"ADORO TE DEVOTE". - A rhythm "said to be by St. Thomas Aquinas," proposed by the Roman Missal as a prayer after Mass.
The hymn consists of seven strophes, each of four lines, rhyming in pairs, in trochaic or catalectic truncated hexameters composed according to accent. Only the first line has an introductory syllable or anacrusis, which might cause it to be mistaken for a trimeter iambic: *Adoro te devote, - latens Déitas*. Elisions are abolished; the caesura falls after the first tripody. Its metrical structure makes it particularly interesting, as it appears there is no other example in medieval Latin literature.
The fame and popularity of the hymn came after 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 for three from the 14th century (the 128 of Monte Cassino, the 286 of Klosterneuburg, and the 1493 Latin manuscript of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris).
Wilmart is of the opinion that St. Thomas is not the author of the hymn, offering the following observations: 1) no testimony to the hymn is known outside the manuscripts that transmit its text; the oldest of these, the Klosterneuburg manuscript, dates to about 1350 and contains a version from 1323, i.e., 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, attribute it to St. Thomas; yet the circumstance, noted by many of them, that Thomas composed the hymn "at the point of death, before receiving the Body of the Lord," contrasts with what his biographer William of Tocco relates (Vita s. Th., X, 59); 3) the authentic poems of St. Thomas—those for the Office of Corpus Christi—lack the simplicity and lyricism of the hymn. To this objection, however, it may be replied that the hymn also contains, here and there, veins of theological reasoning, albeit to a lesser degree than in the other compositions of the Aquinate, in which, moreover, a poetic inspiration always emerges, though contained by the rigor of dogmatic terminology.
However the controversy over the authorship of St. Thomas is resolved, the hymn is a masterpiece of Christian poetry, a harmonious, simple, and profound composition that has greatly benefited Catholic devotion.
Originally, it must have been a prayer for the Elevation (v.); its author seems to have drawn inspiration from a text already familiar to popular piety, one found in the *Summa Theologiae* (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 consecration, *"in mei memoriam facietis"* (cf. Lk 22:19, and 1 Cor 11:24); the *"pie pellicane"* of verse 21 evokes a well-known symbolism (cf. Dante, *Paradiso*, XXV, 113).
In music, the first and last strophes, combined, form an Eucharistic motet. The Gregorian melody, post-classical, in Mode V, is a strophic composition. Among the ancient polyphonic settings, one from 1625, anonymous, for three equal voices, is notable, with the closing line: *Ave Iesu, verum Manhu, Christe Iesu! - Adauge fidem omnium credentium*.