HOTC #1: LSB 331, The Advent of Our King

In the famous words of “The Sound of Music,” “Let’s start at the very beginning / A very good place to start.” After the psalms, the services, the creeds, the prayers, and the Small Catechism, we arrive at #331, the beginning of our journey through the hymns in Lutheran Service Book.

The Author

Charles Coffin was a Frenchman, born in 1676, a time when France was at the height of her powers under “The Sun King,” Louix XIV. An academic, Coffin rose to prominence when, in 1712 he was selected to give the funeral oration for Louis, Duke of Burgundy, grandson of Louis XVI, who had been second in line to the throne of France. Six years later he would be made rector of the University of Paris (more popularly known as the “Sorbonne”). Coffin was a prolific writer, particularly of Latin verse, and several editions of his works were published in his lifetime, with a two-volume complete works publics some six years after his death.

Coffin was strongly suspected by Catholic authorities at the time of being a Jansenist (the Sorbonne was known in this period for the Jansenist sympathies of both the faculty and students). Jansenism had risen from the work of the Dutchman Cornelius Jansen in the early 17th Century. As I am no theologian, I’ll direct you to Encyclopedia Britannica’s article on the subject for all the details, but suffice it to say that Pope Clement XI (at the urging of Louis XIV himself) had, in his papal bull “Unigenitus,” condemned Jansenism.

Coffin expired in June 1749, and was denied Last Rites and a proper Christian burial by the Archbishop of Paris on account of his Jansenism. This upset many Parisians, and over 4,000 of them joined his funeral cortege as it wound through the narrow streets of early modern Paris.

The Text

The original Latin text of this hymn appears in the Paris Breviary of 1736, with a further copy in Coffin’s “Hymni Sacri” of the same year. We will encounter these sources again later, when we consider Coffin’s other contribution to our hymnal, “On Jordan’s Bank the Baptist’s Cry,” LSB #344. The English translation appearing in Lutheran Service Book is largely the work of Englishman John Chandler in his publication “The Hymns of the Primitive Church” from 1837, with some editorial changes updating the language in the present hymnal. The translator of the sixth stanza is not known.

Either Coffin or the editors of the 1736 breviary had intended this hymn for use during Matins, which at that time was not, as we know it now, a daylight morning service (see LSB p. 219, of course), but the medieval form of Matins, which usually began somewhere around 2 o’clock (!) in the morning. This puts the fifth stanza in particular in a new light: “Before the dawning day / Let sin’s dark deeds be gone,” but other allusions exist elsewhere in the text.

The hymn is most obviously useful on the First Sunday in Advent, having as it does the word “Advent” right there in the title. Beyond that, the Zechariah 9:9 reference in the third stanza (“O Zion’s daughter, rise / To meet your lowly King,”) melds well with the Gospel lesson appointed in the one-year lectionary (St. Matthew 21:1-9), as well as Year A (St. Matthew 21:1-11) and Year C (St. Luke 19:28-40) in the three-year lectionary, all of which tell the story of Christ’s entry into Jersualem on Palm Sunday. The fifth stanza (“Before the dawning day / Let sin’s dark deeds be gone, / The sinful self be put away, / The new self now put on”) can also be seen to reference and highlight Romans 13:12, part of the Epistle reading appointed for Advent I in the one-year lectionary. Advent motifs generally pervade the text throughout.

The Tune

The tune is English in origin, by the 18th Century Welsh composer Aaron Williams, and formed a section of his larger hymntune HOLBORN. As a separate entity, ST. THOMAS appears for the first time in Williams’ “The Universal Psalmist,” published in 1763. It has a simple structure of two two-bar phrases (including the pickup note(s)) and one long four-bar concluding phrase. The tune is often used as a beginner-level hymntune when teaching hymn playing to new organists. The angularity of the melody and the use of larger intervals (jumps of thirds and fifths) followed by stepwise passages (observe the contrasts between the first two phrases, as an example) impart a momentum to the tune that must be maintained by the organist in order to encourage robust and coordinated singing. The descending and ascending thirds in the second phrase provide plenty of opportunity for embellishment by a creative organist (inserting passing tones is a favorite trick of mine, personally), and the last two measures (including the pickup note) lend themselves very well to being “tagged” (that is, repeated) prior to the doxological final verse.