The Conquering Cross

Sing with the Understanding

G.R. Balleine (1954)

 

CHAPTER II

THE CONQUERING CROSS

 

The Royal Banners forward go.

Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle.

 

HYMNS in Greek like Phôs Hilaron were useless in the West, where everyone spoke Latin; but by the fourth century Italians, Gauls and Spaniards were beginning to write hymns in Latin. A great stimulus was given to this in 384, when the Empress Justina, who was a follower of the heretic Arius, tried to seize for her sect one of the churches in Milan. Ambrose, the Bishop, shut himself up in it with a crowd of Catholics, and Augustine, who was in Milan at the time, tells how "the people kept ward in the church ready to die with their Bishop, and my mother was one of them." "To save them," he says, "from being worn out by their long vigil," Ambrose produced a bundle of Latin hymns that he had written, and the siege developed into an all-day and all-night choir- practice, "Thus it was," he continues, "that the Eastern custom of hymn-singing began among us, and from that day to this it has been retained, and almost all congregations throughout the rest of the world now follow our example."

 

Ambrose is the first great name in Latin hymnody, and translations of some of his hymns are in modern hymnals (e.g. A.M. 9, 10 and 11); these however are mainly museum pieces, interesting for their antiquity, but too cold and stiff to make much appeal today.

 

Prudentius, the next great Latin hymnist, is more to our taste, but his hymns, e.g. "Earth hath many a noble city," need little exposition. When we reach however the Passiontide Processionals of Venantius Fortunatus, the Vexilla Regis and the Pange Lingua—"The Royal

Banners forward go" and "Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle"—comment is clearly called for.

 

We know exactly when and why these hymns were written. The story begins with the Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine (whom Geoffrey of Monmouth asserts to have been a daughter of the legendary King Coel of Colchester, who called for his fiddlers three).

 

In 326, as an old lady of seventy-nine, she visited Jerusalem, and was said to have discovered the Cross on which Christ had been crucified. The story ran that she found a Jew who knew where the Cross was hidden, and kept him at the bottom of a pit until he revealed the secret. Her servants then dug on the spot and unearthed three crosses. Which was the right one?

 

Just then a funeral conveniently passed. The dead man was laid on each cross in turn, and, as soon as he touched the third, he was restored to life, a sure sign that they had found what they were seeking. This story cannot be true. Only seven years later a Bordeaux pilgrim describes the sights which every Christian was taken to see in Jerusalem, the house of Caiaphas, the pillar of scourging, the Judgement Hall, Calvary, and the cave of the Resurrection; but he says not a word of the Cross.

 

In 338 Eusebius wrote an account of the Empress's visit. But he too makes no mention of her sensational discovery. Nevertheless not much later something must have happened which caused the Church in Jerusalem to believe that the Cross had been found; for they began to send out splinters of it to other Churches. In 348 Cyril of Jerusalem wrote in his Catechetical Lectures, "The whole world is now filled with portions of the wood of the Cross."

 

Two centuries and a half passed, and in 569, Radegunde, Queen of the Franks, founded a nunnery at Poitiers, and the Emperor Justin II sent from Constantinople one of these fragments to be placed in her high altar. This relic was met three miles from the city by a long procession of clergy, bearing banners and censers; and it was for this ceremony that Fortunatus, the Queen's Chaplain, wrote his two great hymns. One small point in the first perhaps calls for comment. The Cross is treated as the Banner of Victory. Why then does it speak of "Royal Banners" in the plural? In medieval processions the large Banner of the Cross was usually escorted by a number of small ones, exhibiting the instruments of the Passion. The second hymn catalogues some of these, the nails, the spear, the vinegar, the gall, the reed. And no doubt this was the case in Radegunde's procession.

 

Being written in the sixth century, both hymns are naturally coloured by ideas that were prevalent then. One strange tradition was that, when Adam was dying, he sent his son Seth to the Garden of Eden to beg forgiveness for his sin; but the Angel at the Gate replied, "The time of pardon is not yet. Thousands of years must pass ere Paradise can be regained. But the wood whereby Redemption will be won shall grow from thy father's tomb." And he gave Seth three seeds from the Tree of Life. When he returned, his father was dead; so he put the seeds in his mouth, and buried him on Golgotha. From them three trees grew, which intertwined into one. Solomon cut this down for his palace; but, as it would not fit, he threw it into the Pool of Bethesda, which became a Pool of Healing. On Good Friday it rose to the surface, and the soldiers used it to make the Cross. This complicated story lies behind Fortunatus' statement in his first hymn that the Cross was "culled from a worthy stock," which he expands in his second:

 

He, our Maker, deeply grieving

That the first-made Adam fell,

When he ate the fruit forbidden,

Whose reward was death and hell,

Marked e'en then this Tree, the ruin

Of the first tree to dispel,

 

Ancient and Modern Revised has dropped this verse, though the older edition retained it.

 

More startling was a theory of the Atonement that was widely believed at this time. It arose from the text, "The Son of Man came to give his life a ransom for many." A ransom is something that sets you free, and it was the experience of thousands that the Cross had set them free from the grip of sin. So it seemed a very suitable word, till someone asked, "To whom was the ransom paid?" Irenaeus made the amazing suggestion, "To Satan." Origen elaborated this idea; and it was accepted even by Augustine and Gregory the Great. It was said that mankind had fallen by sin into slavery to Satan, and Christ wished to redeem us. But Satan, who realized that Jesus was his most dangerous Enemy, would accept no lower price for his slaves than the death of the Redeemer. So Jesus consented to be crucified. But all the time He knew that He was playing a trick on Satan, who had not foreseen the Resurrection! St. Augustine even calls the Cross "the mousetrap" in which Satan was caught! Thus the work for our salvation

 

He ordained to be done,

To the traitor's art opposing

Art yet deeper than his own.

 

Or, as the English Hymnal translates it:

 

That the manifold deceiver's

Art by art might be outweighed.

 

This verse too is dropped in' Ancient and Modern Revised.

 

A statement which naturally puzzles those who like to sing with understanding is the assertion that "in true prophetic song of old' ' David had foretold that God would reign over the heathen "from the Tree." No such prophecy can be found in the Psalter either in the Hebrew or the Septuagint or the Vulgate. But in the Early Middle Ages Psalters were in circulation in which the tenth verse of the Ninety-sixth Psalm ran: "Tell it out among the Heathen that the Lord is reigning from the tree (a ligno)." Justin Martyr and Tertullian both knew that reading, and Fortunatus' Psalter evidently contained these two unauthentic words.

 

But, if we leave David out of the question, it remains true that the Cross is the throne from which Christ rules the world. As soon as the Persecution ceased, and the Church could come out into the open, it adopted the Cross as its symbol. This was rather surprising. Crucifixion was everywhere regarded as the most disgusting and disgraceful form of death, a form of execution reserved for criminals of the lowest type.

 

We might have expected the Church to view the Cross with shuddering horror. But Fortunatus hailed it as "Tree of glory, Tree most fair." The Church marked every new convert with the sign of the Cross. When a building was set apart for public worship it was marked by a consecration cross. When Augustine and his missionary monks marched into Canterbury, a cross was carried at their head. Through all its history the Christian Religion has centred round the Cross.

 

These hymns were written for the reception of a relic that was thought to be part of the Cross, but neither says a word about the relic. Their whole theme is the Cross itself, the Victorious Cross, the Cross that has spoiled and is spoiling the Spoiler of his prey, the Cross that has freed millions of souls from the bondage of sin, the Cross that has been carried from land to land till today there is hardly a tribe on earth that has not heard its message, the Cross that has been the strongest inspiration for every fight against evil. Fortunatus may have had a strange idea as to how the Cross could save.

 

Theories of the Atonement come and go, and we are bound by none of them. But the fact remains beyond all dispute that throughout the ages the Cross has proved the most potent power for transforming men's lives. Christ's words, Christ's works, all have their influence; but it is ' ' from the Tree ' ' that He reigns, Two questions may reasonably be asked of those who sing these hymns: Has the Cross yet won its victory over your own life? Are you willing to be a Cross-bearer, helping to carry the Cross forward to yet greater victories?

 

There are many versions of these hymns in English, including one by Keble and one by Bishop Walsham How, but most books have adopted or adapted those which Neale made for his Medieval Hymns. The plainsong tune to each hymn is the one to which the Latin words have been sung from the beginning, though most modern books add a second time as an alternative. The Vexilla plainsong however suggests magnificently the feeling of a stately procession moving majestically forward. Dante's Inferno shows how familiar the hymn was in his day, for the first canto begins with a parody of it: "The banners of the King of Hell advance."