Today we celebrate the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul, twin pillars of the Roman Church, the Rock and the Apostle. Both of these men learned the hard way what Paul was to make into a famous maxim. All Christians would do well to adopt it.
When I am weak, then I am strong.
Second Corinthians is such a lovely letter, filled with brutally honest pathos:
When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution of the United States, they made liberal use of the concept of rights. They famously held that such rights were “self-evident,” and were an endowment from the “Creator.” This assertion made perfect sense in 1776 when Western civilization had been Christian for a thousand or more years. But historically speaking, there is a problem here. If human equality and the existence of a Creator are really self-evident truths, then what are we to make of societies that recognize neither? The confident assertion of self-evidence is connected to the general immodesty of the Enlightenment,
Thanks to Ariadne’s thread, Theseus was able to escape the labyrinth after slaying the Minotaur. In the Middle Ages, the Church saw Theseus as a type of Christ, descending into the dissolution of hell, slaying death, and leading the lost souls from darkness to light.
“[I]t’s time for the LGBT community to start moving beyond genetic predisposition as a tool for gaining mainstream acceptance of gay rights. . . .For decades now, it’s been the most powerful argument in the LGBT arsenal: that we were “born this way.” . . .Still, as compelling as these arguments are, they may have outgrown their usefulness”
I begin with a quote from dancer and writer Brandon Ambrosino,
Seven or eight years ago, I was invited by a group of priests of the Marquette (Michigan) diocese to give a series of talks on music and morality. They were very receptive to my approach and suggested that I might set down my thoughts in a book. Hence the memoir I mentioned in the previous post. I chose the memoir format because music and morality are so difficult to write about in the abstract. And indeed, I more recently gave a similar talk at the University of Virginia’s St. Anselm Institute and faced some tough questions which, to be honest,
Why a blog on a monastery website? It could be used to share monastic spirituality, and I do hope to cover that. The seniors in our community teach monastic spirituality to the novices and juniors regularly. Thus, not only our own experience of prayer, work and silence should offer some fresh insights on Christian discipleship, but we should also be somewhat experienced in teaching this perspective to others.
What I have discovered, however, is that the spirit of monasticism can be misunderstood,
As many of you know, I am working on a memoir. This was first suggested to me by an editor at Paulist Press after a short interview I gave appeared in the Sun-Times few years ago. From January 1994 until July 1997, I performed in a jazz/rock sort of band called OM. And the transition I made, from playing at the Taste of Chicago, then five months later beginning my novitiate, has generated some interest. This band was not so typical. As I was working on the book on Monday, I noticed the fact that in some way or other, most of the significant persons who went through the band (our line-up had up to six people, including horns and violins) are now educators. I include myself in that group, since I am the prior of what Saint Benedict calls “a school of the Lord’s service.”
One of the interesting points of the memoir has to do with parallel themes in my former work as a musician and my life now as a monk. One such parallel has to do with the marginal status of both monks and artists in the world. Artists are often restless until they can pry open some hidden aspect of reality and show it to others. But then, not everyone has eyes to see what is uncovered, at least right away. Some ‘fusion of horizons’ needs to take place, to introduce others to the language of poetry, art and music, and then the unique perspective of the artist.
![Did you see some kid fall from the sky? Nah. [Bruegel the Elder's depiction of Icarus unmourned]--"Not an important failure," as told by Auden.](https://chicagomonk.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/icarus.jpg)
Bruegel the Elder’s depiction of Icarus unmourned and unnoticed…a splash at the lower right… Did you see some kid fall from the sky? Nah; I wasn’t paying attention —“Not an important failure.”
Any good teacher is in a similar position. Henri Nouwen suggested many years ago that the model of education today is based in a kind of violence that is competitive (students competing for scarce recognition of achievements), unilateral (the transference of a commodified knowledge from strong teacher to weak student), and alienating (marking the gap between the material to be mastered and the real life that comes once one gets the degree). We’ve all had good teachers, though. What were they like? One of the best classes I took in college involved working through Newton’s Principia.
Noel Swerdlow, who initiated me into the magical world of Isaac Newton
What was fantastic about the class was that the professor wrote out, and actually worked out, Newton’s proofs on the blackboard, inviting us to work through them with him. I will never forget his enthusiasm, as if he were the one discovering this and not Newton…rather that we were discovering the beauty of nature’s patterns together, with Newton as quirky guide, friends on an amazing journey past the veil of sense to the mathematical harmony of physics.
Sometimes a learning experience of this sort can be so powerful that it requires a reordering of our old way of thinking. Learning to like jazz or to understand calculus takes time and a kind of ‘conversion’ (Newton had to invent calculus to figure out the moon’s orbital math!). The early Christians called this metanoia. Metanoia means literally to change one’s mind. This idea is also expressed as repentance. When Jesus began His ministry, he preached, “Repent [Metanoeite!] and believe the gospel [Mt. 4: 17].” Learn to think differently! We must undergo a kind of education–note that Jesus spends much of His public life teaching. He teaches not so much a series of facts. Nor does He just impart information. Repentance involves learning to think anew about old facts, seeing from a new perspective, noticing things that had always been there, but discovering in them God’s presence and transforming love. It requires something like contemplation.
Monastic formation is perhaps the most radical instance of this Christian conversion, but it is simply what all Christians pledge to do at baptism. The thought patterns of the old Adam must give way to the new Adam, to the mind of Christ [Phil. 2: 5; 1 Cor. 2: 16]. Recognizing how exactly the old Adam thinks is not so easy, for our cultural upbringing lingers in unsuspected ways. What’s more, we live in a peculiarly blind kind of culture, that no longer recognizes its own dependence on tradition. Freud thought that he discovered a universal psychological law in the Oedipal complex, but in fact, he was merely noticing the modern Western tendency to want to do away with one’s fathers. This habitual refusal to recognize our intellectual and cultural debts causes disruptions and discontinuities in our background tradition, and therefore in our thinking.
In our monastery, we are trying to counteract this situation with different approaches to teaching. One test case, upon which I will dwell more at length in a future post, would be the following question. Can a modern Christian learn to read the Scriptures from the profound spiritual sense that guided the formation of theology from St. Paul until Rupert of Deutz? We live in a scientific age, and Catholic Biblical scholars have been celebrating their freedom to engage in historical-critical method for the past sixty years. Should we even bother to go back to allegory?
But what if the historical-critical method and our enthusiasm for it would turn out to be an unhealthy preoccupation with the world that is passing away? What if it locks us into the very worldview that a conversion is meant to leave behind? Given the present struggles of the Catholic Church in her historic lands, this kind of question bears asking and patient and careful response. It also may call for metanoia. Repent and believe!
I’ve mentioned ‘discontinuity’ a few times in recent weeks. This is what happens when a tradition like monastic life or liturgical music suddenly takes on a strikingly different form than what came immediately before. Why does this interest (or concern) me? If you are allergic to long quotations, you probably can read the first and last sentence of what follows, and still get the gist:
If you are in the Chicago area this Friday night, I hope that you will come by the monastery for Solemn Vespers at 7:00 p.m. The service will last for about 45-50 minutes and will feature the exquisite motet Tu solus, qui facis mirabilia. Unlike the version in the embedded video, however, our Schola will be singing it as a part of the liturgy, and your hearing it will be as part of the publicly assembled Church at worship! Also scheduled: Magnificat by Palestrina and Gustate et videte by di Lasso. And finally, we will be debuting a piece composed just for this celebration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Auctor beate saeculi by Kevin Allen.
I spent Monday morning at the Regenstein library at the University of Chicago, in the forlorn area of the stacks where rest the a cappella liturgical compositions of the 14th century to the present. I was enjoying myself browsing, hoping to discover some long-overlooked masterpiece (I found several dusty books of obscure pieces–we’ll see whether they turn out to be masterpieces). After about an hour of browsing, I was struck by the almost complete gulf between the music of the sixteenth century and that of the seventeenth. Compare, for example, a Magnificat by Orlando di Lasso (ca. 1532-1594):
…and a setting by Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1554-1612):
So these are two composers separated by one generation. Gabrieli is thought by many to have studied under di Lasso, which is why I chose these two in particular. In di Lasso, one can hear already some incipient Baroque elements, to be sure. And he was a much more prominent composer of secular music than was his exact contemporary, the hallowed Palestrina. But Gabrieli moved in an entirely new direction (Mind you, I love Gabrieli’s music!). He was not alone. Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), a priest, was the most celebrated figure of the revolution from Renaissance to Baroque style. Significantly, he was one of the pioneers of the new secular humanist entertainment, opera. His opera L’Orfeo is the earliest opera still in the repertoire.
Back to my Monday experience: what we see in liturgical music of the seventeenth century is precisely the importation of these secular humanist elements into liturgical music, necessitating a break from tradition. For example, the tradition of alternating chant and polyphony in the singing of the Magnificat, is almost always dropped, so that the whole text is set for the choir and orchestra. Also quickly gone is the association of the Magnificat with a particular ecclesiastical mode (or scale), drawn from the proper antiphon of the day (On Friday, we will sing Palestrina’s Mode 1 setting because the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart uses the antiphon Ignem veni mittere in terram, “I came to send fire upon the earth…” which is in the First Mode). Practically speaking, this means that in the new style the monks, canons or nuns, whose job it is to pray the liturgy, are squeezed out in favor of the professional musicians. The particular consecration of specific men and women for the performance of the liturgy is obscured. I will leave an exploration of the consequences of this obfuscation to a later post.
There are many other similar consequences. That these were not apparently felt at the time is somewhat surprising. Why? I mentioned Palestrina’s name with hushed, respectful tones above. He was the greatest composer in Rome at the time of the Council of Trent, and he took it upon himself to forward the Tridentine reforms. Among these were calls for the simplification of liturgical music. Some council fathers had been prepared to restrict liturgical music to Gregorian chant, and legend has it that Palestrina himself rescued polyphonic music for the liturgy with his composition of the sublime yet direct setting of the Mass for Pope Marcellus II:
So within two generations of the council, it seems that liturgical music was largely going its own way, quite contrary to the expectations of many at Trent.
I wrote last week about discontinuities in monastic tradition and the difficulties that these pose for the recovery of a vibrant monastic tradition. Here, I suggest, is a similar discontinuity in liturgical music, one that is probably as radical, in its way, as that which happened after Vatican II. On the other hand, it has more in common with the hidden discontinuities in the broader intellectual tradition of the West, in the sense that it was not clearly perceived as such at the time. And when it was perceived as at least a change, this change was celebrated by those in the know as a liberation from hidebound tradition and a recovery of ancient models of music, which it was not–this was pure propaganda of the sort that Renaissance thinkers excelled in.
Next time: the specific problem of discontinuity and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s brilliant remedy of the Hermeneutic of Continuity.
Key concept #2: Traditions are arguments before they are agreements. And then they are arguments after they are agreements.
(h/t to Adrian Belew)
This appears to me as one of Alasdair MacIntyre’s most important insights. He borrowed the idea from Blessed Cardinal Newman, and he refined it considerably.
Why is this important? For several reasons, though I will mention two today.
In my previous post, I said that liturgy is ‘first theology‘. A fine sounding notion! But what do we find when we gaze out upon the liturgical scene in the contemporary Church? Lots of disagreement. In fact, you will hear Catholics say that we’ve been fighting over the liturgy for forty years or more. And this liturgical stew only got messier when Pope Benedict XVI gave priests permission for a wider use of the ‘extraordinary form’ of the Mass. So what, exactly is the material of the liturgy at this point, the material that is supposedly going to give form to prima theologia?
I would not argue that our present situation is ideal. But I also don’t believe that the situation in, say, 1950 was ideal, either, but for the opposite reason. Church tradition had come to be seen as something unchanging and unquestioned. Now, by contrast, it has come to appear as something up for grabs. The reality is something else. Tradition is an argument. And it is an agreement on what to argue about and how to argue. It is not true that tradition-as-argument means ‘anything goes’. It may appear that way in an emotivist society, such as ours is, where arguments are not rational but are exercises in emotional manipulation.
This brings me to the second point. The idea that traditions are arguments makes it possible for them to be rational. MacIntyre generally shows great respect for other thinkers, even when he strongly disagrees with them. This makes his open criticism of Edmund Burke more piquant. Why is Edmund Burke in his sights?
During and after the French Revolution, Burke began to write down his intellectual defense of Tradition. Few people are aware of just how radical many elements of the Revolution were. There were movements to change the names of the days of the week and the months of the year. There were proposals to renumber the years, using a starting point other than the birth of Christ. There were proposals to change the length of the week and the month, to remove them from the lunar associations. Why? The supposed goal was to organize society in a more rational manner. A month of 30 days or so may or may not prove functionally most effective for human organization, or so the theory went. So maybe ten months of 36 days would make more sense. Maybe eight days of work and two days off…It was all slightly crazy, though it must be stressed that this was done in the name of reason.
So what did Burke do? Did he give a defense of the rationality of tradition in the face of these assaults? Not really. In fact, in his writings he comes close to celebrating tradition precisely as irrational. And this thinking has infected us ever since. Why genuflect when you come into Church? Because the Tradition says so! And don’t ask any more questions! Why did the old Ember Days have seven readings on Saturday? Who knows? And who cares what reasons there might have been–we ‘traditionalists’ don’t need to ask these questions. [This is strongly akin to the same way in which ‘blind obedience’ came to be a religious virtue.] I’m exaggerating, but the point is, for a tradition to be rational requires something like what Newman and MacIntyre have taught us: there must be some way for those engaged in the tradition to give each other persuasive reasons for doing one thing rather than another.
As a young man, Newman discovered that the post-Apostolic Church shaped tradition by arguing about its development.
Where we stand with the liturgy today is, I believe, somewhere before the midpoint of what I hope will turn out to be a fruitful (though tumultuous, alas) reflection on the meaning of the liturgy. Consider the choice facing a pastor who wishes to celebrate the extraordinary form of the Mass: he could, of course, simply begin offering Mass in this way because he has personal feelings in favor. But more often, what happens is that he decides to do so for reasons: to educate his parishioners on the broader tradition of the liturgy; to foster a greater sense of devotion; and so on. Now, once he gives such reasons, and hopefully he does so either in some public parish forum or to his fellow clergy in the local deanery, he is open to being criticized for his choice and for his supporting reasons. He will have to make a defense of his reasoning, and he will have to appeal to shared agreements about the liturgy in order to persuade others. He may end up abandoning the project, or he may convince others to begin celebrating the extraordinary form. Or they may continue to disagree, but now the argument has become considerably more refined on both sides (we hope). Everyone has had to reflect together, and so have become more reflective and reasoned. And out of such exchanges, the Church as a whole will gradually come to have better and better reasons for clearer and clearer choices. As poor choices are weeded out and lame reasons are abandoned, the liturgy will come to be more recognizably consistent, and–very importantly–more ‘rational’ itself. But not ‘rational’ in the Enlightenment sense–I mean this in the sense that we are to offer to God “rational worship!”
“I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual [Greek–logiken…logical!; Latin–rationabile…rational!] worship [Rom 12: 1].” This in turn will allow us to “be prepared to make a defense [lit. “to give a reason”; Gk–logon, Latin–rationem] to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you [1 Peter 3: 15].”
P.S. For those of you who don’t know who Adrian Belew is, he wrote and sang (? shouted?) the lyrics to this…song:
Key concept #1: Liturgy is theology. In fact, it is primary theology.
The “Benedict Option” as exercised by actual Benedictines, is not a rejection of the world, but of regnant worldviews that distort and obscure the gospel. Which is to say such worldviews obscure reality. This is because Christ the Truth came from the Father to free us from sin and error. Worldviews are not so easy to change. They are generally the whole background of everything we think and do. To subject our worldview to a systematic examination can be profoundly disorienting. We should recall that it took Saint Paul many years to sort out the full implications of his conversion (he doesn’t specify, but note the passage of seventeen years in Galatians 1: 18–2: 1, some of which was certainly spent rethinking everything). Saint Antony the Great retreated to the desert around the age of 20 and emerged as a public figure again at 50. Things take time.
Paul’s early career was a series of reversals. Here is depicted his stealth escape from Damascus, the city where he had gone to persecute Christians.
But it helps when others can point out something of the goal, something of the discrepancy between what we had been taking for granted and what our new worldview-in-Christ should look like.
In the early Church, theology was roughly the equivalent of contemplative prayer, a first-hand, personal knowledge of God. This is to be distinguished from knowledge about God or from mere knowledge that God exists, hearsay accounts of God. But contemplative prayer took for granted the Church and the Church’s regular engagement in liturgy. Liturgy is our participation in the exercise of Christ’s high priesthood, the lifting up of our hearts and minds to God, our mystical encounter with God.
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the word ‘theology’ began to undergo a certain transformation, becoming the more familiar academic concept. This wasn’t entirely bad; in fact, there were many good things that came about from the more systematic application of philosophical methods to the common fund of the knowledge of God.
Blessed Columba Marmion, OSB
But this new idea of theology is at a second remove from the encounter with God. At least it can be performed that way. This began to be felt as a problem in the early nineteenth century, as the effects of the Enlightenment began to be felt even within the Church. The roots of the liturgical movement are found in the efforts of Dom Prosper Gueranger and the Wolter brothers at Beuron. In both cases, an effort was made to experience a fuller liturgical celebration. The movement gained greatly in the twentieth century and bore real fruit in the Second Vatican Council (even if it’s taken us time to sort of the wheat from the tares in the intervening years). The liturgical reforms of Vatican II were meant to help re-open the font of theology to everyone, to make available the insights of Benedictines like Odo Casel, Lambert Beaudoin, and Blessed Columba Marmion, for the whole Church, especially those outside the cloister.
Joseph Bottum relates a telling anecdote in An Anxious Age. He is discussing contemporary Catholicism with students in California. One tells him, “I just go to church for confession, to pray, and to take Communion.” The gist of the story, in Bottum’s version, is that young people tune out the homilies and don’t expect much from priests, other than that they show up and dispense the sacraments. What strikes me in this quote is the lack of any sense that Communion, confession, and prayer are all liturgical acts, couched in a whole world, strewn with Biblical vocabulary, thick symbolic gesture, and so on. Rather than living an entirely new life in Christ, the sense is that we go on living in the old world, the one that’s passing away, and from time to time we get our sacramental immunization shot a church, then return to that old world, hopefully not to lose too much fervor along the way. This is better than skipping church! But is it adequate to the New Evangelization that we are being challenged to undertake?
We all know (thanks to Vatican II and Saint John Paul II) that the Eucharist is the source and summit or our baptismal lives. But how do we make sense of it? The Church has given us a whole liturgical discipline to assist us in unpacking the life-altering content of Christ’s gift.
Acclimating ourselves to this “Liturgical Asceticism” (I use here Notre Dame prof David Fagerberg’s term) takes time. And so often when I mention this idea of liturgy as primary theology, the concern is that we need something more immediate, effective, engaged! Something slimmed down for a jet-set generation.
But this was part of my point in mentioning Paul and Antony. Learning to see with spiritual eyes does take time. Yes, there are prodigies like St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who benefit from saintly parents and a strong Catholic culture in general. But for most of us, in most ages of the Church’s history (we conveniently forget that the first thousand years were not always so resoundingly successful in the West!), divinization is a long, and sometimes arduous process. And why not? Isn’t the God of all peace worth the finite struggles of this temporal life? More to come.
