Hymns

A few times, over the years, I have been passing by Carter Barron when the carillon at the Presbyterian church opposite was working. The first time, I was nearly out of earshot before I recognized the tune as that of "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God". The next time, I quickly recognized "Faith of Our Fathers". Now, I don't know what a classically Presbyterian hymn would be, but I was interested that they drew on the Lutheran and Catholic traditions.

My interest in this really began years ago, when happening to be in a Lutheran church, I noticed that the hymnal, and maybe the service, included a text by Peter Abelard. Since then, whenever I happen to be in a strange church, or near a new hymnal, I have a look for ecumenical borrowings. Owing to a falling off in weddings and graduations, I seldom have a chance to look now. It seemed to me that

• The Catholic hymnals reliably carry Charles Wesley, and Martin Luther. John Newton's "Amazing Grace" will almost certainly be there, Calvinist though it clearly is.  Alexander Means's "What Wondrous Love Is This" will be there. You will also find "We Gather Together", and a number of hymns by Isaac Watts.
• In a Protestant hymnal you will likely find Aquinas for "Adoro Te Devote", but of course not for "Pange Lingua"/"Tantum Ergo". Probably you will find Frederick Faber's "Faith of Our Fathers", and you may find the Jesuit martyr Brebeuf's "In the Moon of Winter". You can count on finding the "Come Holy Spirit" of Rabanus Maurus.

This weekend, in a Methodist church for a concert, I had a chance to browse the United Methodist hymnal. It was about as I expected: Brebeuf and Faber were there, also Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux though not Aquinas. At the end of the list of sources, I was interest to see "Wotyla, Karol: see John Paul II"--a litany for peace.

(Is it cheating to count as Catholic the hymns from before 1517? I think not, at least in the case of Abelard and Aquinas: both did a great deal to fit Aristotelian thought into Christian theology, and Martin Luther did not approve of Aristotle.)

On the other hand, the (Catholic) International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) does take only so many Protestant hymns. In Worship, there are seven by Charles Wesley, six by Isaac Watts, and three by Martin Luther, one by Alexander Means. By comparison, Richard Haas, who must be known mostly to choirmasters and the obsessives who read the matter in the back of Worship and Gather, has something like 30, as does Rory Cooney, though some of these must be psalm settings.

One sees, in looking through the hymnals, that there are only so many periods that have produced great hymns. There are notable Latin hymns from the high Middle Ages and before. The Reformation, particularly the Lutheran portion, produced some remarkable hymns, as later did the early Methodists and the American "Great Awakening". But  there are long periods that produced nothing memorable. In the United States, the later 19th Century produced a lot of Protestant hymns that one charitably might call "indifferent", and I don't know that the English contributions of that day were consistently better. A Catholic friend, an amateur of musicology, says hard things about the St. Louis Jesuits, who produced some of the hymns that linger on in American Catholic churches. Nor are they the only offenders in Gather and Worship.

Over the Door and in the Pews

'This is the door of the Lord', they wrote on the lintel of a church in Numidia, 'the righteous shall enter in.' 'The man who enters', however, wrote Augustine, 'is bound to see drunkards, misers, tricksters, gamblers, adulterers, fornicators, people wearing amulets, assiduous clients of sorcerers, astrologers. . . . He must be warned that the same crowds that press into the churches on Christian festivals, also fill the theatres on pagan holidays.'

Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, Chapter 19, "Ubi Ecclesia?"

The chapter concerns the beginnings of Augustine's controversy with the Donatists. As Brown remarks, the Donatist concern for purity of the church had somewhat less to do with the present behavior of the congregation than with the previous behavior of clergy during a persecution.

Beyond Coveting

According to a recent article in the New York Times, German scholars are working steadily away on a Latin dictionary, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (T.L.I.) and hope to be done by 2050. I don't think that an actuary would advise me to subscribe. The dictionary aims to catalogue every way that a word was used between the earliest recorded Latin and about 600 A.D.

If the current eighteen volumes average three inches in thickness, that would amount to four and a half linear feet.  I wouldn't mind having a better Latin dictionary around the house--I regret one not bought a few years ago at a sale. But this is so far beyond any use I might have that I can admire the project but can't covet the product.

Critics

Long ago, I used to read John Simon's movie reviews. Given his reputation, and given the movies, I must have read many savage put-downs. Yet curiously the only two reviews I remember were favorable: one of The Lacemaker, one of an Italian comedy. I did see a number of hard things said in Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline. It was something for Simon to have been thought to be the model for the obnoxious critic in Wilfrid Sheed's Max Jameson, and something to have acknowledged or boasted of the rumor, even if Sheed was in fact his own model.

(The Strand Books website places Paradigms Lost on the third of eight pages if one searches for "John Simon" as author. I can't but think that the late critic would have admired the title of a book on the first page, Filth-diseases and their Prevention, and might have supposed his endeavors to have some relation to those of the earlier John Simon.)

I started to read Clive James much too late, a few book reviews apart. I was hooked a few years ago when I opened Cultural Amnesia to the essay on Margaret Thatcher, which opens with the word "Solzhenitskin", a Thatcher coinage. I am slightly embarrassed to find that of the references in the book, I have followed up at most three: Nirad Chaudhuri, Sergei Diaghilev, and Egon Friedell. (Diaghilev, by visiting the National Gallery of Art's exhibit on the Ballets Russes a couple of years ago.) I have given copies of Cultural Amnesia and Latest Readings to friends, and have read Cultural Cohesion.

Both Simon and James died on Sunday, November 24.

At the Airport

On Tuesday afternoon, we had a two-hour layover at the Philadelphia airport. When we arrived at the B concourse, we were amazed to find that most of the seats in view--bar stools or seats along tables--had tablet computers in front of them. The tablets' size was about ten inches by six, their manufacturer Initio. One could buy merchandise or services, play games, I suppose watch shows. The one thing one could not obviously do was to sit down without a bright display shining at one.

This was not true of all seats without exception. Along the windows there were the standard low seats one is used to find at airport gates. I suppose that some of the tables in restaurants must be without them, but I'm pretty sure I saw most with. A fortnight before, we saw no tablets in the concourse from which international flights leave.

The good news, we found, is that one can remove the tablet from its stand, and lay it face down on the bar or table. My wife and I did so. Our son simply opened his laptop in front of it so that it could not be seen. Still at least two of us found their presence obnoxious.

Many of the tablets are at long tables. The tables have the merit of offering power outlets, which can be scarce in airports. The tables are tall, about bar height, and the chairs in front of the tablets are bolted to the floor. One could defend both choices: the height of the table, to reduce shoulder surfing, i.e. keep the passers by from reading over one's shoulder; bolting down the chairs to keep the restless or careless from toppling a chair and injuring themselves or others.

It is hard not to see the motive for installing the tablets as a combination of the old human need for distraction--Pascal judged that eighty percent of the world's trouble arises from the inability to sit quietly in a room--and modern business's lust for our data and our dollars. Still, some may find the tablets useful. As long as we can place them face down, I won't resent them that much.

A Joke Lost

In the movie of The Accidental Tourist, there is a scene in which Macon Leary's boss, visiting the home of the Leary siblings, watches them all look at a ringing phone without making a move to answer it. They consider who might be calling--not the brother who is off on an errand, for he would know to call a neighbor instead. The boss becomes more and more nervous as the phone goes unanswered. The scene got a good laugh in the theater where I saw it.

Would anyone under twenty-five understand it? I'm not sure how many under thirty remember the days when a phone readout did not show who was calling (or purporting to call). Few enough live in a household with a landline and a telephone in a common area. Phones these days ride in the pocket and display the caller, or at least the purported number.

Though I grew up with landlines, I can sit peaceably and ignore a phone as once only eccentrics did. I'm sure no movie script would contain such a scene today. But it was funny then.

Dates and Databases

A co-worker of admirable initiative is learning SQL in what is probably best way there is: to meet an immediate need. I have offered a clarification or two when asked, but as far as I can tell she has been mastering it quickly.

A while ago, though, a query that should have produced some rows produced none, and it was not clear why. I had a look at the query provided, where the final restriction was something like

ImportantDate BETWEEN 2015-01-01 and 2017-12-31

meaning "the important date occurred in 2016, 2016, or 2017".

Now, not all database engines will accept this. Oracle will reject it as an attempt to use a number where a date belongs. SQL Server, though, and evidently MySQL will happily read 2015-01-01 and 2017-12-31 as arithmetic expressions reducing to 2013 and 1974 respectively. Now, there is no number that is larger than or equal to 2013 and less than or equal to 1974, so such a condition will never allow rows to be returned. She dropped single quotation marks around the dates, and got what she needed.