolvisti et liberasti me. Nunc in sonis, quos animant eloquia tua cum suavi et artificiosa voce cantantur, fateor, aliquantu-lum adquiesco, non quidem ut haeream, sed ut surgam, cum volo. Attamen cum ipsis senten-tiis quibus vivunt ut admittantur ad me, quaerunt in corde meo nonnullius dignitatis locum, et vix eis praebeo congruentem. Aliquando enim plus mihi videor honoris eis tribuere quam decet, dum ipsis sanctis dictis religiosius et ardentius sentio moveri animos nostros in flam-mam pietatis, cum ita cantarentur, quam si non ita cantarentur, et omnes affectus spiritus nostri pro sui diversitate habere proprios modos in voce atque cantu, quorum nescio qua occulta familiaritate excitentur. Sed delectatio carnis meae, cui mentem enervandam non oportet dari, saepe me fallit, dum rationi sensus non ita comitatur, ut patienter sit poste-rior, sed tantum, quia propter illam meruit admitti, etiam praecurrere ac ducere conatur. Ita in his pecco non sentiens et postea sentio. Augustine goes on to admit that there are times when he would just as soon banish the ‘sweet and tuneful strains which accompany David’s psalter . . . from my ears, and indeed from the ears of the church’. For a deeper dis-cussion of this point, see J. den Boeft, ‘Periculum voluptatis: Augustine’s Strained Relations with Poetry’ in Spiritus et littera: Beiträge zur Augustinus-Forschung: Festschrift zum 80. Geburtstag von Cornelius Petrus Mayer OSA, ed. G. Förster et al. (Würzburg 2009) 3-16.

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but about humanity and the world of humanity. . . . The rooster stands for Christ himself ’.44 Now, it may well be true that ‘the rooster stands for Christ’. After all, Ambrose was well acquainted with allegory, and the rooster was a ubiquitous Christian (and pagan) symbol representing the hope of new life in the midst of darkness and death. It does not necessarily follow, how-ever, as the author also asserts, that the hymn ‘does not speak about a rooster’. Indeed, as we have seen, the hymn not only sings about a rooster, the hymn is the rooster’s song! Ambrose is clearly in no particular hurry to move on from his vivid description of the rooster, qua rooster (and what the rooster sounds like as he crows away in the early morning darkness), to what the rooster means or represents as a theological symbol.45 It is, of course, precisely this quality, this loving, lingering attention paid to concrete, physical, sensual detail, that is one of the essential ingredients of poetry.

What if we were to presuppose that, like other poets before and since, Ambrose was keenly interested in taking full advantage of the interplay between sound and sense? These poems were meant to be sung, after all, Ambrose’s rooster not only makes a noise (sonat; line 5); he sings (canente; line 16).46 And Ambrose goes to some length to incorporate the rooster’s song into his own. What if we were to think of Ambrose as a Christian Horace of sorts, working hard to make his poetry as vivid as possible (ut pictura poesis), using figures of speech like repetitio and onomatopoeia to make a point more striking and more memorable for his audience? What if, like Horace, he was as interested in the dulce as in the utile? It is perhaps no accident that utilis and suavis are the two adjectives that Ambrose uses in the Exameron to describe the rooster and his song in the night: est etiam galli cantus suavis in noctibus—non solum suavis sed etiam utilis, qui quasi bonus cohabitator et dormitantem excitat et sollicitum admonet et viantem solatur processum noctis canora significatione protestans.47

44 ‘Der Hymnus spricht also nicht von Hahn, sondern vom Menschen und der Welt des Menschen. . . . Der Hahn steht für Christus selbst’ (Häussling [see note 19, above] 100.

45 On the symbolism of the rooster in paganism and early Christianity, see C. Nauerth’s article ‘Hahn’ in Realencylopädie für Antike und Christentum, vol. 13, 360-72 and the bibli-ography there cited.

46 A glance at an etymological dictionary reveals that the Latin word gallus (as well as the English ‘cock’) are related to the word cano and carmen and canorus. See L. Kretzenbacher, ‘Der Hahn auf dem Kirchturm: Sinnzeichen, Bibelexegese, und Legende’, Rheinisches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde 9 (1958) 195, on the connection between the word for rooster and song in various languages, including Italian, French, and Spanish.

47 Augustine was fascinated by the ‘sweetness’ of Ambrose’s eloquence: Studiose audiebam disputantem in populo, non intentione, qua debui, sed quasi explorans eius facundiam, utrum conveniret famae suae, an maior minorve proflueret, quam praedicabatur; et verbis



In other words, if we were to take as a starting point for our criticism of the Ambrosian hymn that its author is a serious poet, a master of language and metaphor, deeply appreciative of nature and beauty, blessed with a sense of playful humor, and possessed of literary intentions that included not only doctrinal instruction or pious edification but also persuasive charm and even sweet delight, then it might be high time for his latter day critics to rouse them-selves and begin reading Ambrose’s hymns as they would other lyric poems, with an eye to observing how artfully this poet expresses what he has to say, in a way that singers and readers over the centuries have found too deceptively simple and too profoundly moving to resist.48

eius suspendebar intentus, rerum autem incuriosus et contemptor adstabam: et delectabar semonis suavitate. . . . Conf. 5.13. For a modern critic who is equally taken with Ambrose’s eloquence, see Henry, Aeterne rerum conditor (see note 19, above) 351, who describes the hymn as ‘ravishing’ in ‘its unquestionable beauty’.

48 The construction of Ambrose’s hymns, short and simple as they are, may have more in common with the highly worked literary productions of other Latin poets of Late Antiquity who favored what Michael Roberts has called the ‘jeweled style’ than has been often assumed. See M. Roberts, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca and London 1989).

155 - of roosters and repetitio - ambrose's aeterne rerum conditor

Documents

ambroses hymns

ambroses contribution

ambrosian hymn

ambroses use of repetitio

medieval latin hymn

einfalt und wahrheit

eines herzens und glaubens

simplest expression