O Sacred Head

Arnulf of Leuven, 13th century

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When genius and piety come together, expect wonders. When it’s several geniuses, one after another, all of them men of deep piety, expect the immortal.

Our Hymn of the Week is one, I am guessing, that every Christian speaker of English or German has heard and sung, the mighty and profoundly moving “O Sacred Head Sore Wounded,” sometimes translated as “O Sacred Head Surrounded,” and in German, “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden.” What you might not know is how it has come down to us as the most renowned of Holy Week hymns. Though it has been attributed to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who surely was capable of writing it and whose devotions and theology it reflects, scholars have long given the credit to one of Bernard’s successors in the Cistercian life, the Belgian abbot Arnulf of Leuven. And Arnulf didn’t just write the Latin original of what we know as our hymn. He wrote a 74-stanza poem of five lines each, dwelling with loving meditation on seven members of the body of Jesus upon the Cross: the feet (10), the knees (10), the hands (10), the side (10), the breast (10), the heart (14), and the face (10). It’s from those last 10 stanzas, on the face of Jesus, that we get our English and German renderings of the poem in the form of a hymn.

But we in English didn’t get them directly. The great Paul Gerhardt translated Arnulf’s work into German, in stanzas of eight lines, not five, rhyming ABABCDCD, with the syllable count of 7-6-7-6 doubled. More on that structure shortly. Then the organist and composer Dieterich Buxtehude got hold of it, and wrote a series of seven cantatas, meant to be performed together, on each of the seven members. But 74 stanzas would prove much too long. Instead he selected three stanzas from each section, and prefaced them with a verse from Scripture, in five-voice harmony. So, for example, the very first section, on the feet, begins with this beautiful verse from the prophet Nahum: “Ecce super montes pedes evangelizantis et annunciatis pacem,” which means, “Behold upon the mountains the feet of him who brings good news and tidings of peace!” Think of that as coming immediately before you are to dwell with love and sorrow upon the feet of Jesus, nailed to the Cross. The contrast is meant to startle, sure. But it also compels us to consider: there would be no feet upon the mountains bringing good news, if there had been no Jesus on the Cross, nailing to that true tree of life every sin ever committed by man from Adam on.

That’s the first part. What about the seventh, the climax of all, dwelling upon the face of Jesus? That begins with a verse from the Psalms: “Let your face shine upon your servant, and save me in your mercy.” We imagine the beaming smile of a God of grace and favor — and then we get these words, which I’ll give in the original Latin, which was Buxtehude’s text:

Salve, caput cruentatum,
totum spinis coronatum,
vulneratum, conquassatum,
arundine verberatum,
facie sputis illita.

There the first four lines, all rhyming, strike again and again the blows of our guilt: “Hail, head covered with blood, all crowned with thorns, wounded and battered, whipped with the scourge, thy face smeared with spittle.”

I don’t have the words to do justice to that contrast.

But what about the melody? Buxtehude didn’t come up with it on his own. He adopted an earlier melody by Hans Leo Hassler, and it wasn’t for a hymn, but for a sad love song, whose first line you might translate colloquially as “My mood is all mixed up!” or, to be more poetic, “My heart is all astray.” Hassler did compose a good deal of sacred music, but this song wasn’t part of that. It’s to Buxtehude’s immense credit, I think, that he saw the possibility of adapting Hassler’s melody for use in his deeply pious cantatas — and he did revise the melody, making it less jaunty, more stately, more subtle, more complex, but preserving Hassler’s ending not on the tonic note but on the third, which strikes the ear as resolved but open-ended, in the air, waiting.

And then Buxtehude’s melody and Gerhardt’s poem were taken up by a fellow you will have heard of: Johann Sebastian Bach. The hymn, scored for two trebels, tenor, baritone, and bass, is sung, each of five stanzas one at a time spread out through the work, in his magnificent Saint Matthew Passion. It’s the foundation of the whole. But the singers don’t sing exactly the same notes from verse to verse; there are four different arrangements, the most hauntingly lovely of them something that only the most skilled and proficient choirs should attempt.

Every Christian should sing this hymn at least once during Passiontide. You may know it in several English versions, because a lot of people have tried their hands at it, some working straight from the Latin, others straight from the German, others looking at both at once. Don’t let those variations trouble you — I don’t mean the mischief that editors do when they expunge the early Modern English pronouns (thou, thee). The good translations I’ve seen all strive to be both faithful and beautiful. I have included below the poet Robert Bridges’ translation (1899).

Today we have a quietly beautiful rendition of “O Sacred Head Sore Wouded” by the very fine Choir of Trinity College, Melbourne.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber.

O sacred head, sore wounded,
Defiled and put to scorn;
O kingly head, surrounded
With mocking crown of thorn:
What sorrow mars thy grandeur?
Can death thy bloom deflower?
O countenance whose splendor
The hosts of heaven adore!

Thy beauty, long desired,
Hath vanished from our sight;
Thy power is all expired,
And quenched the light of light.
Ah me! for whom thou diest,
Hide not so far thy grace;
Show me, O Love most highest,
The brightness of thy face.

In thy most bitter passion
My heart to share doth cry,
With thee for my salvation
Upon the cross to die.
Ah, keep my heart thus moved
To stand thy cross beneath,
To mourn thee, well-beloved,
And thank thee for thy death.

My days are few, O fail not,
With thine immortal power,
To hold me that I quail not
In death's most fearful hour,
That I may fight befriended,
And see in my last strife
To me thine arms extended
Upon the cross of life.

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