The hymn we have just sung is a tour de force of theological poetry (or poetic theology, if you like). It is in keeping with the huge outpouring of new hymnody that accompanied the Oxford movement and rise of anglo-catholicism in the 19th century, but by the time John Henry Newman wrote it, he had converted to Roman Catholicism; eventually became a Cardinal, and one of the most important Roman Catholic theologians of modern times.
The hymn is in fact the last section of a much longer, 35-verse poem which Newman submitted to a cultural magazine in 1865. Entitled “The Dream of Gerontius”, it tells of the journey of the Christian soul through the gate of death, to the world beyond. The section that forms this hymn is sung by a chorus of angels as the soul enters the presence of Christ – they are celebrating Christ’s redemptive work by which the believer is enabled to face death without fear. The hymn as we have just sung it started to appear in hymnals soon after it was written, so the words were already well known when, in 1900, the whole poem was set to music by Edward Elgar – when we see these words some of us may well hear Elgar’s choral music ringing in our ears.
Praise to the holiest in the height
And in the depth be praise
Holiness was a key theme for the nineteenth-century High Church revival, and here God is holy, transcendent, the creator of heaven and earth. We are reminded of the vision of Isaiah from which we get the words of the Sanctus, or of the psalms: ‘Praise the Lord of heaven, praise him in the height. Praise him, all ye angels of his, praise him all his host’; ‘the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork.’
But this is not the whole story; Newman goes on to say:
In all his words most wonderful
Most sure in all his ways
Here is a God who has revealed himself in his words and in his actions – even though he is the most holy, he has not remained hidden and set apart from us. Rather, he has revealed himself to us through words – the prophets, scripture, and supremely the Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ – and through deeds: the ‘ways’ of God are his love in action, all that he has done for us and for our salvation.
It is this love in action that forms the subject of the rest of the hymn. What God has done to reveal his love is to rescue humanity from our sin and shame; he has delivered us from that which has ensnared us.
Newman goes on to unfold what he calls God’s ‘loving wisdom’ in a way that can only be understood if we understand the scripture that inspired the hymn. This hymn is strongly biblical, as many hymns are. Like Charles Wesley, whose hymns are densely and richly packed with allusions to scripture, Newman recognised that hymns are powerful vehicles for getting Christian truth into people's hearts and minds.
The New Testament reading today is one of those passages to which he is referring. It goes on to say ‘As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven…’ St Paul and Newman are trying to get across that there are two representatives of humanity: Adam who sinned, and Christ who came to save us from the sin. By our humanity we are linked to both: in our sin we are like Adam, but through God’s grace we are united to Christ and so receive his gift of righteousness and eternal life.
Verse 3 goes into more detail. This salvation springs from the loving wisdom of God – there is divine wisdom as well as divine love in the way in which our redemption has been achieved. The wisdom in God’s action is that because it was humanity that failed, so it is in humanity that God has wrought our redemption. It was our flesh and blood that failed, so God uses flesh and blood of the incarnation to redeem our flesh and blood. In coming to earth Christ identified completely with humanity, sharing our nature, so that as our representative he could strive afresh against the foe, and this time not fail as Adam did.
If verse 3 has explored the human side of the incarnation, then it is for verse 4 to express the presence of God in Christ. Newman was a fine theologian, and this is an intensely theological hymn, and he was also a poet – when it is not immediately clear sometimes what he means, that obscurity is part of Newman’s way of retaining the mystery that is at the heart of the incarnation.
The ‘higher gift than grace’ has long confused many people – to the extent that in some versions it has been changed to ‘a higher gift of grace’. But Newman was right the first time. What he is saying here is that, in the incarnation, God gave us more than grace, he gave us himself. In the person of Jesus, God was embodied, enfleshed: ‘God’s very presence, and his very self, and essence all divine’. St Paul wrote in the letter to the Colossians [2.9], ‘it is in Christ that the complete being of the Godhead dwells embodied’, and in the prologue to the gospel of John we read, ‘in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’. It’s only by this understanding of Jesus as fully divine and fully human that we can make any sense of the New Testament teaching about how it is that Jesus achieved our salvation by his passion and resurrection.
So it is in verse 5 that Newman turns to the passion: ‘O generous love’ – how can we comprehend it? The language in this verse is poetic because the concept is so far above anything that we can really express in words. If we struggle to understand the grammar, perhaps that’s partly why. I have seen a version of these lines in which someone has tried to render it in inclusive language – avoiding using the word ‘man’ when all humanity is meant. It’s an interesting exercise to do this, because it forces us to make sure we’ve understood when ‘man’ refers to Christ and when it refers to us. The alternative version reads as follows:
O generous love! that he, who came
as man to smite our foe,
the double agony for us
as man should undergo.
Of course it ruins Newman’s poetry, and also removes some of the deliberate mystery about the verse. What Newman is trying to get across is the extraordinary fact that God should become a human being, for the sake of human beings, in order to solve a problem created by human beings. When God defeated the foe it was as Man (ie in Jesus) and he did this for the sake of humanity; it is only because Jesus came as a fully human person that he was able to get to what it was that was corrupting humanity. The repetition of the word in Newman’s original version really is the best way of expressing it. To simplify the language fails to do justice to what is behind it.
Verse 6 at first seems like an odd way to follow this, but it does make sense continuing on from verse 5. The ‘double agony’ is the agony of body and spirit that Jesus suffered; we sometimes forget the spiritual anguish of the cross, which began in the garden, secretly, and lead up to the cry of desolation on the cross, ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
These two verses link what the cross has done for us and what it teaches us – how the live and how to die. The whole hymn is about the cross as redemption, but it is also our inspiration. Because on the cross Jesus has achieved our salvation, the cross is also where we look when we want to know how it is that we can face death not with fear, but with confidence. The favourite hymn for Good Friday, ‘when I survey the wondrous cross’ does a similar thing – if hymns did not inspire us, why would we keep singing them?
The message of this hymn and of the whole of Newman’s long poem is that through the incarnation and the passion of Christ, our redemption has been accomplished. And so it makes sense that we repeat the first verse at the end. Praise sounds odd in the context of death, but it makes sense in the light of New Testament teaching – the Christian looks at death in quite a different way form the unbeliever: to be sure, there is anguish in dying – for us as well as for Christ – but death itself can be faced calmly and confidently, in the light of Christ’s victory over death.
For this reason, the angels’ song of praise is used as a refrain through the whole of Newman’s poem. The love and wisdom of God in achieving our salvation is something so amazing, that it demands poetry rather than prose, and, as readers of Newman’s poem soon realized, it demands to be sung. Our right response to what God has done for us is to glorify him – our praise from the depths joins with the praise of angels in the heights; perhaps you, like me, are reminded of another great poem-hymn, this time by George Herbert: ‘the heavens are not too high, his praise may thither fly, the earth is not too low, his praises there may grow’. In both hymns, the tune reflects the words: height and depth, heaven and earth, are encompassed in tunes which plumb the depths and soar the heights in their melodic line. For those who know Elgar’s music, these words will always be sung by the angels, but when we sing it ourselves the tune by JB Dykes says it all: rich and expansive, but also strangely intimate and emotive. It does indeed seem to capture the height and depth of things, allowing us to join in with the angels’ song and with the Saviour’s humanity, with Jesus’ suffering and with his triumph.
God has redeemed us in Christ, and because we end with Christ’s victory over sin and death, it is quite appropriate to end where we started, with the praise of God on earth and in heaven.
Amen.