By now, most know not to call the Middle Ages the “Dark Ages.” One author has called them the “Light Ages,”[1] and anyone who has read Dante can see why. The following poem comes from the beginning of this age that was fascinated with light, insofar as we know its date at all. The poem, clearly natal in its theme, has managed to attach itself in the manuscripts to “Orientius,” a monk of Fifth-century Gaul famous for his poem “The Commonitorium.” That poem describes and meditates upon the depredations that Gaul faced during that tumultuous century, and is most famous for a nice one-liner: “All of Gaul smoked like a single funeral pyre.” The line is trotted out in histories of the time, either to prove how bad things were or how melodramatic the Gallo-Romans were, and the rest of the poem tends to molder in the archives.[2]
A few pages underneath the Commonitorium is this nice bit of Christmas verse. We will not know its authorship this side of glory, but it is at home in the “jeweled style” of Late Antiquity with its self-conscious piling of clauses and descriptions and enjoyment of contrast and paradox. I have adopted its meter and hewed as closely as possible to its meaning while making the procrustean transfer that attends translating poetry. The effort will have succeeded if the Latin speakers are grumpy enough to appreciate their Latin more, if those who don’t speak Latin wish they could, and if all who read it rejoice more fully at the birth of the light of the world.
So much more splendid than light is the light that upon us is breaking.
Brightest of days! Oh, she gleams with the merriest pomp of the year, this
Birthday divinely elected. This day for the birth of the one who
Reigned with his father above, the perennial consort of heaven.
Might of the Father unequaled, he now of our flesh is the firstborn;
Now, having gone through our death, he restores mankind to the heavens.
Freely our flesh he assumed, but would never in such see decay
Splendidior lux luce micat, maiorque diebus
Fulget clara dies, toto festiuior anno,
Natalis quae lecta deo. qua nascitur ille,
Cum patre qui semper caeli in consortia regnans,
Virtus magna patris, carnis primordia nostrae,
Mox hominem in caelum reuehens, sic morte peracta
Sumere qui carnem uoluit, nec carne senescit.
Benjamin Phillips is a member of Veto PCA, along with his wife and daughter. He obtained his MA in History at Ohio University and is the Dean of Academics and the Latin Teacher at Southeast Ohio Classical Academy.