The Landscape of Faith
Lecture delivered at the National Eisteddfod, Denbigh, 8th August 2001
What is the point of hymns? In a way, to ask the question is to be reminded of its futility. Hymns are not written or sung to make or prove a point, but to give voice to the praise of Almighty God. The psalms have lasted so long and so well as hymns for Christian people because they have been perceived as nothing but the overflow of loving trust and commitment. But the further matter to remember here is that they were never conceived as individual expressions of religious feeling; they gave voice to the beliefs and emotions of a community. They were a witness to what provided for that community its coherence and direction, its orientation towards the reality of God and God's action in history. Once again, the psalms represent in classical form such an orientation: they often recite the history of Israel as the ground for praising or thanking God; or else they build up not a description but an evocation of God's power (he rides on the clouds, his touch sets fire to the mountains or churns up the sea).
But there is another way in which the psalms work, which is important for the later history of hymn writing. Many psalms, although designed for corporate worship, express personal lamentation - sometimes over the fate of Israel, sometimes over the disease or misery of the singer. A hymn, in other words, may also be an attempt to put the experience of failure, guilt or suffering within the context of God's whole action. By reciting such words, I allow myself to see my experiences in a new way; I learn to love and trust God not in general but in particular - in the particular circumstances of the community's suffering or the individual's stress. Like the song of the three young men in the fiery furnace, such words are testimony to the possibility of faith in any and every place; to make these words my own is to express not only praise to God but trust that God will not be finally absent from any place in which I find myself, in pain as well as celebration. It is no accident that Psalm 42, with its moving depiction of the exile's experience, unable to join in the common worship in Jerusalem, became for many early and mediaeval Christian writers one of the classical expressions of the life of prayer, understood not only as praise but as searching and longing. St Augustine's sermons on this psalm are among the greatest of his expositions.
Christian song, then, exists in part to give a map of the landscape of faith. It sets out the direction in which all believing life is going - towards God; so it needs to find vivid and forceful language to express why the journey is worthwhile and why those on the journey are passionately committed to it. And it also sets out how varied the journey will be, what different views will open up as time goes on; how the sky may be completely dark at some points, even when we are still moving forward and feel uncertain as to whether we are making any progress. The work of Christian song as a shared labour in the Church is always to help us see ourselves in such a landscape; to see both the obstacles and problems in the way and the breaks in the clouds which remind us where we are going.
The hymnody of early Christianity is frequently marked by the imagery of light and fire. In what is probably the oldest of all non-biblical hymns, the phos hilaron (translated in Emynau'r Eglwys no.238 as O lewyrch wyneb y tragwyddol Dad), we find the dominant image is from II Corinthians, the light of God's glory in the face of Jesus. And in the very ancient hymns originating in Syria that make up the Odes of Solomon there is a good deal about the garment and crown of light that is put on by the believer in baptism. At this stage, there is relatively little sense of the hymn's text arguing a theological position; but by the fourth century, as Christian disagreements became sharper, there were more hymns that made a conscious effort to stress particular points of theology - the perfect equality of Father and Son in the Trinity, for example. St Ambrose wrote several hymns specifically designed for controversy; and the opponents of the Nicene creed evidently did the same. From this period on, technical terms from theology increasingly find their way into public hymnody; but it would still be misleading to characterise most hymns as designed for doctrinal instruction in the strict sense. And the majority of mediaeval hymns continue to explore what I have called the landscape of faith.
Let me take an example - not that well-known as a hymn, but in fact a fine instance of both words and music, the Compline hymn for Passiontide in the Sarum Rite , Cultor Dei memento. Its opening verse is essentially a simple metaphor to do with Christian initiation:
Cultor Dei memento
Te fontis et lavacri
Rorem subiisse sanctum
Te chrismate innovatum.
['Worshipper of God, remember that you have experienced the holy dew of the fountain and the bath, that you have been renewed by the oil of anointing'.]
It proceeds to describe the Christian at the close of day making the sign of the cross before sleep: the shadows flee before the cross and the soul or mind (mens) is held steadfast by this bodily sign. The endless twists and turnings of the devil's fantasies are quieted, so that the body rests in peace and the mind contemplates Christ 'even while asleep' (tamen sub ipso…sopore). Thus the simple, everyday act of making the sign of the cross is linked with the basic truth of Christian identity ( we have been baptised and anointed) and reinforced as the daily means of leading us away from the devil's complications into the simplicity of faith in Christ. A small action has large meanings; the cross can defeat all the armies of Satan.
This is one kind of 'landscape' in a hymn. You could take other examples, again from mediaeval English usage, like the office hymns for ordinary weekdays, in which the days of creation are given symbolic meanings. Thus the creation of birds and fishes becomes the occasion for praying that we should be delivered both from being 'lifted up' in pride and self-satisfaction and from being drowned in guilt and anxiety. These are simple, almost crude, metaphors, but illustrate clearly how the hymn, in addition to the praise of God, offers a whole set of resources for giving theological meaning to the routine of daily life, especially of course the exceptionally regular routine of the monastery (though there is little or nothing in the texts that would not be applicable to any believer).
Here the hymn is also part of a wider pattern - as the reference in the Compline hymn to baptism and the sign of the cross makes plain. But one of the things I am interested in here is what happens to hymnody when this broader context changes significantly - when the liturgical and ritual and even visual environment of worship is reduced. The Reformation deliberately set out to simplify this context of worship; and its programme regularly included the providing of hymns in the language of the people alongside the reform of public worship. It could reasonably be said that the expansion of verbal resource, including metaphor, had a lot to do with the need to recreate a landscape for the imagination when some of the traditional forms had vanished; I shall want to come back to this idea later on. Some of the first great reformation hymns, of course, were paraphrases of biblical and traditional canticles (think of Luther's great version of the Te Deum, Grosser Gott, wir loben Dir), or versions of the psalms. But along with these, the Reformation also witnessed a development in which a more directly devotional poetry came to be used in public worship, especially in Lutheran countries. The kind of composition which, in the Middle Ages, would have been unlikely to be used in the liturgy was now enshrined as part of the routine of worship. All these are texts that act as a sort of compensation for the disappearance of some of the more vivid ritual forms of an earlier age. In the seventeenth century, Paul Gerhardt's remarkable output of hymnody gave the Lutheran world a frame of devotional reference which was to last for many generations - a kind of liturgy alongside the liturgy, a rich verbal landscape, charting the virtues of tender response to the acts of God in Christ, resignation in adversity and the hope of heaven. Johann Franck, in the same period, produced one of the great classics of eucharistic hymnody (Schmucke dich, mein lieber Seele, translated by Ifor Evans as Ymaddurna, f'annwyl enaid , 295 in Emynau'r Eglwys), but the trend was strongly away from reflections on doctrinal and sacramental subjects towards highly personal material. Hymns focusing on the death of Christ also feature prominently in the Protestant work of this period, looking back to the language of late mediaeval devotion and to the dramatic identification of the believer with the enemies of Jesus in the Holy Week liturgies.
But what I want to draw attention to in this lecture above all is the degree to which, in Welsh hymnody of the golden age (very roughly from 1730 to 1850), the notion of a landscape of faith takes on some characteristics which are fresh and distinctive in relation to the hymns of other nations and traditions, because of the literal centrality of landscape to so much of it. If the typical theme of German Protestant hymns is self-reproach in the face of the sufferings of Christ and resolution to endure the trials of earthly suffering for oneself, the typical theme of classical Welsh hymns is undoubtedly - as has often been noted - the theme of exile, pilgrimage and longing for the heavenly Jerusalem, Canaan fry. It is something that shows little trace before the Revival; Vicar Prichard writes simple didactic verses about the uniqueness of Christ and the sufficiency of grace; and when he turns to the mysteries of faith ( as, wonderfully, in Awn i Fethlem), the tone and content might come from any of the preceding thousand years. Other early Welsh Reformed writers, like Prys, are primarily involved in paraphrasing the psalms. But with the Revival comes a new tone, a new spirit. If you take almost any group of hymns at random from the period I have mentioned, you may be surprised by the high percentage that place these images of wandering and longing at their heart.
Of course, there are parallels in plenty from other countries; Wales did not invent hymnody about Canaan fry. Abelard's O quanta qualia and the anonymous seventeenth century Jerusalem my happy home (itself ably translated into Welsh by David Charles junior) are only two instances of a devotional rhetoric that goes back at least to St Augustine. It is the relative prominence of this in Welsh writing that is interesting. If we ask what is the 'form of life' envisaged by these hymns as normal for Christians, the answer is that it is one of journeying through a dark and unfamiliar territory, possessed by eagerness and an inner vision of another country; only from the perspective of that other country, in the dawn of a new day, can the experiences of this world be seen truly. We shall think at once of David Charles, Caerfyrddin, and that extraordinarily rich hymn, O fryniau Caersalem ceir gweled; but the examples from Pantycelyn are almost impossible to list. Dros y bryniau tywyll niwlog contains all the themes I have listed, and is as comprehensive a map of faith's landscape as we shall find: here and now, we are in cloud and dark; we are promised the coming of a dawn which will lay bare the contours of Tir Emanwel. Less well-known, perhaps, but powerful in its way, is Islwyn's Gwel, uwchlaw cymylau amser,O fy enaid, gwel y tir. This echoes much of Pantycelyn's characteristic imagery, and adds some refinements of it in its fourth verse -
Troir awelon glyn marwolaeth
Oll yn hedd tu yma i'r fan,
Try holl ocheneidiau hiraeth
Yn anthemau ar y lan:
Syrth y deigryn
Olaf i'r Iorddonen ddu.
The awelon should recall the Awel o Galfaria fryn of a more familiar hymn; and the tears swallowed up in the darkness of Jordan give an extra concreteness to the familiar calming of fears in the waters of the river through which Christ has passed that we find in Pantycelyn's most popular composition (Aethost trwyddi gynt dy hunan/ Pam yr ofnaf bellach ddim?). And the hiraeth for Emmanuel's country is briefly but effectively invoked. Islwyn's text reminds us, as so many of the hymns of his generation do, how much of classical Welsh hymnody is improvisation on Pantycelyn's themes. I have, though, to make one great exception: Anne Griffiths will constantly pick up bits of Pantycelyn's vocabulary, and will use some of his favourite Biblical images (rhosyn Saron is dear to both of them); but, while she is most certainly a poet of hiraeth, the powerfully physical sense of landscape in Pantycelyn and others is far less marked. The myrtwydd of her best-known hymn are scriptural trees before they are local; the Dwr i'w nofio heb fynd trwyddo has biblical resonance again, but represents a slightly different theological emphasis from Pantycelyn, another landscape, reflecting her typical awareness of the possibility of enjoying now the timeless and 'purposeless' contemplation of heaven - while Pantycelyn is typically more aware of the present constraints and the passion to go beyond them. Anne Griffiths's world of faith is far less a journey in storm and cloud: she is a traveller, indeed, but on a Ffordd heb ddechreu, eto'n newydd,/ Ffordd yn gwneud y meirw'n fyw;/ Ffordd I ennill ei thrafelwyr,/ Ffordd yn Briod, ffordd yn Ben. The dawn she longs for is less the dawn lighting up the view over a countryside, as it seems to be in Pantycelyn, but the dawn that lets the beloved see her lover's face.
I don't want at all to overstate this contrast; but fairness obliges me to admit that Anne does occupy a different visual world. It is time now, though, to reflect for a moment on what factors contribute to what I have called the strongly physical or material sense of the landscape of faith in Pantycelyn and many of his successors. One might point to the simple fact that a literate but non-urban society like early modern Wales naturally reaches for metaphors drawn from its daily surroundings. But there are deeper issues involved. I said earlier that the disappearance of the material ritual forms of older religion resulted in the fuller development of a 'verbal landscape', and this, too, evidently plays a crucial part. It is worth remembering that the eighteenth century saw two developments that relate to this. The Revival helped to clear away some of the remaining fragments of folk-piety in Wales, and also built upon the mass literacy campaign of Gruffydd Jones. Words had become decisively the medium in which the map of human experience before God was drawn, as symbols and rites faded away. And the words most readily available were those of the Bible.
The partial result of this is a kind of 'fusion' of local landscape with biblical landscape. Although other nations saw themselves as modern equivalents of the chosen people of Scripture (and much work has been done on the importance of this theme in Reformation England), we do not find elsewhere with quite such clarity the sense of a whole physical environment seen through the medium of the Bible. The traces of this are still evident in the biblical place-names common in parts of Wales, as well as in the growing nineteenth century habit of naming chapels for biblical locations. To call a local place of worship by a name from Scripture was in effect to say that it was a local outpost of Tir Emanwel. And while it is hard to find evidence for any conscious theological reflection on this, it cannot be doubted that all this exercised a powerful influence on the minds of Welsh Nonconformists. The landscape of faith was the immediate environment in its material and physical detail - but also a landscape seen as a sort of shadow of the real country of God. What we actually and physically see now is something like a familiar territory in which we are feeling our way in the dark; when morning comes, we shall see the true landscape, the inner life, you might say, of the physical world around us. So we long and yearn to arrive on the far side of Jordan, to arrive on the peaks of bryniau Caersalem; but those rivers and peaks are strongly imagined in terms of what is now before us.
As always happens with metaphor, both elements are affected. The language of Pantycelyn or Islwyn seems to conceive heaven, the experience of God's near presence, as a 'countryside' more often than a city of God; and the countryside itself receives a sort of 'aura' from its metaphorical use. It is not that we can redefine the classical writers as nature mystics of some kind; they weren't. And there is little or no sense of simply finding grace or meaning through the contemplation of a natural environment. But the effect of the poetry is to produce what I have been arguing is a rather distinctive sense or ethos of faith. Because of the divine promises, we know that the action of God in respect of us is the same as the action of God towards his people in the Bible. Like them, we name our physical landscape so as to remind us of that pattern, that environment of divine action. We also know that we are at present in the middle of doubt, trial, darkness and turmoil: the environment around us is not yet the heavenly country. But, once again, God has promised that light will dawn over the cloud-covered hills, and make the landscape take shape, make sense. So, in one of Pantycelyn's famous images, we expect our heavenly home to appear as it were around every corner.
This is in fact a very sophisticated way of reading and using the Bible. It treats the Bible itself as something that creates a landscape by way of its narrative: because the Bible is a story of exile, pilgrimage, hope and return, there is an obvious sense in which place, environment, is essential to the very structure of biblical meaning. Even more to the point, the narrative tells us that God's people regularly fail to recognise where they are as the place where God's will is to be encountered: in the desert, they want to return to Egypt, in the promised land, they want the extension of their boundaries and their worldly power, after the fall of Jerusalem, they refuse to accept the Babylonian occupation and try to escape. They cannot see that wherever they find themselves is a gift from God - so that every landscape can be a landscape of faith. The grace of God transforms the material environment - as in Second Isaiah - and reveals it as a theatre for God's action.
So for us to identify our physical landscape with that of the Bible is not just to say that Wales is a sacred country, in the rather sentimental style familiar in some kinds of nineteenth century piety. It is to say that here in Wales - and anywhere - the Christian has to be aware that where he or she actually is is where God is to be found. This is the landscape of covenant, exodus, restoration. But this means that this is also the landscape of error, blindness, misrecognition. We walk on in the trust that a way can be found, and that at the end of the journey we shall find ourselves in a place from which the path will be clear as we look back. Meanwhile, we continue in the desert or the dark, repeating our faith that this and nothing other is in fact the land of promise. Tir Emanwel is here and now. The longest and hardest journey is the one to where we actually stand.
All hymnody, I have been suggesting, creates a landscape, places us somewhere. Patristic and mediaeval hymnody often places us in our theological home as imagined in the Catholic sacramental system, clothing our acts with symbolism and reminding us that what is done in the sacraments is only a making visible of the hidden transformations that grace performs in us. Some classical Lutheran hymnody places us before the cross, so that we can see ourselves in that landscape, as occupying the place of Christ's enemies who crucified him. I have been drawing attention to a distinctive element in the Welsh hymns of the golden age which evokes that landscape of faith as the landscape of rural Wales, understood as itself the hidden land of promise, where we wait for dawn to show us what is really before our eyes. In the words of the second century apocryphal gospel of Thomas, 'The Kingdom of the Father is spread abroad upon the earth, but human beings do not see it'.
And all this suggests some concluding reflections. Most of our contemporaries do not inhabit one consistent landscape; they do not see themselves as belonging in a single coherent place which gives shape to their lives, which makes of their personal records a real history. They are more likely to think in terms of roles than of places. The postmodern mind tends to see our identity as a mixture of roles we choose and functions that are given to us. Christian faith is not so much something that gives answers, theories to explain life; it is not even the providing of more satisfying roles to play (though this is a bit nearer the truth). It is an introduction into a new country. This may in many hymns be simply the space of the Church's practice, the world marked out by the sacraments. It may be an introduction into the world of the Bible in the sense of involving us in biblical narratives, especially the story of Christ's passion. Or, as in our own hymns, it may be something more complex: a way of seeing the immediate environment as Canaan in disguise - sometimes a quite thin disguise, the sort of illusory changes that moonlight may give to a view. It is not that far away from Francis Thompson's famous vision of Jacob's ladder 'pitched between heaven and Charing Cross'. And what then gives shape and meaning to the life lived in that landscape is the sense of two things: time moving towards dawn, towards enlightenment; and a journey moving towards a goal, even if it is a journey deeper and deeper into the same landscape ('further up and further in', to borrow C.S. Lewis's language at the end of the Narnia chronicles, where Lewis offers something of the same picture of the 'disguised' landscape as I am proposing here).
If we have forgotten how to sing hymns, we have forgotten how to locate ourselves religiously. We live nowhere. And there are kinds of religious song which, because of their sentimental emptiness or their lack of metrical and imaginative interest, simply do not deliver; they may edify, they may assist feelings of devotion, but they do not set us in a place where we may begin to grow and to see ourselves in a new wholeness. The great office hymns of the Middle Ages and the hymns of a Luther, a Gerhardt or a Wesley work differently. So, in a quite distinctive way, do the landscapes of our own writers. I would dare to say that they have in some ways even more to offer the rootless modern or postmodern imagination because they do not try to locate us in a world of religious symbol but in a specific locality, the here and now of rural Wales, that is being understood and imagined in terms of another specific locality, the Holy Land. The Holy land is a country like others; what is different about it is simply that it is here that those who received God's revelation learned to travel on in darkness, to expect God's touch, God's light - so that every corner, every stone spoke of God. To live here - whether in Wales or anywhere else - as if in Canaan is to change how we see the environment. It affects not only how we value our own histories (as something more than a series of disconnected responses to stimuli) but also how we value our literal landscape and its ecology. It may be that to live without a landscape of faith is to risk having no real landscape of any kind: to live in a world without depth, a world in which all that matters is the individual will and its choices. Perhaps it is true that, as the Australian aborigines a re said to believe, the land around us exists as we call it up by our singing.