The Latin, Pange lingua gloriosi, corporis mysterium, was almost certainly written by Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–74) as an Office hymn for the new festival of Corpus Christi, added to the Roman calendar in 1264; Aquinas’s own confessor, Tolomeo of Lucca, attributed the whole office to him around 1313. Luther later condemned that festival outright, and Lutherans keep the institution of the Sacrament on Maundy Thursday instead, so the text required careful handling to confess Christ’s true presence without the medieval dogma attached to it. Aquinas borrowed his opening words and his meter from Venantius Fortunatus’s sixth-century battle hymn “Sing, My Tongue, the Glorious Battle” (LSB 454), so ours can still be sung to that older tune. The English is a splice: the editors of Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1861 took phrases from Edward Caswall’s 1849 translation and John Mason Neale’s of 1851 and made one hymn of them.
Sung at Our Saviour
2026