Gaudeat Ecclesia, Now and Always
For most of us adults, Christmas is a time of warmth and coziness, anticipation and nostalgia, cheer and generosity. These are suitable for celebrating the birth of a baby who was a great gift. So much of the music we love captures these aspects of Christmas. Think of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Fantasia on Christmas Carols,” moving from the dark warmth of a solo cello through the heavens’ rejoicing over the newborn king to quiet wishes for a happy new year—a perfect musical expression of peace and comfort. By contrast, our children are full of an electric excitement and rejoicing that can be difficult for us to find again.
Medieval Christmas was like this, too. In the mid-1990s, the great early music ensemble Sequentia made two recordings of Christmas music from monasteries of twelfth-century Aquitaine. They give us insight into the medieval view of Christmas, which is one of wonder and awe—almost a joyful stupor—at God’s quietly entering the natural world.
“Marian Christmas texts abound with ‘symbols of the impossible,’” the group’s directors Barbara Thornton and Benjamin Bagby write, “and often the sophisticated modalities and highly colored polyphonies of Aquitanian repertoire seem to create a parallel aura of excitement and mystery typical of these paradoxes.”
A flourishing duchy with deep monastic roots and numerous communities, male and female, Aquitaine was also the home of the troubadours, secular musicians whose songs shaped Europe’s culture and ethic of love. These musical communities cross-pollinated when troubadours spent their “off season” in the cloister creating new verses and melodies before returning to courtly gatherings after Easter. The great monastery of St. Martial de Limoges housed numerous manuscripts that record this confluence of secular and sacred music, particularly music celebrating Christmas and the Incarnation.
Excitement, mystery, and rejoicing in paradoxes or symbols of the impossible: these stand out as the dominant themes of Christmas in medieval Aquitaine. Not excitement because of things in this world, like presents—although surely medieval men and women looked forward to the gifts, feasts, and special traditions they enjoyed every year, just as we do—but excitement at heaven’s breaking into earth and quietly turning the order of the world upside down. When performed, that excitement sounds more like a drinking song than Gregorian chant.
Verbum patris umanatur, O, O
dum puella salutatur, O, O
salutata fecundatur,
viri nescia,
Eya, eya, nova gaudia!
Novus modus geniture, O, O
sed excedens ius nature, O, O
dum unitur creature
creans omnia.
Eya, eya, nova gaudia!
…
Audi partum preter morem, O, O
virgo parit salvatorem, O, O
creatura creatorem,
patrem filia.
Eya, eya, nova gaudia!
The Father’s Word is made human, O, O
as the girl is greeted, O, O;
greeted, she is made fruitful,
knowing no man.
Hurrah, hurrah, such are the new joys!
A new mode of begetting, O, O
Yet surpassing nature’s right, O, O
When the all-creator is united
To the creature.
Hurrah, hurrah, such are the new joys!
…
Hear of a childbearing unparalleled, O, O
The maiden gives birth to the Savior, O, O
The creature to the Creator,
The daughter to her Father.
Hurrah, hurrah, such are the new joys!
An interesting distinction emerges from the jollity here. Compare these images with some of the dominant themes of King Lear. In that play, fathers become children and children take the place of fathers, but it is to illustrate a world falling apart, a world in which God’s order is terrifyingly broken. In the story of Christ’s coming, there are similar role reversals—a creature giving birth to her creator, a daughter to her father—but they signify that God is exceeding the order of nature, not destroying it. The world is not breaking down but becoming more as God intended. In this way, Christmas reveals the love and joy in the inner life of the divine persons, which created and sustains the world.
Other pieces offer a rich exegesis of Old Testament prophecies and New Testament parables. The Church is depicted as the victim of robbers, rescued from near death by Christ the Good Samaritan, and as the prodigal son welcomed home. Images of shoots, trees, and vines intertwine from across different books of the Bible:
Levigati nuclei
nux in virga nascitur,
propinatrix olei
quo David inungitur,
quo lucerna fidei
populis accenditur.
Vermis qui sub vespere
mundi iubar exerit
ramum siccat hedere
quo se Ionas operit:
non in umbra littere
spem salutis ingerit.
Quem non valet baculo
nec legis iusticia
revocat a tumulo
prophete presencia,
in quo, quasi speculo,
nova fulget gracia.
…
Inmutatur titulus,
palmes aret vinee
oleastri surculus
maritatur olee
quam fecundat celitus
ros infusus aree
The nut, smooth of kernel,
grows on the branch,
yielding the oil
by which David is anointed,
by which the torch of faith
is lit for the nations.
The worm which, before evening,
brings forth the world’s light,
dries up the branch of ivy
beneath which Jonah shelters:
it gives no hope of safety
in the shadow of the letter of the Law.
The boy for whom Elisha’s staff
and the Law were of no use
is called back from death by the prophet’s presence,
in whom, as in a mirror, a new grace gleams.
…
The pillar is transformed,
the vine-shoot withers,
a graft of wild olive
is wedded to the olive-tree,
which the dew poured on the threshing-floor
fecundates from heaven.
In this first verse, the branch from the stump of Jesse (Isaiah 11:1) produces the oil for anointing David king (1 Samuel 16:13), oil that also lights the lamp of Christ to enlighten the nations (Isaiah 49:6). Then we move to the story of Jonah, where Christ is compared to the worm eating the vine that sheltered the prophet as a sign of his fulfilling the old law—quite different from the more frequent allegory of Christ as Jonah himself lying three days in the belly of the whale.
Finally, we hear of Elisha healing the son of the Shunnamite woman (2 Kings 4:18–37), in which the prophet’s servant could not heal the boy with Elisha’s staff. After this failed attempt, Elisha comes in person: “Then he went up and lay upon the child, putting his mouth upon his mouth, his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands; and as he stretched himself upon him, the flesh of the child became warm” (2 Kings 18:34). The parallel between God’s coming through his prophets and then in the Incarnation stretching himself upon us, reawakening our flesh by taking it on, jumps off the page.
In the final verse quoted here, the pillar that Jacob erected at Bethel, which he called “the house of God and the gate of heaven” after his vision of the ladder (Genesis 28:10–22) is transformed into the Church—the wild olive shoot grafted onto the tree (Romans 11:17)—and the Virgin Mary. The musicologist Peter Dronke unpacks the final lines: “If Gideon’s fleece (in Judges 6)—on which dew descends from heaven, while the threshing floor around it remains dry—is a figura of Mary, impregnated yet still inviolate, a cognate imagery, based on Isaiah 45, where the heavens drop dew and rain on earth, while earth herself germinates the celestial flower, suggests once more that mystic marriage of heavenly and earthly which is of the essence of these Christmas festivities.”
In the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the risen Jesus walks with his disciples and interprets to them how Moses and the prophets foretold and explained what he would do (Luke 24:27). The disciples, in turn, say that their hearts burned as he did this, before he revealed himself fully to them in the breaking of the bread. Patristic and medieval exegesis burns in a similar way with wonder and rejoices to find Christ’s coming foretold in unexpected ways throughout the Old Testament.
In his book In Tune with the World, the philosopher Josef Pieper writes that in true festivals, participants share in the real experience of receiving something that they love. At bottom, that something is created existence itself:
Underlying all festive joy kindled by a specific circumstance there has to be an absolutely universal affirmation extending to the world as a whole, to the reality of things and the existence of man himself. Naturally, this approval need not be a product of conscious reflection; it need not be formulated at all. Nevertheless, it remains the sole foundation for festivity, no matter what happens to be celebrated in concreto. … For man cannot have the experience of receiving what is loved, unless the world and existence as a whole represent something good and therefore beloved to him.
Pieper follows the great liturgical scholar Josef Andreas Jungmann in claiming that all Christian feasts ultimately reduce to two: Sunday and Easter. But I would argue that Christmas as the feast of the Incarnation is the irreducible bridge between the commemoration of “the divine assent to Creation” on the Lord’s Day and Christ’s triumph over death in the Resurrection. It is the time when God even more deeply proclaims that creation is good by taking on human nature in the womb of a woman. It is a time when the abundant goodness undergirding the natural world breaks through and reveals itself.
So it is that one of the phrases repeated across the Aquitanian Christmas chants is Gaudeat ecclesia, “Let the Church rejoice!” They speak of singing and proclaiming in harmony with heaven and earth because, by joining in their song, we participate in the fulfillment of the prophecies, in the announcement of the good news of the Christ child’s birth with the angels and shepherds. Hence Thornton and Bagby write: “That we sing means that we understand. That we understand is the fulfillment of the prophecies.”
This Christmas, as we enjoy our cozy families and gifts, may we enter that singing, understanding, and fulfillment. May we marvel in Christ’s appearance in Scripture and in our world, with all of its paradoxes. And may we emulate our children’s jubilation. Let the Church rejoice indeed, for the world is a good and salvation is near.