Carmen de Laudibus Domini

UNKNOWN AUTHOR. A POEM IN PRAISE OF THE LORD. Who complains of being helped by a late endowment of virtue? Who says that God’s gift proceeds with a slow step? Who measures the urn of the Eternal Judge by a human standard, and thinks slow what the ages owe to hasten the day that rewards merits? The noble glory of a deed bears witness. For where the slow Saône glides with its stagnant stream along the banks, and the lazy Doubs unfolds its river, where the Haeduan youth are born near the Rhine’s brothers. I recall a marriage of the highest piety and faithfulness; yet divine law heaped up the merit of love. And both had a vow: to precede the companion in death, and with pious grief to entrust the care of the tomb. But the page of the decree chose the wife first. Then the anxious husband orders, with a lavish mouth, a hollow to be carved—what becomes a hospitable stone for the limbs after death: to receive the one coming, and to join eternal bonds, so that those whom the same bed had held while living, after God’s commands, a common tomb might raise. The wife sensed her husband’s prophetic wish, and great miracles she granted to chaste times. For when arms are joined to dead limbs, and a repeated hand binds the bonds to the trunk, lest what fulfills the duties of human life should suffer a shapeless scattering of the disjoined. Unspeakable to tell: at the time when life was ended, the husband, to be joined to his wife, saw the seat prepared.

After the death of the man, the door of joy was unbarred, and the hateful daylight uncovered the dread household god: 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 shade of her coming husband? You do these things, You, Christ God; Your signs are set in motion, and little by little You teach slumbering limbs to rise again: You, whom the holy prophets sang would come. The incorrupt 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 to the immense ocean to run out over the lands, and level shores enclose the mountain waves. You who endowed the stable earth with varied gifts, for our uses, generous with paternal piety: to You mortals entrust seeds in the furrows, and a new offspring proceeds from the dry turf; You command the vines to flow with fertile nectar, You give to trees juices pleasing for human feasts and healthful for healing, You thrust forth sweet honeys. You command every kind of living thing to serve man, and moreover the groves to bend with heavy fruits, and new returns to be born from no seed; You command the various rivers to benefit our labor, and to renew the blessed age with sacred springs. Under Your guidance, the seas lay open to swift prows, and the sailor visited ports divided by straits.

After the certain elements were driven into shapes, lest the heavenly machine begin to lie sluggish with a rough appearance, you marked the world with a varied gift: and whatever shines in the sky, your right hand fashioned. It pleased you to weave the hall of the Lord with these signs. Now, lest the seas be driven inhospitable to any lands, and the busy sailor reward a constant harbor, a frequent island is fixed in the swelling deep, yet it does not fear the surrounding maddened wave, and resting on a tiny circle amid the straits, it resists, trusting in you as leader, whose venerable covenant, bound by equal law, levels the highest and the lowest, and does not allow those placed upon it to exceed any bounds. And lest the earth lie too flat or bare, you commanded hills to rise up to be fitted with great vines, and spacious groves to weave shade. Then, lest a vast horror drive through the silent forests, you add countless offspring to the lofty woods: so that the inhabitant of the grove, as prey is not lacking for the seeker, you give many birds, then a thousand swarms of voices to resound in the groves with mortal harmony: thus it pleased you to weave the year with varied forms, and with pleasant alternation to give fruit to mortals: lest an always long day burn the world too much, nor a short one snatch the unburned from the newborn fire, and lest unceasing labor shake everything with constant effort, the dewy night gives rest to the weary cares of men: and so that human health might lead a secure life, healing herbs spring up spontaneously from the turf; the Father himself plants these by his nod, not by a rich plow.

If I were covered with iron walls, if I had an iron voice and a thousand tongues for singing, I could not recount all the gifts of your piety. But that father of yours, placed in a secret seat, seen by no one easily, yet feared by all, sent you as lord of the lands and master of life. And whoever venerates the Son with just honor, let him dedicate his prayers and eternal life to both. You are tenacious of chastity and righteousness, and yet easy to bend the laws after a crime, if anyone, driven headlong by madness, has fallen away from you from the prescribed limit of life. So that our faces might be permitted to look upon you, our parent, you clothed yourself in a human face and mortal limbs. For who would attempt to raise his fragile gaze, if you had wished to stand before trembling lands as you are when you hurl thunderbolts with your mighty right hand, especially when you command that the penalty be feared directly? Or when, appeased, you distribute rains to thirsty fields and bring forth doubtful ears of grain in the furrows. Yet, lest no sign show your remarkable birth, you are conceived by a virgin; it is not enough to be chaste. Nor could a married woman join a brother to the Lord, nor would foul contagion be far from the womb.

Soon, when blessed age had matured with progress, you set out to preserve the untamed minds with paternal warnings, and you offer the right path to those who slip. And so that the commands sent from God might be fully understood, you take empire away from death, and with disease undone, you order the desperate to take up the duties of life, and you restore the day to the blind. And lest anything remain unattempted by which treacherous error might perish, you show sense to tombs, and you order limbs long buried to rise again into the upper air, and the beloved corpses recognize their own name. But after the suitable follower had absorbed the law, so that the heavenly spirit might shed the mortal hall, you, intent on the law by which you would teach all things to be endured for the highest God, and that each one rightly takes up eternal life through contempt of death: thus, bearing your father's commands fulfilled, you returned to the secret places of the highest heaven, where the bright ether forbids sluggish clouds to kindle in its own sky. And so that the perishing multitude might be certain of the abundance, which shuts out the commands of the merciful God from its ears, and so that new laws would not already hold the dead: you free for us the infernal prison's deadly places, and you order an innumerable crowd to emerge from the shadows, with only those shut in whom an impious life has marked. And you divide the places of punishment for the coming shades, those who would not believe in you or those who would pretend to believe.

Holy God and venerable pledge of the highest God, at whose name, when violent death has been put to flight, souls, bound to their own breasts and to the breasts of others, cry out and grow pale, and, once commanded, withdraw—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 sanctifies: make Constantine for me a victor and joyful, and equal to him. You have given nothing better than this offspring to the lands before, nor will you give: may his children, I pray, equal their father.