Lord Jesus, think on me

It is curious that the brief 5th-c text by Synesius of Cyrene was (in 1876) expanded into a fuller and rather different hymn by Allen William Chatfield, first of 4 stzs, then 8. Many hymn-books now print 6. While adopting Chatfield’s opening line, the present book has returned to the simplicity and brevity of the Gk original. It is the last of 10 odes, serving as an epilogue to the others. The drawback of the longer versions is that they appear to attribute perplexity and depression to sin; HTC attempted to remedy this (in Lord Jesus, think of me) by avoiding the reference to sin: ‘… and take away my fear’; this, however, raises other questions, and still leaves the hymn some way from its authentic roots. The Gk text Mnoeo Christe is printed in the Historical Companion to Hymns A&M, and a prose translation in Routley’s A Panorama of Christian Hymnody. The present free paraphrase was made for this book.

The Welsh PENMAEN accompanies the longer version of the hymn in GH, but is not otherwise widely used. It is a traditional melody which the equally little-known M C Griffith arranged in the late 19th c. The name comes from S Wales; one Penmaen is near Newport, another near Swansea. Other associated tunes are Damon’s SOUTHWELL, Stainer’s ST PAUL’S, and the 1960 composition by Geoffrey Beaumont, MEMENTO.

b Cyrene, N Africa c365–375, d c414 (given in Praise! as c430). Brought up in a wealthy family as a pagan gentleman, he studied at Alexandria under the neo-Platonist Hypatia, before travelling to Constantinople in 397 in a vain effort to make the emperor Arcadius take the Gothic incursions with due seriousness. A man of both practical vision and philosophic tastes, he slowly accepted the truth of the Christian faith and in 403 married a Christian lady. In 410 he became Bishop of Ptolemais (Akko, or Acre, on the Mediterranean coast N of Haifa) partly because he could obtain help from the imperial authorities to enrich his own less affluent province. His writings retained traces of Neo-Platonism, based on the views of the 3rd-c Plotinus merged with some eastern mysticism. In 1851 Charles Kingsley included him in the first of his historical novels, Hypatia, or New Foes with Old Faces, which however had a mixed reception for other reasons. His life and work were treated by Alice Gardner in 1886 and W T Crawford, 1901, but there is little (in English) of more recent date. No.679.