“How I wept during your hymns and songs. I was deeply moved by the music of the sweet chants of your Church. The sounds flowed into my ears, and the truth was distilled into my heart. This caused the feelings of devotion to overflow; tears ran, and it was good for me to have that experience.
The Church at Milan had begun only a short time before to employ this method of mutual comfort and exhortation. The brothers used to sing together with both heart and voice in a state of high enthusiasm.
Only a year or a little more had passed since Justina, mother of the young king Valentenian, was persecuting your servant Ambrose in the interest of her heresy. She had been led into error by the Arians. The devout congregation kept continual guard in the church, ready to die with their bishop, your servant. … That was the time when the decision was taken to introduce hymns and psalms sung after the custom of the Eastern churches, to prevent the people from succumbing to depression and exhaustion.
From that time to this day, the practice has been retained, and many, indeed almost all your flocks in other parts of the world, have imitated it.”
-St. Augustine, Confessions, Book IX
In this remarkable passage from St. Augustine’s Confessions, I find a couple things worth consideration:
- Music in church doesn’t have to be devoid of pathos, and reacting emotionally to that music and having “feelings of devotion” can be a good and healthy thing. For so many converts to Orthodoxy in the West who are trying to leave behind the error of overly emotional worship music where the pathos can become manipulative and distracting, the correction mustn’t be an over-correction, such that all pathos is rejected as empty sentimentality. Our emotions, like every other part of our souls and bodies, can properly be engaged in divine worship.
- An Eastern custom was not simply adopted at Milan, but adapted to its Western circumstance. The “custom of the Eastern churches” (that is, didactic hymns of extra-biblical poetry, certain of the melodies of the East, and antiphonal singing) were introduced and caught on. But Ambrose used the vernacular (Latin) and employed a more native form of poetry, settling on an iambic dimeter rhythm and rhyming scheme. The result was the birth of what would become a distinctly Western hymnology. When a foreign draft is imbibed, if it is wholesome, it is digested and metabolized by the native body.