Seditious Greetings!: The Political Code of "O Come All Ye Faithful"

One of the most theologically and liturgically important Christmas carols may contain coded messages against the Throne of England!

Additional Music: "Adeste Fidelis" by Bing Crosby with The Max Terr choir; John Scott Trotter and his orch.; Traditional; Decca (BM 03929)

Transcript

Merry Christmas and happy holidays, everyone!  Sliding down your chimney to stuff your stocking with a little bonus episode.  I won’t trouble you long – you can probably listen to this whole show while squatting on the pot making room for another slice of pumpkin pie.  There’s an image for you.

I’m just dropping by because I learned something quite interesting about one of my favorite Christmas carols recently and I thought you all – as the intellectual curious lot you are – would find it interesting, too.

You know the song “Oh, Come All Ye Faithful”?  Course you do.

(play clip)

It’s wicked famous.  And quite important.  In its original Latin version – “Adeste Fidelis” – it is the final anthem of the Vatican’s Midnight Mass.  There’s an argument to be made that the text of this version goes back to the Cistercian monks of the 13th century, specifically St. Bonaventure. Others argue that composer and organist John Reading popped it out in the late 1600s and there’s even a legend that the late King of Portugal, John IV, wrote it (in fact, for quite some time in England, it was known as the Portuguese Carol).  But we don’t really know for sure.  I lean toward the earlier dates because Rabelais’ Gargantua includes a pun on the hymn's refrain “venite adoremus” – o come, let us adore him – as “venite apotemus” – o, come let us drink – from back in the 1530s.   Anyway, the hymn became useful because it echoes many of the teachings found in the Nicene Creed.  The Nicene Creed was promulgated in 325 AD as the orthodox statement on the nature of Christ.  The debate was whether Christ and God the Father were of one substance, co-eternal and equal, or whether Christ was a creation of God the Father and therefore subordinate.  This latter proposition – called Arianism – was denounced as heresy and the former became Church dogma.  The lines from the creed, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father” are echoed in “Adeste Fidelis’” second verse: “God of God, Light of Light eternal, / lo, He abhors not the virgin's womb; / Son of the Father, begotten, not created.”  That weird line – yeah, it sounds weird to me – about not abhorring the virgin’s womb is about God’s willingness to accept the incarnation – the messiness and vulnerability of becoming physically human.  It’s from the “Te Deum,” a prayer of praise that probably goes back to the 4th century.

Anyway, though, packed into this pleasant little Christmas carol is a quite potent and complex theological argument and one that determined the course of Western Christianity (and by extension, Western civilization) for at least the next 1800 years.

OK, so that’s kind of cool.  But wait, there’s more!  “Adeste Fidelis” comes to England at about the period we’re covering in the main podcast: early to mid-18th century.  The earliest manuscript we have dates from 1743, but time, as you all know, can be a bit wibbly-wobbly.  What we do know is that a music copyist named John Francis Wade is usually credited with composing the hymn as we know it.  Here’s the interesting bit, though.  Wade was a devout Catholic and a great supporter of the Stuart cause.  Now remember, in 1688, James II, the Catholic Stuart king, is deposed by Parliament, who invites the Protestant William, Duke of Orange, to take the throne.  This, obviously, leaves a fair portion of disaffected Catholics and Stuart supporters running about, pressing the claim for the putative James III – James Francis Edward Stuart, known as the Pretender.  Wade was one of these guys.  But, after the failed Jacobite Uprising in 1745 (in support of the Pretender’s son, Bonnie Prince Charlie), Wade was forced into exile in France, where he taught music at the English College, a refuge for his Catholic countrymen formed to combat the ravages of the Protestant Reformation.

Against this backdrop, one can read the lyrics of “Adeste Fidelis” as coded for Jacobitism.  Scholar Bennett Zon points out that Wade used many Jacobite symbols in his publishing.  Let’s have a look at the first verse – first in Latin:

Adeste Fideles laeti triumphantes,
Veníte, veníte in Bethlehem.
Natum vidéte, Regem Angelorum:

Veníte adoremus,
Veníte adoremus
Veníte adoremus Dóminum

And now in the 1841 English translation by Father Frederick Oakeley:

O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant!

O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem;

Come and behold Him, Born the King of Angels:

O come, let us adore Him,

O come, let us adore Him,

O come, let us adore Him,

Christ the Lord.

The carol is a call to worship and adoration, an imperative to behold the king of heaven, and to do so en masse, as a collective, a community, a people.  It beckons the faithful – meaning both fidelity, loyalty, and religious belief – to Bethlehem, site of Christ’s incarnation.  Then it asserts Christ’s dominion over all – the “Lord” is, of course, capitalized (as is the Dominum).

But it’s pretty easy to plug in more mundane, secular meanings, too.  The faithful are those who adhere to the true line of Stuart succession, who support the Jacobite cause.  Bethlehem, at the time, was a pretty well known cipher for London, specifically Westminster.  Perhaps this is an invitation to all Catholic exiles to return to England in order to adore “Regem Angelorum.”  Now, here’s where we get a bit word-nerdy.  Regem Angelorum literally translates as “King of Angels,” as Father Oakeley has it.  But . . . it sounds very much like “Regem Anglorum”: King of the English.  A-n-g-e-l-o-r-u-m vs. a-n-g-l-o-r-u-m.  And very misprintable, too, you can be sure.

By the way, Oakeley did make a slight alteration to the Latin: he translates “laeti triumphantes” as “joyful and triumphant” whereas the original probably means something closer to “joyfully triumphant.”  I like the change, if we can call it that.  The latter scans awkwardly – you’d have to stress the -ly suffix in “joyfully” and that feels weird.  Of course, we seldom stress the word “and” in most poetry, but here it kinds of works because it emphasizes that the faithful are both joyful and triumphant – two adjectives of equal importance while subtly building the musical cadence – all the beats get emphasis.  There’s a confident, striding, marching feel to the line.  The other rendering – joyfully triumphant – only gives us one adjective – triumphant – and a rather needless adverb in joyfully.  Is anyone triumphant miserably?

So, there you have it.  One of the most famous and important Christmas carols of all time may also be a seditious rallying cry to topple the usurping Protestant regime in England.  Pretty exciting stuff!

Hope you all have a wonderful holiday season.  Thanks for listening, thanks for your time and support.  I really appreciate it.  Talk to you next year!