- Aug 27, 2014
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One of the 'issues' of being Oriental Orthodox is that you cannot always tell how what you are doing connects with what others are doing, even in the communion, let alone outside of it. By that, I mean (for instance) how the 'Coptic' version (which is entirely in Greek) of the hymn "O Monogenes Yios" is a longer text than the preserved version of 'the Greeks' proper (Eastern Orthodox and other Byzantine Christians following the rite of Constantinople). And that's generally the relation between us and the outside world: to the extent that we can say "We share X hymn with the Greeks, the Latins, the whoevers", our version is generally quite a bit longer than theirs. The 'extra' stuff -- extra from their point of view, anyway -- is often Coptic-specific, such that again even other people within the OO communion who 'have the same hymn' often have a different and shorter version of it. Call this one situation created by the fact that we never underwent a period of liturgical Byzantinization as the Eastern Chalcedonians did, so the exact forms of our common hymns are likely to differ from each other more than they would in any other communion.
It's not really a problem, but because that is how it is, I'm always on the lookout for hymns that might be considered equivalent or roughly so between OO (including within the communion/'cross-jurisdictionally'), EO, Catholics, and high-church traditional Protestants. These hymns, I would imagine, point to a common wellspring that is still preserved to whatever degree it is among these different groups that otherwise might not see very much in common between them, and since this particular subforum is meant to be a place where people of these divergent backgrounds can come together in a non-polemical environment and discuss our commonalities and differences, I wanted to post about one such hymn here, so that we might discuss what different 'versions' of it we have inherited.
I don't really know the common names of hymns anymore, since pretty much every Coptic hymn is known by its opening line or word, so the hymn I'm thinking of is known in the Coptic Orthodox Church as "Is Pateer Agios" (Copticized Greek for "One is the Holy Father"), or "Isbateer" (the 'Copto-Arabic' pronunciation). Like seemingly everything, it comes in long and short forms, each of which is used as is appropriate for whatever season we are in (the long for feasts like Pascha, the short as a response in non-festal liturgies). Here is an example of the long form (sorry for the shaky camera; at least it's not in portrait mode...see, the Egyptians are evolving, however slowly!):
All the translations I have seen of the "longer" text are relatively garbled due to complicated linguistic reasons I'm not going to get into here (believe me, I actually started typing them out at first and nearly fell asleep during my own explanation...and I'm a linguist in my civilian life!), but it is probably relevant that they are in Coptic, not Greek (the only Greek is the first line), and about Coptic-specific topics (NB: while it is used as both a festive and annual tune now in its respective long and short forms, the long form is traditionally considered a Papal hymn -- meant to be sung in the presence of the Coptic Orthodox Pope -- which explains some of the text), as evidenced in verses like "The Lord swore and will not repent, 'You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.' Our holy father, the high priest, Pope Abba (Tawadros)". It's no mystery why other churches wouldn't have that, since HH Pope Tawadros II is not the patriarch of any other Church (there is no concept of 'universal jurisdiction' among us, and never has been).
But the Armenians have something very close to it, I believe, in the hymn "Amen Hayr Surb" (Amen, Holy Father), which I found in translation on a blog under the title "Hymn of the Doxology" (hence the thread title; I guess that's what this hymn is called in English?), with the following translation: THE FATHER HOLY, the Son Holy, the Spirit Holy. Blessing to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and forever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
Here it is prayed with the amazing heavenly voice of one Fr. Mikayel of Tatev monastery in Armenia:
It retains that same opening line as the Greek/Coptic hymn, so I'm counting it as the same, as the longer Coptic text (the 'short' version being just the opening Greek line, which is prayed in every liturgy) is clearly a later form.
Most puzzlingly, even though it can be counted as a kind of 'half-Greek' hymn among the Copts (like a lot of our hymns, the kernel of it is Greek; even to this day, something like 10% of the hymns in the standard Coptic liturgy are actually in Greek, and many lay Copts couldn't tell you the difference, as the Greek parts are printed in our service books in the Coptic script), I can't seem to find an exact match for it among the Greeks proper. This is the closest I found on YouTube, and I had to search in Greek to get it (difficult for me, since I can type it and read it, but I don't really know it beyond what we have inherited in the Egyptian Church as part of our shared heritage for the first five and a half centuries):
I don't think it's the same, but it might be as close as we can get. I think it's the Greek version of this:
It's Trinitarian and Christological (duh), so it checks all the boxes needed to be 'saying the same thing' (again, ignoring the Coptic additions that transform it in its 'long' form into a Papal hymn that is...not used as a Papal hymn specifically...except when it is...arghhhh), but it doesn't preserve the phrasing of the first line as the Coptic short form and Armenian versions do, so I wouldn't be surprised to find that there is something out there in the EO/Byzantine that is closer to that, and I just don't know about it because I'm not one of those.
Among Protestants, it's even a bit more difficult, because simply typing "Hymn of the Doxology" into Google gets results that relate to a 17th century hymn known by that name. I remember singing it as a child in the Presbyterian Church (and apparently the Methodists and others also sing it):
Since that's different enough and we obviously know the exact source of the text, I think this can probably be best classified as its own thing, maybe inspired by more ancient doxologies, but not really a retention of any specific one. But I'd be interested to know earlier Protestant forms, as I know they also retain a prayer that is in the form that is already found in the Coptic and Armenian examples (I saw it yesterday on some kind of Protestant site, but of course now I can't find it...hahaha), with maybe a little syntactic difference (e.g., "The Holy Father is one, the Holy Son is one, the Holy Spirit is one" or something like this).
If you know any versions of this very simple and ancient doxology that might be unique to your Church or communion, feel free to share them here. Also, sometimes the uniqueness is not in the text itself (there are only so many ways to say the same prayer, after all), but in where you find it. I couldn't find an audio clip of it, but it appears that the Syriac Orthodox retain it in an anaphora (and probably in others, as well) that they attribute to HH Pope Xystus (Sixtus), Pope of Rome who according to them departed in 251 AD! I can't find any record of a Roman Pope by that name who departed in that year. Sixtus I is way too early (d. 125), while Sixtus II is at least a bit too late (according to western sources, anyway, his martyrdom was in 258). That makes me wonder exactly what traditions the Syriac Orthodox in particular have received about HH Pope Sixtus, as he is not among the Popes honored in the Coptic Synaxarium, as far as I can tell (the searchable version online lists several others, like HH Pope Felix, HH Pope Hippolytus, and HH Pope Clement, but not Xystus/Sixtus; maybe because he was the subject of at least two corrective letters by our then-Pope, HH Pope Dinoysius, concerning the baptism of heretics? I don't know...that's just a guess, and a rather flimsy one at that, as it's not like he is specifically condemned anywhere, either.)
It's not really a problem, but because that is how it is, I'm always on the lookout for hymns that might be considered equivalent or roughly so between OO (including within the communion/'cross-jurisdictionally'), EO, Catholics, and high-church traditional Protestants. These hymns, I would imagine, point to a common wellspring that is still preserved to whatever degree it is among these different groups that otherwise might not see very much in common between them, and since this particular subforum is meant to be a place where people of these divergent backgrounds can come together in a non-polemical environment and discuss our commonalities and differences, I wanted to post about one such hymn here, so that we might discuss what different 'versions' of it we have inherited.
I don't really know the common names of hymns anymore, since pretty much every Coptic hymn is known by its opening line or word, so the hymn I'm thinking of is known in the Coptic Orthodox Church as "Is Pateer Agios" (Copticized Greek for "One is the Holy Father"), or "Isbateer" (the 'Copto-Arabic' pronunciation). Like seemingly everything, it comes in long and short forms, each of which is used as is appropriate for whatever season we are in (the long for feasts like Pascha, the short as a response in non-festal liturgies). Here is an example of the long form (sorry for the shaky camera; at least it's not in portrait mode...see, the Egyptians are evolving, however slowly!):
All the translations I have seen of the "longer" text are relatively garbled due to complicated linguistic reasons I'm not going to get into here (believe me, I actually started typing them out at first and nearly fell asleep during my own explanation...and I'm a linguist in my civilian life!), but it is probably relevant that they are in Coptic, not Greek (the only Greek is the first line), and about Coptic-specific topics (NB: while it is used as both a festive and annual tune now in its respective long and short forms, the long form is traditionally considered a Papal hymn -- meant to be sung in the presence of the Coptic Orthodox Pope -- which explains some of the text), as evidenced in verses like "The Lord swore and will not repent, 'You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.' Our holy father, the high priest, Pope Abba (Tawadros)". It's no mystery why other churches wouldn't have that, since HH Pope Tawadros II is not the patriarch of any other Church (there is no concept of 'universal jurisdiction' among us, and never has been).
But the Armenians have something very close to it, I believe, in the hymn "Amen Hayr Surb" (Amen, Holy Father), which I found in translation on a blog under the title "Hymn of the Doxology" (hence the thread title; I guess that's what this hymn is called in English?), with the following translation: THE FATHER HOLY, the Son Holy, the Spirit Holy. Blessing to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and forever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
Here it is prayed with the amazing heavenly voice of one Fr. Mikayel of Tatev monastery in Armenia:
It retains that same opening line as the Greek/Coptic hymn, so I'm counting it as the same, as the longer Coptic text (the 'short' version being just the opening Greek line, which is prayed in every liturgy) is clearly a later form.
Most puzzlingly, even though it can be counted as a kind of 'half-Greek' hymn among the Copts (like a lot of our hymns, the kernel of it is Greek; even to this day, something like 10% of the hymns in the standard Coptic liturgy are actually in Greek, and many lay Copts couldn't tell you the difference, as the Greek parts are printed in our service books in the Coptic script), I can't seem to find an exact match for it among the Greeks proper. This is the closest I found on YouTube, and I had to search in Greek to get it (difficult for me, since I can type it and read it, but I don't really know it beyond what we have inherited in the Egyptian Church as part of our shared heritage for the first five and a half centuries):
I don't think it's the same, but it might be as close as we can get. I think it's the Greek version of this:
It's Trinitarian and Christological (duh), so it checks all the boxes needed to be 'saying the same thing' (again, ignoring the Coptic additions that transform it in its 'long' form into a Papal hymn that is...not used as a Papal hymn specifically...except when it is...arghhhh), but it doesn't preserve the phrasing of the first line as the Coptic short form and Armenian versions do, so I wouldn't be surprised to find that there is something out there in the EO/Byzantine that is closer to that, and I just don't know about it because I'm not one of those.
Among Protestants, it's even a bit more difficult, because simply typing "Hymn of the Doxology" into Google gets results that relate to a 17th century hymn known by that name. I remember singing it as a child in the Presbyterian Church (and apparently the Methodists and others also sing it):
Since that's different enough and we obviously know the exact source of the text, I think this can probably be best classified as its own thing, maybe inspired by more ancient doxologies, but not really a retention of any specific one. But I'd be interested to know earlier Protestant forms, as I know they also retain a prayer that is in the form that is already found in the Coptic and Armenian examples (I saw it yesterday on some kind of Protestant site, but of course now I can't find it...hahaha), with maybe a little syntactic difference (e.g., "The Holy Father is one, the Holy Son is one, the Holy Spirit is one" or something like this).
If you know any versions of this very simple and ancient doxology that might be unique to your Church or communion, feel free to share them here. Also, sometimes the uniqueness is not in the text itself (there are only so many ways to say the same prayer, after all), but in where you find it. I couldn't find an audio clip of it, but it appears that the Syriac Orthodox retain it in an anaphora (and probably in others, as well) that they attribute to HH Pope Xystus (Sixtus), Pope of Rome who according to them departed in 251 AD! I can't find any record of a Roman Pope by that name who departed in that year. Sixtus I is way too early (d. 125), while Sixtus II is at least a bit too late (according to western sources, anyway, his martyrdom was in 258). That makes me wonder exactly what traditions the Syriac Orthodox in particular have received about HH Pope Sixtus, as he is not among the Popes honored in the Coptic Synaxarium, as far as I can tell (the searchable version online lists several others, like HH Pope Felix, HH Pope Hippolytus, and HH Pope Clement, but not Xystus/Sixtus; maybe because he was the subject of at least two corrective letters by our then-Pope, HH Pope Dinoysius, concerning the baptism of heretics? I don't know...that's just a guess, and a rather flimsy one at that, as it's not like he is specifically condemned anywhere, either.)
What better thing is there to be doing, anyway? You've got a Holy Bible, you're in the liturgy, you've gotta chant it! If we didn't chant like this the liturgy would be over in like 90 minutes tops. Then we'd be having the agape meal at like 10 in the morning. It's weird to be eating together so early in the morning unless the Holy Week feast (when it'd be weird to be eating together that late).
