ADORO TE DEVOTE. - A rhythm attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas, proposed by the Roman Missal as a prayer after Mass.
The A. consists of seven stanzas, each of four verses, rhymed in pairs, in trochaic catalectic or truncated senarii, composed according to accent. Only the first verse has a leading syllable or anacrusis, which could cause it to be mistaken for an iambic trimeter: Adoro te devote, - Idrene Delida. Elisions are abolished; the caesura falls after the first tripody. Its metrical structure makes it particularly interesting because, it seems, there is no other example of it in medieval Latin literature.
The fame and popularity of the hymn are later than its insertion into the Missal of Pius V (14 July 1570), among the prayers that complete the thanksgiving after Mass. The manuscripts now known number about thirty, all from the 15th and 16th centuries, except three from the 14th century (MS 128 of Montecassino, MS 286 of Klosterneuburg, and MS lat. 14963 of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris).
Wilmart holds that St. Thomas is not the author of the A., making the following observations: 1) no testimonies to the A. are known apart from the manuscripts that give its text; the oldest of these, the Klosterneuburg manuscript, dates from about 1350 and contains a recension of 1323, that is, half a century after the death of St. Thomas (7 March 1274); 2) except for six manuscripts that do not specify the author, all the others, including the three oldest, favor St. Thomas; but the circumstance, mentioned by many of them, that Thomas composed the A. « instante suo obitu, ante sumptionem Corporis Domini », conflicts with what his biographer William of Tocco tells us (Vita t. Th., X, 59); 3) the authentic poems of St. Thomas — those for the office of Corpus Christi — do not have the simplicity and lyricism of the A. But to this objection one may reply that the A. too has, here and there, veins of theological reasoning, even if to a lesser degree than in the other compositions of the Aquinate, in which, moreover, poetic inspiration always surfaces, however much restrained by the rigor of dogmatic terminology.
However the controversy over the authorship of St. Thomas may be resolved, the A. is a masterpiece of Christian poetry, a harmonious, simple and profound composition, which has greatly benefited Catholic devotion.
Originally it must have been a prayer for the Elevation (v.); its author must have drawn inspiration from a text already familiar to the piety of the people, a text found in the Sum. Theol. (part IV, q. 10) of Alexander of Hales (d. 1245): Adoro te, Iesu Christe salvator, qui per mortem tuam redimisti mundum, quem credo sub hac specie, quam video, contineri.
The memorial of verse 17 recalls the words of the consecration « in mei memoriam facietis » (cf. Lk. 22:19, and 1 Cor. 11:24); the pious pelican of verse 21 evokes a well-known symbolism (cf. Dante, Par., XXV, 113).
In music, the first and last stanzas, joined together, constitute a Eucharistic motet. The Gregorian melody, post-classical, of mode V, is a strophic composition. Among the ancient ones, mention should be made of the polyphonic one of 1625, anonymous, for 3 equal voices, with the finale: Ave Iesu, verum Manhu, Christe Iesu! - Adauge fidem omnium credentium.
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Igino Cecchetti