I remember when, as a young Director of Music in a parish church, I was teaching my choir Charles Wood’ anthem ‘O Thou the central orb’, one of my sopranos said to me “I’m sure this is very lovely, but what does it actually mean?” Some might consider that a very fair question; indeed, at least one commentator has concluded that the text doesn’t really “mean anything at all”.

As a theologically-educated Director of Music, however, instead of giving that conclusion I reached for my copy of the complete works of the pseudo-Dionysius, and suggested that she read his Celestial Hierarchy. Naïve as I was, I confidently believed that doing so would answer all her questions – it turned out there were more clear ways of explicating the matter – but I stand by the association. The opening lines of the Celestial Hierarchy read ‘That every divine illumination, while going forth with love in various ways to the objects of its forethought, remains one. Nor is this all: it also unifies the things illuminated.’

The pseudo-Dionysius develops a model describing God as the central source of illumination, heat and light for the World, as a central justification for those created beings closest to the source being named Seraphim (literally ‘burning ones’). Henry Ramsden Bramley’s text – written in 1873 at the request of Frederick Ouseley to fit existing music by Orlando Gibbons and only later (1933) set by Wood – similarly describes God as the sun of a solar system of goodness, illuminating us all:

O Thou the central orb of righteous love,
Pure beam of the most high,
Eternal light of this our wintry world,
Thy radiance bright awakes new joy in faith,
Hope soars above, above.

Come, quickly come, and let thy glory shine,
Gilding our darksome heaven with rays divine.
Thy saints with holy lustre round Thee move,
As stars about thy throne, set in the height
of God’s ordaining counsel,
As thy sight gives measured grace to each,
Thy power to prove.

Let Thy bright beams disperse the gloom of sin,
Our nature all shall feel eternal day,
In fellowship with Thee,
Transforming day to souls erewhile unclean,
now pure within, now pure within. Amen.

Apart from this anthem, Bramley is best remembered for collaborating with John Stainer on Christmas carols. Charles Wood, born in Armagh, had studied under C V Stanford and eventually replaced him as Professor Music at Cambridge.

P.S. No, it does not mean to say ‘clay’!
A number of choirs that I have sung in have been instructed to adopt a ‘correction’ to the text in the penultimate line, where the ‘d’ of ‘day’ is taken to be a mistaken reading of a ‘c’ and an ‘l’ close together. Not only is this not borne out by the manuscript score (of which I have seen an image) where it is possible to argue this in one line, but it seems pretty clear in the other parts that the ‘d’ is intended, but it would also be theologically incoherent. Those proposing the emendation, as I understand it, want to read ‘transforming’ as an active verb, changing the clay of (presumably) human bodies into pure souls – notwithstanding that bodies and souls are materially different, theologically speaking. In the context of the poem, however, the transformative effect of the enlightening revelation of the Divine constitutes a ‘transforming day’ for our previously-sinful souls; this seems to me to be unarguably the more appropriate and intelligible reading.