# 448 O love, how deep, how broad, how high

Text: Latin, 15th century, translated by Benjamin Webb

Music: Deus tuorom militum

Jesus Christ, by Mikhail Vasilevich Nesterov

One of the benefits of the Oxford and the Cambridge-Camden Movements was the rediscovery of the vast liturgical and musical resources of the early and medieval Church. Today, largely through the work of John Mason Neale and his colleagues, we enjoy a wealth of Greek and Latin hymnody from these periods, of which this text is a superb example.

Though this text has been attributed to Thomas à Kempis due to similarities with his famous devotional book, The Imitation of Christ, it is likely an anonymous text. Written in the fifteenth century, the Latin original had twenty-three stanzas. Benjamin Webb translated eight of them into English. These were published in The Hymnal Noted in the early 1850s.

The text is fairly stable, with a few variations in the wording of some lines and some differences on exactly which stanzas are included. Some hymnals include a stanza beginning “He sent no angel to our race” as the second, but most omit this one. Though there is some variation in the last doxological stanza, most hymnals have the one beginning “All glory to our Lord and God,” which refers back to the first stanza in its second line, “For love so deep, so high, so broad.”

The first stanza extols the extent of God’s love that prompted Christ to come and redeem us, and the final stanza is a doxology. The intervening stanzas tell the story of Christ’s life, from birth to ascension.

DEUS TUORUM MILITUM (sometimes called GRENOBLE) was published in France in the 1753 Grenoble Antiphoner as a setting for the text "Deus tuorum militum" (“The God of Your Soldiers”). One of the finest French diocesan tunes from the eighteenth century, it represents a departure in Roman Catholic hymnody from the older chant style. Sing with vigor.

Here’s a rousing rendition from St. Bart’s: YOUTUBE