Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence: A Song History
"Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence" is an English verse paraphrase of a chant from the Liturgy of St. James, an early eucharistic rite associated with the church in Jerusalem; the passage, known as the Cherubic Hymn, accompanied the bringing forward of the bread and wine.[1] The liturgy was long credited to James, the brother of Jesus, but C. Michael Hawn writes that it seems to have taken shape under Cyril of Jerusalem around 347 and to have grown afterward.[2] Sources differ on its date: the Hymnology Archive places the Orthodox form of the rite in the late fourth or early fifth century and notes that one of its oldest surviving manuscripts dates from the ninth.[3] Hymnary.org's notes, for their part, give both the fifth century and the late fourth.[1]
Paten (Dedicated to Saint Sergius) from the Beth Misona Treasure, silver, Syria, c. 500. An early Syrian paten for the eucharistic bread, shown for the liturgy the hymn comes from; it has no connection to the hymn.
Gerard Moultrie (1829–1885), an Anglican clergyman, versified the passage in four stanzas, first printed in the second edition of Orby Shipley's Lyra Eucharistica (1864), a book of Communion hymns, working from a prose translation that J. M. Neale had published in 1859.[3] The Psalter Hymnal Handbook, reproduced on Hymnary.org, adds that he studied at Exeter College, Oxford, and translated hymns from Greek, Latin and German.[1] Some editors have since cut or reworded the second stanza out of concern over its eucharistic theology, and Percy Dearmer's version in Songs of Praise (enlarged edition, 1931) begins by echoing Moultrie's but is otherwise largely Dearmer's own writing.[3]
The tune, PICARDY, first appeared in Chansons Populaires des Provinces de France (Paris, 1860), taken down from Mme. Pierre Dupont and set for piano by J. B. Wekerlin; she had learned it as a child in Picardy.[3] Ralph Vaughan Williams first matched it with Moultrie's words in The English Hymnal of 1906, and the two have rarely been parted since.[3][2] Hymnals often label the melody a seventeenth-century French carol, though the Hymnology Archive finds the grounds for that date unclear.[4][3] Hymnary.org counts the text in some two hundred hymnals, from The United Methodist Hymnal to Evangelical Lutheran Worship, and the Psalter Hymnal Handbook commends it for Communion during the Christmas season.[1] Larry Conger includes it in Christmas Duets For Mountain Dulcimer, a Fingers Of Steel book of twenty arrangements, where it is one of four pieces written for EBE tuning with a capo at the first fret instead of DAD.[5]
Sources
- Hymnary.org: "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence".
- Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: 'Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence'" (C. Michael Hawn).
- Hymnology Archive: "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence".
- Hymnary.org: "PICARDY".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Christmas Duets For Mountain Dulcimer".
- Image: Paten (Dedicated to Saint Sergius) from the Beth Misona Treasure, silver, Syria, c. 500. The Cleveland Museum of Art.