Of the Father's Heart Begotten

Lyrics

Of the Father's heart begotten
ere the world from chaos rose,
he is Alpha: from that fountain,
all that is and hath been flows;
he is Omega, of all things
yet to come the mystic close,
evermore and evermore.

By his word was all created;
he commanded and 'twas done;
earth and sky and boundless ocean,
universe of three in one,
all that sees the moon's soft radiance,
all that breathes beneath the sun,
evermore and evermore.

O how blest that wondrous birthday,
when the maid the curse retrieved,
brought to birth mankind's salvation,
by the Holy Ghost conceived,
and the Babe, the world's Redeemer,
in her loving arms received,
evermore and evermore.

This is he, whom seer and sybil
sang in ages long gone by;
this is he of old revealèd
in the page of prophecy;
lo! he comes, the promised Saviour;
let the world his praises cry!
evermore and evermore.

Sing, ye heights of heaven, his praises;
angels and archangels, sing!
Wheresoe'er ye be, ye faithful,
let your joyous anthems ring,
every tongue his name confessing,
countless voices answering,
evermore and evermore.

History

"Of the Father's Heart Begotten" is an English version of "Corde natus ex parentis", part of a long Latin poem by Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (348–c. 413), a Christian poet from the north of the Iberian Peninsula. Prudentius practised law, served twice as a provincial governor and was summoned to the court of the Emperor Theodosius I before withdrawing from public life; he later gathered his poems into a collection with a preface dated 405. Among them is the Liber Cathemerinon, a cycle of twelve lyric hymns. Its ninth, "Hymnus omnis horae" ("Hymn for all hours"), runs to 38 three-line stanzas, and the hymn sung in English is a selection from it, beginning at the stanza that opens "Corde natus ex parentis".

Several English translations exist. The best known is John Mason Neale's of the 1850s, which began "Of the Father sole begotten"; Henry W. Baker revised and extended it for Hymns Ancient & Modern in 1861 as "Of the Father's love begotten". The words in this recording are a different translation, by the classical scholar R. F. Davis (1866–1937) of St John's College, Cambridge, who was dissatisfied with Neale's version. Davis's text was published in 1905 in The Hymns of Prudentius, a volume of translations he shared with B. Martin Pope, in rhymed English that follows the metre of the Latin and is printed alongside it. The English Hymnal adopted it the following year, in 1906, using a selection of Prudentius's stanzas without a closing doxology, and in 2013 the hymn book Ancient and Modern replaced Baker's text with Davis's. Its opening, "Of the Father's heart begotten, / ere the world from chaos rose", sets it apart from the Neale–Baker version.

Both The English Hymnal and Ancient and Modern set Davis's words to DIVINUM MYSTERIUM. The melody began as a plainsong trope, an embellishment of the Sanctus sung at Mass, and is found in medieval manuscripts from Italy, Germany, Bohemia and Spain, where it carried the Latin text "Divinum mysterium" that gives it its name. It first appeared in print in Piae Cantiones (1582), a collection of sacred and secular songs compiled by Jaakko Suomalainen (Jacobus Finno) and published by Theodoric Petri. Thomas Helmore, who took the melody from a copy of Piae Cantiones he owned, fitted it to Neale's words in the 1850s, recasting it in duple time and extending its first phrase to suit the hymn's 8.7.8.7.8.7.7 metre. The English Hymnal of 1906 printed a triple-time version, probably arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams. In the text as sung here, every stanza closes with the refrain "evermore and evermore".

Performance

This recording, titled on its channel "Of the Father's Heart Begotten - Ancient Christmas Hymn, St Martin's Voices", is performed by St Martin's Voices. It runs about 5 minutes 20 seconds and sets five verses of seven lines, each ending "evermore and evermore"; it was published to the channel in December 2024.

Sources: hymnary.org · hymnologyarchive.com · en.wikipedia.org · St Martin's Voices recording and Words book