Of the Father’s love begotten,
Ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega,
He the source, the ending He,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see,
Evermore and evermore!
O that birth forever blessed,
When the virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving,
Bare the Savior of our race;
And the babe, the world’s Redeemer,
First revealed His sacred face,
Evermore and evermore!
Public domain hymn text (19th century (English translation)). Words by John Mason Neale and Henry W. Baker, from Aurelius Prudentius.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This hymn's text is drawn from a much longer Latin poem written by Aurelius Prudentius, a Roman lawyer and provincial governor who, after a successful career in imperial administration under the Christian emperors of the late fourth century, retired around age fifty-seven to devote the remainder of his life entirely to writing Christian poetry, becoming, in the process, one of the first major Latin-language Christian poets in history and a significant influence on medieval Christian hymnody for many centuries afterward.
The original poem, part of a larger collection Prudentius titled 'Cathemerinon' ('Hymns for the Christian's Day'), was written to be sung across the different hours and seasons of Christian life, and the specific portion used in this hymn addresses Christ's eternal, pre-existent nature as 'the source, the ending' of all things — language directly echoing Revelation 22:13's description of Christ as 'Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.'
The hymn is set to 'Divinum Mysterium,' a plainsong melody that itself dates from at least the thirteenth century, considerably later than Prudentius's own fourth-century Latin text, meaning words and tune were composed roughly nine centuries apart before eventually being combined.
The English translation commonly sung today combines work by two separate nineteenth-century translators, John Mason Neale — already responsible elsewhere in this collection for numerous translations from ancient Greek and Latin hymnody — and Henry W. Baker, an Anglican clergyman and hymnal editor, whose combined efforts brought this fourth-century Roman poem into English-language congregational worship nearly fifteen hundred years after Prudentius originally composed it, making the underlying text one of the oldest represented anywhere within this entire hymnal collection.
