The Oldest Hymn Still Sung

Phos Hilaron, gladsome light, is the oldest Christian hymn in continuous liturgical use outside the New Testament, sung at the lighting of the evening lamps. Basil of Caesarea, writing in the fourth century, already refers to it as ancient and does not know who wrote it, which places its composition in the third century or earlier and makes it a survival from the worship of the persecuted church. It is sung at the ceremony of the lamp-lighting (lucernarium) at Vespers, and it addresses Christ as the cheerful light of the holy glory of the immortal Father.

The hymn belongs to a natural and very old religious moment: the marking of the transition from day to evening by the kindling of a lamp, reinterpreted so that the ordinary evening light becomes an image of Christ, the light that does not fail. Its endurance is striking, a short hymn that has been sung, unbroken, from before the age of Constantine into the evening prayer of the Eastern and Western churches alike, including its adoption into Anglican and other Western evening offices. That so early and so simple a text should still be in daily use makes it a rare living thread reaching back to the worship of the earliest centuries.