100. Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee

The Story Behind the Hymn

Like 'O Sacred Head, Now Wounded' (hymn 98 elsewhere in this collection), this hymn's underlying text is traditionally attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux, the highly influential twelfth-century French Cistercian abbot and theologian, though, exactly as with that other hymn, modern scholars studying the question closely now generally regard the precise original authorship of the underlying medieval Latin poem as genuinely uncertain rather than firmly established fact.

Edward Caswall, an English clergyman who, much like John Henry Newman (hymn 99), personally converted from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism and subsequently joined Newman's own religious community, the Birmingham Oratory, translated the original Latin text into its now-familiar English form in 1849, doing so as part of a considerably broader, sustained personal project of deliberately bringing a wide range of ancient Latin hymn texts into regular English-language congregational worship for the first time.

Caswall personally translated a substantial number of separate medieval Latin hymns during his many years of dedicated work at the Oratory, and this particular hymn remains today one of his single most widely sung and lastingly successful English translations, valued especially and specifically for its deliberately simple, unhurried, meditative focus on the mere thought of Christ's own name functioning, by itself, as a genuine and sufficient source of inward comfort — notably independent of any specific accompanying request, petition, or expressed personal need being separately voiced anywhere else within the hymn's own text, a rare quality of pure, unrequesting contemplation that sets it apart from many more overtly petitionary hymns found elsewhere throughout this same broader hymnal collection.