HOTC #21: LSB #423, Jesus Refuge of the Weary
Christ Preaching, stained glass by John La Farge
The Author
Girolamo Savonarola is perhaps one of the most famous names of the Italian Renaissance. Highly educated, the young Savonarola took to poetry early, much of it dealing with the late Medieval and Renaissance church, as well as the larger world, and dwelling particularly on the relationship between the two. He joined the Dominican order in 1475, and rose to prominence in the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent. That prominence came as the result of his preaching; known for his fiery sermons full of apocalyptic fervor and most than a hint of populism, his sermons were heard by crowds often so numerous that they had to be moved into the city’s monumental cathedral. There, under Brunelleschi’s famous dome, Savonarola laid bare the corruption of both the church and the state of his time. His preaching veered into prophecies, the most famous of which may have been that a “New Cyrus” was coming from north of the Alps to renew the church. Many took the invasion of Charles VIII of France, the next year, as the fulfillment of this prophecy, and Savonarola’s influence and fame could only grow given those circumstances.
Savonarola Preaching Against Prodigality by Ludwig von Langenmantel, 1879
Soon, a political faction had grown up around Savonarola, and the populist firebrand soon found himself essentially in charge of the city politically. The Medici rulers of Florence were driven from the city by Savonarola’s supporters, and a new parliament was installed. Eventually, Savonarola claimed a vision in which he undertook a journey to the Virgin Mary. Savonarola now identified Florence with the New Jerusalem of prophecy: he declared Christ to be the king of Florence, promoted theocracy, and a virtual crusade against all manner of vice was undertaken. The pinnacle of this last movement were the famous Bonfires of the Vanities, the largest and most famous of which occurred on February 7 (the day before Ash Wednesday), 1497, when thousands of pieces of art - ancient sculptures, manuscripts, paintings (including, perhaps, several of Botticelli’s works), tapestries, and even musical instruments and mirrors were piled up and burned in the Florence’s main square.
This, along with (and also probably primarily because of) Florence’s refusal to join his alliance against the aforementioned French invasion of Italy, drew the ire of Pope Alexander VI, who excommunicated Savonarola some three months after the bonfires. The next year, he gave up public preaching, and authored the work that is considered his masterpiece, Triumph of the Cross. He and his associates, a man named Domenico and another named Silvestro Maruffi (all three were Dominican friars), were inevitably arrested and “tried” as heretics and schismatics. Condemned, they were hanged above a large fire, which consumed the bodies and left no remains for those who might’ve sought relics. What was left after the fire was tossed in the River Arno.
The nascent Florentine Republic hobbled on for a few more years, but a counterrevolution in 1512 reinstalled the House of Medici, in the person of Cardinal Giovanni de’Medici, the future Pope Leo X. The Medici would rule Florence and its successor states until 1737.
Savonarola is a controversial figure to this day, claimed as it were by both Protestant and Catholic, as well as populists, Marxists, and socialists of many stripes. His fiery mix of populism, Scripture, prophecy, and asceticism ignited a fervent, in many ways flagellant political movement in Florence. His near-contemporary, Niccolò Machiavelli, used the meteoric rise and equally meteoric fall of Savonarola’s movement to illustrate the fickle nature of political mobs in his famous work The Prince:
“If Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus had been unarmed they could not have enforced their constitutions for long—as happened in our time to Fra Girolamo Savonarola, who was ruined with his new order of things immediately the multitude believed in him no longer, and he had no means of keeping steadfast those who believed or of making the unbelievers to believe.”
Still, his condemnation of the rampant ecclesiastical corruption of his time and his calls for reform of the church have led many to see him as a forerunner of the Reformation. His teachings on justification are not enormously removed from those of Luther (a quote from his Meditations reads: “Not by their own deservings, O Lord, or by their own works have they been saved, lest any man should be able to boast, but because it seemed good in Thy sight.”), and while Savonarola held Rome to be “the mother of all other churches and the pope its head,” he also held Scripture to be a controlling force in the church, writing that “I preach the regeneration of the Church, taking the Scriptures as my sole guide.” Luther himself would opine that:
“Christ canonizes Savonarola through us even though popes and papists burst to pieces over it.”
The Text
A particular feature of Savonarola’s ministry in Florence was the degree to which he dramatized religious life in the city. His sermons and the famous Bonfires of the Vanities are perhaps the boldest and definitely the most famous examples, but there were other methods as well. One of these was an enlargement of the earlier Italian practice of singing religious songs called laudes, usually in the vernacular, in religious processions, confraternities, and when gathered to hear sermons (which were often heard outside of the church services we’re used to hearing them in today). Savonarola himself was a gifted poet, and with his friend and fellow poet Girolamo Benivieni he composed several laudes, including at least three for use in the “Carnival” processions that traditionally preceded the Lenten season. “Giesu sommo conforto,” the subject before us today, is one of those laudes. The translation found in Lutheran Service Book is by Jane, Lady Wilde, and was originally made for inclusion in R.R. Madden’s 1862 The Life and Martyrdom of Savonarola.
The hymn opens by directly addressing Jesus - this is a prayer, and the language here echoes St. Matthew 11:28-29, with the reference to Jesus as the “Fountain in life’s desert dreary…” clearly evoking both the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness (St. Luke, Chapter 4) as well as Moses striking the rock (Exodus 17:1-17), both of which are prominent Lenten readings and contain prominent Lenten themes.
The second verse begins with a series of questions that can either be seen as soul-searching or as rhetorical: “Do we pass that cross unheeding, breathing no repentant vow?” Of course we do. “[Even] though we see You wounded, bleeding?” Guilty. “[Though we] see your thorn-encircled brow?” Yep. Even for all that, though, His “…sinless death has brough us Life eternal, peace, and rest,” that is, peace in Christ regardless of our sinful ignorance. The first two verses, then, in summary, could read “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”
The final verse returns to directly addressing Jesus, asking Him that we might feel a “…more fervent love for You,” that is that the rhetorical questions from the previous verse might be answered in the negative, not the positive. The repentant tone of the second verse gives way in the last half of the third verse to a vision of Heaven, where ‘‘‘…in glory, parted never / From the blessed Savior’s side,” the believer dwells for all eternity.
The text is Savonarola’s only contribution to Lutheran Service Book, and indeed appears to be his only hymn in wide circulation today.
The Tune
O DU LIEBE MEINER LIEBE is often attributed to the Swiss-Scandinavian composer Johannes Thommen, who first published it in Basel in 1745. He himself claimed, however, that the tune was already well-known in the Moravian community of his time, and a manuscript from the Moravian Herrnhut community dates from somewhere between 1735 and 1744.
The general shape of the tune, while covering the distance of a seventh, is still very flat, staying mostly within in the fifth from G to D if one leaves out the F#s at the cadences. The motion is entirely in quarter notes except at the cadences. This hymn is an excellent example of the mantra that “All quarter notes are not created equal”: if the meter is ignored and all the notes are given similar gravity and articulation, the hymn will plod monotonously, rather than carry the energy necessary for quality congregational singing. The hymn is in common meter (4/4), so the strongest beat is, naturally, the first beat, the second strongest is the third beat, and “2” and “4” are the weak beats. Given this pattern, the four-measure phrases of the hymn break neatly into two pairs of two measures each, where the high D in the first measure of each full phrase acts to set up the descending motive in the following measure.
The came to prominence too late for use by most of the great classical Lutheran church composers, and most of the settings available today are by modern church composers (see selections noted below).
Settings of this hymn and/or tune can be found in:
For organ:
Concordia Hymn Prelude Library, Vol. 8
Festive Intonations: Short Hymn Introductions in 30 Seconds or Less