Philosophy Commons^™

Thomistic Wit And The Medieval English Hymn, Michael H. Means

University of Dayton Review

It is only fitting that we celebrate the 700th anniversary of St. Thomas Aquinas not only with scholarship and argumentation, but also with music and song and poem. Although he wrote only a few hymns, St. Thomas is one of the greatest and most profound of the Latin hymnodists. To pay homage to that aspect of his life's work, I wish here to single out a distinguishing characteristic of his religious verse and then look for similar characteristics in a rather different body of poetry, the religious lyrics of medieval England.