Of The Father's Love Begotten: A Song History
The words of this Christmas hymn go back to Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, born in 348 in Caesaraugusta (now Zaragoza, Spain), who practiced law and twice served as a provincial governor before devoting himself to Christian poetry.[1] The hymn comes from his Cathemerinon, a set of twelve lyric poems keyed to the daily round and to feasts of the church year.[1] The Latin lines, beginning Corde natus ex parentis, were drawn from a longer poem in that cycle, and a Discipleship Ministries article by Dr. Hawn reads them as a reply to Arian teaching, which denied that the Son was co-eternal with the Father.[2] The sources consulted here differ on when Prudentius died: Britannica says only that it was after 405, while Hymnary.org gives about 413.[1][3]
Primo Miniatore di San Domenico, Bifolium from an Antiphonary: Music, ink, tempera and gold on parchment, c. 1320–40. Medieval chant notation, shown for the plainchant melody DIVINUM MYSTERIUM; these pages hold different chants.
John Mason Neale's English version appeared in six stanzas in The Hymnal Noted in 1854; Henry W. Baker's nine-stanza revision, which Hymnary.org dates to 1859, was then printed in Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1861.[3] The melody, DIVINUM MYSTERIUM, is a medieval chant first attached to a different Latin text, and it was paired with Prudentius's words only later.[2][4] Dates for the chant vary: Hawn assigns it to the eleventh century, while Hymnary.org's notes cite manuscripts of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries.[2][4] Theodoricus Petri's Piae Cantiones of 1582 printed the tune in triple meter, and some hymnals still use that form while others keep the free rhythm of chant.[4]
The harmonization found in The United Methodist Hymnal, where the hymn is number 184, comes from C. Winfred Douglas, music editor of the Episcopal Hymnal 1940.[2] Hymnary.org lists the text in more than two hundred hymnals.[3] On the dulcimer, it is one of twelve Christmas pieces Larry Conger arranges fingerstyle in DAD tuning in Nine Lessons And Carols, a Fingers Of Steel download that includes an MP3 recording of each tune.[5]
Sources
- Britannica: "Prudentius".
- Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: 'Of the Father's Love Begotten'".
- Hymnary.org: "Of the Father's Love Begotten".
- Hymnary.org: "DIVINUM MYSTERIUM".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Nine Lessons And Carols".
- Image: Primo Miniatore di San Domenico, Bifolium from an Antiphonary: Music, ink, tempera and gold on parchment, c. 1320–40. The Cleveland Museum of Art.