Come, Ye Faithful, Raise the Strain

St. John of Damascus, 8th century

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People who study the art and literature of the high Middle Ages know that you get the merriest and most boisterous celebrations of Christmas then, and popular carols in all the languages of Europe. But you don’t get Easter carols — the high solemnity and the joy of Easter don’t invite the same kind of informality, but grandeur instead, looking forward to the consummation of all human history. The earliest Christians sang many hymns about the Resurrection, and why not? It is the definitive victory, in the face of human evil, hatred, all sin, and death itself. Our author for today’s Hymn of the Week, John of Damascus, wrote three of the Easter hymns that are included in my second-favorite hymnal of all time, The English Hymnal of 1933; this one is part of his famous Easter Canon, translated by the brilliant John Mason Neale.

John of Damascus was an Arab-speaking Christian at a time when the Muslims were pressing ferociously against the old Roman empire in the east, with its capital at Constantinople. Christians had long been painting portraits of Christ and of the saints, but John was suddenly pressed into a new controversy not only by the Muslims, who of course do not make images, but by the iconoclastic — the word means “image-smashing” — emperor Leo III. Leo saved the empire; he was a brilliant military tactician. (If you’re curious, look up the invention they called “Greek fire”.) But Leo also wanted to get rid of images — even to smash them. But the monks, siding with the common people, put up a fight against Leo and his cohorts, and John was their champion. He carried the day, so the churches of the East honor him as you’d honor someone who defends the truth against all odds, and in the teeth of all the great powers of the state. He defended those works of art by considering the Incarnation. When God became man, he raised up human art and ennobled our understanding of all created things, all material things. Easter is the pinnacle here too, because Jesus did not rise up as a spirit — any pagan might easily accept that sort of thing. He rose in the body, glorified.

Our Word of the Week, road, comes into play in John’s hymn and Neale’s translation, in a powerful and perhaps surprising way. For the first stanza does not mention the Resurrection at all! It’s about the passage of Israel from bondage in Egypt, through the waters of the Red Sea, away from Pharaoh and on their way, on the road, to the Promised Land. That’s what the Fathers, and the theologians of the Middle Ages, and the poets and artists of the Renaissance understood as a “type”: a foreshadowing, a looking-forward from an event or a person or a law in the Old Testament, to its full reality in the New. That way of seeing things was common to the evangelists, too, and Jesus himself gives us the prime example: think of when he says that no sign will be given to the stubborn men of his day, but “the sign of Jonah.” The passage through the Red Sea is fulfilled in the Resurrection, because Christ has crossed the waters of death, leading his faithful from the Egypt of sin and death to what Paul calls the glorious liberty of the children of God.

I like very much the word John uses three times to name Christ: Philanthrope. He is the Lover of Mankind. He suffered for us, in our place, to our benefit, the innocent for the guilty, and the benefit is infinite, beyond imagination.

The passage from land to land is also a passage from time to time, from the “winter of our sins” to the “Queen of seasons,” the spring, and to this feast in spring, the “Feast of feasts.” Or you can say it’s a passage from time as a river that carries all things away, to time as broken into and transformed by the event, opening out from the temporary to the eternal. Enjoy, then, the rich tapestry of images, material, temporal, and historical, that John gives us. Think of them as the rock that Moses struck in the desert, or as the side of Christ pierced by the lance. A river of life comes forth.

Come, ye faithful, raise the strain
Of triumphant gladness;
God hath brought his Israel
Into joy from sadness;
Loosed from Pharaoh's bitter yoke
Jacob's sons and daughters;
Led them with unmoistened foot
Through the Red Sea waters.

'Tis the spring of souls today;
Christ hath burst his prison,
And from three days' sleep in death
As a Sun hath risen;
All the winter of our sins,
Long and dark, is flying
From his Light, to whom we give
Laud and praise undying.

Now the Queen of seasons, bright
With the Day of splendor,
With the royal Feast of feasts,
Comes its joy to render;
Comes to glad Jerusalem,
Who with true affection
Welcomes in unwearied strains
Jesus' Resurrection.

Neither might the gates of death
Nor the tomb's dark portal,
Nor the watchers, nor the seal,
Hold thee as a mortal;
But today amidst the twelve
Thou didst stand, bestowing
That thy peace which evermore
Passeth human knowing.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six days each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs. as well. Paid subscribers receive audio-enhanced posts, weekly podcasts on a wide variety of topics, and access on demand to our full archive and to the comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, join us as a subscriber.

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