Christianity's most-sung canticle may not have been Mary's at all
Sung every evening at Vespers and Evensong, the Magnificat is known as the Song of Mary. It turns the social order upside down: the proud scattered, the hungry fed, the rich sent away empty. Yet some ancient manuscripts give the words to her cousin Elizabeth, and a leading scholar argued for that reading in 1900.
The name comes from the first word of the Latin text, meaning that the soul magnifies the Lord. The words appear only in Luke's Gospel, chapter 1, verses 46 to 55. Mary has come to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who is pregnant with John the Baptist; the unborn child stirs, Elizabeth praises Mary's faith in words later echoed by the Hail Mary, and Mary answers with the canticle. It ranks among the eight oldest Christian hymns and is perhaps the earliest hymn to Mary.
Luke sets it among four songs in his account of Jesus's infancy, alongside Zechariah's Benedictus, the angels' Gloria and Simeon's Nunc dimittis. All four are modelled on the praise hymns of the Psalms and on Jewish hymn-writing of the time. The Magnificat's opening shows a hallmark of Hebrew poetry, synonymous parallelism, in which each phrase mirrors another: soul answers spirit, and proclaiming God's greatness answers finding gladness in him. Later lines build three pointed reversals, setting the proud against the lowly, the mighty against the humble and the rich against the hungry. Its strongest echo is the Song of Hannah in the first book of Samuel.
The four-part movement is easy to trace. Mary rejoices at being chosen to bear the Messiah, praises God's power, holiness and mercy, anticipates a world transformed, and ends by recalling God's faithfulness to the promise made to Abraham. Whether the historical Mary spoke it is debated. Adolf von Harnack proposed in 1900 that verse 46 should read that Elizabeth spoke, following several old readings; Jeffrey Kloha notes that few modern commentaries or Greek editions agree, though he sees a case for it.
In worship the canticle is a fixture of the Liturgy of the Hours. Catholics and Lutherans sing it at Vespers, Anglicans at Evening Prayer, and Eastern churches always at Matins, where it is called the Ode of the Theotokos. Western tradition tacks on the Gloria Patri doxology, which is not part of Luke's text. The canticle also appears in the Book of Odes found in some Septuagint manuscripts.
Source: Magnificat
