Magnificat

The story

The Magnificat, also called the Song of Mary or Canticle of Mary, and in the Byzantine Rite the Ode of the Theotokos, is a canticle taken from the Gospel of Luke (1:46–55). In Luke's narrative Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth, who is pregnant with John the Baptist; the child moves in Elizabeth's womb, Elizabeth praises Mary for her faith, and Mary answers with the Magnificat. Its Western name comes from the first word of its Latin text. Some ancient authorities give the song to Elizabeth instead, and in 1900 Adolf von Harnack argued for that reading; Jeffrey Kloha notes that few commentaries and no edition of the Greek New Testament of the last half-century agree, though he holds that the case can be made. Scholars also discuss whether the historical Mary herself spoke it.

It is one of four hymns in Luke's account of Jesus's infancy, with Zechariah's Benedictus, the angels' Gloria in Excelsis Deo and Simeon's Nunc dimittis, thought to be drawn from a collection of early Jewish-Christian canticles. In form they follow the hymns of praise of the Psalter and the Jewish hymn-writing of their time, built on the parallel lines of Hebrew poetry. The Magnificat echoes many passages of the Hebrew Bible, above all the Song of Hannah in 1 Samuel. The oldest, probably original, version is in Koine Greek, and it is one of the songs gathered in the Book of Odes found in some manuscripts of the Septuagint. It is counted among the eight most ancient Christian hymns and is perhaps the earliest hymn to Mary.

It became the most popular of the canticles. In the West it is sung or said at the main evening service, Vespers in the Catholic and Lutheran churches and Evening Prayer or Evensong in the Anglican Communion, where it is usually paired with the Nunc dimittis and followed by the Gloria Patri, a doxology not found in the original text. In the Eastern Orthodox Church it is sung at Matins, with a refrain to Mary between its verses. It is also read in Advent and, among Lutherans, at the Feast of the Visitation on 2 July.

Composers have set it since the Renaissance, among them Monteverdi in his Vespers of 1610, Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach (1723, revised 1733), Bruckner, Rachmaninoff and Arvo Pärt. For the Anglican Evensong, where the "Mag and Nunc" are sung daily in some cathedrals, Charles Villiers Stanford wrote a Magnificat in every major key and Herbert Howells published 18 settings. Hymn paraphrases include Maria Luise Thurmair's German "Den Herren will ich loben" (1954), Timothy Dudley-Smith's "Tell Out, My Soul" (1962) and Rory Cooney's "Canticle of the Turning" (1990).

Its theme of the mighty brought down and the lowly lifted up has given it a political edge. In Nicaragua it is a favourite prayer of many peasants and is often carried as a sacramental; under the Somoza government, when campesinos had to carry proof that they had voted for Somoza, they mockingly called that document a "Magnificat". During the British Raj, Archbishop William Temple joked to the evangelist Jack Winslow, who sympathised with Indian independence, that singing the Magnificat would make him look even more of a revolutionary than his home-spun Indian clothes did.

What it says

A song of praise in which Mary rejoices in God for choosing her to bear the promised Messiah and glorifies his power, holiness and mercy. It looks forward to a world turned upside down, the proud humbled and the humble raised, the hungry fed and the rich sent away with nothing, and ends by praising God's faithfulness to his promise to Abraham. Its mood is joyful and confident.

The words