How do you know when you’ve got an age that’s decadent? Is it when satires are everywhere, because people lash out against dishonesty and folly and luxury (that was once a bad word — and maybe that should be our Word of the Week one of these days)? Or is it when satires are unknown, because everybody’s gone numb to those things? Hard to tell, right? The author of the poem that gave us our Hymn of the Week, “Jerusalem the Golden,” was a Benedictine monk called Bernard of Cluny. He’s most famous for his poem, De Contemptu mundi, On Contempt for the World, and if you think Geoffrey Chaucer had a tart tongue for abuses of power and shameless women and millers who lay a heavy thumb on the scale so as to give less flour to their customers than they’ve paid for, and if you think that Jonathan Swift was fired by what’s called savage indignation, Bernard of Cluny doesn’t yield an inch to either of them. But believe it or not, it’s from this same poem that we get our celebratory hymn! I guess if you live in Graft City all your life, you’ll long all the more ardently for the true city of peace, Jerusalem above. And yet, how do we know that the Graft City of Bernard’s time was worse than the same place in ours? Because he lashed out against it? Maybe it’s the reverse. We don’t know. I mean this: If you’ve got a monk down the road who is calling out your wickedness and who gives some eye-popping descriptions of the Place Down Below, you might end up restraining yourself a bit. You might even fall to your knees and say, “I shall arise and go to my father’s house.” After all, there will be a great feast at the father’s house, instead of starving in the far country, no matter how much worldly food you stuff yourself with.

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In any case, Bernard’s heart isn’t with criticizing this world, but rather with praising the golden city and longing for it, because that’s where the feasting is going to be. Now then, Edward Caswall, the translator, and a writer of hymns on his own part, was a satirist too — at least when he was young, and he wrote a parody of Aristotle, on the Art of Pluck, that is, on the art of getting through your university education while remaining utterly ignorant. Caswall, my friend, thou shouldst be living at this day! Of course, since we’re talking about the 19th century here and England, you’ve got to be familiar with Latin and Greek to get all the jokes. So he says that when a student of Pluck comes upon the sentence in Livy, Hannibal transivit Alpes summa diligentia, meaning “Hannibal crossed the Alps as fast as he could,” he renders it, “Hannibal crossed the Alps on top of a diligence” — a French stagecoach! File that under the category, Grammarians Have Their Fun Too.
Now, the Church had taken some lines from Bernard’s satire and turned them into an Office hymn, Urbs Sion aurea, Sion the Golden City, and that’s what Caswall translated, appending to it a translation of two lines that appear much later, to bring the hymn to a better conclusion. That was clever of him, but then, Caswall was quite a capable poet and translator. He was also a minister of the Church of England, though he did swim the Tiber to become Roman Catholic, he and his wife, following the lead of John Henry Newman, with whom Caswall was a very close collaborator. Some years after his wife passed away, Caswall was ordained a priest, but our hymn today can well be sung by all Christians, in all communions and denominations.

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The hymn is all about fullness and feasting and peace — peace not as a negative, not as the absence of war, but as a full and living and joyful order. The ancient Hebrews, who lived in that semi-arid land of much heat, and streams that go dry in summer, and the precious artesian wells of “living water,” meaning water that flows rather than standing and gathering disease — they would naturally, we’d suppose, long like the deer for cooling streams, and would naturally hope for full harvests, but that, I think, didn’t really make them different from everyone else. For the desert comes in many a form, after all, as does famine, which you can suffer even when your belly is full. Honey was the sweetest food they ever knew, but then, for that intense sweetness united with genuine flavor, do we know anything better? Feasting is for triumph, too, and people who don’t bother to fight won’t know the joy of victory; that’s not a punishment, but just what it means to resign. Who will know the greatest joy of coming home, but those who have turned their hearts homeward, and set forth against all temptations to give in or never to set out to begin with? It’s a solemn hymn, and the melody we sing it to, Ewing (after the composer, Alexander Ewing), is stately, but make no mistake, it is meant to instill in us an ever-growing eagerness for that ultimate homeland, and the wedding feast of the Lamb.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true

Today’s beautiful hymn comes to us from the Sidney Sussex College Choir, Cambridge.

Jerusalem the golden, With milk and honey blest, Beneath thy contemplation Sink heart and voice oppressed; I know not, O I know not What joys await us there, What radiancy of glory, What bliss beyond compare! They stand, those halls of Sion, All jubilant with song, And bright with many an angel, And all the martyr throng; The Prince is ever in them, The daylight is serene, The pastures of the blessed Are decked in glorious sheen. There is the throne of David; And there, from care released, The shout of them that triumph, The song of them that feast; And they who with their Leader Have conquered in the fight, For ever and for ever Are clad in robes of white. O sweet and blessed country, The home of God’s elect! O sweet and blessed country That eager hearts expect! Jesus, in mercy bring us To that dear land of rest, Who art, with God the Father, And Spirit, ever blest.