O matchless beauty of our God

The beauty of God is a biblical theme (cf Psalms 27.4, 90:17) which demands great sensitivity in its treatment, whether in prose or verse. In this case the prose was provided in the original Lat of Augustine of Hippo c400, and the verse paraphrase by Colin Thompson in 1987. Augustine’s Confessions Bk 10 contains a prayer beginning ‘Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new … You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness …’ The 1992 translator Henry Chadwick is quoted in the Companion to Rejoice and Sing as saying that ‘Augustine’s Latin in this chapter is a work of high art, with rhymes and poetic rhythms not reproducible in translation. He is fusing imagery from the Song of Solomon with … reflection on Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium, and simultaneously summarising the central themes of the Confessions’. The hymn-writer echoes this language while adding touches of his own, such as 1.4 and 6.4 recalling Psalm 110:3, and 5.3–4 from Isaiah 61:3. His version appeared first in Rejoice and Sing, 1991.

For notes on Gordon Slater’s tune ST BOTOLPH see 337, where it is arranged in the key of E flat. In RS the words are set to STRACATHRO (343).

b Tagaste, N Africa 354, d Hippo (now Bône, Algeria), N Africa 430. Born to a pagan father and a Christian mother (Monica, to whose prayers he owed an incalculable debt), he received a Christian education. At the Univ of Carthage he studied rhetoric to prepare for the legal profession but then switched to literature, at the same time abandoning any form of Christian faith and taking a mistress. In 373 he turned to philosophy and for 9 years adopted Manichaeism, blending mystery, myth and dualism with an austere lifestyle. Disillusioned by its superstition and ineffectiveness, he then went briefly to Rome to teach rhetoric but this time was disgusted with his own students. His next home was Milan, where he was moved by the preaching of Bp Ambrose (qv) and drew close to a Christian position, holding back only because of the call to holiness. But in summer 386 he had the experience of hearing a voice say ‘Tolle, lege…Take, read’, turned to Rom 13:13, and was decisively converted, submitting at last to ‘put on’ (or be clothed with) Christ. After months in seclusion he was baptized at Easter 387, returning to N Africa in 388 to found a Christian community. But on a visit to Hippo Regius in 391 he was unexpectedly and suddenly persuaded to be ordained; within 4 years he was assistant bishop, then sole bishop of Hippo from c396 until his death there in 430, with the Vandals besieging the city. His leadership and written works established him as one of the universal church’s foremost teachers and ‘doctors’, combating heretical and unworthy concepts of God, including the ‘British heresy’ of Pelagianism which taught that human freewill and good works provided the way to salvation. So Augustine is strongest on concepts of divine grace as taught by the apostle Paul, and successors such as Calvin, the Reformers and Puritans etc. Much of his writing was born of controversy, his greatest works being the Confessions (c400, not merely autobiography) and The City of God (in 22 bks, 413–426 following the traumatic fall of Rome in 410, contrasting the earthly and heavenly kingdoms). Both books have been constantly reissued and re-edited and have remained continuously in print; Charles Colson names their author as second only to C S Lewis in forming his own spiritual understanding, and the American evangelical leaders D James Kennedy, David McKenna and R Albert Mohler jr pay him similar tributes. As well as Augustine’s immense theological influence, resented as it inevitably is by later liberalism, many quotations have passed into popular Christian use in prayers and hymns, as here. No.737.

b Exeter, Devon 1945. Oxford Univ, MA, PhD. Ordained in the URC, 1971; formerly Chaplain to the Univ of Sussex; currently (2011) Lecturer in Spanish at Oxford. His first published hymn was Christian people, raise your song, in New Church Praise, 1975. Including paraphrases he has 7 items in Rejoice and Sing (1991), on whose editorial committee he served, and 3 in Common Praise (2000). One text and a paraphrase feature in the 2005 edn of A Panorama of Christian Hymnody. He has supplied articles and reviews to periodicals such as the Journal of Theological Studies, and written several books. No.737.