O come, O come, Immanuel

Few ‘standard’ hymns have such varied texts as this one. Their divergence results from loyalties split between differing families of paraphrases based mainly on J M Neale (A&M) and T A Lacey (EH), adherence to the anonymous 18th-c metrical Lat, respect for the antiphons a thousand years earlier still, and a love of the scriptural titles for our Lord Jesus Christ on which these in turn were based. Add the legitimate concern of most editors to provide an authentic but intelligible vehicle for a contemporary congregation’s praise; and out of such a mix, almost miraculously, comes this gloriously unique hymn! The original 7 antiphons (seasonally sung scriptural extracts, in this case ‘the great O’s of Advent’) date from the 6th or 7th cents, and were used, one at a time, on the days leading up to Christmas; they were used from the feast labelled ‘O Sapientia’ (‘O Wisdom, which camest out of the mouth of the Most High …’, 17 Dec) in the traditional church calendar. The 7th and last is ‘O Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the hope of all nations and their Saviour, come and save us, O Lord our God’.

The Lat versification is first found in the 7th edn of a Cologne Psalter from 1710; John Mason Neale paraphrased the text in 1851; when published in his Hymnal Noted (1854) it was already much changed. A&M adapted it further in 1861; the Jubilate version and stz-order adopted here, prepared c1980 for HTC, is based mainly on Neale, though the second half of stz 3 comes from Lacey’s version. One repeated change which removes ‘thou’ also enriches stzs 2–4 with initial adjectives. Like most subsequent books including Praise!, A&M and EH are content with 5 stzs; Sing Glory (1999) provides a contemporary version of all 7. As it stands here, the hymn is constructed on a biblical framework of Matthew 1:23; Exodus 19–20; Isaiah 11:1; and Revelation 22:16 (formerly ‘Dayspring’ from Luke 1:78, as in 405) and Revelation 3:7, with many other interweaving themes including exile and resurrection. Writing in 1979 on translated Lat hymns, Erik Routley judged this and 367 to be ‘among the twenty most-used hymns in all Christendom’.

The plainsong melody, now named VENI IMMANUEL from the opening Lat words, was marked ‘From a French Missal in the National Library, Lisbon’ when it was included by Thos Helmore in The Hymnal Noted, Pt II 1854, arranged as a 19th-c hymn tune. J H Arnold arranged it as plainsong for the 1933 edn of EH, a move which was vindicated by the discovery in 1966 of ‘a small 15th-c processional which had belonged to French Franciscan nuns’—so the Companion to Rejoice and Sing p143, qv. It is often the only tune of its kind in evangelical hymnals, which are usually wary of the plainchant mode (see 442 and 522). Part of its distinctiveness lies in its basically simple structure, balancing rising or falling triad/chord shapes; the present arrangement was made by Noël Tredinnick at All Souls’ Langham Place, London, in 1974, and published in HTC and elsewhere.

b at Lamb’s Conduit St, Bloomsbury, Middx (C London) 1818, d East Grinstead, Sussex 1866. He was taught privately and at Sherborne Sch; Trinity Coll Cambridge (BA 1840), then Fellow and Tutor at Downing Coll. On 11 occasions he won the annual Seatonian Prize for a sacred poem. Ordained in 1841, he was unable to serve as incumbent of Crawley, Sussex, through ill health, and spent 3 winters in Madeira. He became Warden of Sackville Coll, E Grinstead, W Sussex, from 1846 until his death 20 years later. This was a set of private almshouses; in spite of a stormy relationship with his bishop and others over ‘high’ ritualistic practices, he developed an original and organised system of poor relief both locally and in London, through the sisterhood communities he founded.

With Thos Helmore, Neale compiled the Hymnal Noted in 1852, which did much to remove the tractarian (‘high church’) suspicion of hymns as essentially ‘nonconformist’. Among his many other writings, arising from a vast capacity for reading, was the ground-breaking History of the Eastern Church and the rediscovery and rejuvenating of old carols (collections for Christmas in 1853 and Easter the year following). His untypical, eccentric but popular item Good King Wenceslas was a target for the barbs of P Dearmer, qv, who (like others since) voiced the hope in 1928 that it ‘might be gradually dropped’.

Neale and his immediate circle had a pervasive effect on many things Anglican, including architecture, furnishing and liturgy, which has lasted until our own day. He founded and led the Camden Society and edited the journal The Ecclesiologist in order to give practical local expression to the doctrines of the Tractarians. But his greatest literary work lay in his translation of classic Gk and Lat hymns. In this he pioneered the rediscovery of some of the church’s medieval and earlier treasures, and his academic scholarship blended with his considerable and disciplined poetic gifts which showed greater fluency with the passing years. Like Chas Wesley he was an extraordinarily fast worker, given the high quality of so much of his verse. His translations from Lat, mainly 1852–65, kept the rhythm of the sources; among his original hymns (1842–66) he was critical of his own early attempts to write for children. But he considered that a text in draft should be given plenty of time to mature or be improved; he voluntarily submitted many texts to an editorial committee. Even so, some were attacked by RCs because in translation he had removed some offensive Roman doctrines; others, because they leant too far in a popish direction. His own position was made clear by such gems as, ‘We need not defend ourselves against any charge of sympathising with vulgarity in composition or Calvinism in doctrine’.

Of his final Original Sequences and Hymns (1866), many were written ‘before my illness’, some over 20 years earlier, and ‘the rest are the work of a sick bed’—JMN, writing a few days before his death. His daughter Mary assisted in collecting his work, and many of his sermons were published. He was familiar with some 20 languages, and had a notable ministry among children, writing several children’s books. He had strong views on music, and was a keen admirer of the poetry of John Keble, qv. 72 items (most of them paraphrases) are credited to him in EH, and he has always been wellrepresented in A&M, featuring 30 times in the current (2000) edn, Common Praise. Julian gives him extended treatment and notes ‘the enormous influence Dr Neale has exercised over modern hymnody’. In A G Lough’s significantly titled The Influence of John Mason Neale (1962) and Michael Chandler’s 1995 biography, while the main interest of the writers lies elsewhere, there are interesting chapters respectively on his ‘Hymns, Ballads and Carols’ and his ‘Hymns and Psalms’. What Charles Wesley was with original texts, so was Neale with translations, not least in the sense that, as a contemporary put it, ‘he was always writing’. Nos.225, 297*, 338, 346, 371*, 407, 442, 472, 567, 881, 971.