Usquequo Domine?

Please, dear Lord, let not your servant depart, after all these years, without seeing Saturday 7th July.

A word of reassurance...

...to old comrades-in-arms, after that last post: I'm not planning to re-order the Undercroft. It will continue for the foreseeable future to smell funny down here. It's me, not you.

Those leaded windows? They don't open.

The Trad Archipelago

From every point by many a turning road,
Maimed, crippled, changed in body or in mind,
It was a sight to see the cripples come
Out on the fields. The land looked all awry,
The roads ran crooked and the light fell wrong.
Our fields were like a pack of cheating cards
Dealt out at random - all we had to play
In the bad game for the good stake, our life.
Edwin Muir - from The Good Town

A LITTLE while ago an aquaintance - a former Protestant, someone of far deeper theological learning than me (not my Fundamentalist Friend, to whom I'll return subsequently) - began expressing a serious interest in the traditional Liturgy of the Roman Rite (as I guessed he would, sooner or later). His questions were characteristically thoughtful and Christocentric; but living in a country with a tiny Catholic population, he had no present opportunity to assist at the traditional Liturgy and few sympathetic souls with whom to discuss it. He had provided himself with a Missal and a Breviary, for the purpose of investigating the differences between Old and New and, having done so, had drawn the same conclusions as so many of us - not from the romance of Latin nor the ravishing heaven-hungry beauty of the chant, nor the "silence", nor any vision of glamorous externals; no brocaded fiddlebacks nor incense-hazed high altars haunted his imagination (yet). The texts and the rubrics did it all on their own. A man after my own heart.

"Will the Old come back? Should I pray for its return?" - these were his immediate concerns, together with how best to assimilate the traditional liturgy into his devotional life, where no opportunity to live it fully and properly (in the Church and with the Church) existed. I told him right away - pray the Office anyway. Pray the Missal. Adopt both as the primary source and inspiration of your devotional life - but for the good of your soul, keep clear of TradWorld!
The spontaneity of this last advice surprised me as much as its vehemence. "Where did that come from?" I had a vision of myself as a hooded spectre, indicating with horrid warning the unseen pit, from which groans, muted screams and abandoned ullulations were suddenly audible. I am of course, a denizen of the pit, acclimatised to its acrid, sulphurous bowels, having spent most of my adult life there. I'm a Trad: one of those whom the abnormality of the times has compelled into a variety of absurd and unnatural postures; one of the mad, driven in my leisure hours to the digestion of turgid encyclicals in order to defend what ought to be self-evident; to contrive some kind of "systematic statement of the obvious" in the face of universal denial and purblind stupidity. Has it done me any good? Well has it?

"Perhaps the greatest damage done by Pope Paul VI's reform of the Mass (and by the ongoing process that has outstripped it), the greatest spiritual deficit, is this: we are now positively obliged to talk about the liturgy. Even those who want to preserve the liturgy or pray in the spirit of the liturgy, and even those who make great sacrifices to remain faithful to it - all have lost something priceless, namely, the innocence that accepts it as something God-given, something that comes down to man as gift from heaven.

Those of us who are defenders of the great and sacred liturgy, the classical Roman liturgy, have all become - whether in a small way or a big way - liturgical experts. In order to counter the arguments of the reform, which was padded with technical, archaeological, and historical scholarship, we had to delve into questions of worship and liturgy-something that is utterly foreign to the religious man. We have let ourselves be led into a kind of scholastic and juridical way of considering the liturgy. What is absolutely indispensable for genuine liturgy? When are the celebrant's whims tolerable, and when do they become unacceptable? We have got used to accepting liturgy on the basis of the minimum requirements, whereas the criteria ought to be maximal. And finally, we have started to evaluate liturgy - a monstrous act! We sit in the pews and ask ourselves, was that Holy Mass, or wasn't it? I go to church to see God and come away like a theatre critic. And if, now and again, we have the privilege of celebrating a Holy Mass that allows us to forget, for a while, the huge historical and religious catastrophe that has profoundly damaged the bridge between man and God, we cannot forget all the efforts that had to be made so that this Mass could take place, how many letters had to be written, how many sacrifices made this Holy Sacrifice possible, so that (among other things) we could pray for a bishop who does not want our prayers at all and would prefer not to have his name mentioned in the Canon.

What have we lost? The opportunity to lead a hidden religious life, days begun with a quiet Mass in a modest little neighbourhood church; a life in which we learn, over decades, discreetly guided by priests, to mingle our own sacrifice with Christ's sacrifice; a Holy Mass in which we ponder our own sins and the graces given to us - and nothing else: rarely is this possible any more for a Catholic aware of liturgical tradition, once the liturgy's unquestioned status has been destroyed."
Martin Mosebach - from The Heresy of Formlessness

...We have seen
Good men made evil wrangling with the evil,
Straight minds grown crooked fighting crooked minds.
Our peace betrayed us; we betrayed our peace.
Look at it well. This was the good town once.’

These thoughts we have, walking among our ruins.
Edwin Muir - from The Good Town

Will Pope Benedict break in upon the captives to harrow the Limbus Tradorum, the unfurled banner of the Motu Proprio streaming in his excommunication-banishing wake? Who knows? I shall in any case continue to sustain myself here on sweet messages from the pre-lapsarian, "separated" but unsullied East, among whose gentle ministers Father Stephen always seems so uncannily apropos.

Lurve

As an ochlophobic Scot, two of the things I detest most in this world are weddings, and parting with money.

My five-year-old emerged into the school-yard on Friday, brandishing a piece of artwork. Festooned with love hearts, it indicated two stick-people with ear-splitting grins being bound in chains of matrimony.

"That's lovely, darling - did you do that?"

"No. Evan did it. That's me (the yellow-haired stick-person) and that's Evan."

Evan's BMW-driving mum just happened to be standing behind me. I engaged her winningly through her designer shades.

"More expense, huh?"

"Not my problem - you're the father of the bride. I'm very old fashioned about such things."

I'm very cynical about the kinds of things BMW drivers choose to get "very old-fashioned" about, but it doesn't do to be chippy.

If your daughters won't (in spite of everything) follow their patrons into Carmel, then start praying earnestly for their elopement; preferably in mum-in-law's BMW.

Symphony in white major

A VISITOR to the Undercroft has touched its Eeyoreish denizen on the raw, as a consequence of which I've promised to make a bit of an effort to post something uplifting, life-enhancing and beautiful beyond the normal run of sublunary experiences. Those who come here in the expectation of something other than that - for whom, perhaps, the prospect of one's lugubrious self cutting a caper is repellant and unsettling, like one of Arturo's lipsticked, cavorting skeletons, look away now:

LUNCH

An Orwellian Moment

All right, yes – it’s a cliché. Clue to the True Nature of Catholicism’s Present Crisis, or Troubling Aspect of the Neo-Catholic Mentality Painfully Exposed don’t have the same snap, so I’m running with it nevertheless. Father Z has re-posted his guide to appropriate and edifying behaviour subsequent to the motu proprio's immanent arrival. I am not angling for one of Father’s Sour Grapes Awards, nor do I wish to gainsay any one of his prescriptions; I’m going to remain within the letter of the law by getting my retaliation in before, all at once, the quarrel sinks.

“My theory is good”, insists, smoothly, the sinister brain surgeon in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes – “it’s the facts that are misleading”. Catholic commentators, pundits, bloggers of “conservative” stripe and a number of eminent clerics are today lining up to inform us solemnly that the Church’s traditional liturgy “was never abolished”. Well, I never; and more - some of these people are the very same people who, just a blinking of an eye since, were lining up to inform us solemnly that abolished it was, and that furthermore We Had Better Get Used To It. It’s a funny old world, as an eminent “conservative” famously observed. History is being prepared in its official version. That last forty years during which your family apostasised and you were pushed out of your parish? They never happened.

Catholicism, one might be forgiven for observing, only actually exists today on paper. What Bishop Fellay calls "normal Catholic life" is not possible anywhere - not in a "conservative" parish, and not in the SSPX, either. Whatever one's position, one requires an additional layer of theory (“hermeneutic of continuity” or “state of emergency”, according to inclination) to qualify it - to paper over the theological or ecclesiological gaps and fissures one has to live with in practice.

What to do about it it? I don't know. Telling the truth, though, has to be the indispensible condition of an integrated Christian life. A religious posture which requires to be shored up with ideological constructions and historical contingencies in order to preserve the appearance of coherence - of realisability - cannot be maintainted indefinitely. As Chesterton says somewhere, if you can't make a coloured picture of a thing, it's of no earthly use.

This is the basis of my impatience, on the one hand, with the "hermeneutic of continuity", that celebrated mot du jour. On a combox at the NLM recently, a Benedictine father invoked it in relation to the good effect of the Old Rite on the celebration of the New. This is fine as it relates to externals – but what about the texts, and that ominous shift in the lex orandi that it doesn’t require a Dr Lauren Pristas to detect? Asserted continuity is meaningless here. It springs from the same desperation that leads conservatives to insist, whenever an official statement includes something obviously at odds with reality, "Oh well, of course he has to say that..." - as though Our Lord could ever require us, like Soviet Communists, to falsify reality in order to preserve the credibility of some a priori ideological position or "foundational myth" - the Conciliar Renewal or the Glories of the Revolution.

On the other hand, although I am grateful to the SSPX on whom I have depended, on and off (and never exclusively) for twenty-five years, they remain committed, apparently, to a mere restoration of the status quo ante. I understand the reasons for their dogged immobility, and admire how they've managed to sustain it post-Lefebvre and in spite of the confident prognostications of their enemies of an inevitable slide into schism and heresy - but are they the future? I must confess my heart does not leap at the prospect. I think of them as being a bit like a seed, which gets through the winter - the frosts, the floods, the passage through the guts of animals - by being small, hard and not very attractive; but a seed must subsequently break out of its protective shell or it will die in the ground.

Why has Western Christianity shattered into pieces at least twice in the past 1000 years? Why does it seem so predominantly arid and legalistic? Is a restoration of all the appurtenances of the central-bureaucratic Papacy, and an officially asserted “continuity” the answer? My own attitude to the Papacy - notwithstanding a sincere admiration and affection for its present occupant - is, I confess, that of Cordelia to her father Lear - "I love thee according to my bond, neither more nor less". There’s the immoveable object of Tu es petrus. Beyond that…

It has been suggested by friends (who ought to know me better) that my "heart-thinking encounter" with Orthodoxy has to do with liturgical/aesthetical dreaming - a fascination with the glamorous externals of Byzantine worship. Not so. I am a Roman Catholic. My liturgical home is every bit as inspired, authentic, radical, Apostolic and Christ-bearing as any in the East. The challenge posed by the "pristine witness" of Orthodoxy is at another level altogether.

Here

I am a man now.
Pass your hand over my brow.
You can feel the place where the brains grow.

I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see
The footprints that led up to me.

There is blood in my veins
That has run clear of the stain
Contracted in so many loins.

Why, then, are my hands red
With the blood of so many dead?
Is this where I was misled?

Why are my hands this way
That they will not do as I say?
Does no God hear when I pray?

I have no where to go
The swift satellites show
The clock of my whole being is slow,

It is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart.
I must stay here with my hurt.

R.S. Thomas

"...of no concern to the vast majority of Catholics..."

ABOUT SUFFERING they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

WH Auden - Musée des Beaux Arts

Apophatic

There is a book on my shelves, its spine somewhat light-faded, bought many years ago at a time when its title excited me; packed up, unread, before a move; unpacked and re-shelved afterwards, the gold lettering still able to raise a frisson of promise and excitement – an undiscovered country awaiting the leisure to explore it. Art and Scholasticism by Jacques Maritain. I kid you not.

Middle-age presents temptations and sins unanticipated or imagined in youth and frequently, nowadays, I find myself bringing “boredom” - by which I suppose I mean accidie - to the Second Plank after Shipwreck. It is a crime to be bored, a sin against all three of the theological virtues – far more pernicious than the unsubtle misdemeanours of vigorous early manhood. The thought of Art and Scholasticism brings it on in topmast-high, unconquerable waves.

It is dispersed somewhat, for a while, in the hortus conclusus of the Divine Office (Deo gratias) but also by kindred spirits, among whom I number Philip Larkin. This sometimes surprises friends, who imagine I’d find the black thread of godless despair running through all of his work repellant and indigestible. Not a bit of it. He’s indispensible to me. My wife knows why.

“Happiness writes white” he is alleged to have answered, confronted with the accusation of wallowing in gratuitous, whinging miserablism. The accusation is of course, false. Only eupeptic souls who lack, in Alan Bennett’s phrase (Bennett being himself the perfect reader of Larkin) that “fully developed capacity never quite to enjoy oneself” of which all three of us became conscious very early in life, could ever be so obtuse and fundamentally humourless as to bring it. I relish the music of his lugubrious misanthropy (“mug-faced wives, glaring at jellies”), the exquisitely placed provincial middle-class locutions (those who produce the word “ironic” here are the same people who call Gregorian Chant “relaxing”), the cold-eyed refusal to admit that there’s much else for it in an empty universe but to “flay thy neighbour, as thyself”. Larkin’s godlessness is precisely that, having very little to do with “atheism”; today’s shrill proponents of which would, it’s absolutely certain, have bored him rigid. In this he’s a far better representative of his age than a Richard Dawkins or a Christpher Hitchens. Who, after all, but a preposterous bore would waste his time propagandising for the banal and self-evident?

And yet, as with Wilfred Owen, “the poetry is in the pity”. Pity is everywhere, and it's perfectly genuine:

The Old Fools

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there's really been no change,
And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange:
Why aren't they screaming?

At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petaled flower
Of being here. Next time you can't pretend
There'll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they're for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines -
How can they ignore it?

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can't quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun's
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinction's alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous, inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.

Dementia, of all the manifestations of human suffering, presents perhaps the greatest challenge to Christians. I mean this in a double sense: most obviously that my (mostly) non-practicing wife, having spent her nights lavishing inexhaustable patience and compassion on people whose illnesses frighten and repel the majority of us, will have a great deal more to show on the Last Day than me, with my finely-honed theological principles; but more: where is the immortal soul, with its irreducible personhood in all of it? What answer can one make to epiphenomenalism when it’s so obvious that integral personality disappears in precise proportion to the disintegration of the tissues of the brain, turning (in the words of a friend) a beloved and vivacious grandparent into an unrecognisable old sinner?

Art, like real theology, exists for the truth. My faith tells me that the soul of a demented man remains intact and inviolable, its operations no longer mediated, but impeded and suppressed for a while within the purgatory of a failing organism; but Larkin’s poetry is true, too. It’s a true representation, unmarred by any puerile polemic, of a godless universe. I need, periodically, good, strong doses of it.

Liturgical Movement

... My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe,
or as the black coal that is on the smith's forge;
or as the sole of a shoe left in white halls;
it was you that put that darkness over my life.

You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;
and my fear is great that you have taken God from me

from Donal Og, anonymous 8th Century Irish, trans. Lady Gregory.

Please, please, if you haven't already done so, read these two posts of Fr. Stephen:
How much is too little? How much is enough?
Another Gospel...
If your parish has moved, or effectively dropped, the Feast of the Ascension, read them twice.

Lex orandi, lex credendi

For Hilary

GABRIEL SYME was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet; he was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self‑realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.

Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left— sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible. His hatred of modern lawlessness had been crowned also by an accident. It happened that he was walking in a side street at the instant of a dynamite outrage. He had been blind and deaf for a moment, and then seen, the smoke clearing, the broken windows and the bleeding faces. After that he went about as usual—quiet, courteous, rather gentle; but there was a spot on his mind that was not sane. He did not regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid men, combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded them as a huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion.

He poured perpetually into newspapers and their waste‑paper baskets a torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of this deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no nearer his enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he paced the Thames embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage or so solitary as he...

GK Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday

Animula

'Issues from the hand of God, the simple soul'
To a flat world of changing lights and noise,
To light, dark, dry or damp, chilly or warm;
Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs,
Rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys,
Advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm,
Retreating to the corner of arm and knee,
Eager to be reassured, taking pleasure
In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree,
Pleasure in the wind, the sunlight and the sea;
Studies the sunlit pattern on the floor
And running stags around a silver tray;
Confounds the actual and the fanciful,
Content with playing-cards and kings and queens,
What the fairies do and what the servants say.
The heavy burden of the growing soul
Perplexes and offends more, day by day;
Week by week, offends and perplexes more
With the imperatives of ‘is and seems’
And may and may not, desire and control.
The pain of living and the drug of dreams
Curl up the small soul in the window seat
Behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Issues from the hand of time the simple soul
Irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame,
Unable to fare forward or retreat,
Fearing the warm reality, the offered good,
Denying the importunity of the blood,
Shadow of its own shadows, spectre in its own gloom,
Leaving disordered papers in a dusty room;
Living first in the silence after the viaticum.

Pray for Guiterriez, avid of speed and power,
For Boudin, blown to pieces,
For this one who made a great fortune,
And that one who went his own way.
Pray for Floret, by the boarhound slain between the yew trees,
Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.

TS Eliot

Breathing Together

COMING TO CONSCIOUSNESS in the wake of some catastrophe, a man gropes his way amidst the rubble and the fallout. His memory has been disrupted and his senses impaired by a recent, unrecollected trauma; he recognises, hears, sees little with any clarity. Guided, though, by some profound instinct, and sustained by unreasonable hope, as he stumbles he becomes aware by degrees of the presence of fellow human beings. Each stops and listens; each hears the breathing of the others. Are there two – or three? Hands are extended in the darkness, and the slow, painful journey continues. None asks, nor does it occur to him to ask, where the others are bound; each has recognised the same instinct, the same hope in his fellows.

As their journey advances and their solidarity develops the man admires and grows to rely upon this one’s sharper eyes, that one’s clearer head; one’s strong arm, or strong sense of structure to discern which masonry, seemingly substantial, will shelter their passage or crumble at the touch; another’s kindness and calm. After a seeming eternity of struggle during which the instinct has appeared to fail, the hope to flicker and the solidarity to dissipate amidst inevitable quarrels, desertions and defeats, the little company (no longer so little now) finds itself on open, rising ground. The air has cleared and suddenly there below them, in sharp relief, is their city - their patria – her hills, her river; the broken towers and shattered ramparts; the great, half-ruined dome.

Reconstructing Roman Catholicism
It has been my contention for some time now that what is going on in the Roman Catholic Church is not reform but destruction...

Such criticisms against this are not new, and they are formulated by a small minority in the Church known as traditionalists. Often, however, this so-called traditionalist rhetoric is embedded in its own positivist and authoritarian narratives of what the past was like and how the present should be. It is not enough to preserve in some sense the forms used in the past. One must go deeper, into the very foundations of these practices that were dismissed as medieval, baroque, and decadent. Traditionalism, as it has appeared as a movement since the 1960's, is not radical enough, in the sense that "radix" in Latin means the root of living things. Traditionalism tends to ossify liturgy, theology, and the Catholic ethos into an agenda that did not exist prior to the changes.
- Arturo Vasquez

To "breathe together" - conspirare - is the meaning of "conspiracy". It's what like-thinking, like-loving human beings do as a matter of course. It implies necessarily no organisation nor formal statement of intent; no plan of action nor party line. It’s no more than the normal and natural way of things. It’s what we all do. The wildest and most radical of all conspiracies is of those who seek to breathe together with the Man-God in His Mystical Body.

This ignorant and infirm straggler offers thanks to all friends and co-conspirators, and begs for their prayers.

Latin Passions

Among the wealth of rare and splendid things at The Sarabite, this jewel glitters especially brightly:


You

You are the sonnet
That the morning utters:

Silent, singing,
The incessant rustling
Of birds in the branches.

You are the song
That lifts up my feet,
Period of longing,
Period of sighs-
Sweet blade that
Plunges into memory
And cuts away all
That bends in sorrow.

You are the hue of
The sky in spring-
The light that glides off
The streams that
Gallop over stones.

You are the muse,
The recitation,
The singer,
And the tear-

All of this you consume
In your gentle eye-

And I fade away,
Lost and lifted up
In morning's prize.

Arturo Vásquez

Meanwhile, at The Muniment Room, TTony reflects on his missed Spanish wedding.

The parish church of St Eloi, Andernos, on the Arcachon Bassin, where Mademoiselle became Mrs Moretben according to the traditional rites of the Roman Church. In the foreground are the ruins of an earlier Gallo-Roman basilica.

Ignatian Retreat

"I am convinced that the ecclesial crisis in which we find ourselves today depends in great part upon the collapse of the liturgy"
- Josef Cardinal Ratzinger

"If we consider the bimillenary history of God's Church, guided by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, we can gratefully admire the orderly development of the ritual forms in which we commemorate the event of our salvation (...) The Eleventh Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, held from 2-23 October 2005 in the Vatican, gratefully acknowledged the guidance of the Holy Spirit in this rich history. In a particular way, the Synod Fathers acknowledged and reaffirmed the beneficial influence on the Church's life of the liturgical renewal which began with the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council. The Synod of Bishops was able to evaluate the reception of the renewal in the years following the Council. There were many expressions of appreciation. The difficulties and even the occasional abuses which were noted, it was affirmed, cannot overshadow the benefits and the validity of the liturgical renewal, whose riches are yet to be fully explored..."
- Pope Benedict XVI

“What seems to me to be white, I will believe to be black if the hierarchical Church thus determines it.”
- St Ignatius Loyola

Monet, Monet, Monet...

MONET - ROUEN CATHEDRAL

My modest collection of recordings includes almost none of the Romantics. I mention this gratuitously, to reassure those who detected a whiff of something incongruous and unsavoury about the Evil Denizen of the Undercroft weeping like a milkmaid under great waves of Richard Strauss as matter of routine. I make an exception for the Four Last Songs as a kind of sublime summing-up of something that ought to be kept mostly in quarantine, for all of the reasons ably presented by the visitors to my combox on the posting below. There. I'm glad I was able to clear that up. A pint of milk, please barman - in a dirty glass.

I mentioned similarly ambiguous feelings about Duruflé, organist and choirmaster of the great Cathedral of Rouen in the period just before the Council, whose characteristic ouevre, exemplified in his Requiem, is liturgical plainsong tastefully re-clothed in exquisitely respectful orchestration and subtle polyphonic variations. Duruflé himself provided two scores for the Requiem - one for choir and orchestra, another for choir and organ. It is therefore eminently useable liturgically, as its composer, a genuine lover of the liturgy, had intended.

So far so good. Like the high altar and canopied cathedra of Rouen Cathedral itself, reconstructed after war-damage in fine, minimal late-Liturgical Movement style (infinitely preferrable to the baroque monstrosity squatting in the chaste sanctuary of Chartres), but now a mere repository for the dust stirred by rarer visitors to that abandoned cul-de-sac east of the cuboid People's Altar under the crossing, it represents a kind of culmination, abandoned almost in the instant of its appearance; a sad, evocative glimpse of a discarded vision.

I loved - still love - the Duruflé Requiem; but along with related manifestations of the pre-Conciliar Liturgical Movement I have begun to regard it with a certain resentment. The feelings of longing and wistfulness it conjures are not, I fear, related to that holy fire kindled in the soul by the Gregorian originals; more a kind of fuzzy, naturalistic, emotional mirage or impression. And now, whenever I hear those Gregorian melodies in their proper liturgical context, my mind involuntarily fills them out with Duruflé. I can't quite get rid of him, and I'm not pleased. He's interfering with my prayers for the departed, and wafting me off somewhere quite remote, I suspect, from the Rex tremendae majestatis.

TTony wonders whether Duruflé has enhanced or merely adulterated the plainsong setting of the Requiem Mass, superimposing a dubious romantic sensibility on its gothic austerity. I don't think that's quite right. I think he's Monet-fied or Debussy-ficated it, which might be something even worse.

The Third Last Song

...requiring no superfluous comment from me.

Letters to a Fundamentalist Friend - II

PART TWO - THE HEART

FATHER STEPHEN FREEMAN, whose blog I recommended to you last time, describes himself somewhere as an “ignorant person”. I must warn you that I am not only ignorant but retarded, partially as a consequence of having mistaken apologetics and arguments (of the type in which the internet abounds) for real theology - which is, as he reminds us, only ever about a Person. If you and I are shipmates, though, that's a privileged relationship: we've come aboard at quite different ports - on different continents, with utterly different cultures, I daresay. Meanwhile, our destination remains a possibility merely, a place of the imagination, until the moment when straining eyes glimpse through early morning haze the sunlight on that dome, these ramparts. Meanwhile with nothing between here and there but wide-open sea, we can be frank in a new way. So let me tell you what I think I see already:

Here is something that has tantalised and fascinated me for years: “orthodoxy” is not, in the first instance, “right belief” at all – but “right glory”. That’s what the Greek words mean. Of course a modern Greek will also understand “orthodoxy” in the sense more familiar to us; but when the choir chants Doxa Soi Kyrie, doxa Soi, he certainly doesn’t hear Doctrine to Thee, O Lord, doctrine to Thee.

Does this perhaps go to the heart of what has gone wrong with “modern” Christianity? This submerged sense of the word “orthodoxy” seems baffling to the western mind, habituated more and more, from the late Middle Ages on, to thinking almost exclusively in terms of “correct doctrine” as first in the order of precedence – to the point at which almost everything else is up for grabs. What has troubled me most of my adult life is a nagging sense of deepening divergence between the Catholicism of the Catechism and Catholicism as it actually presents itself to the believer today – as though, provided the “theory” continues to be asserted and officially upheld, it doesn’t much matter about anything else. If true, it's madness, as the most basic analogy will tell us:

How do we go about understanding our mother? Having first drawn life from her, do we begin to place the greatest emphasis subsequently on having a firm, correct theoretical understanding of the notion of maternity, childhood and the governing principles that ought to determine the interaction between them? Is the quality of our relationship with her a direct function of our having acquired a theoretically “correct” apparatus? Having done all that, do we then advance to “loving“ her – as defined essentially by approaching her in the way that seems most “correct” to ourselves (punctiliously formal or offhand and matey, according to taste), while crooning sentimental ditties at her? Would that make us good children?

Children give “right glory” to their mothers because they first of all suckled them and lived with them and loved them before it ever occurred to them to think of the relationship in terms of what was correct and what wasn’t; when a child runs to his mother in love, or joy or distress; or tries to please her with some little gift; weeps when she weeps, laughs when she laughs; or, years later, carries her to the lavatory, cleans up her vomit, closes her eyes, lays her in the earth and weeps out his heart in gratitude to and for her – does he do this because he got it all out of a book? And having done it, could some other person who’d studied the book more assiduously claim to understand the whole mysterious business better, nevertheless?

How does this apply to the way we live our lives with the God we claim to love? Do we really live with Him - or are we content merely to study Him and scrupulously measure the quality of our continuing interaction with Him according to approved theoretical models?

Prosper of Aquitaine, a pupil of St Augustine, in the fifth century provided the West with a famous axiom - one it has all but forgotten- condensed in the phrase lex orandi, lex credendi : “the law of prayer establishes the law of belief”; or to put it more directly, “as you pray, so shall you believe”; or “if you habitually approach God in a way that really isn't consistent with what you believe in theory, your beliefs will gradually conform themselves to your behaviour”. It’s obvious really - we are not angels, but men.

Correct doctrine is fundamentally important – but the manner in which we aquire and maintain it is more important still. Just as we know and love our mother as a consequence of living intimacy with her, so our sensus fidei, our instinctive “feeling for the faith” develops as we meet and live with Our Lord in His Church, and especially as together we follow Him, fasting and feasting, from cradle to Cross and beyond, in the Liturgy. “The Church is Jesus extended in time and space in the souls of those united to him.” It is the Mystical Body visibly incarnated. Christianity is not, and never can be a “home alone” affair; neither can you do it “by the book” (Fr Freeman); nor is the Church, in contradiction to the Incarnation, a purely invisible entity without a tangible body or a distinctive, audible voice. Does it speak to us of “truths” that contradict Scripture? Impossible. Truth is Truth. On the contrary, in the Divine Liturgy, all Scripture finds its true and proper context as the very voice of the praying Christ.

The central, defining, foundational act of the faithful soul is prayer. "Correct doctrine" merely, will not "transform us in Christ". Worship which, whatever we assert about it, is in reality no more than "a dance around the Golden Calf that is ourselves" (Cardinal Ratzinger) will in any case degrade it. Instead of growing into fuller personalities, by participating in the life of the True Personality, we will become the brittle, neurotic, inhibited, fearful, spiritual hypochondriacs and hygiene fetishists you described. To paraphrase Father Freeman again: pray, go to Church, receive the Sacraments, forgive and ask forgiveness, give stuff away. Stop pretending we can ever know all the answers. Then we’ll begin to know Him. Everything else will follow.

Letters to a Fundamentalist Friend

PART ONE - THE HEAD

Dear T.,

You will notice from my address* that I am presently at sea. The voyage is arduous and uncomfortable and there are no guarantees it will ever make port. I am, nevertheless, queasily embarked; twenty-five years of haunting the quayside are at an end.

The sea is a kind of desert, so the opportunity is presented to make a better Lent than usual. If the condition of orthodoxy in one's faith is "to think with the Church", the Christian must in addition learn to "think with the heart". Christianity is incorporation into the life of a Person – it isn’t an argument or an ideology. I am for the time being persuaded that the preoccupation with proofs and demonstrations of proofs, of controversies and their logical resolution, is radically prejudicial to “thinking with the heart”, in addition to being practically futile. "Internet religion" is, moreover, a very poor substitute for the real thing, and it's highly doubtful that the hours most of us spend strutting and fretting on this cold little stage are in any way pleasing to God, or helpful to our salvation. We could – therefore should, probably - have been praying, or just playing with our children instead. So, in addition to bodily fasting, a few weeks' retreat from cyberspace is probably all to the good. Kyrie eleison!

Another advantage of the desert, of course, is a certain enlargement of perspective one gains from being temporarily apart from the fray...

…

I WILL BRING OUT those passages of scripture which speak to me with perfect clarity of Our Lord’s promises to His Church, and you will decline to accept that these passages ought to be understood as the Church has always understood them. So which perspective is, on a balance of probabilities, the authentic one? No-one ever came to Scripture without some sort of hermeneutical “key” – it’s impossible. The only question is, then – which “key”? The Fathers, to whose witness I defer, acclaimed by the Church within their own lifetimes for clarity of teaching, purity of doctrine, and – most importantly of all – manifest holiness of life, reveal an unbroken, continuing tradition of interpretation from the very birth of the Church. I will therefore always strive to understand Scripture in the same sense as them. This is vitally important for me. God does not change; no jot or tittle will pass away. There is no value or point whatsoever in Scripture admonishing us to hear something called “the Church” as the “house of God and ground and pillar of Truth” if this “Church” cannot be identified with any certainty. Where, then, is this Church? There is no point in appealing, circular fashion, to Scripture, because it’s precisely the interpretation of Scripture on which we disagree. Secondary sources then - witnesses to how the first Christians themselves understood the Church and the Gospel:

The true knowledge is the doctrine of the apostles, and the ancient organization of the Church throughout the whole world, and the manifestation of the body of Christ according to the succession of bishops, by which succession the bishops have handed down the Church which is found everywhere.
St Irenaeus

One quote, plucked from among innumerable others, by different authors, all in the same vein. Note that Irenaeus, writing in the second century, already speaks of the "ancient organisation of the Church".

This Church, then, was, and must remain, visibly constituted: go to any second century town, as the Fathers again bear witness, and ask “where is the Catholic Church?” You will - now, as then - be directed to a people gathered together with presbyters and deacons under a bishop in the Apostolic succession; who teaches, governs and sanctifies each local or particular church in communion with the Universal, “holding-all” Church whose unchanging, integral faith, order and sacramental life all of its members, united to its Head, maintain. The oft-asserted notion among the “reformed” communities, of the myriad modern “denominations” being equivalent to particular churches, the sum total of which constitute the “catholic church” despite the absence of any meaningful unity of faith, sacrament or constitution is, I’m sorry to say, a fanciful and anachronistic absurdity which can’t survive a moment’s honest encounter with the first few centuries, during which the Church asserted her catholicity precisely as the note distinguishing her from schismatic and heretical sects. Nothing has changed.

Where, then, is the record of holy souls in the first centuries, raising their voices and shedding their blood for the sufficiency and pre-eminence of scripture against the rise of usurping “Catholicism”? Where are their writings? Where are their witnesses? Where, for that matter, is any indication that Our Lord intended New Testament Scripture (which He never mentions) rather than, and apart from, the “teaching Church” (of which He speaks in the most exalted terms) to provide the sole, sufficient, infallible rule of faith? From my point of view this complete absence of any “parallel tradition” is itself sufficient to render incredible the Protestant account of Christianity, before even beginning to address the hopeless internal contradictions inherent in sola scriptura itself.

On the other hand, if catholic Christianity which alone can lay claim to a historically verifiable, continuing tradition from the Apostles to the present day is a human fabrication, then everything is rendered definitively uncertain – especially Scripture, the contents of which were discerned according to the tradition and by the authority of the Church. If what Christians took for fifteen hundred years to be the “House of God and ground and pillar of truth” was never anything of the sort, then Scripture has proved an unreliable guide throughout most of the Church’s history. What use is a scripture that insists I “hear the Church”, and then leaves me uncertain about what and where the Church is? How reliable is a scripture in which God promises to lead us “into all truth” and to be with us always, prior to abandoning us almost immediately to all sorts of ruinous, fundamental errors?

Perspective, again - mine versus yours - on the subject of false “triumphalism” and the gates of hell not prevailing: from the very beginning the Church has to struggle to distinguish herself from those errant and self appointed “pastors” - the wolves in sheeps’ clothing who “gather apart”; then the terrible Arian crisis when it really did seem for while tht all was lost; the constant threat of subjection to secular authority; the schism between East and West; the Great Western Schism; the administrative and juridical chaos of the late Middle Ages; the Protestant revolt; Jansenist rigorism versus Jesuit casuistry; the Deists and rationalists; religious nationalism; Revolution, ultramontanist reaction and the disorder and degradation following Vatican II’s ill-conceived and incredible attempt to synthesise them; the long martyrdom of the East under Islam and then atheistic Communism – well yes, I agree: it would seem as though “crisis” were indeed the “fifth mark” of the Church, and that Hell has come perilously close to prevailing throughout two millennia. There she still is, nevertheless – with the same unchanging faith, the same sacraments the same constitution, the same essential unity, miraculously preserved – unless the whole of what we call Revelation is a deep and disastrous delusion.

* i.e. "Sailing to Byzantium" - the beginnings of a serious and "heart-thinking" encounter with Orthodoxy.

PART TWO - THE HEART