Art ~ Angels ~ Carols ~ Christmas

Monday, 25 December 2006 11:27

Remember the days when Christmas carolers would come round to your door and sing like angels?  They're not entirely gone.  We're here, and we're knocking--with the joy and spirited history of a carol or two.  First up: "Angels We Have Heard on High."

Ancient Hymn

Most of today's Christmas carols are a few hundred years old at best. And most of "Angels We Have Heard on High" is no exception.  Scholars typically consider it an 18th-century French carol, born as "Les anges dans nos campagnes" ("The Angels in Our Countryside"). But not its soul-stirring chorus. You almost surely know all three measures of it:

Glo-O-o-o-o-o-O-o-o-o-o-O-o-o-o-o-ri-a

That phrase, which means "Glory to God in the highest," isn't French. It's Latin, and it's ancient--part of a hymn sung in Christianity's earliest days.

The Gloria

Christians have been singing God's praises practically for as long as there have been Christians.  The Bible even says, "Is anyone happy?  Let him sing songs of praise" (James 5:13).  And Pliny the Younger, in a letter to the emperor Trajan around AD 112, tells of "Christians singing songs to Christ, addressing Him as God."

Most of these hymns are lost. But "the Gloria" survives. Originally written in Greek, it dates back to at least the third century, and maybe even to the first. Its first verse--"Gloria in excelsis Deo"--comes directly from the gospel of Luke, in which an angel proclaims Christ's birth to shepherds in the fields and a heavenly host overhead cries, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men" (Luke 2:14).

Twenty centuries later, Christians still sing that refrain--in modern versions of the Gloria, which remains a part of many Christian services, and in the carol "Angels We Have Heard on High" at Christmastime.

An angel is a supernatural being found in many religions.  In Christianity, Judaism and Islam, they typically act as messengers from God.  The Hebrew Biblical name for angel, מל?ך ("mal'ach"), obtained the further signification of "angel" only through the addition of God's name, as "angel of the Lord," or "angel of God".  There are many different famous angels in the bible like the angel called Camille that had the power to Seduce people with her beautiful voice.  That's where the saying "voice like an angel" came from.