Then we have John's foster-brother and fellow-monk, Cosmas of Jerusalem, "the Melodist," whom Neale regards as the most learned of the Greek poets. Stephen the Sabaite, a nephew of John of Damascus, who spent fifty-nine years in the convent of Mar Saba, is the author of the Greek composition on which Neale founded his well-known English hymn—
"Art thou weary, art thou languid?"
Another hymn-writer was Theophanes the historian, known as "the Branded," who was mutilated for his devotion to the icons and died about a.d. 820. Theodore of Studium and his brother Joseph come half a century later (about a.d. 890). Lastly, there is Theocristus, in the same monastery at Constantinople, the author of "a suppliant canon to Jesus," which Dr. Neale anglicises in the hymn[1]—
"Jesu, name all names above,
Jesu, best and dearest,
Jesu, Fount of perfect love,
Holiest, tenderest, nearest!
Jesu, source of grace completest,
Jesu truest, Jesu sweetest,
Jesu, well of power Divine,
Make me, keep me, seal me Thine," etc.
The Church which could produce such a hymn as that will be entirely misjudged if it is only viewed in the light of the quarrels of its bishops with heretics and schismatics. It was the end of the ninth century, too, that age which was the darkest of the Dark Ages in the West, when a monk in the great Constantinople monastery poured out his soul in one of the hymns of truest adoration and love for his Lord ever produced, anticipating similar hymns of personal devotion to Christ in the two Bernards at Clairvaux and Cluny. It is in its hymns that we can trace the course of a pure stream of genuine spiritual religion that is sometimes forced underground when we are
- ↑ The Greek begins, Ἰησοῦ γλυκύτατε, etc.
