17th-Century Ethnodoxology - O Sacred Head, Now Wounded

O Sacred Head, Now Wounded is one of the oldest, and most beautiful, hymns that we sing in the church today. Since the subject matter is Christ's suffering and death, we usually only hear it during this time of year. Like some of our favorite Christmas hymns, this once-a-year scarcity may actually contribute to our collective love for it. And just as some of those songs have a long history, this one is also as the product of many musicians and lyricists, including an ethnodoxologist from the 17th century named Paul Gerhardt.

Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676)

Ethnodoxology is the process of helping people in diverse cultures worship the same Triune God. (See my post on ethnodoxology for a fuller explanation of that term.) Gerhardt took the words to this hymn from a long Latin poem and made them understandable for his own German-speaking congregation. He would have never called himself an ethnodoxologist (that word didn't exist back then), but he simply wanted to remove the language barrier to having a meaningful worship experience. Several other musicians also did their own ethnodoxological work to make the final product singable for ordinary folks.

 The tune for Sacred Head was a secular love song: "Mein G'müt ist mir verwirret" ("Confused are all my feelings") which Hans Leo Hassler had adapted from an older medieval melody sometime around 1600.  About fifty years later Johann Crüger adjusted the tune some more and put it with the German words that Gerhardt translated from Latin. Johann Sebastian Bach also played an important role in shaping this hymn: he arranged the harmony and used five stanzas of the song in his 1729 St. Matthew Passion (as well as some of his other works). It is Bach's harmonization that more or less is used in our modern hymnals.


When a composer takes an existing song and puts new words to it, like Hassler and Crüger each did in turn, music theorists call this contrafactum. It sounds like a fancier process than it really is. Putting new words on an existing tune can be serious or silly -- think of what Weird Al Yankovic does with songs like "Eat it." Many of our most beloved hymns went through a similar adaptation: the tunes for What Child Is This? and Hark! The Herald Angels Sing each had a history before they got paired with their current words. In some traditional cultures this can be an initial step in creating a set of worship songs by putting scripture-based words on familiar melodies. (See my posts on reworking traditional songs for more on that process.)

The church at large has greatly benefited from Gerhardt's efforts to make this wonderful Latin text accessible to a wider audience. Salve mundi salutare was written in seven stanzas, each one addressed to different parts of Christ's body: the feet, knees, hands, side, breast, heart, face. It is the seventh body part -- the face, or head -- which Gerhardt adapted and made his own. Several English translations of the German exist, but it is James W. Alexander's 1830 version that we know best today in the U.S.:

O sacred Head, now wounded, 

with grief and shame weighed down, 

 now scornfully surrounded 

with thorns, thine only crown: 

how pale thou art with anguish, 

with sore abuse and scorn! 

How does that visage languish 

which once was bright as morn!

So to all of you aspiring song writers out there: Don't be dismayed if it takes several decades of revision and translation to get your new composition just right. And don't be shy to let some other musicians and lyricists take a crack at helping you improve it. It may even need to be translated into two or three languages before it gains traction. So make sure to give explicit permission to translators who want to put your words into Hindi, Cantonese, Urdu, Bahasa Indonesia, or Spanish!

Here is the portion of the hymn setting we more-or-less know today, 

as it appears in St. Matthew's Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach