Panis Angelicus

Thomas Aquinas, 1264; music by Cesar Franck

I’ve often thought many an entry at Word and Song is like a message in a bottle, or an object from a time capsule, or a diary discovered in a forgotten piece of furniture. So many are the things we know were done, but it’s hard to imagine what kinds of people did them — what they thought and felt, what stirred their hearts, how they spent their hours of quiet, what words of poetry formed their imaginations and dwelt within them all their lives long, and with what devotion they bent their knees in prayer.

If you go to Samuel-Rousseau Square in Paris, you can see the impressive monument to Cesar Franck, the composer of the best-known melody to our Hymn of the Week, Panis Angelicus. Franck is seated on the right, portrayed as a strikingly handsome man in his prime, calm in concentration, brows knit, a barely perceptible smile playing upon his lips. On the left and above him is an angel, whom Franck does not see, but he does hear: the angel has a scroll on which are written the titles of some of Franck’s best-known religious compositions: Hulda, Beatitudes, Ruth, Redemption. The intention of the sculptor, Alfred Lenoir, is clear. Franck, in his music, is an evangelist, like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; that’s how you’ll see them portrayed in paintings and illuminations and sculptures, as being instructed by an angel of God. You don’t have to take that literally to grasp that Franck derived his inspiration from his faith. There was no Christian Franck on Sunday and an ordinary secular Franck on the other days of the week. He was doing his work to praise God and to delight and instruct men, whether he composed or taught or played.

Now Cesar Franck did not compose the text of his song. That came from Thomas Aquinas, in 1264, and he too is eminently worthy of our notice. Franck was a child prodigy, performing before the King of Belgium, Leopold I, when he was just an 11 year old boy, pressed into a career as a pianist and organist by his hard-driving father. Thomas also was a prodigy, and his own hard-driving father sent him to the University of Naples at age 11, where he quickly out-reasoned his masters in grammar and logic. Maybe he was what we’d now call “autistic,” too, because his fellow students at the University of Cologne, where he studied under Albert the Great, called him the Dumb Ox. Certainly he was quiet and humble. But Albert knew how bright the lad was. “We call this young man a dumb ox,” he said, “but his bellowing in doctrine will one day resound throughout the world.” As in fact it did. And as far as the history of poetry is concerned, it is impossible to imagine that Dante would ever have written his great epic without Thomas’s vast and meticulously organized works. Indeed, my old professor of medieval literature, Robert Hollander, said that he believed that Dante wrote the Divine Comedy “for Thomas.”

I’ve heard that Thomas once was dictating the texts of four separate books, simultaneously, as he walked around the room, to each of four secretaries set in the corners. But the most charming story about Thomas that I’ve heard shows his deep humility. His fellow Dominican students wanted to play a trick on him. All at once they shouted, as they were looking out of the window, “Thomas, look! A flying pig!” He came on over, and they roared with laughter. When they asked him why he came to look, he said, with a shrug, “I thought it was more likely that a pig could fly than that a Dominican would tell a lie.

So then, in 1264, when Thomas’s reputation was established all over Europe, Pope Urban IV asked him to compose the hymns for the office of the recently established feast of Corpus Christi — the Body of Christ. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t expect professors of philosophy or theology to be able to come up with brilliant poetry on request. Thomas did just that: in the hymns Pange, lingua (which ends with the two stanzas known by their first words, Tantum ergo), Verbum supernum (which ends with the two stanzas known by their first words, O Salutaris), the sequence Lauda, Sion, and Sacris solemniis, whose penultimate stanza, beginning with Panis angelicus, Franck set to music.

I’ll give the text below in Latin, followed by a literal translation in English prose. The words express the humility of God, if we may use that phrase without blame. That God should speak to us — that’s already an act of infinite descent. But that he should become our bread — no one could have imagined. Meanwhile, enjoy this heart-wringing rendition by Luciano Pavarotti and his father, singing together, as they had also done in church when the great one was only a boy.

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Panis angelicus
fit panis hominum;
dat panis caelicus
figuris terminum.
O res mirabilis!
Manducat Dominum
pauper, servum, et humilis.

The Bread of angels becomes the bread of men; the Bread from heaven puts an end to mere images.  What a wondrous thing!  The poor man, the servant, and the lowly feed upon their Lord.

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