Music and Worship: Praise to the Holiest in the Height

On Palm Sunday 2006 we sang ‘Praise to the Holiest in the height’, surely one of the most uplifting of all hymns.

The words are part of a long poem written in the 1860s by John Henry Newman (1801–1890). Newman began his career as an Anglican clergyman (he was prominent in the early nineteenth-century high-church Oxford movement), but converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1840s, later becoming a Cardinal. His poem, entitled ‘The Dream of Gerontius’, concerns the death of an old man and his first experiences of the afterlife.

Five groups of ‘angelicals’ (angelic beings) in turn sing the words we now know as verse 1 of the hymn. The first four groups continue with verses not found in our hymnbooks. The fifth group sing the words we know, but without, as we do, repeating the first verse at the end.
Verses 2–6 of the hymn sum up the whole story of salvation. The first Adam sinned. The second Adam (Jesus Christ) ‘str[o]ve afresh against the foe [Satan]’ and prevailed. It was the wisdom and love of God which ordained this.

Verse 5 is the hardest to understand. What does Newman mean by the ‘double agony’? Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor believes that Newman ‘was referring to that mystery which is at the heart both of our human existence and one of the deepest questions to which it gives rise. That is – the consequence of sin, namely suffering and death’. An alternative view has been that the double agony is Christ’s private agony in the garden of Gethsemane and the public agony of the crucifixion. What do you think?

The most widely used tune for ‘Praise to the Holiest’ is ‘Gerontius’ by John Bacchus Dykes (1823–1876). It appears that this tune was composed specially for Newman’s verses, hence its name. Dykes was a high-church Anglican clergyman, who worked mainly in Durham. He was highly talented musically, and became an assistant organist at about the age of 10. He had a gift for writing singable hymn melodies with effective harmonies: among his other tunes are ‘Dominus regit me’ (for ‘The King of love my Shepherd is’) and ‘Melita’ (‘Eternal Father, strong to save’). In ‘Gerontius’, notice how Dykes has a high note for ‘height’, and then brings the melody much lower for ‘in the depths’.

The words of ‘Praise to the Holiest’ were later set to much more ambitious music in the oratorio ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ by Sir Edward Elgar. (The words of the hymn ‘Firmly I believe and truly’ also come from Newman’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’.)