Carmen de Laudibus Domini

The anonymous poem, "In Praise of the Lord." Who complains of being helped by a late endowment of virtue? Who thinks that the promises of God proceed with the step of death? Who measures the urn of the eternal judge by a human standard, and thinks slow the day which the ages must hasten, the day that returns rewards for merits? A noble deed testifies to this by its great glory. For where the sluggish Arar, with its stagnant column, will pre-name the banks, and, sluggish, scarcely unfolds its stream, where the youth of the Haedui are born near the brother Rhine. The marriage was remembered with the highest piety and faith: yet divine law heaped up the merit of love. And there was a vow for both, to precede the companion in death, and to entrust the care of the tomb to pious grief: but the page of the decree chose the wife first. Then the anxious husband orders to be hollowed out with a generous mouth, what are made after death, the hospitable rocks for the limbs: "You will receive the one coming, and you will join eternal covenants; so that those whom the same bed held while living, after the precepts of God, a common tomb might raise." The wife, prescient, perceived the vow of her husband, and great miracles she bestowed upon her chaste times. For when the arms are joined to the dead limbs, and the repeated hand binds the chains to the trunk, lest what are fulfilled by the gifts of human life should suffer a shapeless drifting of the disjoined. It is immense to say, at the time when life was completed, the husband, about to be joined to his partner, looked forward to his seat.

After the man's death, the gentle door was unsealed, and the hateful household god was revealed by the ungrateful light: a woman was caught extending her left palm, inviting her companion with the gesture of living love. Who gave affection to the tomb? Who loosened the bonds? Whence does the buried woman see the shadow of her future husband? You do these things, you, Christ God; your signs are set in motion, and you gradually teach the buried limbs to rise again: you, whom the holy prophets sang would come, the incorruptible offspring of God, and the ruler of the ruler, without whom the great father deliberates nothing vast. At whose command the sea stood still on fixed shores, nor is it permitted for the immense sea to run out over the lands, and flat shores enclose the mountainous waves: you who endowed the stable earth with varied gifts for our use, generous with paternal piety. By you, mortals entrust seeds to the furrows, and a new birth proceeds from the dry sod. You command the vines to flow with sweet nectar: you give to trees juices pleasing for men's feasts and healing for health: you thrust forth sweet honeys. You command every kind of living thing to serve man, and moreover, groves to bend with heavy fruits, and new returns to be born from no seed. You cause various streams to benefit our labor, and to renew the blessed age with sacred springs. With you as guide, the seas lay open to sail-bearing prows, and the sailor traversed ports divided by straits.

After the elements were fixed in certain forms, lest the celestial machine begin to grow sluggish with a rough appearance, you marked the world with a varied gift: and whatever shines in the sky, your right hand fashioned. With these signs it pleased you to weave the hall of the Lord. Lest the inhospitable seas be driven by no lands, and the eager sailor count a constant harbor, a frequent island is fixed in the swelling sea; yet it does not fear the maddened wave that surrounds it, and resting on a tiny orb amid the straits it resists, trusting in you as its guide; whose venerable covenant, bound by equal law, levels the highest and the lowest, and does not allow the imposed to transgress any boundaries. And lest the earth lie too flat or bare, you commanded hills to rise, to be fitted with great vines, and spacious groves to weave shade. Then, lest a vast horror dwell in the sluggish forests, you add countless offspring to the tall trees: so that the woods have an inhabitant, nor does the seeker of prey lack. Then many birds, then thousands of voices of song, to resound in a mortal harmony of light and groves: thus it pleased you to weave the year with varied forms, and with pleasant change to add fruit for mortals: lest an overlong day burn the world too much, or a short day snatch away the newborn fire. And lest labor shake everything with unceasing effort, the dewy night gives rest to weary human cares: and so that human health might lead a secure life, healing herbs rise spontaneously from the turf. The Father himself sows these by his nod, not by the rich plow.

I would not be able to recount all the gifts of your piety, even if my vitals were enclosed in an iron wall, and I had a voice of iron and a thousand tongues for singing. But that Father of yours, placed in a secret seat, not easily visible to anyone, and terrible to all, sent you as Lord to the lands and as master of strength. And whoever venerates the Son with just honor, dedicates his prayers and eternal life to both. You are tenacious of chastity and righteousness, and easily bending the laws after a crime, if headlong madness has driven someone away from you from the prescribed limit of life. Our Father, that our faces might be allowed to look upon you, clothed you in a human face and perishable limbs. For who would attempt to raise fragile eyes, if he had wished to set such a one on the trembling earth as you are when you hurl vast thunderbolts with your right hand, and command the present to tremble at the direct punishment: or when, appeased, you divide rains for thirsty fields and produce doubtful ears of grain in the furrows? Yet, lest no remarkable thing should show your birth, you are conceived from a Virgin: it is not enough to be chaste, nor that a woman who is married could join a brother to the Lord, lest foul contagion be far from the womb. Soon, when your age happily matured with progress, you begin to keep untamed minds with fatherly warnings, and you offer the straight path to those who are slipping.

And so that the commands sent by God might be fully clear, you take power away from death, and with disease undone, you bid the despairing to take up the duties of life, and you restore the day to the blind. And so that nothing untried might remain entirely, which treacherous error might pass over, you give feeling to tombs, and you bid limbs long hidden to rise again into the upper air, and the beloved corpses recognize your name. But after the suitable follower had absorbed the law, so that the heavenly spirit might cast off the mortal hall, you, intent on the law, taught all things to be endured for the highest God, and that each person rightly takes up eternal life through contempt of death. Thus, bearing the completed commands of your father, you returned to the highest secrets of the sky, where the bright ether forbids sluggish clouds to kindle in its own heaven. And so that the abundance of the perishing crowd might be certain—those who shut out the commands of God from their wretched ears, and whom the new laws no longer held now that they were dead—you open the deadly places of infernal prison to us, and you bid a countless people to emerge from the shadows, only those closed off whom an impious life has marked. And you assign places of punishment to the coming shades, both those who do not believe in you and those who pretend to believe.

Holy God, and venerable offspring of the highest God, at whose name death, put to flight by violence, souls, bound to their own breasts and to the breasts of others, cry out and grow pale, and, once ordered, depart, just as many miracles of yours previously reveal, when they are held suspended between earth and sky, because through you nothing is permitted to the enemy, who is constrained. But now, by your merits, you make the Lord, the parent by piety, the ruler easy in command, the teacher by the law of living, and equal to the edicts which the law established for you sanctions: make Constantine for me victorious and joyful, a peer. You have given nothing better than this offspring to the lands before, nor will you give: may his children, I pray, equal the father!