Nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum, in vanum laborant qui aedificaverunt eam - "Unless the Lord built the house, they worked in vain who built it" Ps. 127
Seven years ago, in the run-up to the Synod on the Family, there was a mild controversy over the Pope's decision to remove Latin from its place of honor as the official language of the meeting. By the time the synod convened the language issue had largely been overshadowed by . . . other things. Nevertheless, I don’t think the Latin question should be forgotten. I felt compelled to write the post below at the time, both because the Latin language is a particular interest of mine (as I explain in the article), but more importantly because the discussion of its place in the Church helps illustrate some important aspects of Catholicism. Now, with a rumored return to the bad old days of restricted opportunities to celebrate the Traditional Latin Mass (as I discuss here and here), it seems like a good time to rerun my old (slightly revised) post:
Lingua Latina Aeterna
Passing the literary torch: Virgil and Dante Meeting Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan by Nicola Consoni (c.1850)
Thus the Roman tongue is now first and foremost a sacred tongue, which resounds in the Sacred Liturgy, the halls of divinity, and the documents of the Apostolic See. In this same tongue you yourselves again and again address a sweet salutation to the Queen of Heaven, your Mother, and to your Father who reigns on high. This tongue is the key that unlocks for you the sources of history. Nearly all the Roman and Christian past preserved for us, in inscriptions, writings and books, with some exceptions of later centuries, wears the vesture of the Latin tongue. - His Holiness Pope Pius XII's Address to the Student Youth of Rome, January 30, 1949
Over the last couple of days I have been watching two gentlemen going back and forth in the comments section about the Pope’s decision not to use Latin as the official language of the Synod of Bishops. They both make some interesting points about the place and importance of the Latin language in the life of the Church. Their spirited discussion has got me thinking not just about the Latin language, but about some of the distinctive features of Catholicism . . .
The scene is a parish church. A congregation has assembled for Sunday Mass. The opening hymn begins with a grand flourish. The celebrant processes into the church amid alleluias and mighty blasts from the organ. We reach a mini-climax. The music ends. Then, there is a moment of silence while the celebrant adjusts his microphone. He smiles. And what are the first words out of his mouth? "Good morning, everybody" THUD! You can almost hear something collapsing . . . The church building, the music, and the celebrant in flowing robes all seem to to say, "This is a ritual," an event out of the ordinary. Then, the "Good morning" intrudes itself and indicates that this is really a business meeting and not a liturgy, after all. -Thomas Day, Why Catholics Can't Sing
In Why Catholics Can't Sing Thomas Day takes a close and often acerbic look at what is wrong with the liturgy as it is all too often celebrated in Catholic churches. A major theme, as we can see in the excerpt above, is that reformers and others (both clerical and lay) who are responsible for planning and conducting liturgical celebrations ignore the importance of ritual - of sights, sounds, scents, and actions - in fostering our relationship with God. While there have been some marked improvements since Day's book was first published in 1991 (most notably Pope Benedict XVI's Apostolic Letter Summorum Pontificumin 2007, about which more below), we're nowhere near out of the woods yet.
"David Bearing the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem" by Domenico Gargiulo, c. 1640
This is not just a matter of aesthetics, by the way. Yes, a poorly celebrated or even a lackadaisical Mass can still be valid, and the Eucharist confected by an irreverent priest is still the Body and Blood of Christ. The Mass, however, is more than just a delivery system for the Eucharist. It is also the highest form of prayer. It helps us to find communion with our Lord on a number of different levels, and prepares us, ideally, to be properly receptive to the Grace of the Eucharist. And, if we truly believe that the Mass is bringing us the Real Presence of the Second Person of the Trinity, well, can we possibly be reverent enough?
An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was first published 3 December 2016. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.
Darmok and Jalod at Tanagra
I recently re-published a post called “Star Trek, Secularism, and Christian Faith”. It had originally been posted on my first blog, Principium et Finis, where it garnered more page views than anything else on the blog – more than anything else I’ve ever published online, in fact. There seems to be something about imaginative stories (Star Trek is just one example) that captures our attention, and has done so since our far-distant ancestors gathered around campfires to hear story-tellers recount the communal tales that defined them as a people.
Tamarian Captain and Captain Jean-Luc Picard
In my earlier post I was somewhat critical of the creators of the television science-fiction franchise on the grounds that they didn’t really understand what religious believers mean by "faith", which was supposed to be a major theme in episode I was discussing. They are on much firmer ground in the episode called “Darmok”, from the fourth season of the series Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not only that, I think that this particular story throws an interesting light on some current issues in the Catholic Church.
In “Darmok” the (mostly human) crew of the starship Enterprise encounters an alien race called the Tamarians, with whom humans have previously had several frustratingly unsuccessful attempts at communication. It seems that the Earthling’s Universal Translators (ah, the wonders of science fiction!) are able to discover the meaning of the Tamarians’ words, but can’t figure out how the words combine to express meaning. What is one to make, for instance, of utterances such as “Shaka, when the walls fell”, or “The river Tamarc, in winter”? The aliens seem to be talking in metaphors and allusions drawn from stories known to them and to nobody else.
Data and Troi explain Tamarian Language
Jean-Luc Picard, the Enterprise’s captain (played by Patrick Stuart) experiences the same frustration as his predecessors in his attempts to communicate with the commander of a Tamarian ship, a frustration clearly shared by his alien counterpart. Finally, the Tamarian captain holds up two daggers and declares “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!”, at which both he and Picard are transported (more sci-fi wizardry) down to the surface of a planet below. Picard soon learns that the captain is not challenging him to a duel as he at first supposes, but what he does intend, or what he means by his insistent repetition of “Darmok and Jalod at Tanagra!” remains a mystery.
Finally, after the two captains together encounter a deadly creature (which mortally wounds Picard’s Tamarian counterpart), Picard puts the puzzle together. Darmok and Jalod were two heroes, perhaps rivals or enemies, who together fought a beast on an island called Tanagra, and formed a bond of friendship. The alien captain had hoped that, by putting himself and Picard in a similar situation, they might likewise achieve through shared experience what they couldn't find through mere words. Understanding too late his counterpart's intent, Picard is able at least to comfort the dying Tamarian by recounting to him the ancient epic of Gil-Gamesh.
We Are Formed by Experience
The Tamarians, as are all Star Trek aliens, are really humans in disguise (literally, of course, but figuratively as well). In this particular story the creators of the television show have put their finger on something that goes to the very heart of what it is to be human: we are formed by our experiences, not only as individuals but as peoples. The “aliens” they have created here view the world only through the lens of the stories that have been passed down about the history of their people, and in their everyday experiences they consciously relive the experiences of their forebears. Their only way to communicate abstractions is through the concrete: people, places, and events.
Picard tells Tamarians about death of their captain
Now, we Earth-dwellers may not look very much like them at first. We have a wealth of language that communicates abstractions and ideas . . . and yet we are more Tamarian than we might appear at first glance. Notice how easily, for example, the name of the Nazi’s hand-picked Norwegian puppet Vidkun Quisling has become the common noun “quisling”, a synonym for “traitor” . . . or how easily we use a metaphorical term such as “puppet”, as I did just now. Often, we quickly forget that the expressions we are using are metaphors at all. I remember, for instance during the 1992 presidential campaign when former (and future) California governor Jerry Brown was asked about the “anointed front-runner” Bill Clinton. Brown asked whether he was running for president, or running for pope. Some allusions are even more deeply buried: how many people even know when they use the word “mentor” they are alluding to Homer’s Odyssey, where the goddess Athena, in the guise of a wise old man named Mentor, accompanies Odysseus’s son Telemachus to provide guidance (or, to speak metaphorically, “show him the ropes”).
It's a Mystery to Me
There’s even more going on here than the use of language. The Tamarian captain understands that actions, experiences, can communicate in ways that words cannot (a point I also discuss in a post I republished this week, “Christ, or Anti-Christ? Art & the Power of Imagination”), which is of course true of human beings as much as it is of the fictional “Children of Tamar”. This is a large part of why so many religions rely on ritual and formal rites: the actions communicate to us much more deeply than mere words, because we are actually living out what they want to convey. The true meaning of the term “mystery” (from the Greek μυστήριον) in fact, is not something unknowable, but something that can only be known experientially, through doing. Traditional Christianity tells us that God uses these mysteries as a means not only of imparting His Grace, but of revealing himself to us. Once we understand that, we can more easily see why μυστήριον translates into Latin as sacramentum, because sacraments involve not only knowing or thinking, but acting.
The Mystery of the Eucharist
Most religions rely, to some degree or other, on mystery. At the very core of Christianity we find the Profoundest Mystery, the Supreme Sacrament: The Infinite God become Man in order to experience our humanity, and to invite us, in turn, to share in His Divinity. We live out this mystery concretely when we receive the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist which is, as the Second Vatican Council reminds us, the summit and source of the Christian life. While Catholic Christianity includes countless lesser ways of living out spiritual realities as well, including the other Sacraments, sacramentals, devotions, and so on, the Eucharist, and the Sacrifice of the Mass in which we receive it, is the most important thing we do.
Turning Toward The Lord
It can be helpful, I think, to bear these considerations in mind when we look at the suggestion recently made [5 July 2016] by Cardinal Sarah, head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, that priests start re-introducing the practice of saying the Mass ad orientem, “toward the rising sun”, which is to say facing the altar rather than the congregation. The Cardinal made the suggestion in a talk delivered at a liturgical conference in London this past summer (full text here). Cardinal Sarah asked his fellow shepherds in the episcopy to support him in this matter, saying:
I very humbly and fraternally would like to appeal also to my brother bishops: please lead your priests and people towards the Lord in this way, particularly at large celebrations in your dioceses and in your cathedral. Please form your seminarians in the reality that we are not called to the priesthood to be at the centre of liturgical worship ourselves, but to lead Christ’s faithful to him as fellow worshippers united in the one same act of adoration.
Implicit in the part of the quote I have italicized above is the idea that what we do, and what the priest does, during the Mass is a part of the message.
Ad Orientem: facing The Lord Together
I first came across a similar suggestion in regard to ad orientem worship some years ago in an article by Fr. Joseph Fessio called “The Mass of Vatican II”. In his essay Fr. Fessio explains what the documents of Vatican II actually say about the Mass; for instance, that it should remain mostly in Latin, and that Gregorian Chant “should be given pride of place in liturgical services", and various other directives that appear not to have much influenced the post-conciliar revision of the liturgy. Fr. Fessio points out that one thing that was done does not appear, anywhere, in the Council’s documents, just as it had never been part of the tradition of the Church over the previous 18 centuries: turning the priest at Mass around to face the congregation, rather than having him face the altar, the liturgical East, along with the people he is leading in prayer. In defending the traditional practice Fr. Fessio more explicitly makes some of the same points that Cardinal Sarah does in his London talk:
It's true that when the priest faces the people for the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, there may be a sense of greater unity as a community. But there is also a danger of the priest being the performer and you being the spectator - precisely what the Council did not want: priest performers and congregational spectators. But there is something more problematic. You can see it, perhaps, by contrasting Mass facing the people with Mass facing East or facing the Lord. I don't say Mass "with my back to the people" anymore than Patton went through Germany with his "back to the soldiers." Patton led the Third Army across Germany and they followed him to achieve a goal. The Mass is part of the Pilgrim Church on the way to our goal, our heavenly homeland. This world is not our heavenly homeland. We don't sit around in a circle and look at each other. We want to look with each other and with the priest towards the rising sun, the rays of grace, where the Son will come again in glory on the clouds.
The Medium is the Message
Marshall McLuhan famously said of television that “the medium is the message”. The same can be said of all media, including sacred media. How we celebrate the Mass sends a message. The symbolic “message” of the ad orientem Mass is clear: that all of us together, priest and people, are making an offering to God; we all face our Lord together. When priest and people face each other, who is offering what to whom? The message seems to be that we are there to see each other, not to turn to Our Lord. The little cartoon to the left (which, I confess, I stole from Fr. Z’s blog) gives a good illustration of the problem. Cardinal Sarah himself recently made the same point in a talk deliveredto the bishops of Sri Lanka,
In recent decades in some countries the Sacred Liturgy has become too anthropocentric; man not Almighty God has often become its focus.
But that’s not how it’s supposed to be. Instead,
In every Catholic liturgy, the Church, made up of both minister and faithful, gives her complete focus – body, heart and mind – to God who is the centre of our lives and the origin of every blessing and grace.
That’s the beauty of the traditional ad orientem celebration of the Mass: we don’t merely read or hear but experience for ourselves the Truth that God is the center of our lives, and our in our worship we all turn to Him together.
It's Greek to Me
Which brings me to one of my few real quibbles with “Darmok”. In the final scene of the episode we see Captain Picard reading a book when his first officer, Commander Riker, enters the room. Riker looks at the book curiously, and says, “Greek, sir?” (did I mention that Captain Picard is the consummate Renaissance man? Starship captain, interstellar warrior, student of Latin and Greek, etc.), which leads to this exchange:
PICARD: Oh, the Homeric Hymns. One of the root metaphors of our own culture.
RIKER: For the next time we encounter the Tamarians?
PICARD: More familiarity with our own mythology might help us to relate to theirs. The Tamarian was willing to risk all of us just for the hope of communication, connection. Now the door is open between our peoples. That commitment meant more to him than his own life. Thank you, Number One.
Now, the Homeric Hymns is not a bad place to start, as far as it goes, but if Picard really wants to get at the “root” of what it is to be human, I have a better suggestion for him, one that goes like this:
“Why aren’t you putting up the Christmas tree?” I’ve heard that from my students I can’t tell you how many times every school day since Thanksgiving. “For the same reason we’re not having an Easter egg hunt”, I growl back, “it’s Advent, not Christmas!” I have a nice Advent Wreath in my classroom with electric candles (state law prohibits real candles and, honestly, they could be the occasion of all sorts of mischief in a high school classroom). We have special Advent prayers (printed on purple paper) taken from the Liturgy of the Hours for every day until Christmas, including the O Antiphons on the last seven class days before Christmas. I have carefully explained to my young charges that this is a season of preparation and penitence, distinct from the Christmas Season. To all of which I receive as a response: “Christmas and Advent are the same thing! Put up the tree!”
Classroom Advent Wreath last week, the 2nd week of Advent
I have to admit that the entire world outside my classroom (with the exception of Catholic churches, and those of other Christians who still honor the traditions of our forebears) is taking the side of my students on this one. My second job, in fact, is at a retail store, where I work in the seasonal department. Here, I find myself stocking and sorting Christmas lights and decorations before Halloween has even passed, and well before Thanksgiving I’m blasted with endless repetitions of the most execrable “Christmas” songs (most of which have virtually nothing to do with the Nativity of Christ) ever spawned in the brains of Tin Pan Alley songsters. I’m convinced that if I ever succumb to a state of raving, maniacal insanity, it will be from having to hear “Santa Baby” one time too many.
So, why fight the tide? Am I just being stubborn, rigid one might say, by sticking with the “old-fashioned” way of doing things? Not at all. “Tradition”, G.K. Chesterton tells us, “is the democracy of the dead”. It allows our ancestors the chance the present their perspective on whatever issue we may be facing. If we’re smart, we’ll pay attention to them (which is not the same as mindlessly following them), because they normally spent generations dealing with the same, or similar issues. Most human traditions represent the wisdom acquired through many years, often centuries, of trial and error. We who are Catholics ought to be particularly deferential toward those traditions which have also been established by the Church, because our Faith tells us that Christ created the Church to act on his behalf here on Earth. I’m not suggesting that traditions such as liturgical seasons enjoy the same status as Dogma (“You’re risking hellfire if you put up that tree on December 4th!”), simply that it would be wiser to give serious consideration to why we have a separate season of Advent, for instance, than to simply go along with the secular conventional wisdom.
Here, as always, the Church is happy to give us reasons for what she has established (see 1 Peter 3:15). As it happens, there are three main purposes for setting aside this special time in the liturgical year. As the entry on Advent in the Catholic Encyclopedia explains:
During this time the faithful are admonished
to prepare themselves worthily to celebrate the anniversary of the Lord's coming into the world as the incarnate God of love,
thus to make their souls fitting abodes for the Redeemer coming in Holy Communion and through grace, and
thereby to make themselves ready for His final coming as judge, at death and at the end of the world.
Moretto da Brescia's "Christ in the Wilderness"
The first reason is the most obvious: we are preparing ourselves for the arrival (adventus in Latin) of the Messiah at Christmas. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the Incarnation in human history; the only possibly greater event is the Resurrection at Easter, and one can argue that it makes more sense to look at both Christmas and Easter as different sides of the same event (see below). Furthermore, it is an enduring feature of humanity that we need to prepare, spiritually and psychologically, for important events. Jesus spent forty days in the desert before undertaking his ministry, St. Paul several years before his; in a similar way, couples prepare themselves during a period of betrothal prior to marriage. One used to be able to underscore this point by noting that the consummation ought to take place not after the engagement, but only after the wedding itself; unfortunately, in a society that believes in waiting for marriage no more than it believes in waiting for Christmas, this example doesn’t clarify for most people. In any case, the special period set aside before the event impresses upon us the importance of the event itself. The four weeks of preparation before Christmas tells us, on an experiential level, that the Nativity is a Very Big Deal indeed.
The second reason (to prepare us to more fittingly receive Holy Communion) reminds us that Christ comes to us in different ways, which should not surprise us, as the events of Salvation History typically embody different layers of meaning, and hence the traditional four senses of scripture. In much the same way, we can find different dimensions to liturgical observances. Jesus, therefore, does not incarnate only as the child of Bethlehem. In fact, we experience His adventus and incarnatio every time we receive His Body and Blood in Holy Communion. The Nativity itself only makes sense in light of Christ’s offering up of Himself on the Cross, the baby resting on the wooden trestles of the manger as He will later hang on the wooden beams of the cross. And so, during Advent we are called to reflect on Christ's coming bodily among us in the Holy Eucharist.
Finally, there is yet a third adventus of the Messiah, a further way in which Christ comes into our world. Like the Nativity, and unlike Holy Communion, it is a unique, one-time event: His coming in glory at the end of time. There’s still another meaning here as well, as each one of us receives a preview of sorts when He comes for us individually at death, the end of our own time here on Earth. Whether we are facing our own end, or the Ultimate End, we need to be ready to face our Judge. As John the Baptist, who figures prominently in the Second sunday of Advent, warns us: “Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Matthew 3:10). For this reason Advent, much like Lent, and unlike Christmas, is a penitential season.
From Michelangelo's "Last Judgment"
And yet Advent is different from Lent, too, as Christmas is a less complicated celebration than the Triduum and Easter, the observances that follow Lent. Let’s return for a moment to our wedding analogy. Advent, as I said above, can be compared to the period of engagement before a wedding. Even though we know that marriage will also entail trials and hardships, it is a fundamentally good and happy thing, and so we anticipate the coming wedding with joy. We start making arrangements in advance (planning a reception, choosing a dress, sending invitations, etc.). As the wedding day itself draws closer, our preparations intensify with bridal showers, rehearsals, and the rest. Likewise the celebration of Advent intensifies as we draw nearer to the joy of the Nativity: the 3rd Sunday of Advent is called GaudeteSunday because the introit for the Mass comes from St. Paul’s letter to the Phillipians, Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico, gaudete (“Rejoice in the Lord always, I say again, rejoice”, Philipians 4:4); we show our joyful anticipation with a pink candle on our advent wreaths on this Sunday. Then also, from December 17th (the first day of the O Antiphons) the daily liturgy becomes more Christmas-centric.
And so, in a spirit of preparation, I will at last relent and put up the tree in my classroom (an artificial tree, of course, in keeping with state law) in the last week before Christmas break. I will remind my students, however, that it’s not Christmas quite yet. And, when they return the first week of January, when the decorations have already been disappearing out in the world, the tree will still be there to greet them . . . because then ‘twill be The Season To Be Jolly.
An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was first published November 24th, 2014. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.
While we're on the topic of neglected composers, how about poor Antonio Salieri? Had he not been cruelly libeled by Peter Shaffer in the play & film Amadeus, it is quite possible that his music would not be performed at all (incidentally, Shaffer's cartoonish depiction did few favors to the memory of Mozart either, who was the purported protagonist of his story). The truth is that although Mozart had some suspicions about Salieri when he first arrived in Vienna, the two eventually developed a friendly and respectful professional relationship. Salieri, in fact, responded very favorably to Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, and in his final letter Mozart mentions taking Salieri to a musical performance in his own carriage. Needless to say, Salieri did not murder Mozart (nor anyone else that we know of).
The lovely piece below is the "Sanctus & Benedictus" from Salieri's Requiem Mass, one of his four Masses. It reminds us of a time when great composers were expected to employ some portion their God-given talent to the praise and worship of that generous Creator. It is, I think, also a good example of why his contemporaries considered him a gifted composer.
