Hymnologists have their favorites among the sacred singers of the Middle Ages, but all concede the first place to the poet who gave the world the Dies Irae, the great sequence or “prose” sung in the service for the dead of the Latin Church. It has attracted more attention than any other single hymn. Whole books have been written about it. It is indissolubly associated in the history of music with Mozart’s wonderful “Requiem,” and in that of literature with the concluding scenes of the first part of “Faust.” More translations have been made of it than of any other poem in the Latin language, or perhaps in any language. All Christendom rejoices in it as a common treasure, the gift of God through a devout Italian monk of the thirteenth century.

It was in an age full of vitality that this “hymn of the giants” was written—the most interesting century in the history of Christendom, Matthew Arnold says. In all directions we encounter the play or collision of great forces. The Papacy, the Empire, the Crusades, the Mendicant Orders, and even, in its way, the Inquisition, give evidence of the working of a spirit of energy and movement, which places the century in sharp contrast to the less explicit development which had preceded, and the age of comparative exhaustion which followed. Nowhere was this more visible than in the characters of the great Churchmen of the thirteenth century. Popes like Innocent III. and Gregory IX., founders of orders like Dominic and Francis, theologians like Aquinas and Bonaventura, may excite our admiration or our censure, but they are men of such magnitude as are not to be found in other centuries in the same number. They were live men, and they have made a lasting impression upon the world by the force of their vitality.

Two of these, Aquinas and Bonaventura, we shall meet again as hymn-writers. But first we have to deal with one whose chief claim to recollection is a single great hymn. Thomas of Celano was an Italian at a time when Italy was stirred by the great battle of Pope with Emperor into an intellectual life, which was to culminate in Dante at the close of the century. Exactly in its last year the writing of the Divina Commedia was to begin. The troubles of his time must have come very close to Thomas. His native city of Celano, a town of the old Marsians, was one of the first to suffer under the hand of Frederick II. In 1223 it was forced to capitulate by the Count of Acerra, Thomas of Aquinas, the warlike uncle and namesake of the great theologian. The inhabitants were compelled to leave their houses, taking all their movables, and the place was burned to the ground, only the church of St John being left standing among the ruins. The people, to punish their disloyalty to the Emperor, were transported to Sicily, Malta, and Calabria, whence they returned to rebuild their town after their enemy’s death. How old Thomas was at the time of this calamity, and whether it had anything to do with his becoming a monk of the Order of Francis of Assisi, we do not know. But certainly it is not impossible that the spectacle of this dies irae, when the sanctities of his boyhood’s home were left desolate, or even the news of its occurrence in his absence, may have left a permanent impression upon his mind, and may have suggested more or less directly his great hymn.

Celano lay in the northern end of the Kingdom of Naples, as it was afterward called, across the Apennines from Rome and slightly north of it. It was not far from the northern boundary of Frederick’s hereditary dominions, across which lay the Umbrian region, where Assisi is situated. At some time and in some way Thomas made his way to Assisi, and came under the influence of the wonderful man whose personality has made the mountain town a place of pilgrimage even for those who are not of the Latin communion.

Francis of Assisi is one of the strangest, if also one of the most beautiful figures in the history of Christendom. Protestants vie with Catholics, Karl Hase and Margaret Oliphant with Frederic Ozanam and Joseph Goerres, in depicting this devout and childlike spirit, who took poverty for his bride and set himself to realize in the utmost literalness the command to go forth to preach repentance and forgiveness of sins, taking neither scrip nor purse, and possessing no more than the absolute necessaries of human existence. At first he had no thought of founding an order, but only of helping the poor and the suffering for Christ’s sweet sake. But the divine fire of loving humility and childlike simplicity in the man drew others inevitably to his side, until there arose in his mind the sense of a great vocation to gather men into a new form of brotherhood. “Fear not,” he said to his earliest disciples, “in that ye seem few and simple-minded. Preach repentance to the world, trusting in Him who hath overcome the world, that His Spirit speaks through you. You will find some to receive you and your word with joy, if still more to resist and mock you. Bear all that with patience and meekness. Take no heed for your simplicity or mine. In a short time the wise and the noble will come to preach with you before princes and people, and many will be turned to the Lord. He has shown it to me, and in mine ears there is a sound of the multitude of disciples who are to come to us out of every people. The French are on the way; the Spaniards are hurrying; the Germans and English run; and a multitude of other tongues hasten hither.” So Thomas of Celano records his words in his biography of the saint, which is the freest from exaggerations and the most trustworthy of them all.

As Thomas survived Francis some thirty years, there is no reason to regard him as one of the group of the first disciples who began to gather around the founder as early as 1209. He is not named among “the twelve apostles” who came first. But the relation between the two men seems to have been more than usually close and intimate. Perhaps it was the more so as being founded on contrasts rather than on resemblances in their characters. For Francis was distinguished from other teachers of his age by the bright and cheerful views he entertained of God and His love to mankind. This was the theme of his sayings and his songs; this he preached to the poor when they streamed out of the Italian cities to welcome him as one who brought comfort and joy to the downcast. They emphasized their sense of the difference between him and the ordinary preachers by saying, “He hears those whom even God will not hear!” Thomas, on the other hand, seems to have been constitutionally predisposed to look at the darker side of things, to sing of judgment rather than of mercy. But he, too, found comfort in the heart-sunshine of his master. “His words were like fire,” he says, “penetrating the heart.” “How lovely, splendid, glorious he appeared in innocence of life, in simplicity of speech, in purity of heart, in divine delight, in brotherly love, in constant obedience, in loving harmony, in angelic aspect.” He found in Francis the most perfect realization of the Christian ideal that he or his century could conceive of; and shall we not admit with George Macdonald that a perfect monk is a very fine thing in his way, although much less so than a perfect man?

Their sympathies as poets must have drawn them together. Francis, as Joseph Goerres well says, was a troubadour as well as a saint. In his youth he had won distinction as a singer of worldly songs in the provenÇal French, which was then the language of literature in Northern Italy. After his conversion he burst out singing the praises of God in this same foreign and exotic tongue. But as he became more directly interested in the welfare of his fellow-men, he began to use his gift of song in his native Italian. How many of the poems that are printed under his name are really his own, and how many are the work of his disciple, Jacopone da Todi, is matter of dispute. But even Father Affo (1777), the most negative of critics on this point, does not deny his authorship of the wonderful “Song of the Sun,” also called the “Song of the Creatures,” in which the childlike delight of the saint in God’s works finds such charming expression, that Matthew Arnold has singled it out as the utterance of what is most exquisite in the spirit of his century. Thomas, too, it was known, had the poetic gift, and indeed was recognized by his brethren as the man of most literary power in the order. Upon him they laid the duty of compiling the founder’s biography, and of writing the “legend” of his life, which should be read in the breviary service on the day of his commemoration.

Yet he also was recognized as possessing practical gifts. The order had spread into Germany as well as in the other directions of which Francis had prophesied. The first attempts to establish it north of the Alps, made in 1216, were not happy. The Italians sent on this mission knew only one German word, “Ja!” “Are you heretics?” (Sind Sie Ketzer?) was the first question put to them on Teutonic soil; and knowing nothing else to say, they said “Ja!” So they were marched across the frontier again in disgrace. But brethren better provided in the matter of their Ollendorff had been sent five years later, and now Thomas of Celano was one of those who had been selected for the German mission, to give stability and unity to the work there. He was made “custos” of the monasteries at Mainz, Worms and Koeln (Cologne), and even took charge of the whole province when its head returned to Assisi. We find Thomas himself back in Assisi by 1230, where Jordan, the “custos” of the Thuringian monasteries, came to see him.

Francis had died in 1226, but whether Thomas was actual witness of his last days, or derived his knowledge of them from others, his is recognized as the authentic account of the saint’s departure. His own death is said to have occurred in 1255, but what events filled up the meantime, besides the biographic labors we have mentioned, is not known. Perhaps it was in those years that he composed his great sequence, as his mind, when less directly brightened by the influence of his master, would be more likely to revert to those trains of thought which corresponded to his natural disposition. Possibly it was as his own life was drawing to a close, and the shadows of the Great Day gathered nearer him, that he poured out his soul in his great hymn—the greatest of all hymns, unless we except the Te Deum.

Besides the Dies Irae, there are ascribed to Thomas two other sequences—

Fregit victor virtualis