Nicetas of Remesiana

Nicetas was bishop of Remesiana, a town on the great military road through the Balkans, in what is now Bela Palanka in southeastern Serbia. He was born about 335 and died about 414. His diocese sat on the frontier of the Roman world, among Dacians, Bessi, Goths, and the mixed population of the border provinces.

Most of what is known about him personally comes from a friend. Paulinus of Nola, in Italy, wrote two long poems about Nicetas, one welcoming him on a visit in 398 and one seeing him off in 402, and they are full of detail. Paulinus describes him preaching to mountain tribes, says that the Bessi, a people with a fierce reputation as bandits, had been brought to Christ by him and were now singing psalms, and calls him a man who tamed wolves into sheep. He travelled the long road from the Danube to Campania twice to see his friend, which tells you something about both men.

Nicetas wrote instruction for people coming into the church. His six books of Instruction for Candidates for Baptism survive only in part, and the fragments include an explanation of the creed that contains the earliest known use of the phrase communio sanctorum, the communion of saints, in a Latin creed. He also wrote a short work on the vigils of the saints and another called On the Benefit of Psalmody, defending congregational singing against people who thought it too worldly for church, a small book with a large argument in it: that ordinary people singing Scripture together is not decoration but instruction.

That is the background to the claim he is best known for. The great Latin hymn Te Deum laudamus, 'We praise thee, O God', was attributed for centuries to Ambrose and Augustine together, on a legend that they improvised it at Augustine's baptism. That story is not credible. Since the late nineteenth century the strongest scholarly case has been for Nicetas: a group of early manuscripts carries his name over the text, the language and rhythm suit his other writing, and the hymn's shape fits a frontier bishop teaching converts to praise God in memorable lines. The attribution is not certain and is still argued, but it is the leading candidate and has been for over a century.

If it is his, then a bishop of a small Balkan town on the empire's edge wrote the hymn sung at coronations, at the end of councils, at the election of popes, and every Sunday in monasteries for fifteen hundred years.

Sources: Paulinus of Nola, Poems 17 and 27; Nicetas of Remesiana, De psalmodiae bono and the fragments of the Instructio ad competentes (English translation in Fathers of the Church, volume 7); A. E. Burn, Niceta of Remesiana: His Life and Works (1905); Gennadius, De viris illustribus.