Ravishing Chant of St Paul’s Famous Love Chapter

Some music is beautiful, and then, some music simply takes your breath away. The hymn to love by the young Romanian singer Maria Coman (in the video below) certainly qualifies as breathtaking in every way.

I’m not surprised that it should be so wondrous. It starts with the power of its words—in effect, the Word of scripture itself.

The text is the famous 13^th chapter of St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, which is read at virtually every Christian wedding. In it, St. Paul describes the very inner life of God—charity—which everyone can partake of even in this life.

(The video contains subtitles so there is no need to repeat the words here.)

The two other elements of this ravishing presentation are the setting (a Romanian Orthodox church of profound beauty) and the artist’s captivating soprano voice chanting the hymn with extreme grace and delicacy.

Together with a video production of the highest quality, these artistic elements form a magnificent display of sacred beauty.

This hymn does what church music is supposed to do: it raises the heart and mind heavenward and inspires prayer. In a sense, the whole presentation is a prayer. 

The Paradoxical Language of the Hymn

But the language too contributes to the hymn’s ineffable beauty.

When I first heard the chant, I was under the impression that it was written in some ancient biblical language or dialect. Ms. Coman’s features, which at first struck me as Lebanese, added to the Middle Eastern aura of the whole experience.

Yet, when I read the video title and researched a little about the artist, I discovered that the hymn derives, not the Middle East, but from a very rich religious culture in Europe which has inherited elements of its language both from east and west.

Romanian is the only major language in Central Europe that can be called a Romance language (that is, it shares Latin as its root language system with Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese).

Technically, it is called a sub-Romance language given its hybrid nature. Romanians are ethnically Slavs, so the Romanian language is also highly influenced by Slavic and old Slavonic language systems.

If you listen carefully to Ms. Coman’s words, you may be able to pick out traces of the eastern and western strains of influence. For example, the word faith in Romanian (credință, sounds like “credenza”) comes from the Latin “credere”, to believe.

And where we would expect the word love to sound something like the Latin amor or caritas, in Romanian, it is derived from the Old Church Slavonic term dragoste. (See my article about the two brothers who created this language.)

Another indication of the hybrid nature of Romanian is that it is written in the Latin alphabet…only in Romania. But if you go to the small neighboring country of Moldova, where they also speak Romanian, you’ll have to learn to read it in the Cyrillic script used by Russian and other Slavic languages.

What an amazing and beautiful language!

And if you get to know any Romanians, as I have, you’ll undoubtedly think the same about the people and their culture.

Maria Coman seems to embody the very best of the Romanian language, culture, and beauty, so please take a few minutes to enjoy her ravishing rendition of St. Paul’s hymn to the Charity of Christ.