Next week will be Holy Week and I intend, as I did last year, to work through a musical setting of the stations of the Cross (last year I did Dupré’s chemin de la croix). This week, though I am still thinking Lent more generally, so instead of somehow marking the installation of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, I am commenting on a lenten hymn.

J. M. Neale’s Hymns of the Eastern Church consists of his translations of number of hymns from Greek into metrical English, and several of these are still in common use. They include a text identified as a Stichera for the second week of the great fast, given the greek title ου γαρ βλεπεις τους παραττοντας and attributed to St Andrew of Crete, a seventh-century bishop born in Damascus.

A number of online sources claim, however, that this particular ‘translation’ is of a text the original of which has not been identified – and I have not been able to repudiate this claim (I cannot say that my search has been exhaustive, but I did try quite hard to find a greek text of which it might be even a paraphrase) – and suggest therefore that Neale simply composed the text himself. The text in full reads:

Christian! dost thou see them
On the holy ground,
How the troops of Midian
Prowl and prowl around?
Christian! up and smite them,
Counting gain but loss:
Smite them by the merit
Of the Holy Cross!

Christian! dost thou feel them,
How they work within,
Striving, tempting, luring,
Goading into sin?
Christian! never tremble!
Never be down-cast!
Smite them by the virtue
Of the Lenten Fast!

Christian! dost thou hear them
How they speak thee fair?
“Always fast and vigil?
Always watch and prayer?”
Christian! say but boldly:
“While I breathe, I pray:”
Peace shall follow battle,
Night shall end in day.

“Well I know thy trouble,
O my servant true;
Thou art very weary,—
I was weary too:
But that toil shall make thee,
Some day, all Mine own:
But the end of sorrow
Shall be near My Throne.”

I know the hymn to tune named for the supposed author, St Andrew of Crete, which neatly divides each verse into a threatening minor (or Dorian) first half and a triumphant second half; the tune was written for this text, and fits it well.

I have generally held back from suggesting that this hymn be sung at my own church, largely because I’m not sure what our congregation would make of the ‘troops of Midian’ as a cypher for sin. The biblical referent is presumably Numbers 31, in which the Lord through Moses directs the Israelites to avenge (נְקֹם) themselves on Midianites – vengeance we must understand for having led them into idolatry.

The idea of this as a literal history seems unlikely to be very edifying, but there is an ancient tradition in Christianity – associated with the great though never-canonised early theologian Origen, though certainly not exclusive to him – of interpreting the victims of apparent sanctioned violence in the Scriptures not as literal but as figurative: we must dash our own impure thoughts against the rocks (Psalm 137); in the same way, we must make war against our own tendency to idolatry – can the lenten fast equip us to smite them?