Finding Meaning in Life
Unraveling 'Media Vita in Morte Sumus'

Finding Meaning in Life

Media vita in morte sumus is Latin for “In the midst of life we are in death.” It is the first line of a medieval church chant, an antiphon: a short sung text that goes with a psalm or canticle in the daily round of prayer. English service books of the Middle Ages set it at Compline, the last prayer of the day, for about two weeks in the middle of Lent. English speakers know it because the first Book of Common Prayer, in 1549, put it into the burial service.

It is not a Crusader or Templar battle chant. It was already in an English service book before the First Crusade was preached, and we found no medieval source that links it to the Crusades or to the Templars.

What the words say

Here is the whole antiphon as the Sarum Breviary gives it (Paris edition, 1531, printed in Julian’s Dictionary of Hymnology), beside the English of the Book of Common Prayer as revised in 1662:

Latin	Book of Common Prayer (1662)
Media vita in morte sumus:	In the midst of life we are in death:
quem quaerimus adjutorem nisi te, Domine,	of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord,
qui pro peccatis nostris juste irasceris?	who for our sins art justly displeased?
Sancte Deus, sancte fortis, sancte et misericors Salvator:	Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour,
amarae morti ne tradas nos.	deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.

Read to the end and the chant is a question and a plea. It asks who can help, answers that only God can, and asks not to be handed over to death. The last Latin line says only amarae morti, “bitter death”; “eternal” is the Prayer Book’s addition.

The refrain Sancte Deus, sancte fortis has a longer history of its own. Julian’s Dictionary of Hymnology says it is based on the Trisagion (“thrice holy”), an invocation introduced into the Greek service books in about AD 446.

What the chant is

Where it was sung. The Sarum (Salisbury) Breviary gives Media vita at Compline as the antiphon to the Nunc Dimittis, “for 15 days about the middle of Lent”. It is also in the York Breviary printed in 1493.

How old it is. Nobody knows who wrote it or when. The earliest copy Julian’s Dictionary cites is in a manuscript now in the British Library, Harley MS 2961, where it is set “for use during Lent”. That manuscript is the Leofric Collectar, written at Exeter in the third quarter of the eleventh century. Pope Urban II called for the expedition that became the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095, so the chant was already being copied in England before the Crusades began.

What people did with it. Julian reports the German hymnologist Rambach’s account that by the middle of the thirteenth century it had come into universal use as a prayer “in times of trouble”, and that people also used it “as an incantation”.

The Cologne ruling of 1310

The clearest medieval record of how it was used comes from a church council. In 1310 a council of the church province of Cologne, under Archbishop Henry of Virneburg, issued a set of statutes. The twenty-first reads:

Prohibemus item, ne in aliqua ecclesiarum nobis subiectarum imprecationes fiant, nec decantetur Media vita contra aliquas personas, nisi de nostra licentia speciali.

In our translation: “We likewise forbid that curses be made in any of the churches subject to us, or that the Media vita be sung against any persons, except by our special licence.” The statute gives the reason: it is for the archbishop to decide “when such things are to be done”.

Some books date this ruling to 1316; Julian’s Dictionary gives “1316 (1310)”. The statutes as printed in Hartzheim’s Concilia Germaniae are headed 1310.

So by the early fourteenth century, people were singing a prayer for mercy at other people, as a curse, and the church wanted a say in when that happened.

The Notker legend

The best-known origin story says that Notker of St Gall, a monk who died in 912, wrote the antiphon after watching workmen build a bridge over a gorge near the abbey. Julian’s Dictionary says this tradition “has not been traced earlier than the Chronicle of J. Metzler, written in 1613”, and that no evidence can be found for either the story or the ascription. It adds that the antiphon appears in only three St Gall manuscripts, all comparatively late (one from the fourteenth century, one from 1431, one from 1507), and none of them names Notker.

Where the “Crusader battle chant” label came from

We could not find where the Crusader and Templar labels began. Here is what the sources do say.

Myth as a Crusader or Templar chant. The antiphon was being copied into an English service book for Lent before the First Crusade was preached, and we found no medieval source that connects it with the Crusades or with the Templars.

Unverified as a battle song. Julian passes on the claim of a German writer, Bässler, in 1858, that “it was used as a war song by the priests accompanying the hosts before and during battle”. Julian names no medieval witness for this, and we did not find one.

Where you have heard it

In German. German translations were in use by the fifteenth century. Martin Luther took one of them, altered it, added two stanzas of his own, and published the hymn Mitten wir im Leben sind (“In the midst of life we are”) in the Erfurt Enchiridion of 1524. Julian says it took, and in his day still held, “a foremost place among German hymns for the dying”.

In English. Miles Coverdale published an English version of Luther’s hymn, “In the myddest of our lyvynge”, in 1539. Ten years later the line entered the Church of England’s services. The first Book of Common Prayer was first used on Pentecost Sunday, 9 June 1549, and was mainly the work of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. In its burial service, at the graveside, the priest says, or the priest and clerks sing: “In the myddest of lyfe we be in death”, followed by the rest of the antiphon in English. The wording most people know, “In the midst of life we are in death”, is the 1662 revision.

How to check a “medieval chant” you find online

The story of Media vita shows how to test any chant that arrives with a dramatic label:

1. Look for it in a service book. A chant that was really sung in church is in breviaries and antiphoners, and reference works like Julian’s Dictionary of Hymnology say which ones and where in the year.
2. Compare dates. If the earliest copy is older than the event the label names, the label is later than the chant.
3. Separate a later writer from a medieval witness. “A nineteenth-century scholar said” is not the same as “a chronicle records”.
4. Read to the last line. The last line of Media vita is a plea not to be handed over to death, which tells you more about the chant than the first line does.

The idea the first line carries is simple: death is not only at the end of life but in the middle of it. The antiphon’s own answer is not to seize the day but to ask for help. Readers who want the classical versions of the same thought can compare memento mori in Older Than You Think and Horace’s line in Carpe diem.

Sources

• John Julian (ed.), A Dictionary of Hymnology, revised edition (John Murray, 1907), vol. 1, pp. 720–721, entry “Media vita in morte sumus”: https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofhymn01lond
• Joseph Hartzheim (ed.), Concilia Germaniae, vol. 4 (Cologne, 1761), Council of Cologne under Archbishop Henry of Virneburg, 1310, statute XXI; translation from the Latin is ours: https://archive.org/details/gri_33125010872436
• EM1060: The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060–1220, “London, British Library, Harley 2961”: https://em1060.stanford.edu/manuscript/london-british-library-harley-2961
• Paul Halsall (ed.), Internet Medieval Sourcebook, “Urban II: Speech at Council of Clermont, 1095”: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/urban2-5vers.asp
• The Book of Common Prayer (1549), “The Order for the Burial of the Dead”, transcribed by the Society of Archbishop Justus (archived copy): https://web.archive.org/web/20260613182833/http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1549/Burial_1549.htm
• Society of Archbishop Justus, “The First Book of Common Prayer” (archived copy): https://web.archive.org/web/2026/http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bio/162.html
• The Book of Common Prayer (1662), “The Order for the Burial of the Dead”, transcription: http://www.eskimo.com/~lhowell/bcp1662/occasion/burial.html

Checked September 2026.