Oh, What Their Joy and Their Glory Must Be — LSB 675

Peter Abelard wrote this for the convent of the Paraclete, where the abbess was Heloise. They had married in secret; her guardian, believing Abelard meant to discard her, hired men to break into his house at night and castrate him. He fled into monastic life and later called his past “the darkness of history.” Around 1131 he composed a full year of hymns for Heloise and her sisters, and this one closes the first volume, appointed for Vespers on Saturday. Its Latin title, O quanta qualia sunt illa sabbata, sings of “those endless Sabbaths,” the day that supersedes both the weekly sabbath and the Year of Jubilee. In stanza 2 Abelard wrote that in that city the wish is not less than its reward. John Mason Neale rendered the line in 1851 as “wish and fulfillment are not severed there,” almost certainly without knowing how literally a man severed from his wife and his body would have meant it. Its closing stanza is a precise Trinitarian doxology, perhaps Abelard’s own answer to the Council of Soissons, where in 1121 he was forced to burn his book on the Trinity with his own hands.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142), a celebrated French scholar, lived one of the best-known love stories of the Middle Ages. He secretly married Heloise; her uncle Fulbert, believing Abelard meant to be rid of her when he sent her to a convent for safety, had men break into his rooms at night and mutilate him. Both entered religious life, and years later Abelard wrote a whole hymnal for the community Heloise led as abbess. This hymn closes its first book, appointed for Saturday Vespers, the hour when the week’s work ends and the Sabbath rest begins, which is why it longs for “those endless Sabbaths” of heaven. Like today’s Epistle, it draws on John’s vision of the new Jerusalem, and in the second stanza it calls that city a place where “wish and fulfillment are not severed,” words that carry a heavy weight from this author. Neale translated it in 1851, and the tune comes from a Paris antiphoner of the later seventeenth century.